The Fisher Queen

by Sylvia Taylor

  On the fifth day, the weather went lousy and the fish thinned out and so did the boats. Our wash-down pump broke down from running 18 hours a day, so we dressed 60 fish with buckets of water hauled over the side. We heard on the radio that there was some kind of commotion in Bull Harbour and they were looking for new managers, but when the reception went scratchy we could only speculate on what had happened.

  I woke up the next morning feeling as dark and jumpy as the weather. We’d lost the fish and were scratching around with a handful of other boats when the call came over the radio telephone. “Central Isle, Central Isle, do you read me?” Dan’s warm voice sounded tight and strained. Paul went into the cabin to answer and came out a different man.

  “Paul, Paul, what’s wrong?” I vaulted out of the cockpit and ran to the cabin doorway where he stood trembling and glassy-eyed.

  “God, Syl, I don’t know how to tell you,” he said, passing a hand over his eyes.

  “What happened?” I grabbed the bib straps of his Hellys and stared up into his face, my heart pounding. “Is it my parents? My sister? Brother? Who?” I shook his straps to get the thing out of him I didn’t want to hear.

  “That was Dan. He just came from Bull Harbour. Jesus, Syl, Bob was killed falling into the ice auger two days ago and their son-in-law, Dave, had his arm chewed up and broken real bad trying to rescue him. Christ Almighty, their first clue that something had happened was the red ice coming out of the auger and into someone’s hold.”

  I sagged against him, my head spinning. It wasn’t our relatives, but people who had become our family out there. “Oh my God, Paul, we just saw them a week ago. We had drinks with them. They gave us smoked salmon. I can’t believe it. Poor Pat. Oh my God. Dave and his wife just got married this spring and she just told me she was pregnant. I can’t stand it. That was his father-in-law and his own arm is ruined? God help those poor people.”

  We held each other tight, wept out our shock and horror. It was always so close, like a shadow creeping behind you. It made no sense. Dan had survived a killing storm for 14 hours; Bob had slipped and fallen; Dave had caught his sleeve. There was nothing left to do but pull in the gear, go in early and pick up the groceries in Winter Harbour that Gerry had radioed us to bring him in Sea Otter Cove. The next day we would go out again.

  Most people thought beautiful fish-tailed women lured you into danger, but for us it was a know-it-all old fisherman with a barking German accent that set our teeth and egos on edge. To add to our melancholy over the ice-auger tragedy, the weather was even more miserable and the fish even fewer. So when Mr. Highliner insisted that we too could catch a fortune in fish if we had the balls to come out to the deep or blue water, Paul took the tantalizing bait and followed the guy’s massive steel boat straight out to the distant, dark, almost indigo waters more than 20 miles offshore.

  At 75 fathoms and rough seas, we threw out the gear again and caught nothing but Brown Bomber rock cod. Then snarled up our gear while we rolled around for another hour, listening to the old German inform us we must be stupid if we couldn’t catch fish that were right under our noses.

  We picked up again and kept running out to 100 fathoms while I sat on the hatch cover and watched land speed away from us. My worry-voice whispered—We are too far from land; this is not safe or good—as land became a smudgy pencil line and the wind shrieked through our rigging and the waves got jumpier. I tried by sheer force of will to turn the boat around, to override the autopilot. No such luck. Paul was convinced we’d score big if we just kept on the tail of the alleged highliner. But I was familiar with the usual outcomes of these grandiose and often spontaneous schemes.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the thinning smudge and felt anxious as a child watching her parent walk away. Paul noticed and said we’d just try it a little while, then turn back. I’d heard that one before too. Now I was bereft and resigned and threw any delusions about long-distance sailing I may have had overboard.

  He went into the wheelhouse and emerged a minute later with a quirky look I couldn’t read—it was all in the eyes, the squinchy lips—but I knew I wasn’t in trouble about something.

  “Go up to the bow,” Paul said, and motioned with his head.

  “What for?”

  “There’s something up there you will want to see.”

  Clinging to the handrail, I crouch-walked up to the foredeck, finding handholds to keep from pitching over the rearing bow. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for and scanned the horizon in exasperation.

