The Fisher Queen

by Sylvia Taylor

  Like the ragpicker who pulled a massive halibut into his stern that proceeded to smash the shit out of everything, including the fisherman, who panicked after not being able to gaff it to death and decided to shoot it with a handgun he kept in his cabin. Good news was he killed it before it totally destroyed his net and drum; bad news was the bullet passed through the halibut’s head and the deck and the hull.

  Then came a load of El Niño stories. No one really understood that weather phenomenon, that weird warming of the ocean surface that arises at Christmas off the western coast of South America. The cold nutrient-rich water doesn’t well up, which causes die-offs of plankton and fish and alters Pacific currents and storm tracks and even reverses trade winds, disrupting weather around the world. Stories more fantastical than the last about weird and wonderful creatures that came up with the tropical waters every four or five years. Acres and acres of silver-dollar-sized luminous jellyfish that travelled on the surface of the ocean by the small sails on their backs. They’d come into the boat on the lines and gear, and if touched, they left an invisible acid so strong it burned your skin and could only be neutralized with baking soda. The howls of barehanded greenhorns innocently peeing over the side could be heard for miles. Locals caught tuna off the dock in Zeballos, an inland mining town 50 miles up a twisting inlet, when tuna were normally chased 200 miles offshore. The six-foot circular sunfish, flat and pale as a piece of plywood, caught outside of Prince Rupert, another 300 miles north of Cape Scott. The fish mounted on the wall of the old Savoy Hotel, scene of many a frontier debauchery, before a blaze turned everything to ash.

  El Niño wreaked havoc with the West Coast trollers. Especially with sockeye, the troller’s meal ticket, when the fish would disappear altogether from the warmer outside waters and run for the colder water of the Inside Passage. It devastated trollers who had only outside licences. The warm water also brought in huge schools of mackerel that loaded the lines so trollers couldn’t catch anything else and ate every salmon smelt in sight, dramatically reducing future runs of mature salmon—a double whammy.

  It was all so complex and interconnected—what the eco-activist Dr. David Suzuki, the ethnobiologist Dr. Wade Davis and the Greenpeace environmental warriors called The Web. Even scientists didn’t really know what made salmon tick, never mind what affected this mythic fish that had been the lifeblood of coastal peoples for thousands of years. We knew more about living in space than we did about the life cycle of salmon.

  Then came the rehashing of old seagoing superstitions to explain the epidemic of poor catches, engine breakdowns, lost gear, bad injuries, running aground. But how could opening a can upside-down or changing a boat name bring havoc, or throwing salt over your shoulder or putting a coin under the mast save you from disaster? I reasoned my way through the ancient taboo against women on long sailing-ship voyages and working boats—it could get a little tricky out there with a boatload of randy sailors.

  The superstition was so serious in old Britain that if a woman even stepped foot on a boat, the men would have it scrubbed stem to stern and exorcised by a priest, or even scuttled, rather than go out to sea on it, especially the dories of Northern Scotland that fished the treacherous North Sea. The fishing museums in tiny towns all along the Scottish coasts bore witness to the outcome of many a deadly trespass. On the Firth of Forth, a bronze statue of a Fishwife stood on the shore of an ancient fishing village, eternally looking out to sea, eternally waiting, just as women were meant to be . . . until the last wee while. But for most of us out here, man or woman, there was someone somewhere who waited and wondered and worried.

  The local First Nations people had their own myths and legends, of a much nobler intent, about personal integrity and how to conserve salmon for future—something the modern world had fallen back on a day late and a buck short.

  The Haida told of a great shining, leaping fish that each year brought big medicine to the village of the Great Chief and his people, a life-giving creature his daughter had seen in a dream. In the time when people and animals were the same beings, four supernatural brothers came to the Squamish to help them find the village of the Salmon People and convinced the fish people to come every year to the Squamish. Chief Spring Salmon promised he would send these fish in order from the early spring to the fall: the spring salmon, sockeye, coho, dog salmon, then humpback. They would come for all eternity to feed the people as long as the fish were honoured and their bones carefully gathered and returned to the sea. The Yakima told a legend about when the salmon disappeared because the people ignored the Creator’s warning about protecting them. All the people’s attempts to revive the salmon failed until the great Sea Snake took pity and used his powers to restore them.

