by Robson Green
She runs, and just when I think I have her she leaps five feet out of the water and runs again, taking another thirty metres of line with her. All I can do is keep the line tight. One of us has to tire and this time it’s not going to be me. Wally and his large family are expecting food on the table and they are relying on me to get it there. I reel her in and get her to the snow-covered bank. She is a fifteen-pound silver, a dark burgundy colour, similar to a sockeye salmon. I pick her up to inspect her and she is covered in snow like icing sugar. Her tail is worn from creating her redd (nest) on the gravel riverbed, in which she will have laid her eggs. This tail is so powerful that it has not only migrated 4,000 miles but then also dug a hole while fighting the current – and all on an empty stomach.
‘Happy Thanksgiving, Wally. Last cast! Get in!’ I say.
I am so chuffed not to be going back empty-handed and also proud that I have landed a silver on the famous Kenai. Wally says he never doubted me for a second . . . Millions would, Wally, millions would.
Wally’s wife prepares all the ingredients for our Thanksgiving feast, including locally grown vegetables as well as herbs and spices. She uses every part of the fish save the entrails. The fish head is used to create a delicious soup. All I’m thinking is that I hope it tastes as good as it smells, because the aroma is unbearably beautiful. We all agree fish tastes wonderful when you have caught it yourself – though these people have probably never tasted the supermarket stuff.
That said, many of the tribe do not eat as healthily as Wally and his family. Unfortunately the Sugpiaq suffered terribly in 1989, along with their fellow Alaskans, when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez spilled over 10 million gallons of crude oil. The spill, at that time the largest in US history, affected 1,100 miles of Alaskan coastline and killed or poisoned almost all the fish. As a result the tribe was sent an abundance of processed food by American charities and well-wishers. Concerned about contamination during the years after the spill, native people abandoned about half the wild foods they would normally have eaten. Their bodies were unable to assimilate the imported food and sadly there is now an obesity crisis within the tribe, just as there is across most of the West. Hopefully, with Wally at the helm of the tribe, the Sugpiaq people will return to their healthy lifestyle and the eating patterns of their forefathers.
Down at the village hall, the party is underway. Thanksgiving is the celebration of the first time native people shared their food with British settlers. Four hundred years later they are just as generous. We arrive with our stewed salmon and soup and I sit down and join Wally and his family at the table and tuck in – it’s delicious. I try other food on offer, too. With a little Nanwalek ketchup, which is seal blubber boiled down into a waxy paste. It tastes like, well, erm, seal fat. It kind of has the Marmite effect: you love it or hate it, and let me tell you I hate it! I later discovered that it has been known to cause botulism. This strangely didn’t concern me. Well, I work with actors with faces full of botox – a deadly strain of the bacteria. A couple of air kisses could be as lethal as a bad portion of seal fat – it’s a good reason to avoid kissing Simon Cowell, ladies! Anyway, before you think of freezing your faces in permanent surprise, digest this: botulism is a lethal toxin that blocks nerve function and causes paralysis. I mean, what muppet wants to inject that into their face? All I can say is it’s bonkers.
After a bellyful of delicious local food there is only one way to end this Thanksgiving evening, and that’s with a song. I get hold of a guitar and perform an old northeastern folk song entitled ‘They Don’t Write Them Like That Anymore’. I can see one of Wally’s teenage daughters thinking, ‘Thank the Lord for that.’ I hit the final chord.
‘Goodnight, Nanwalek, it’s good to be back! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.’
Chapter Five
BOSTON AND CAPE COD
Follow that Fish
November 2008, Series 2
As I walk through Boston Arrivals I spot the director, Jamie Goold, among the throng. Immediately I can see something’s wrong. He walks purposely over to me, stony-faced.
‘What’s happened? [pause] Is it my dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘No, he’s had a heart attack.’
It’s a surreal and emotional introduction to Boston.
I phone the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle. Dad is in intensive care but able to talk.
‘Are you OK? Jesus, Dad.’
‘I’m all right, son.’
‘I’m organising a flight home first thing tomorrow.’