  “Look down,” Paul said through the wheelhouse port window.

  And then I saw them. Bullet-shaped grey shadows below the surface, just behind the keel. I couldn’t imagine what could swim that fast; we were running at eight knots. I kneeled at the port gunwale and watched the bullets rise to the surface and transform into three silvery dolphins.

  “There’s more on the other side.” He grinned like a kid from the starboard window.

  I crept across the bow to see three more bullets speeding along.

  “They’re riding our wake,” Paul said, years falling from his face. “Like surfing.”

  That explained why they could move so fast—clever little buggers. Not only clever but also gymnastic, as the ones on the starboard side started surging and doing little squiggly leaps in the air. Oddly, the other three were doing exactly the same thing on the other side. I scuttled back and forth like a crab, watching them leap higher and higher, as if competing with each other. Suddenly one of them leapt clear across the bow to the other side, then another and another. I shrieked with delight as they jumped two by two over the bow.

  They were the Solid Gold Dancing Dolphins performing their world-famous water ballet. They must have been having the time of their lives, judging from all the clicks and squeals and purrs. My clapping and squealing seemed to egg them on to even greater feats of leaping and gyrating. Then they slowly returned to surfing.

  I was shaking and weeping and laughing as I crawled to the port side, where I draped over the gunwale to get closer to those magical creatures. I inched lower and lower and stretched my hand to them, babbled my gratitude and told them how beautiful they were and how much I loved them. One of them slipped onto its side, showed its luminous belly and stared straight up at me, clicking and whirring, as it slowly raised its fin. I reached down, strained to touch, only inches apart, ecstatic. Then I felt a steady pull on my waistband gently hauling me back onto the deck.

  “Come on, dolphin girl, I don’t want you going overboard with them,” Paul said, and steered me back to the hatch cover.

  “Thank you, Paul, thank you for showing them to me.” I reached up and threw my arms around his neck, pressed my cheek into his rough, woollen sweater.

  “I knew you’d get a kick out of them,” he said, gently wiping my cheek with his smelly sleeve. “Come on, let’s go in. Fuck the blue water and him.” He headed for the cabin to turn us around.

  Three hours later on the way down the inlet to Winter Harbour, we got a call from Craig in Port Hardy inviting us to the social event of the season: a huge baseball barbecue live-band bash in the park at Stories Bay just outside of town. Craig and his gang of fisher friends, The Wild Ones, were organizing it for the next day, and he announced it was high time we got officially inducted into the gang. He had already invited Richard and Steve. We could stay on their boat overnight and get a ride back the next day with Craig in his truck from Hardy and his boat from Coal Harbour. All we had to do was hitchhike to Holberg, four or five miles away by logging road, where we would pick up Craig’s truck (keys under the mat), which was parked by the general store, and drive to Hardy.

  When Paul turned to me with an inquiring face still holding the mic, I yelled, “Yes, we’d love to go!” Craig was a walking upper and just what the doctor ordered to help get us out of our funk. The fishing had dropped off, the weather had turned lousy, and we could pick up a new wash-down pump in town.

  As soon as we showered,
changed and threw a few things in a bag, we walked out to the road behind the tiny Winter Harbour post office. Minutes later we were picked up by a good-natured logger going back to Holberg in his truck. Above the blasting country-and-western hits, he cautioned us to keep our eyes peeled on this twisty dirt logging road to Hardy where people drove like maniacs and the tree-laden trucks bore down the middle like locomotives.

  Now inland, it was hot as stink and we were soon covered in road dust coming in through the truck windows. I chuckled to myself thinking how my mother would rather have walked the 20 miles rather than have one speck of dust touch her perfectly coiffed and heavily lacquered hair. How different her perfect helmet hair was from my unruly mop. I remembered gasping like a guppy with my younger sister and brother in the back of the family station wagon as we drove from Vancouver through the baking heat of the Interior to our cabin property, all the car windows firmly in the upright position.

