The Fisher Queen

by Sylvia Taylor

  We piled all four of us into the front seat of Craig’s truck and drove the 30-mile neck of land between the west and east coasts of Vancouver Island and went to raise hell in Hardy. We ran into everyone we knew in the world, and drank too much, ate too much, danced too much and laughed too much for any mortal being. But since we were immortal, the rules of this world didn’t apply to us, and after a final goodbye to the fantastic band from Seattle that we’d closed down every bar in town with, we wove our way back to Coal Harbour. After a brief nap, gallons of orange juice and a mountain of Aspirins, we motored back to Winter Harbour and our wee bunks, subdued and deeply satisfied.

  And as we sat together after dinner on our boat with Craig and his new deckie, Alex, a brilliant flash of emerald green and ruby red streaked through our open window and fluttered its tiny humming self against the front window. I reached my cupped hands to the creature, and as it touched my palms, it suddenly lay still, and I was transfixed with the miracle of its exquisiteness. Moving slowly through the hush I stepped onto our deck and lifted my hands as the bird shot upward and spun itself toward the setting sun.

  The Great Grey Beast

  When it is only 4:30 in the morning, and the wind keens and clangs through your rigging, it is a bad sign. When you are still tied to a wharf in a sheltered harbour, and your boat shifts and strains around you, it is a very bad sign.

  My damp, chilly shelf of a bed was a thousand times preferable; bankruptcy, starvation, even homicide, were preferable to what I knew waited for us just around the corner—a howling Grey Beast with a taste for wood and bones raging down the inlet, flinging itself against the sheltering wooded walls of that tiny harbour. And who would be foolish enough to pit themselves against this monster? Fisherfolk . . . desperate with worry and exhaustion.

  The gods and government had conspired to set a deadly stage: no fish, terrible weather, closures, strikes, cutbacks, rocketing interest rates and falling fish prices. People took bigger and bigger risks, hoping for the miracle that would pay their mortgage and feed their kids. Many would drown in debt, in liquor, in despair. Some would be eaten alive by the Great Grey Beast that waited for us all.

  Paul said we couldn’t afford to take another harbour day—we were flat broke, “not a goddamned nickel left,” even in the change jar. Ours was not the only tab discreetly kept in the camp accounts, but it might have been the longest. We were going out and that was final. So I was just to shut up and go below if I couldn’t stand it. But of course I had to stand it; what else could I do but pray and go numb?

  I was ashen before we even ran The Gut—a churning, rock-infested channel that spits you out into the inlet or open ocean, depending on which way you are going. It must be what the gates of hell look like. Everything was black and bilious, and I couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the water began. I couldn’t imagine it could get worse until the erratic sharp waves crested white and started crashing over our bow. First thing you learn about the west coast: it can always get worse.

  I staggered up the fo’c’sle stairs into the wheelhouse, lurching from one handhold to the next. Nobody should have to be thrown around like that before the sun comes up.

  “What the hell are you doing up here?” Paul growled.

  “I wanna see my name on the wave that’s gonna kill me,” I snarled back.

  We couldn’t use stabilizers because they’d tear off on the rocks—they were that close—so it was like riding a 20,000-pound Brahma bull. I braced in the wheelhouse, knees bent, feet apart, hands clutching the thick wooden dashboard rim, and still my feet left the floor with each crashing wave.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little odd that it’s only 7:00 a.m. and people are already beating their way back in?” I said. “Is that telling you something?”

  “We’ll go see how it is,” he said. “There’s lots of people behind us.”

  Lots was an exaggeration, but there were a few boats bouncing around, waiting their turn to shoot through. It was so narrow there, only one boat could go through at a time—not a problem unless people were running in for their lives, which I suspected would happen fairly soon. Nothing I said, no amount of reason or sanity, could change his mind.

  “You have no right to put my life at risk like this. This is insane. The farther out we go, the worse it is. Listen to what they’re saying.” I turned up the volume on the radio. There were some attempts at false bravado, but the rest were picking up their gear or just plain turning around and running back in.