‘Don’t you dare get on the plane. All the family are here, and we love you and I am fine.’
‘But I want to be there.’
‘There’s nothing you can do. I know you were in Casualty but an actor in a hospital is about as useful as a chocolate teapot,’ he laughs, short of breath.
I really didn’t want to stay. The truth is that I was scared to death and I wanted to be with my family. I had never faced the possibility of life without Dad before and it shook me to the core.
‘Dad, did it hurt?’ I ask, like one of Job’s Comforters, part of me wanting to know how serious it was, the other what it will be like when I go through it later on!
He says, ‘I have never felt pain like it.’
This is a man who has worked down the mines all his life and has suffered slipped discs and a crooked back, like his father, a miner before him, all of this resulting in a perpetual stoop when he walks. He’s endured severe nerve damage in his fingers (vibration white finger) from working at the coalface but never complains. He’s always managed the pain by swimming for miles in the North Sea, irrespective of what time of year it is. Now that’s hardcore.
‘Imagine you are in a room and the walls are closing in,’ he says. ‘And they start to squeeze your ribs from right to left and the crushing is not stopping and the pain is getting worse. It takes a lot to drop me to my knees.’
I imagine him bent double in searing agony. I’ve never seen my father vulnerable before. Growing up, Robson Senior, or Big Rob, as he is known to his mates, was the hardest man in the village. He’s only five-foot-nine but stocky with huge shoulders, built like a juggernaut. When people ask me to describe my father, the best word is ‘huge’. He is huge both in character and stature, not an ounce of fat on him, and boy, could he handle himself in a fight – of which there were many. Like the time when a young guy knocked all my teeth out and Dad went round to his house, pushed him aside and chinned his father! Or if ever he was woken up by people on the street outside, he would thunder down the stairs, give someone a smack in the mouth and ask questions later. No one dared to interrupt his sleep. If David, Joanna, Dawn or I did, we knew not to be in the same postcode.
My younger brother, David, inherited Dad’s build and toughness, but that gene wasn’t passed on to me. I always say, ‘A runner is better than a fighter and an ego heals faster than a broken jaw.’
‘Make a good programme, Robson.’
‘I will, and I’ll be over to see you in six days.’
The phone clicks off. I exhale deeply, feeling as though there is a tight band around my head. I am poleaxed by anxiety and want to blub like a child.
Tonight we are meant to be going out on a trawler for three days in pursuit of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a fish that can grow to record sizes of over 1,400 pounds. Men risk life and limb to hunt these creatures because one that size could be worth around half a million dollars on the Japanese market. Our timing is perfect: the bluefin are running. But after the news of my father, and indeed the ordeal of the Ocean Pearl a few weeks ago, I just can’t face it. Mercifully Jamie has asked the trawlermen if we can postpone our trip until the morning, explaining the situation, but my dad being poorly means nothing to them – they have to make a living – so they go without us.
Jamie calls a production meeting with Jonathan, the AP from the Alaska episode, cameraman Mike Carling and the sound-man Patrick Boland, and we decide to go out on
the trawler at the back end of the week. We’ll just have to pray we haven’t missed the bluefin run. We re-jig the schedule as best we can. Luckily Jamie is an expert at thinking on his feet.
After the meeting Mike takes me to one side.
‘What you’re going through with your dad – I’ve been there. If you need to talk I know exactly how you’re feeling.’
Mike is ex-army and built like a brick shithouse. He’s also got a massive heart. We’d bonded on the Ocean Pearl trawler, during thirty-six hours of hell, which was a hundred times worse for him with a heavy camera on his shoulder, but, unlike me, Mike never complained once. Over the next few nights I talk about my dad and how to face the inevitable. I regale Mike with stories of my childhood, such as the one and only time Dad took us out fishing in Devon, when I was seven and David was five. David and I were really seasick so the captain suggested he turn the boat around but my father said, ‘No way, I’ve paid five pound. We are staying out ’til we get a fish.’ We came back with one mackerel, which Mum cooked and made a right mess of. Dad doesn’t get fishing – to him it’s inactive and boring. His favourite hobby is drinking; he loves it and could have won many medals had dipsomania been an Olympic discipline. I once witnessed him devour eighteen pints and still manage to walk home – I have never been so proud. He fell over the hedge in the front garden but it was a grand effort all the same.
