Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs

by Malcolm MacPherson

  Over the years people who lived in Homer acquired another quality that was a by-product of the sea. It was a sense of impending loss. The feeling was ancient, as old as when men first ventured off land. Nobody ever got used to the premature death of men at sea but after a long time and many losses, a certain resignation had seeped into the collective Homer mind. The men tried to deny it. They thought of drowning as tragic but honorable, as a tribute that had to be paid to nature and the devils of the Bering Sea. The fear of loss never left some part of the thoughts of every man and woman in Homer, whether or not they earned their livings off the sea. It created a pervasive mood of melancholy. But loss at sea also made men of the sea wild, with an abandonment of normal habits and thoughts. We were here today and gone tomorrow because we knew that was what we were, and we lived the here today to its fullest. Yet death followed us, like a spy.

  About the time I came into the world, in 1962, Homer was going through rough times. A dirt road that connected the town to the outside world was not paved until the 1970s, and people came and went more conveniently by sea. In those days, Homer meant a hardscrabble existence. But soon its natural beauty and isolation attracted eccentrics fleeing conformity, the law, and convention. Hippies discovered the town early in the Sixties and spread their anarchist gospel. Artists and a sprinkling of poets and writers followed. A colony of “Barefooters” pitched up with the vow not to wear shoes, to let their hair grow, and dress in cotton robes until peace was achieved in the world. “Old Believers,” nonconformist sectarians of the Russian Orthodox Church, came next with their own peculiar devotion. The most celebrated local eccentric now is a sweet older woman named Jean Keene, also known as “The Eagle Lady.” She lives on the Spit in the tiniest of log cabins where she cares for the feeding of bald eagles, which flock around her house from as far away as Kodiak. She is a savvy, rugged septuagenarian, Alaskan to the core, who drives a rusted, beaten Chevy pickup and works in a cannery. She would not live anywhere else.

  Getting away from government drew others to Homer like Cook Inlet sockeye draw me to the sea each summer. That was surely the case with my old man and his friends. LeRoy Shoultz, for instance, a neighbor and friend, decided to leave the Lower Forty-Eight when the Indiana police called to warn him of a summons. A neighbor had turned him in for leaving his trashcan out by the curb. That same night he told his young wife, Rita, “OK, that’s enough of this stuff,” and packed up his young family without further deliberation. With $1,100 in his wallet and a credit card for gas he hit the highway, not that he was leaving that much behind. To his way of thought, Indiana was old and settled. Alaska was wild, and he yearned for its promise. When he and his family reached Alaska, even the air tasted free. He was flat broke, with four young kids, a couple cans of beans, and some oatmeal to live on, but they all considered nothing too hard in exchange for adventure and freedom from in-your-face government.

  New friends in campgrounds gave them salmon to get by on. “We weren’t complaining,” I remember Rita telling me. She assumed that work would turn up for LeRoy. A local carpenter saw their Indiana license plate and invited them home to a moose dinner. He recommended LeRoy to the local cannery. With LeRoy now employed, they rented a one-room shack in town for $50 a month, with one bed. Rita told me, “We thought we were living high. We had electricity and a rain barrel for water. In a little while we had enough to build a small log cabin. After we first moved in, my mom came up to visit us from Indiana, and I was just totally excited that we had a driveway. We had no water, just electricity. But we had a driveway. My mom could not get that into her head. She just couldn’t understand that up here you are fighting everyday things all the time. You have to be young all the time.”

  As Rita said, nowhere more than in Alaska, the land formed people with sharp, chiseled features. The extremes of weather—minus-80 degree temperatures, Williwaw winds that blew 130 mph, and 90 inches of snowfall a year—made Alaskans seem almost foreign to their more genteel cousins in the Lower Forty-Eight. Alaska presented a blank slate to write lives anew. All that was needed was grit. The cold and dark of Alaskan winters made us naturally cussed, independent, and self-reliant, which in turn gave us a lottery mentality—if somebody was going to win, why shouldn’t it be me?

  And, in keeping, we strictly did not ask for outside help. In Alaska, people reached out to their neighbors. Charity and neighborliness were not virtues that we practiced only on Sundays. And nothing brought that home to us in Homer more than the loss of the trawler Aleutian Harvester.

