The Fisher Queen

by Sylvia Taylor

  We knew it would be a low score again this trip, but the 10-day clock was about to run out of time and Paul had decided to bypass Bull Harbour this time and run down to Port Hardy for more gear and to get our pilot looked at again. It was late June and we hadn’t been back to Port Hardy since mid-May. I wondered what it would be like on the verge of the first big opening.

  This quick turnaround was going to catapult us over the top of Vancouver Island and down the wild and woolly west coast, where we’d heard they were doing a bit better than this miserable scratching around in the dirty lump that continued day after day at the north end. Coho season was opening in three days, on July 1, and we wanted to hit it hard out of Winter Harbour. Ironically, the very morning we had to run in was brilliantly sunny and calm. I took that as a good omen for our run to Winter Harbour.

  We’d been up since 4:30 a.m. to fish the morning bite and had trolled as close into the offshore shelves and reefs as possible, to save fuel and pick up the odd straggler. The nor’wester was picking up pretty good, as it often did in the afternoon. We pointed the bow into the waves and picked up the gear. We’d radioed the camp in Port Hardy and knew they had space and ice for us and an unload time. Paul knew better than to arrive in a fish camp during high season without radioing ahead. He’d seen the boats tied six deep off the finger floats, waiting their lives away.

  But we’d be okay; Paul knew the manager and he liked us. Being loyal, bringing in quality fish and helping out with the unload kept us on the company A-list for ice, water, fuel and even pricing at all the camps. They even let us run a tab when things got scratchy. A good reputation could make or break you and was damn near impossible to fix if broken.

  While we stashed the gear, we made mental notes on what we had to replace and what we could get by with. I’d set up a system of notebooks for everything we needed and bought, from food to fuel, so I could keep track of our expenses and how much we used. No matter how frugal we were, we barely broke even most of the time.

  A shopping list may be more of a wish list, depending on the fish camp, how much you made that trip and how much they have in stock. So you plan your meals out carefully, factor in all the other costs, like fuel, coffee and cigarettes, count your pennies and hope for the best. I’d stood in front of grocery shelves that made Cold War food lines look like Harrods of London.

  Most of the time, if the autopilot was working, I dressed the last of the fish and kept watch for other boats while Paul went down to the hold through the deck hatch to pull off the ice blankets and excavate any groceries still tucked away in the ice. He shovelled the top layer of ice onto the hold floor to make sure no over-zealous camp worker accidentally sliced into the first layer of fish. I carefully washed down the wooden deck. No stray guts or slime to slip on or last-minute fish dressing to wait for with our boat. We lifted off the massive hatch cover and laid it on the aft-deck, well out of the way. This was the kind of stuff that kept us on the A-list.

  We were getting close to the Nahwitti Bar, which usually required some rodeo-riding and careful navigation, so we hung our Hellys on outdoor hooks by the cabin door and swung into Phase Two. While Paul navigated the channel and checked our electronics, I collected and separated the laundry into three designated green garbage bags.

  1. Dirty: underwear, bedding, towels

  2. Filthy: socks, bottom-layer shirts and long johns

  3. Disgusting: top-layer shirts and pants

  I measured powdered laundry detergent into three sandwich bags and counted out quarters for the machines in case I couldn’t get to the free ones in time. There was nothing like waiting for your laundry to dry while the skipper frothed and bellowed about getting back out to the grounds.

  As we steamed into Hardy harbour, Paul called the camp again to see if we could unload right away or if we’d have to tie up to wait our turn. It was shocking to see so many fishboats in one place at one time. When I read reports of the fleet size it seemed exaggerated: I never saw more than 40 or 50 boats fishing close together, and in off-season, boats were tucked away in hundreds of nooks and crannies along this vast coastline. This was a dog pound of a harbour: boats of every size, shape and condition imaginable. Some like old mongrels limping on three legs, some as sensible and sturdy as black labs and some like primped-up poodles. And everywhere, a circus of noise, action, smells. Bellowing skippers and shrieking seagulls, grinding gears and reeking diesel, airborne ice and flapping fish. After 10 days of isolation it sent me reeling around the deck. If isolation on land was called bushed could this be called waved? I, the urban groover, felt like a hillbilly down from the hills.