  “I said get down below if you can’t take it,” Paul said, turning off the radio.

  “Take what? Drowning? Being smashed to bits? What the hell is the matter with you? Even if we get back in one piece, we’ll probably wreck our gear. The wind will just throw stuff all over the place.”

  Something black and hard slid down behind his eyes. “I said we’re going to go out and try it. We can’t afford another day off. You run the wheel and I’ll set the gear. Just watch out for other boats.”

  Cutting the engine to trolling speed, he waited for me to take the wheel and then stomped out of the cabin.

  I knew he hadn’t told me to steer to give me something to do. It was just too rough to use the autopilot; I would have to manually keep us on tack. I felt like Captain Ahab, lashed to the huge wooden wheel, wrestling with the sea. I watched the few other boats flail and plunge, awash with breaking waves, and knew how horrific we must look to them.

  I stretched up to turn on the radio and heard a string of sub-dued, strained voices advising and agreeing to go in. Fisherfolk are very reluctant to see anyone stay out in such dangerous conditions and often risk their own boats and lives to rescue others.

  “We take care of our own,” they say. “Who else is going to?”

  The BC government, in its infinite fiscal wisdom, had cut the Coast Guard fleet down to three boats for thousands of miles of convoluted coastline. And so the Graveyard of the Pacific continued to earn its name.

  The marine forecast suddenly upgraded to gale-force winds and posted a warning to all north and west coast traffic. Again, the forecast had been inaccurate and late. Many people blamed it on the lighthouses going automated. The running joke in the fleet was which lighthouse would break down next and for how long. No more friendly face behind that flashing light, just clicks and whirs.

  Wrestling the lurching wheel, I was awash in rage and fear and pity for all us poor souls who were risking everything for nothing. I wondered how much more of this I could stand. I wondered how many more seasons the entire industry, this whole way of life, could stand. Terrible storm clouds were gathering there too: secret meetings, deals and documents, talk of fish farms and Native land claims, conspiracy theories to rival Watergate.

  “The glory days are over. Get out while you can,” some people said.

  “It’s just a couple of bad years. Get a bigger boat,” others said.

  I watched someone in a nearby boat struggle to bring in his gear, lines and hooks flying and tangling around his head. Everything seemed airborne as the wind and water screamed and shoved at us. Suddenly the back door burst open.

  “Turn us wide to starboard and start running in at half-speed. I’ll keep pulling in the gear,” Paul bellowed.

  “Thank God,” I whispered, but my relief was tempered with a terrible foreboding. You never pull gear while running—you’d probably lose and snarl most of it—unless you are in even more danger if you take your time.

  I forced myself to narrow my focus to the treacherous channel several miles away. I couldn’t think of what it would be like when we got there—three hours worse than when we went out? I forced myself to breathe slowly, to keep my muscles limber and my brain alert. I remembered a line from Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune: “Fear is the mind-killer.”

  “Push it slowly to three-quarter speed,” Paul thundered from the cockpit.

  That meant he was either almost done or about to cut all the gear off, but it definitely meant we were in serious
trouble. It was so rough I couldn’t steer from the seat and instead had to stand, knees deeply flexed to withstand the slamming. I willed the channel closer and told myself the lovely lie: I can see trees. I’ll be OKAY. Just as I started to make out individual trunks, Paul crashed through the door, gumboots and rain gear streaming, grabbed the wheel and shoved the throttle full open. “Get yourself somewhere safe, it’s gonna be a rough ride in.” No shit.

  I wedged myself into a corner of the wheelhouse, bent my knees and hung on for dear life. I played the Getting Closer game: hold your eyes shut for as long as you can and open them to see how much closer you are to land.

  “Stop fucking torturing yourself. Get below,” he snapped.

  I was mute as I took in his stony face and twitching jaw muscles. I wondered what would happen when the 20 boats I could see all got to the channel at the same time.