  At the time, Thanksgiving 1985, I was fishing with my dad by the Augustine volcano, and we had sheltered up in a storm. With not much else to do but ride it out, I talked on single sideband radio to a friend aboard the Aleutian Harvester named Danny Martin. I had worked for two or three seasons with Danny on a gill net boat named Sea Hawk II. That day he was fishing near us, and I asked him how it was going. He said, “It sucks, man. This is my last trip.” He was net dragging in forty-or fifty-foot waves, and he should not have been out there. A while later I heard a Mayday on the radio. Aleutian Harvester had been on radar, and then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone. She had rolled over and vanished like a stone down a well. No one at first could understand. She went too quickly. Nobody in Homer, where three of the four Harvester crewmen came from, wanted to believe that a ship of that size could vanish in plain sight with its sister ship only an eighth of a mile off. There were no survivors, no flotsam, no jetsam, not a single trace that the Aleutian had ever existed. The Coast Guard searched for three days with helicopters, airplanes, and boats before they quit. But the people of Homer were not yet ready to abandon their own sons. If you are a relative or friend of a man lost at sea, there can be no time limit on loss. Homerites stuffed money in hats, emptied savings accounts, liquidated stocks, and held fund-raisers to pay for private search helicopters and airplanes that cost $5,000 a day. That effort to find any trace of the Harvester—and nothing was ever found—started the Aleutian Harvester Fund, which since 1985 has paid for pilots to search for lost airplanes, stranded tourists, and hunters, and sadly, other sailors on ships lost at sea.

  A family friend tells a story that my brothers and I repeat often. Ken Moore, who owns the Northern Enterprises Boatyard in Homer where I dry-dock Fishing Fever over the winter, owed a debt of gratitude to a couple named Mudd and Stinky Jones who had come to Homer, as Ken says, “without a sink.” Stinky was a carpenter whose idea of finished work was with a chain saw. Later, after Mudd left him, he lived in two partially buried steel tanks. At the time, the couple owned a devil’s half acre out of town but more often than not stayed in Homer in a house borrowed from a friend named Poop Deck Platt. Ken was working two jobs at that time, driving back and forth between Homer and Kenai, up the peninsula. One day, Stinky asked Ken to pick up something in Anchor Point on his weekly commute. Several days went by, and while driving through Clam Gulch, Ken remembered the favor. He had forgotten the specifics. He stopped at the Anchor River Inn to call Stinky on the phone. There, he faced an embarrassing dilemma. Who was Stinky Jones? In a phone book he found six Joneses with telephones in the Homer area, but Ken had no idea who Stinky was. He called each Jones, asking, “Are you Stinky?” After three numbers he heard a familiar voice. His first question, “What’s your name, Stinky?” It was Karl.

  Ken, who is my father’s age, knew men who went by Popeye, a sailor; Pappy, Popeye’s pappy; Packsack Louie; Ike the Kike; and Hundred Log Tallis. That was how mail was addressed to them. Hardly anybody knew Poop Deck as Clarence. He used to say, “Nobody remembers Clarence, and nobody forgets Poop Deck.”

  But Homer was not all sweetness. Everyone knew everyone else, and that was good in a crisis. But there was no anonymity like city dwellers enjoy. Gossip crushed even people who were strong. And privacy was difficult to come by. A few years ago, a local Homer character, a drunk and a vagrant, acquired an annoying habit. He would drop by houses unannounced at unexpected times and act as if he owned the plac
e. He would pour a cocktail, stay awhile, and leave when he was ready. That went on for years. Most people locked their doors. But some never bothered to. They complained to a judge who ordered the man to behave. On the next Thanksgiving, a family in town was sitting down to a festive meal when the drunk arrived and refused to leave. The father politely rose from the table and went for a gun. He shot the man dead in the living room. Pondering what sentence to give the killer, who pled guilty, a local judge sentenced him to one month in the town jail. In Homer, hospitality and neighborliness should be expected but not taken for granted.

