Russell had a thought. The Alaska Wildlife Troopers, a division of the State Police, had a surveillance system for boats in the salmon fishery, which was the largest in Alaska. Fines for infractions were hefty but to find violators the State Police patrolled immense areas of ocean with only 80 field officers. And therefore, they had brought technology to bear. The State Police patrolled the Cook Inlet salmon grounds in airplanes. From the vantage of height, they viewed the entire fleet and marked any boat that set its gill net as few as two seconds before the 7 a.m. opening. Could spotters in the airplane have seen Fishing Fever?
He called them on VHF patched through the phone system. He spoke briefly with an officer on watch, who told him no, that his department did not keep records of boats in the fishery; only violators had names. And Johnathan clearly had obeyed the rules. Not for the first time, Russell wished every commercial fishing boat—and not just the Bering Sea crabbing boats—carried VMS (Vehicle Monitoring Systems), which were global positioning systems that transmitted a crab boat’s geographic position at all times to federal National Marine Fisheries’s computers in Washington, D.C. But no such luck.
Russell headed west-southwest and continually scanned the dark horizon for a light. His gut told him Johnathan was heading toward Augustine Island and the Shelikof Strait.
The Greater the Greed the Faster the Pace
Andy
The telephone has not rung, which probably means that Russell is out of contact in the Inlet. And he has not found Johnathan. Sabrina is asleep and I brew a pot of coffee, which I carry out to the back porch. Today is going to be hot with plenty of humidity. The air is heavy and the sun, recently risen, is already mean with shimmering intensity. It is peculiar of me to go from a working life on the Bering Sea, where the temperatures go well below zero, to the summer heat of southern Indiana. I do not know which I like better and am glad I can have both.
That reminds me of the conundrum that Johnathan faces. I do too, but to a far smaller degree. It is that he will never leave the sea. I already have left it in my mind; but my heart refuses to follow. Johnathan’s soul would be robbed of its sustenance without the ocean, a boat to work on, and crabs and salmon to catch. He would become someone different from what he is now, someone neither he nor I know. And yet staying on the sea could well kill him. The odds of survival never lengthen on the Bering Sea as the years go by. The equation for Johnathan (and anyone who tests the fates on the sea) becomes existential. Do you stop what you love to stay alive? Or do you continue to do what you love even if it kills you? It is a question of what a life is worth. I swear John would rather be dead.
The same quandaries do not preoccupy me. And for that I can thank Sabrina, who gave me a life that I love away from the sea. Our parents told us that Sabrina and I met when we were kids; neither she nor I remember being neighbors in Homer or that we played together before her family moved outside of town. We did not see each other again until our teens; she was working as a chambermaid out at Land’s End, the hotel that my grandfather owned. My brothers and I knew who she was. I did not ask her out on dates, and her parents probably would not have let her go out with me. The Hillstrand boys had bad reputations and there were fathers who would have locked up their daughters rather than have them go out with any of us. We met again when we were in our twenties; she had given birth to Chelsey, who was around two when Johnathan’s girlfriend, Tammy, introduced us at a party. It was love at first sight. What could have ended as a one-night stand grew into a solid marriage.
Sabrina was working as a real estate agent at the time. Her father, LeRoy, was a developer subdividing land and her mother, Rita, was the president of a Homer real estate office. Her family had nothing to do with fishing or the sea. In Homer, that was unusual. The differences in upbringing intrigued us both and brought us closer together. I would spend the night with her and sneak out the window before the babysitter arrived in the morning. One day, she asked me why I was sneaking out. We were married not long after.
Marriage did not change me and that led to trouble. I went on with my life much as before, working for my dad on the Time Bandit. As if we were both still single, Sabrina and I hung out in bars and drank to see how plastered we could get. I would call her on the way home from the boat, drunk, slurring my words. I knew what she was thinking. But it would be too easy to say that alcohol nearly destroyed our marriage. Our lifestyle did it. We faced what hundreds of fishing couples face but fail to overcome.