  “Hey, thanks a million for picking us up,” Paul said with a bright smile, scooting me in first to sit jammed between them on the dusty, worn bench seat. “I’m Paul and this is Sylvia. We’re tied up at BC Packers and going to Holberg to pick up a friend’s truck to take to Hardy.” He reached across me to shake hands with the bearded, stocky, middle-aged logger.

  “No problem. I’m Mike. Good to meet you. Sorry for the junk.” He smiled sheepishly at the candy wrappers and pop cans on the floor and jammed a thick bundle of papers and notebooks onto the cluttered dashboard. “I’m one of the foremen at the lumber camp.”

  “Love the hula dancer.” I smiled and pointed to the jiggly dash ornament.

  “Got it when the wife and I went to Hawaii last year. She keeps me company on these crazy roads. Sport fishing up here?”

  “Nope, commercial. Trollers,” Paul said. The dark walls of seemingly endless pine forest pressed close as we vibrated over the washboards and swerved around potholes.

  “Heard you guys are having a tough season. That’s a shame. Lots of sports stuff starting to go on. The Americans are coming up in droves since their salmon are petering out. Starting to see big cruisers in Ukie and Tofino and I hear there’s a big sport fishing business coming into Ucluelet to cater to the Americans, mostly.”

  “Yuh, I heard he’s bringing in 10 or 15 boats that can hold up to five or six people, to rent out or for guided daytrips,” Paul said. “I wonder how the government’s going to regulate those catches. And there’s talk of fish farms going into Alberni Inlet. The Scandinavians have already messed things up with fish farms there, and the government is going ahead with it here. It’s crazy.”

  “I heard about that,” Mike said. “Let’s hope our government does a better job regulating that stuff here. Fish farms sound like a good idea, but you know what they say about things being too good to be true. Where did you say your friend’s truck was?”

  Mike drove us right to the truck, wished us good fishing and a fine time in Port Hardy, and drove away with a wave and a shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits honk.

  We hightailed it to Port Hardy over more dirt road, nearly driving into the bush to avoid two loaded logging trucks, and were thankful to hit town roads again. We wandered the government wharf and found Richard’s boat and a cheery welcome. I repaired Steve’s haircut, which Richard had given him with a weed whacker, and after a tearful recount of the ice-auger nightmare, we sauntered up to the Seagate for greasy fries, burgers and slightly skunky beer. I savoured every disgusting bite and swallow.

  An old bearded gent sat alone a few tables away, an island of solitude in the middle of the smoky caterwauling, sipping his beer and gazing at something beyond the dingy walls and this frontier town clinging to the edge of the wilds. With soft-spoken dignity, he accepted our offer to join us for a beer. We wheedled a few stories: grappling with grizzlies, sewing a fingertip on backwards, burying his young bride and baby behind a sod hut. He had trapped and dogsledded and gold panned from Alaska to Yukon and Northwest Territories and down to the wilds of northern Oregon. He never met my eyes or answered my questions, so I let the men draw the magic from him before he quietly rose and thanked us for our generosity and walked straight-backed into the night.

  Demurely refusing Richard’s offer of his double bunk, Paul and I chose to spend the last currency of our energy on a night of passion and deluded privacy in the luxury of a real bed with dry sheets in a room that didn’t move. Besides, the infamous Kelly Ruth had tied up to Richard’s boat and every ho and drunk in town would be partying on the boat that was known all over the coast for its painted penis K and lolling-tongued Rolling Stones mouth on the cabin sides.

  These were partiers the likes of Mad Dog, who, a few months ago, the RCMP had chased driving a hundred miles an hour on the treacherous road from Port Alberni to Ucluelet—we and the rest of the bar had watched him drive off the pier and into Ucluelet Inlet. When Mad Dog’s head broke the surface, cigarette still clenched between his teeth, he gave the cops the finger and shouted, “You’ll never take me alive, ya dirty screws,” before turning onto his belly and swimming across the inlet to the Native village, Ittatsoo, where the cops couldn’t nab him. What finally caught him was a gas leak on his fishboat that blew him to kingdom come when he lit a cigarette and burned his boat to the waterline—just the way he would have wanted it.