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Seeing as we aren’t going out on the trawler to catch tuna, we have to find something else to film. So we decide to do a PTC on Cape Cod and the history of the name. In 1602, a chap called Bartholomew Gosnold, an eminent English lawyer, explorer and privateer, went fishing and caught a few cod with a collective weight of 1,000 pounds, as you do. (Sadly we’re not going to catch any today as the cod are too small due to overfishing and therefore not extreme enough.) Having rather a lot of sway and also having discovered the area first, he decreed it should henceforth be known as Cape Cod. He also named Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter. I wonder if they’ll name a place after me one day? Perhaps a cricket field in Northumberland – Robson’s Green – or a bridge I once fished off. I can dream.
(I actually wasn’t named Robson when I was a baby. Believe it or not for two days my name was Gary Green, but then Dad turned up, took the band off my arm and gave me his own name. Thank God he did. I can’t think of many hip Garys off the top of my head. Well, there’s Gary Oldman: extremely cool. Gary Lineker: quite cool. Gary Glitter: hmm, death penalty springs to mind. I’m very glad I’m Robson. It’s a name that belongs to the mining communities of the northeast and it’s common for the eldest son to have a surname as a first name. In fact, in my class at middle school there was me, Robson Green, and my mate Robson Brown. I kid you not.)
Anyway, the history of this part of New England is also pivotal in the founding of modern America. In September 1620 the Mayflower set sail from England and that November she landed on the shores of Cape Cod, most probably near Provincetown, aka ‘P-Town’, nowadays the gay capital and party town of Massachusetts. Probably not what the highly religious Pilgrim Fathers had in mind, but I’ve heard Burger Queen is worth a visit. In December 1620 the Plymouth Colony was founded and the rest, as they say, is American history. But there is also another important historical fact associated with the Cape and this one I actually know a lot about. Here’s a clue: the famous score is just two notes played on a cello, over and over again. Dur-nur, dur-nur, dur-nur-dur-nur . . . faster and faster . . . That’s right, it was the setting for Jaws. Over the summer of 1974, when Steven Spielberg was just twenty-seven, they filmed all around here and Martha’s Vineyard. Usually movies were shot in a studio, but the young maverick Spielberg wanted to prove himself and took the gamble to shoot in the ocean. There were many near-drownings and the film was fraught with setbacks, not least when the $250,000 mechanical shark was finally ready for his close-up and turned out to be cross-eyed and a bit, well, rubbish-looking. He also sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound and all his electricals had to be overhauled. Not to mention that Jaws was worse than me in the high-maintenance stakes: every night he had to be hosed down and freshly painted. Spielberg knew he was facing a flop so he went back to the drawing board. He later said, ‘I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark. So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock: “What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?”’ He realised ‘it’s what we don’t see that is truly frightening’, and thus made a classic by featuring the shark as little as possible.
Great whites are in fact rare off Cape Cod but there are plenty of other sharks, such as the vicious mako, which is what I’m off to catch this morning. Known round these parts as ‘the taxman’, mako can take 70 per cent or even 90 per cent chunks out of your quarry when fishing, which is known as being taxed.
As I walk down to the aptly named Green Harbour (hopefully not named after a forebear who lost his life to a shark), the only question is: are we going to need a bigger boat? I meet Tom de Persia and his son, Jeff, who run several sports fishing charters off the Cape. Today we’re heading two hours east into the Atlantic to go in search of this ultimate predator. It’s beautiful out at sea, the sun is rising, the dolphins are swimming, but bloody hell, Tom is driving the boat like an utter madman. It’s obvious he hasn’t skippered in a while by the way he is battering the boat at speed into the waves. Jeff is more of an able seaman and is losing patience with his father’s incompetence. As we are all thrown around the boat, Jeff shouts, ‘What the hell are you doing, Dad?’ Let’s just say they seem to have a somewhat strained relationship. I think Tom is just desperate to be on camera.