Crab fishing gave me a sense of adventure. Nobody could tell me what to do. I was strictly my own man out there. That kind of thinking did not leave much room for Sabrina. It was the opposite of sharing. I could not talk to her about my life. I was not certain what I could say. I had my life and she was the landside part of it, the unadventurous, unexciting, routine part of it. She was not at the center of us together because there was no center; there was fishing and after fishing. That made her feel lonely and resentful of fishing, of my fishing family, and of the fisherman in me. She buried her resentments in booze. I stopped talking about fishing, about the risks, the dangers, the thrills. We had nothing to talk about, except that we had everything to talk about.
Sabrina could tell you what that life was like. When a boat broke or went down, she was in the circle of wives who called and talked continually. In that sense, it was as old as men going down to the sea. She knew whom to call. When Clark Sparks was lost overboard in New England, the boat’s skipper, Thorn Tasker, asked her if she would call Clark’s mom. He did not know to call anyone else but Sabrina. That was the worst phone call she ever made. Life for the women ashore was a series of calls. We talked through a marine operator and we would have to say “over” and “over-and-out.” Anyone could listen in. People got divorces over the radio; nothing was private. That radio grew into a nightmare for us working on the boat. We did not want any attachment to the land. We hated when wives and girlfriends called with nothing to say except “Hello” and “How are you?” The last word we wanted to hear was about a drowning or another boat going down. The wives would call about that but we usually knew anyway, and we did not want to know from them. We would brush off catastrophe. We could not let ourselves get emotional, or else we would be basket cases all the time. We had to finish what we were doing and could not stop and mourn a tragedy.
Sabrina knew and respected that code but other women did not, or simply ignored it. She was like a den mother to them. Johnathan had a sequence of girlfriends who called her up all the time. “Have you heard from him? Is he okay?” Sabrina would tell them, “Chill out. If they are going to call you, they will.” She had to teach them to go with the flow, not to be rigid, and to be open-minded. Sabrina had started out very rigid but she learned to let it go. Otherwise, she would still be tilting at windmills.
One time, Sabrina visited Dutch in the middle of a blizzard, and the temperature was 30 below zero. At that time I was working on a catcher processor called the Optimist Prime. Sabrina and I had come to an agreement that I could not be gone more than sixty days. After two months’ separation, I either had to go home or Sabrina had to come to where I was working. I had been gone for three months and we had a four-month-old baby, Cassie. Sabrina thought she had landed in Hell. I was a lowly deckhand and I had to ask the captain if I could go to town. I got off at 8:30 in the evenings, went to the Grand Aleutian hotel, where Sabrina was staying with the baby, spent a couple of hours with her, went back to the boat, and after several nights, I was nearly dead with fatigue. I asked her, “Why don’t you come out on the boat with the baby?”
The boat was anchored in the middle of Dutch harbor. One of my buddies took a skiff to pick up her and the baby at the dock. She was out in the middle of the harbor with an infant in her arms praying for her life; the baby was screaming for hers. The skiff motor died. Sabrina had met the guy in the skiff minutes before and did not know whether to trust him. He started the engine, but the motor kept dying. At last, she reached the boat and she handed up ou
r new baby to me. She spent a few days out there, more days than she would have liked, I think, but she did not want to take that skiff back to the dock.
As a fisherman on the Bering, I have to look my own mortality square in the eye not only for myself but for Sabrina and the girls. Sabrina had to be ready to lose me and be okay with that. Otherwise, she would be a nervous wreck. People ask her, “Aren’t you worried about him out there?”
“No,” she replies. “I had to turn that over to God. I had to let it go.”