  The Grey Beast knew the channel mouth was its last chance. I imagined it hoped we would save it some work by running into each other, and it was furious when we did not. It shrieked and lunged and snapped as one by one we were hurled into The Gut.

  Just as we cleared the channel, we saw a familiar boat approaching. He couldn’t have been considering going out. As soon as we moved into calmer water, we radioed him.

  “Fishing’s no good here and I just dropped off my deckhand in Winter Harbour. He had to go home, so I thought I’d run ’round to Bull Harbour,” Dan said in his usual Perry Como drawl.

  We were flummoxed. Calm, sensible Dan was going to run alone, in a gale, through the worst waters on the coast. I mouthed, “Has he gone insane?” Most of us tried to talk some sense into him. He finally agreed to leave his radio and mouse on and periodically let us know he was still okay.

  Utterly exhausted, we anchored behind a small island halfway down the inlet to rest and wait to see what the weather would do. It was another five miles through the twisting inlet to Winter Harbour, and if the weather settled down by the following day, we would go out again, saving us the extra 10 miles of fuel costs. We also knew we could keep Dan in range much longer from here.

  For the moment we were safe, but Dan was not. I lay on my bunk, sweating and shaking, heart racing with the release of terror and rage. I braced against my inner storm as I listened to Dan fighting his.

  I’d always loved radio plays; one Vancouver station still aired them late Sunday nights. I’d turn out the lights and burrow deep in my blankets, making movies in my head. But this was real life; I was not safe in my bed at home and I did not want to see the movie my head was making.

  Hour after hour we heard the winds scream louder, the waves hit harder. We heard his voice whittling away. We heard crashes and clatters and held our breath ’til he calmly reported which piece of rigging had just come down. I wept and prayed for him, for all of us, for the salvation of this magnificent and terrible way of life, for the preservation of the Wild West and the demise of its domestication.

  The next terrible crash threw us from our bunks and I sank to my knees, sobbing into my hands. Faintly we heard him, his voice fading in and out, eerily calm.

  “If you can still hear me, this is probably my last message. My mast has come down and my aerial is going under. I’m in my survival suit and I’ve tied an orange float around my waist so they can find my body easier. When they find me, tell them to look for the letter in a plastic bag inside my shirt. It’s for my wife and kids. Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I love . . .”

  Then nothing, the hissing of dead air, then frantic voices calling, “Dan! Dan!” “Can you hear me?” “Don’t give up.” Someone called a mayday into the Coast Guard. Everyone knew it was pointless.

  I cried so hard I turned inside out.

  And it was only noon.

  High-Pressure Fronts

  A string of sou’easters pushed us steadily up the west coast of Vancouver Island from the roaring seas of Estevan south of Winter Harbour as we chased the last stragglers of the coho run all the way back to Cape Scott and around the corner. Our ears pricked, we sifted through the obtuse messages coming over the radio telephone for clues to where the next hot spot would be. Trouble was, by the time we deciphered the coded comments between group members and ran like stink to get there, the fish had usually moved on.

  But when we heard Papa Gerry’s lilt suggest we meet him “for dinner in the usual place,” we threw it in the bucket at Sea Otter Cove and ran like hell to the Yankee Spot off Fisherman Bay and dropped the gear. The tip couldn’t have come at a better time: we had just deep-sixed another shipment of gear to Davy Jones’s locker on some pinnacle just outside the cove that seemed to magically change location every damn time, as if it was crouched under the land shelf and waited for us to wallow by so it could leap up and grab a mouthful of gear. A very expensive meal at $300–400 a serving.

  To top things off, as Paul raised a trolling pole to capture a pig float that had come loose when our steel gear lines snapped, our second radio aerial broke off and fuelled a total shitstorm of yelling and cursing, much of it aimed at me. Something snapped inside me.