The mako shark is the fastest shark in the ocean and the third-fastest creature on the planet. They are capable of jumping twenty feet out of the water and are responsible for taking many a chunk out of fishermen who land them on their boats. We will not be landing our mako, as shark fishing is part of a catch-and-release programme, which means any taxmen we catch will be electronically tagged so that marine biologists can study feeding, breeding and extreme fiscal pillaging, and other habits of this fearsome creature.
To attract these predators we have got to get the smell of blood in their nostrils, so out goes the chum crate full of ground-up smelly fish. We drag the crate behind the boat, to encourage sharks to head straight for us – it’s definitely counter-intuitive. I am looking for dorsal fins in the water, trying to act casual. When the sharks do get near the boat we are going to try to hook one using balloons.
‘Are we throwing the mako a party?’ I ask.
Jeff explains that the balloon acts as a bobber, so when the shark bites the balloons pop. Because of the waves and the swell it’s sometimes difficult to see where the bait has dropped; in this instance we’re using bonito, which is a medium-sized mackerel-type fish. The bright-coloured balloon is an extreme version of a fish float, and if we accidentally fall asleep (which is quite possible when out fishing) the loud bang will hopefully wake us up. Well, that’s the theory.
Jeff has been fishing since he was born. In fact, when he came out of the womb, the first thing his parents gave him was a rod – well, almost the first thing. They probably gave him a kiss and then a good glug of milk and then the rod. Jeff is fascinated by sharks and saw Jaws before he went on his first shark-fishing trip with his dad. He has seen the film twenty-six times at the cinema. I myself saw Jaws six times at the Newcastle Odeon (now a car park) with my best mate Keith Jobson; we watched Star Wars sixteen times.
As I wait for a bite, I jabber at the crew and camera. The sun gleams on the water and I check every bump and ripple for signs of movement. I really don’t want to spot a grey dorsal fin cutting through the waves like a scalpel, but then again I really do. What is it about humans and the need to scare the shit out of ourselves? Spielberg is right, it’s the things we can’t see that scare us the most, so I suppose shark fishing is a way of facing your fears, literally. It’s also borne out of pure curiosity to see and know m
ore about what lurks beneath. To my mind it’s bloody bonkers, but I am contractually obliged!
I imagine I’m in the barrel scene of the movie. The shark is circling Quint’s boat. Quint loads a harpoon and attaches it to a plastic barrel. He shoots Jaws. The predator is now very pissed off and takes the barrel on a very fast journey. He disappears and so does the barrel. Where’s the shark gone? John Williams’s cello music is playing in my head: dur-nur, dur-nur, dur-nur. Every glimmer looks like movement and my eyes are in overdrive. I’m seeing shapes everywhere. I stare at the balloon waiting for it to pop. I wait. But a watched balloon never bursts.
Two hours later and we’ve got bugger-all, I am still in one piece and I’m bored. I’m also absolutely freezing my nuts off out here. Quint never looked cold but then, compared to Orkney Islander Robert Shaw, who played the grizzly fisherman, I am a soft Southerner. He was probably warmed up by rum, as he wasn’t shy of a drink. Shaw was an incredibly talented man and actually wrote the USS Indianapolis monologue scene in which Quint explains his violent hatred of sharks. Watch it again, it’s brilliant. He died in 1978 of a heart attack but is on my imaginary list of top five people of all time to go on the lash with, the others being: Oliver Reed, Peter Sellers, Errol Flynn and, weirdly, Michael Bublé.
Suddenly I swear I see something break the surface of the water. Jeff isn’t sure. The balloon starts moving towards us very slowly. I don’t think we are going to need a bigger boat. It’s about the pace of a Chihuahua paddling under the surface. We pull up the line – ‘It’s a shark!’ Just the wrong bloody kind. It’s a small spiny dogfish. I grab him by the tail and hold him up to camera. He’s got two small dorsal fins and really rough skin, and reminds me of an ex-girlfriend.