  Only the wild animals were run out of town. Around Homer, bears killed people and moose chased people, and that brings to mind my Grandmother Jo, who feared neither man nor beast. She and her husband, our maternal grandfather, Ernie Shupert, were Alaska homesteaders, original settlers after the Second World War to whom the United States government gave land. In return, they planted alfalfa and later, rhubarb and strawberries and built a small log house on eighty acres. Grandfather Ernie had served with Col. Lawrence Castner’s “Cutthroats,” officially the Alaska Combat Intelligence Platoon: sixty-four scouts, snipers, and irregulars who fought the Japanese forces garrisoned on two islands at the western end of the Aleutian chain. He decided, after the war, to stay in Alaska.

  Grandma Jo came from Southern California. She is a delicate woman with the heart of a dragon who tarred the roof of her house when she was in her eighties. After Ernie died, the government forbade her to bury him at home. She stormed down to the county offices and told the supervisor, “I’m doing it. If you want to dig him up, then dig him up, but he’s going in.” Grandpa Shupert still lies there by the driveway.

  We often stayed with Grandma Jo and Grandpa Ernie in the summers in our preteen years when our father was out fishing. Grandpa Ernie shot two bears from the door of the house one summer. He dressed them and hung their carcasses from a tripod; they looked just like skinned humans and the sight haunted me. From then on, I had bear nightmares. We ate bear meat, and Grandpa Ernie cured the hides for blankets. Their bathroom was an outhouse about fifty yards across dangerous bear terrain. When nature called in the middle of the night, I could beat the speed of light getting to that outhouse. More than once, a bear loomed out of the moonlight, and I sat shouting for help until the bear moved on.

  Even though she is now ninety-one and weighs no more than eighty pounds, Grandma Jo faced down a moose alone not long ago when she was walking down her sloped driveway with her little dog Allie, who loved to eat pancakes. Grandma Jo was picking up the mail on the Sterling Highway, where she lives about five miles north of Homer on forested land, when a moose cow stepped out of the trees onto the gravel drive. At first she was worried that the animal was a bear; she was less afraid of a moose. She hurried her pace, looking back over her shoulder, and did not see a bull moose standing almost in front of her until it was too late.

  He charged her, knocking her flat on the snow. Grandma was unconscious. She woke up in an instant to see the moose rising on its rear legs to attack her with its front hooves, and she thought, “This is it.” But her dog Allie barked and snarled and frightened the animal away. He stood guard over Grandma Jo and then helped her back to the house. Grandma did not think she was injured in the attack. She drank a cup of tea in her kitchen and turned on the TV. She enjoys game shows. When our brother Neal insisted that she visit the hospital, just in case, she found excuses until he drove her into Homer days later. The doctors said she had cracked her ribs. She still refused to believe that she was hurt. Neal asked her if she would rather live closer to town for safety’s sake. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” she told him, which ended that discussion.

  Living off nature, indeed being in nature, drew people closer to life and death in Alaska than in other places. Whether it was a Sunday picnic or sport fishing for halibut, the most intense fun came from the excitement of near disaster. Not long ago, friends and I traveled Homer’s shoreline on four-wheelers on a picnic around a point that floods at high tide. A tree branch swept one friend off his four-wheeler and knocked him senseless. A woman lost her camera. A kid hit a rock and fell into the water. I took a wrong turn and went up a mountain, and by the time we got back to the shore, the tide had trapped us. We hoisted the four-wheelers over rocks. We forged on. We were laughing so hard we were crying. What a greater day of fun that was than if everything had gone right.

  The same thinking applies at sea. Fishermen must be natural gamblers and eternal optimists; otherwise we would live in fear of the unknown, of failure, of death and injury. As fishermen, we do not know what the next season portends. We can only get our gear together the best we can and be ready for what nature has in store. From our experience of disasters, hard winters, broken, burned, sunk, and adrift boats, hunger and sickness, and the need for grit that physical isolation demands, commercial Bering Sea fishermen know our place in a unique and very dangerous profession. Alone on the sea—as I am now—we may not survive, but we start with the premise, as do most Alaskans, that our own rock-ribbed self-sufficiency will see us through.