  But these dire warnings and rumours of recession and declining stocks were a million miles away that day as we lounged and laughed and even danced on the deck between pulls in our gumboots and Hellys. Two songs became our anthem, the hottest hits in the north-end fleet, played over and over. We could see people bobbing around in their sterns or shouting out about feelin’ fine and peace of mind, groovin’ to “Draggin’ the Line” by Tommy James and the Shondells or to the hard-luck guts and glory of “Fishing Grounds” by Ken Hamm, a Canadian blues legend living on Vancouver Island.

  Nothing else mattered but being here in this glorious place, being gloriously free to go gloriously broke. Sure we had to make a living, but it was so much more than that—each in our own way was answering the call of the wild. Some more renegade, more educated, more spiritual, more rough-around-the-edges than others, but we were all members of an ancient tribe that had already begun its descent along with a way of life that would soon be lost to the world. And I would hold that fierce glory in my heart forever.

  As we motored into Fisherman Bay that night with the biblical sky unfolding around us, Paul steering, his arm around my shoulders, me leaning against him, my arm around his back, my eyes filled with tears.

  “What’s up?” he said gently, tilting my chin up toward him. “You okay?”

  “This is the most romantic moment of my life.”

  “On a dirty, old fishboat, with a dirty, old fisherman, after not having a shower for a week? You are one strange chick,” he laughed, squeezing me to him.

  “No, I mean it, Paul. There’s something so powerful and beautiful about this. This is what humans have been doing for half a million years, a bonded pair out in the natural world together fighting for survival to make a life for themselves and relying on each other for even their life and safety. Especially with the dirty and smelly and dangerous. How many people get to do this together anymore? We’re like a dying breed, people who work together, and I will always be thankful that I got to do this and share it with you.”

  “You’re something else, that’s for sure,” he said, and kissed the top of my head. “C’mon, let’s get the anchor down. I want to check the engine. It seems to be vibrating a little. I think we should troll toward Goletas just in case. I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere if something goes wrong.”

  By the time we hit the channel we could feel a definite vibration coming through the floor. We started to run for Hardy with another fog bank chasing us all the way. An hour out of Hardy Bay the fog engulfed us just as the engine temperature started to climb. The Central Isle limped into the harbour with steam belching through the floor, and coasted to the closest float of the commercial wharf.

  It was over. The engine was shot without even a chance of a Viking Funeral, and we sat up all night trying to decide how we would deal with this wretched end to our season. Engine repairs would eat up most of what we’d saved after accounting for the mortgage payments. There would be no school this year. The best I could do was go home to Vancouver, find a job and a place for us to live while Paul stayed in Port Hardy to fix the engine and then bring the boat home. Later he could try to lease a gillnetter for the fall runs. He had been an ace gillnetter before trading the nets for hooks two years before. I
prayed he’d be able to make up for our loss.

  Then the phone calls, collect, to everyone I cared about and some I didn’t. Dialled from the graffiti-covered booth at the top of the wharf next to the clanging of the forklifts and the grinding of the ice auger, awash with bittersweet responses of relief and disappointment: Yes, I’m fine. No, I didn’t make any money. Yes, we’re still together. No, he won’t be coming home quite yet. Yes, I need to find a job. No, I can’t live at the house. Yes, it was worth it. No, I don’t hate him. Yes, I am very thin. No, I can’t wait to settle in court. Yes, we are going to live together. No, I don’t regret it. Yes, I want to see Gay’s baby. No, I haven’t forgotten my family. Yes, you’re still my best friend in the whole world. No, I didn’t get hurt. Yes, I need a place to stay for a couple of weeks. No, I’m not lying. Yes, I missed you. No, I won’t go back to you. Yes, I’ve changed. Yes, I feel good. Yes, I feel bad. Yes, I wish it had turned out different. Yes, I’m sure.