  We lucked out and were told to tie up at the unloading dock. By the time we threaded our way to the far end of the camp I had changed into moderately clean clothes, stashed the grocery list and change in my back pocket, put the laundry bags and shower kit on the deck, and dropped the bumpers down on the tie-up side. As Paul nosed into the float and swung the stern in, I grabbed the middle tie-up rope, leaped onto the float and cranked it hard onto a cleat. He cut the engine and threw me the bow and then the stern lines to tie down. We were snug. He threw me the three laundry bags and I stumped my way along the float, up the corrugated ramp and across the dock to the wash house. We hardly spoke a word. I knew what he’d do; he knew what I’d do.

  Though I was never seasick, solid land threw me off balance, and I walked like a drunken duck. I ignored the stares and raw yearnings and worn-out offers that came at me like buckshot. This wasn’t the first time I’d navigated a man’s world. I had already been fending off the advances of a bona fide lech. He made it clear with extravagant offers of less work and more pay that he would not let up until I jumped boats. The fact that I was not only Paul’s deckhand but also his girlfriend didn’t seem to penetrate his hormone haze. Paul and his pals laughingly referred to him as my salmon stalker. I was not amused and took to hiding in the cabin when he was coincidentally in every camp at the same time and would brazenly come onto our deck asking for me. If he was tailing our boat to stay close to me, all he would get out of it was to go broke too. First-aid Anne was no more amused than I, and she let me know she’d had a little chat with him one day in her office that would likely cool his ardour. I never knew the details of that chat, but when we next saw him, he acted like a dog that had had a hose turned on him.

  The laundry gods were with me on this turnaround, and as I entered the laundry room, a sturdy old fishwife in gumboots, red mackinaw and flowered kerchief looked me up and down, smiled indulgently and said, “Here ya go dear, you go ahead and take these two free washers, I can wait.” For a second, my throat tightened up and I had the urge to curl up in her ample lap and cry, but I just smiled back and thanked her.

  Being female in the fishing industry was a lot like travelling in some remote and exotic country. I’d thrill to the sights and sounds, revel in the sheer otherness of it all, but the longer I was gone, the more I secretly yearned for my tribe. And the longer I was gone, the less particular I was. Pretty soon just speaking the same language, or in the case of fishing, being female instantly bonded us. If you were a girl or ever had been, you were my new best friend.

  While the first two loads washed I went next door and parboiled myself in the shower. While the first loads were drying and the third load washed, I bought groceries and left them behind the counter. While the third load dried I folded the first two into clean bags, left them on the washer and carried the groceries back to the boat. By the time I returned, the last load was dry and I carried the three bags to the boat.

  In the meantime, Paul had helped shovel out the ton of ice in the hold overboard while the fish were hauled out, graded, weighed, tabulated and taken away in bins. He’d hosed and scrubbed the deck, hold, compartment boards, hatch cover and checkers with detergent and collected his fish slip and whatever cash he’d decided to take out of our earnings to pay for fuel and supplies. Sometimes we ran a tab if the trip was poor. There was nothing more demoralizing.
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  When Paul took our fish book and crew log up to the office to record our catch and workdays for Employment Canada, our take was $634 for 10 days.

  We untied from the unloading dock and motored over to the fuel and water dock, where he supervised the fill-up while I put away the dry goods and laundry. Last stop was the ice house, where he rearranged the compartment boards in the hold and directed the stream of fresh ice pouring in through a huge, segmented aluminum pipe. It looked like a dragon’s neck and mouth as it reared up from the side of the ice house on a huge boom, then dropped straight down into our hold. The ice travelled up from the ice house on an auger, a massive slowly turning steel screw inside the pipe. Very low-tech but very tough and effective. Not much to go wrong unless someone in the ice house got caught in the auger; then it was all too horrible to even consider.