  We keep our fishing gear and Time Bandit in Homer in the off-season. But before we were ready to set out to fish for crab last year, we had to gear down from a summer of tendering, which is the monotonous but profitable work of hauling other boats’ catch of herring and salmon to the canneries. We offloaded transvac pumps and weight boxes, and once the boat was stripped, we gave Time Bandit some overdue TLC.

  Time Bandit is a 298-ton, 113-foot house-aft boat with a beam 28 feet across and a hold capacity of 120,000 pounds for king crab and of 175,000 pounds for opilio. The boat is a Hillstrand family affair. Our dad designed her, and together with my brothers, we built her in dry dock in Coos Bay, Oregon, for about $1.6 million. Dad decided to name her after the eponymous Terry Gilliam movie fantasy about six dwarves in a time ripple who set out to get “stinking rich.” I suppose Dad was wishful thinking about his sons.

  The boat construction left us with plenty of time to get into trouble. Andy was the worst, which is usually not the case. I was arm wrestling with a man we met in Joe Tang’s, which had become our hangout after we were kicked out of every other bar in Coos Bay (naturally, we called Joe’s sexy daughter “Poon”). For a reason that only Andy can explain, he jumped on my arm-wrestling opponent and began to beat the crap out of him. Andy grabbed him around the neck and Joe tried to pull him off by the legs, but Andy would not let go. Finally the police stopped the fight. I guess Andy thought that the man had insulted me; Andy is my bodyguard, as I am his. He can say anything to me, but if anyone else crosses me with even an evil look Andy will be all over him like a cheap three-piece suit.

  When we finished Time Bandit’s construction, after nine months, Dad said to us, “Okay, boys, this is your boat now.” He was not giving it to us. He was offering it for sale. But we had no savings. He demanded a 33 percent share of the boat off the top from what we would earn crab fishing and for salmon tendering; in return he would make the payments on what was owed of the capital costs of Time Bandit.

  He asked us, “Okay, where’s your fuel money?” Of course, we had none. “Where are you going to get it?” he asked. We started with a $50,000 loan. Dad assumed we would fail. He was never one for optimism where his boys were concerned; we rarely could do right. “You’ll never make it,” he told us, which made us want to work like hell to succeed. Over eight tough, lean years we split what was left between us brothers after we had paid Dad, the crew, and upkeep on the boat. We did not have much to show, but we had a boat and loved the life. Dad gave us no breaks. In fact, he gave us nothing for free. At the final tally, we paid him $1.7 million for Time Bandit. We paid him off in full.

  What we had bought from him was an incredibly stable platform seaworthy nearly beyond nautical measure. Time Bandit was designed and built for work and only work. She has an elegant and shapely bow, but the rest of her is pedestrian and squat as a potato-eating peasant. We decided, since we were goi
ng to spend more than half our lives aboard, to give ourselves more creature comforts than are customarily found on boats in the Bering Sea fleet. Time Bandit has a four-man sauna in the forepeak, staterooms with queen-size beds, and two bathrooms, one en suite in the stateroom that Andy and I share as co-captains. Ours looks like a normal bathroom with a vanity and sink, a full-length bathtub with a shower, a regular toilet, and cabinets for towels, cleaning chemicals, and gear. Below, the crew’s bathroom contains a full-size clothes washer and dryer and a stand-up shower. And in the galley, we installed a dishwasher, microwave, full oven and range, a large refrigerator, and a wide-screen TV for viewing hundreds of DVDs that we catalog in a drawer.

  Last year, before the start of the season, we hoisted Time Bandit up on the grid in dry dock to have the barnacles blasted off her hull and a fresh coat of paint sprayed on. This past year, with stricter environmental laws, we did not paint her ourselves, and the cost skyrocketed. When the paint was dry, we bolted new zincs to her keel to help preserve her bottom from rust. We repaired and refurbished her interior, replacing cabinets, carpets, the microwave, and the seat cushions, and we patched a square hole in a door where a massive rogue wave had flung the microwave off its bolts across the crew quarters and through the door. The same rogue ripped the oven and range unit off its moorings and skidded the refrigerator from one wall to another.