  Paul and I were careful and kind with each other in those last hours together, quietly going about our business, buffering ourselves and our fledgling relationship forged in the crucible of the last four months. I’d return home as I’d left, broke and homeless, but altered to my core and without a molecule of regret. No matter how tough things would get, I had a new benchmark for endurance and profound experience that would never be bested.

  I had chosen life again and always would.

  I left Port Hardy on a Greyhound bus at dawn, waving goodbye to the man I had despised and adored as intensely as I had everything else in that world. That I’d already shared more with than many people do in a lifetime. As the hours and miles rolled by, a stream of images played out in reverse on the window: eagles on the mud flats, schools of islands, totems guarding a broken beach, brilliant worlds clinging to pylons. Then the cars, and more cars, and trucks and stoplights. Hamlets became villages, then towns: Port McNeill, Kelsey Bay, Campbell River, Courtenay, Qualicum, Parksville. Faster and faster, louder and louder, then the mill town of Nanaimo and the ferry terminal that I’d driven through a thousand times, now overwhelming with traffic and noise and unnatural smells. Past the lighthouses and markers and buoys, south and more south, from the fishing grounds 400 miles away. Then the blessed relief of the Strait of Georgia on the massive Queen of Tsawwassen ferry, crossing the calm inside waters on the incoming tide. Past the deep-sea freighters tethered in Burrard Inlet to the sheltered Horseshoe Bay terminal and its charming urban village. Then swept up by my best friend Beenie in a flurry of hugs and kisses and tears; our time apart felt like four days or 400 years. A thousand stories, a million words and no idea where to start but to cry and laugh.

  Along the sinuous highway that hugged the mountainous shoulders of Vancouver. More cars, more buildings, more tears of reunion, then the first sight of my beautiful, brash city. The tape deck blasting Steely Dan while Beenie made plans for a night of sushi at the Asahi and carousing at the Ankor.

  My body was strapped into Beenie’s little beater, but my heart and spirit had yet to find me in this kaleidoscope of old and new. I murmured absently as she burbled about what I looked like and how I’d changed. Across Burrard Inlet and my last look at the sea from the Lions Gate Bridge. Through the erotic clamour of downtown Vancouver to False Creek that rippled into the salty heart of the city. To a glittering tower where I gazed down on the blue-collar corner of the Granville Island boat basin that I’d left from on that pussy-willow morning a lifetime ago.

  Epilogue

  I am where I have been so many times before: alone on a windswept beach. I always know what to do here. I always know who I am here. This is no technicolour Tahitian dream beach—it is Canada’s wild western coast, my home, my lifeblood. I am soaked to the marrow with it and can’t live without it. Every cell of me sighs with relief.

  The land and sea have gifted me with a perfect moon shell. I have found others, but they are broken. I almost discard them but glance again and realize that if they were not broken, I could not see the symmetry and beauty of the design, the perfect and elegant spiralling to the centre.

  I am in a paradise of cedar and sand and wind and waves and fresh, rushing water. Hunkered down in a little trailer so much like a boat, beside a stream under the cedar trees in Powell River, a sturdy town on BC’s Sunshine Coast. The sun flashes its most engaging smile. The stream flings itself to the sea. The gods have conspired to seduce a book out of me.

  On the ferry from Vancouver, I had stood transfixed in front of the gift-store bookrack. My colleague who is here with me to mentor and teach the emerging Powell River writers said, “This is where your book will be.” I wanted to see it there so bad it tugged at my guts.

  During a drizzly Vancouver winter in 2006, I fled to Arizona to write a historical novel about the northern BC coast and the people who made their living on the sea. That didn’t happen. I sat for two days with six months of research strewn about me, completely blocked. In desperation I started writing about my own experiences in that world in the mid-1980s, thinking they would stream me into the novel. The novel never happened, but the stories insisted on themselves and became portholes into the world I lived in as a young woman, deckhanding in the commercial salmon trolling fleet.