But the strain persisted. You cannot love someone and just let go the worry that he may die in a profession where dying is very real. You can learn to live with that reality. Like the time I was on the Polar Star, an eighty-six-footer. Sabrina got a telephone call that my boat had sunk. She did not believe that to be true. For some reason, she told herself, “That’s wrong.” If my boat went down, she knew the Coast Guard would have called her. She waited and worried. I had heard a Mayday that identified my boat as sunk. I looked around. We’re not sinking. It was just confusion. A second boat named Polar Star had indeed sunk.
Sabrina may have put worry behind her, while living with the worst-case scenarios. She cannot walk around thinking I can die at any minute. It would be an unacceptable way to live. On TV she sees the wives of soldiers in Iraq. Those women say good-bye to their husbands and cry like they have already lost them. Sabrina could be doing the same thing every time I go away. She did, too, for a while. She would act brave and strong when I would leave. When she was alone, she would cry. People asked her how she did it. She answered them. “I just do it.”
She did not blame her drinking on me, but the truth was, she hid her emotions in a bottle because of my inability to share mine and because we were both silently trying to spare each other of what we were really feeling. She grew up drinking and was an alcoholic when we met, and so was I and Johnathan and our dad. The Hillstrand men were not known for their social drinking; our DNA is soaked in alcohol.
For Sabrina and me, drinking went abruptly from all to nothing. We stopped together and started to change our lives after she made a conscious decision to leave the life of a fisherman’s wife. The self-destructiveness had reached into her soul. She determined not to live a life anymore in bars, surrounded by oblivion, drinking, staying up, fights, disruptions, and tension. Together, we learned how to communicate better—and all that.
But by its nature, my life was disruptive and for Sabrina, as it is for all other fishing wives, it created challenges for us to overcome. To an extent, fishing wives see their husbands off, wait for them to come home, and then a big reunion celebrates their return. Distance does make the heart grow fonder but only up to a point. I would go home, and I automatically assumed that I was the head of the household. I sat in the easy chair and took command of the TV remote control. But Sabrina was used to making the decisions at home. She did not call the boat to say the car broke down, what do I do? She fixed it. Women are the natural organizers and the captains of the house. I was the captain of the ship out on the Bering Sea. I would come home and think I automatically was the captain of the house, too. Who was the captain? We sat down together and agreed. “OK, you be in charge of this, and I’ll be in charge of that.” Sabrina and I ended up asking, “How important is being in charge anyway? Why do I have to play it only my way?” It’s a constant balancing act.
Ten years of marriage went by before we spent more than sixty days in a row together. There was always another opening: salmon, herring, crab. And I worked at the whim of my dad. In American society everyone, on paper at least, is free to do what he wants to do and be what she wants to be. In marriage, the other person had to change. But when both people wanted the other person to change, friction and failure were the result. Sabrina had her own income. She had started a real estate company and worked as a bartender and waitress and a journalist for the Homer Tribune. She ran a donut shop until donuts made her sick when she was pregnant. I tried to run the shop for a while, but it was destroying me. I learned that she did not need me. We had to work out who was in charge and when and what were our individual responsibilities. Learning to work as a team was the hardest and most rewarding work I have ever done, or will ever do, because we worked side by side.
Sabrina comes out on the porch where I am sitting with a cup in hand. She sits down and looks at me.
“Did you sleep?” she asks.
“A little,” I replied.
“What would you like to do about Johnathan?”
“What can I do?”
She stares in the direction of the horse ring. “It’s still dark there,” she says, referring to the three-hour time difference between Indiana and Alaska.
“You mean the Coast Guard?”
“Would it do any good for you to fly up there?”
I think about that. I can tell that she is worried about Johnathan, too. She is used to not showing her concern. She has had years of practice. “Not until Russ calls,” I tell her. “I think that’s what worries me, that I can’t do anything but sit here and worry.”
She laughs softly and goes inside.