  The Wild Ones were tame by comparison. After a logger-sized breakfast at the local diner and buying a new wash-down pump and a pair of dove-grey cords to replace the pants that now hung off me, we hopped a ride with Richard and Steve’s friend out to the party of the decade. Hundreds of people converged by land and sea on the paradise of a park 10 miles out of town on a long, silvery beach that looked over the strait and small islands. A gaggle of boats, from massive steel draggers to sleek little pleasure rockets, bobbed at anchor in the sparkling bay, their skiffs filled to the gunwales with goodies and merrymakers all racing for shore like seals after salmon. Vehicles of every vintage filled the dirt parking lot and lined the two-lane roads as far as you could see. Fisherfolk and loggers and miners and townies with their kids and dogs. Pickups loaded with sawhorses and two-by-fours, tables and barbecues. Everyone laughing and busy and buzzing with excitement as the white-chalked baseball diamond emerged and the stage grew strong and the generators and electric cables powered up the speakers and strung lights looping around the stage. A monster tape deck pounded out everything from Led Zeppelin to Patsy Cline, as everyone pitched in to create a cross between Woodstock and a Sunday church picnic. Some of the bigger fellas kept an eye on the young bucks and drinkers and waltzed them out when they got a bit wrangy, which was less often than at any big-city bar I’d been in. Someone brought balloons and popcorn for the kids, who spun like tops in the old school playground. A marathon of baseball games and a potluck seafood barbecue, picnic tables loaded with every edible imaginable. In the early evening, as some of the young families made for home, a pretty decent local rock band kept everyone dancing into the night, until Wes the heavy hitter quietly came on stage and a roar went up from the massive crowd.

  Wes had run with all the Big Dogs of blues—Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Stevie Wonder, Bo Diddley—and had found his way here from South Carolina a few years previous. Nobody knew how or why he appeared in Port Hardy. He kept to himself and led a quiet life working for the township during the day, teaching guitar at night and playing in the local pubs once in a blue moon. But when he cranked out those three Bo Diddley hits, everyone was up on their feet dancing and clapping and singing at the top of their lungs.

  We danced all night under the stars and big-bellied moon, barefoot in the cool, fresh grass that filled us up with life and joy. We owed it to the living and to the dead.

  Home

  It was so easy to ignore Gaia’s whispers that autumn was coming, with the land and sea awash with golden light, the winds gentle and warm, and all her creatures languorous in the late summer days. But the signs came early in the north: the taste of the wind, the cast of the sun, the burnished look of
the land. Northern summers are counted in weeks, not in months like the south. The farther north you go, the more compressed and intense summer becomes, the light pushing hard into the night, fighting for every moment until giving way to relentless winter.

  As the lucky and the strong made their way past the fleet to their Mother Streams, the last of the stragglers were brought on board, a few dozen a day, to help feed the world and make another boat mortgage payment. We played out the last days of August and into September in long, slow sweeps back and forth from the north-end Yankee Spot through Cape Scott to Cape Cook, selling in Winter Harbour or Port Hardy. But never again to Bull Harbour. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to stand in that office or watch the ice rush down that auger. Nothing against the new people—we’d heard they were very nice.

  We often sold our day catches to the Neptune cash buyer outside Winter Harbour and even picked up extra ice for free from the other camps because they liked us and everything seemed to be winding down, the fierceness of it all melting away in the slanting sun and fog that had started drifting in more often.

  I never got used to being offshore in that strange, muffled world of west coast fog so thick we couldn’t see our own bow. One thick morning, an old-timer on the radio informed his pal that he was hanging up because he had to go on deck to sweep the fog off his bow so he could see where he was going.

  There was a lot more entertaining radio chit-chat going on. By that point, whatever season you were going to have was had, and people who’d had a lousy season, which was most everyone, were just trying to extend their time by a few more weeks to accumulate enough stamps to apply for Unemployment Insurance benefits and hope to God the claim was processed by Christmas. So fisherfolk might as well relax and have a few laughs over the non-stop comedy coming over the airwaves. Since the competition for fish was pretty much done, they competed to outdo each other with outrageous stories and superstitions.