  The stories shouted and laughed and wept their way out of me as I sat baking in the desert. They dragged me mercilessly through those months at sea. Pulled me down into whirlpools of memory and then threw me back on shore blinking and shivering. To find myself deep in the Southwest desert instead of the Northwest waters. I came home with 30,000 words of life stories that sang like sirens on the rocks.

  Now, four years later, I had arrived at the Willingdon Beach Campsite in Powell River. Soon after I settled in, the camp manager’s wife came by and asked if I’d like to feed the fish. I followed her upstream, a few feet from my door, to a 20-foot trough, similar to a culvert cut in half lengthwise and covered with metal catwalk lids that she raised to reveal 70,000 humpback salmon fry. I fed them in fanned handfuls from a recycled ice cream bucket, a dry granular stuff that looked like coffee grounds and smelled like dead seal. The quicksilver babies boiled to the surface for supper.

  Quietly beside myself, I asked if she knew why I was there. She said no, that my colleagues hadn’t said, just that I would be staying for a few days. I told her I had come from Vancouver to teach and edit at the annual Powell River Writers’ Conference and work on my book about the salmon-fishing industry. She smiled and shook my hand and welcomed me to town, reminded me that Powell River was a thriving hotbed of the arts.

  She said the babies had arrived the night before by Department of Fisheries and Oceans truck. They would be nurtured for about three weeks until they doubled in size, to three inches, before being released into the stream to rush out to sea a hundred feet away to continue their life cycle. The stream water was piped into the nursery trough to imprint the smell of home on the babies. Another 55,000 larger smolts in a submerged sea-water tank at the end of the breakwater in a float dock would be released into the ocean in a few days. As many as Man and Nature allowed would come back to their Mother Stream in 18 months by smelling their way home through hundreds of Pacific miles. Fisheries hoped 40 percent of the babies, about 50,000 fish, would return home to spawn. Much fewer would.

  In a simple gesture of nurturance and stewardship, campsite guests pitched in to feed the babies, to do their part to help curb the devastation we have wrought on this planet.

  A similar nurturance draws a gathering of wordsmiths to the writing conference. I love them for their courage and tenacity; I know in my bones that I’m on my mark and doing what I love: inspiring people to believe the writing life is real and doable. For 12 years I have supported the literary communities of British Columbia through my involvement with the Federation of BC Writers, first as a regional director on the board, then as president and finally as chief administrator. I have encouraged writers to manifest their passion in literary events and writing programs throughout North Ame
rica. Coached, edited and consulted with authors and entrepreneurs around the world. Written hundreds of articles and short stories. Everything I ever learned or did, every career I thrashed through, from engineering to counselling to teaching, every thought or feeling or philosophy I ever had, has funnelled into what I do now.

  For four years I have shared The Fisher Queen stories, from Haida Gwaii to Arizona, conferences to coffee shops, radio to ranches—even made shortlist for the CBC National Literary Awards in 2010 with the Great Grey Beast story. People crowded into reading rooms, flocked to literary events, asking, When will these stories be a book? Their faces lit with the longing to know and touch another tile in the great mosaic of this country and how the Wild West informs who we are.

  Electric energy crackles any time creative minds and diligent focus come together. This little-engine-that-could of a conference is no exception. The air in the room where I teach my master class hums with the high hearts and hard work of going pro in the writing world. At noon, a motley crew of presenters and organizers and attendees thankfully piles into cars for the windy drive through Powell River’s business district, past the devolving pulp mill and to the town limits, where we will lunch and absorb the expanse of lake and tree and sky to fuel us through the indoor hours. Coasties can’t be away from the wilding world for long before things start coming undone inside us.

  We are randomly arranged at four long tables set end to end along the windows: locals on one side, facing in, guests on the other, facing out. It’s hard to be completely present when the wind and water are tugging me to come join them. It’s hard to pay attention when my eyes follow the weavings of the eagles, when my nose catches the edge of the sea. The quiet woman across the table is watching me; the chatty woman next to her repeats something.