  Once the ice was down, I dropped the perishables to Paul in the hold and he stashed them away. One more tie-up at the regular holding wharf while he showered and shaved and bought and bullshitted and I made up the bunks and planned our meals. With fuel, gear, food and cigs, we’d have just enough left for beer and burgs at the Seagate pub with fisher friends we’d run into at the camp. They’d heard the hotel had just installed a new technology that would show rock videos—the cutting edge of musical entertainment, here at the edge of the world.

  Our pilot part had come in on the float plane—another good omen, I figured—and Paul would install it on our way to the west coast of the island the next day, while I steered. All was well with the world and hope ran high as we drank and smoked and laughed and danced the night away. While gyrating to Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” a particularly stunning Viking throwback effortlessly lifted me onto his brawny shoulder and I was handed a clutch of red roses bought from a little hippie girl in the bar and anointed Queen of the North to the roars of approving males and my smug, proud boyfriend, whose smile said, “Lust all you want, but she’s coming home with me.”

  We were leaving behind our bad luck and the growing fears that the fish were disappearing—that was all people talked about on the radio and at the camps. Even our pal Gerry, the hottest highliner we knew, couldn’t seem to find fish on the north end, even on the Steamer Grounds and Barogh Shoals, 30 miles offshore. In this game, it was better to laugh than cry, and people dragged tables and chairs over to our growing party, attracted like moths to the bright light of our belief. We vied to outdo each other with more outrageous stories and jokes and damn near choked when one of the old salty dogs cracked up the table by announcing his tab was stretched thinner than a mosquito’s foreskin over a 40-gallon drum.

  Late that night after we closed down the bar and drank the last of the beer and smoked the last of the cigarettes around Davey’s galley table, we heard the story about what had happened to Big John, the halibut fisherman, the previous winter.

  In a land of wild excess, of raw survival, Big John was the wildest and most excessive human being anyone had ever seen. His massive, hulking body would fill a doorway, usually to a bar, and the room would fall silent, folks considering the next closest means of escape. He was so vulgar he made even the saltiest dog stammer and blush. Everyone knew he would never go hungry—he had enough congealed food stashed in that mud-brown matted beard to feed on for days. So it wasn’t surprising he’d found his way to the West Coast fishing fleet. Lots of misfits hid out here and this wild and dirty life suited him to a tee. Where could he get away with not bathing for days and days? Where else could he wear the same long underwear for months?

  The thing about Big John was that he was a working machine. He was virtually indestructible. As long as you had a bunk big enough to hold him and enough food to feed him, he’d work through anything and never complain. In fact, it seemed he hardly noticed the difference between being on land or sea. He was a skipper’s dream, if you could stand the smell and lack of conversation.

  But it was the harbour time that always got him into trouble. He’d drink ’til he dropped, a long and formidable event. People only had to see him brawling in a bar once. Then it would be time to cruise the docks and look for another job. There was always a skipper looking for a new deckhand and he seemed tame enough.

  But even Big John couldn’t cheat the sea of its due. One frigid night the past winter, the halibut boat he crewed for went down in a midnight gale north of Cape Scott. No matter what, he was one of our own, and when one was lost it brought the imminence of death a little closer to all of us.

  People said he had managed to struggle into a survival suit before the boat broke up but didn’t make it to the Zodiac with the other two. He just disappeared in the roaring hell. They said the other two were picked up the next morning by the Coast Guard, much the worse for wear, but still alive thanks to their suits. The search for Big John was hampered by the furious southeast gale but the Coast Guard would keep trying. Everyone knew what the chances of survival after the first 24 hours were for a regular human being, even in a survival suit, but what about someone built like a woolly mammoth?

  It was one of the worst storms anyone could remember, raging and hurling itself against the west coast for two days. Not even Big John could have survived, and even if he had, God knows where it would have blown him. Folks figured the Graveyard of the Pacific had cut another notch in its gatepost and wished him good journey to whatever and wherever the Creator had planned for him.