Moments like these lead me to introspection, which is something I usually manage to avoid. As I walk over to the barn to check on Rio and the other horses, I think about change. For instance, one of the changes I enjoy, I am able to live thousands of miles from the Time Bandit and the Bering Sea fishing grounds. But not all the changes in the last ten years or so have been as welcome. Commercial fishermen like Johnathan and me are many things: We are born optimists; we are fierce competitors; we are hard workers and harder to lead than a herd of cats. Above everything, we can’t tolerate change, despite its inevitability. Take the change that came to Alaskan crab fishing. We are still trying to get comfortable with that.
In 1976, with the passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act, and the international fishing boundary expanded from 12 to 200 miles. Effectively, the act Americanized Alaskan fisheries. Without the Russians and the Japanese ships scooping crabs in tons aboard their industrial boats, Alaskan fishermen were finally left alone to catch what belonged to the people of Alaska. This was the good news. The bad news was that a new and alarming lethality crept into an industry that was already dangerous enough.
From the start, the crab catch was organized around The Derby, jargon for “open access.” I loved the Derby, which had a wild anarchy of the kind that is not much sanctioned in America anymore, on the sea or off. The game was every man for himself, a virtual free-for-all, with no regulation once the starting gun went off, and it suited my nature, which probably says more about me than I should admit. Put another way, the Derby was like a cattle drive on the sea, from the days of the Chisholm Trail, when real cowboys herded their longhorns to the railheads.
Crews like ours on Time Bandit worked without sleep in all weather and seas to catch as many crabs in an allotted time as our holds would take and our bodies would allow. Johnathan and I, who know better than to take unnecessary risks at sea, went ahead anyway in search of the red gold that we call king crabs. Secrecy was the guiding rule. No boat captain ever told another captain about his hot spots, where he reliably would find crabs year after year. The crabs shifted their grounds, and no one spoke over the single sideband what their prospect pots showed or where they were successful. Meanwhile, ships were going down at a rate that everyone knew was unacceptable, even criminal, and yet no one knew what could be done to stop it. No one was really even certain why.
The Derby created the dawning of a perfect storm for Alaskan fishermen. Whether anyone ever meant the crab fishery to become a breakneck race against time, elements, and the fishing of a species of sea creature that, while it does not swim, moves freely over the sea floor, the circumstances began to kill men. Any captain with a license and a boat, no matter what size or concern of its captain for safety, could enter the Derby just by showing up. Boats went out on the Bering Sea that did not have the seaworthiness to handle the wind
and weather. The State of Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game set catch limits to protect the long-term health of the crabs; but Fish & Game, acknowledging the cussedness of fishermen, let them take care of their own long-term health, which was something that the fishermen clearly would show themselves incapable of doing.
The Derby frenzy started each year, usually in September, on a precise day at an exact minute. Aware that the season might last only fifty-two hours, the fishermen worked ceaselessly and took alarming risks to plug their holds. In some years, forecasts of storms on the Bering forced Fish & Game to delay the opening for the protection of fishermen who would simply ignore their better judgment to remain in port and face whatever the Bering Sea had to throw at them. The catch was like sand dropping through an hourglass. Fish & Game continually estimated the catch according to the numbers and sizes of the licensed boats and the tonnage of their deliveries to the processors. They knew within hours when the fleet would reach the preset limit, and an announcement over single sideband signaled a day and an exact time of the season’s end. The boat crews worked with increased fury, knowing the minutes were ticking down. Tired, aching, and groggy, crews and captains made fatal mistakes.
Unwittingly, the federal government made a bad situation even more dangerous with an unintentional consequence. The National Marine Fisheries Service, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), invited crab fishermen to reinvest what they otherwise would have paid in taxes in capital construction. At first, boat owners used the tax money to rebuild their vessels. They added new technologies that increased their speed and the tonnage of the catch. With their existing vessels updated, the captains plowed more tax-free money in two, three, five, or eight new boats that they designed to ply seas in any weather, with larger holds for greater tonnages of crabs. They built in booms for sodium lights, allowing them to work night and day, and decks strong enough to hold megatons of pots.
Time Bandit Page 13