  I roared right back at him. “Stop taking your shit out on me. I have my own shit and don’t take it out on you. I’m just as worried sick about not making money and I’m the one who has to wait another year to go back to school and somehow find the money to pay the bloody divorce lawyer. I don’t even have a goddamned place to live since that bastard I married secretly moved back into the house and threw out my renter. And he has the goddamned nerve to be vindictive to me? He leaves me for another woman after my car accident then comes whining for me to take him back a year later? Then gets pissed off when I don’t? Are you kidding me? And my parents are freaking out because I haven’t been fooling them with my chirpy little collect calls. And I’ve kept this all to myself because I didn’t want to burden you with it, you asshole. But that doesn’t stop you, does it?”

  Stunned and silent, he stepped back as I wheeled away from him and into the cabin. I had never laid into him before. Either I turned myself inside out being princess cheerful or retreated into frenetic activity or the pages of a book or, if all else failed, cried in my bunk, my face buried in the pillow. But I had woken in the cold, wet dawn of that morning with a severe case of existential angst. I was sick of cleaning and tying gear, of trying to catch up on my million-hour sleep deprivation, of manifesting meals out of thin air. I was sick of wondering when that evil pilot part would arrive in Port Hardy. I was sick of the same old ridiculous stories, of drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I was sick of worrying and most of all, I was sick of being me. I just wanted to climb out of my skin and trade it for someone else’s. I had never felt like that before.

  Flinging the last “don’t you ever,” I slammed the cabin door behind me and started rearranging the cook pots at maximum volume. A few minutes later, Paul quietly knocked on the door, which threw me a bit. When I opened it, he was bent over with his bum in the doorway. I couldn’t help but giggle, and when he turned to look over his shoulder with a smug smile and then turned away as if he was perfectly safe in his gesture, I took a couple of deep breaths and kicked him so hard that he flew forward and barely caught himself before falling flat.

  He turned to me in shocked surprise and gingerly rubbed his bum. “Jesus, I didn’t think you’d really do it. I won’t be turning my back on you again any time soon.”

  “You told me I could kick you if you ever took your shit out on me again, and I just took you up on your offer.” Heat rushed to my face as I fought my trembling chin and he huffed himself into the cockpit to fiddle with the pilot.

  I was horrified that I had struck someone for the first time in my life, but held myself back from rushing to apologize. A deal was a deal.

  But we were back on familiar turf now, with tempers appeased and new hope, and we soon spied Gerry’s boat on a tack to Cape Sutil. They were so close our short-range Mickey Mouse radio could pick them up, and we made plans for a late supper together. It was late in the afternoon
, but we could still troll there through the night bite in a calmer sea, the north end being more protected from the full force of the sou’east wind, and we’d soon picked up a couple dozen coho and a decent-sized spring, the ultimate upper.

  As I hummed and gutted the dark-backed coho at the dressing trough, Paul fiddled with something in the checkers after the last pull.

  “Hey, I’ve been thinking about something since the ass-kicking event this morning,” he said from the cockpit.

  “Oh?” I looked over my right shoulder, acting nonchalant, masking my hope that we might actually talk through something intense instead of ignoring it. He was standing with his back to me, his head tilted back and to one side.

  “Yuh, that was weird, you actually kicking me, you know.”

  “I know and in one way I’m sorry but in anoth . . .”

  “I’m not sure I can really trust you anymore.”

  “What do you mean? That was a tota . . .” I could feel a lump growing in my throat as I turned to face him and laid the knife in the dressing trough.

  “I mean . . . I’m gonna have to keep . . . an . . . eye . . . on . . . you . . . from now on.” He spun around to face me. A huge sulphur-yellow eyeball was stuck in one of his eye sockets above a monumental grin.

  “Jesus, Paul! That’s not the snapper’s eye, is it? Oh my God, you are totally mental,” I shrieked, doubling over the trough with laughter and nearly impaling myself on the dressing knife.

  As a grand finale, he scrambled out of the cockpit and started lurching around the deck, arms stretched out in front of him like a zombie, groaning, “I am the ghost of Davy Jones come to thank you for all the fucking gear you’ve sent me this year. Whooooooooo.” Then tried to grab me for a horrible drooly kiss.

  “It’s a damn good thing you’re so cute,” I said, kissing his slimy lips.