  The storyteller’s serious face and hushed tones didn’t look like good news—we prepared ourselves for a grisly account. “They found him way up near the Charlottes after three days, out there bobbin’ around, still alive, barely.”

  We stared dumbfounded.

  Lowering his voice, he leaned in closer over Davey’s green Arborite galley table jammed with elbows, bottles and ashtrays. “He pulled through okay, but they say he’s not alright in the head. Took him up in the helicopter babblin’ away about seein’ stuff. Bein’ thrown around out there in a blow all by yourself would blow anyone’s mind. Poor bastard.”

  As the frigid halibut season had lurched on, people heard bizarre bits and pieces of what had happened to John out there. Tales of lights and voices and visions and, most surprisingly, of prayers. No one paid much attention to accuracy or reality; it would have ruined a perfectly good story. Everyone knew the creative powers of time, beer and imagination and relished the tellings and retellings in bars and fishboats all along the coast.

  Someone ran into the skipper of the doomed halibut boat at the Fisheries dock in Vancouver’s False Creek a few months later, and after a little prompting and a couple of beers at the local pub, they got the whole story.

  Big John’s massive blubbery body and shaggy hair and beard had helped keep him alive, buffered the relentless pounding of waves and wind and kept in his body heat. He wouldn’t have starved in three days; his fat supplied the energy he needed to keep his body upright. To save him from dehydration, the deluxe-model survival suit he was wearing had packets of water with attached drinking tubes embedded in the lining of the upper chest. It also had a self-activated blinking light fixed to the top of the close-fitting hood to go along with the brilliant orange colour and the flares stashed in leg pockets.

  For two days his powerful body had protected itself, sometimes hurled like a stick, sometimes dragged up and down the roller-coaster waves. By the third night the seas had calmed to a heavy sickening swell, but he had reached the end of his endurance. Feeling there was no hope of rescue, he made the decision to hurry the end and unzip his survival suit. Just before he did, he found himself stumbling through some kind of prayer, an entreaty to something, for help and forgiveness for a life poorly lived.

  “Yeah, thanks, I will take that beer to wet my whistle. Wait ’til you get a load of what happened next,” the storyteller said and lit another cigarette. Paul pushed a fresh bottle of Labatt Blue across the table to him as we all took a long silent pull on our beers.

  As Big John’s hand felt for the zipper release, he heard an eerie, uneart
hly sound, a penetrating hum, and thought he must be dying or having a stroke. It grew louder, and though he had tried to keep his eyes shut to protect them from the corrosive effects of salt water, he opened them to the smothering darkness. Suddenly a pinpoint of light appeared just above the water and slowly grew larger and more nebulous, like a luminous fog. As he blinked rapidly to clear his vision, the fog seemed to collect into wavering shapes that stretched back into the distance, human shapes that gradually took on bits of detail—a plumed hat, a jewelled sword, a heavy duffel coat, a shell necklace. Every shape and size and feature of human imaginable, some alone, some in clusters.

  This endless line of misty figures that hovered just above the waves terrified Big John more than any storm and he screamed, “No. No. Go away. Leave me alone.” The gates of hell had opened and they were all evil spirits coming to take him to his just desserts. Closer and closer they came ’til they seemed to cluster around him, drifting and murmuring.

  “The damnedest thing about it,” the storyteller said, taking a big gulp of his beer and slowly shaking his head, “is that John heard these voices in his head telling him not to be afraid or give up hope cuz it wasn’t his time. They told him help would come soon and his life was meant for somethin’ else. They told him to keep lookin’ up.”

  John must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to a heavy whump-whump sound through the pre-dawn grey and looked up to see the lights of a huge Coast Guard helicopter coming toward him. The Coast Guard guy said that the pilot was just about to turn to move farther down the coast when he told the crew he’d make one more circle. That’s when they saw the tiny blinking light and the glimmer of orange.