Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  About one-half of the entire U.S. seafood catch is taken in the Bering Sea, with pollock—a mild whitefish used in fish sticks and surimi—topping the list. Crabbing, the most dangerous occupation in America, rivaled pollock fishing before it hit a recent slump. Crab fishermen work the Bering Sea in winter months, braving high waves, ninety-mile-perhour winds, and freezing spray that can make a boat heavy enough to roll. Why risk such conditions? Fast profits. At the industry’s peak in the 1980s, a crewmember onboard an elite crab-fishing highliner might have taken home “a $100,000 paycheck in a single two-month season,” according to Spike Walker in Working on the Edge.

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax

  I have a picture of us hanging onto the chart table with both hands to keep from being thrown across the wheelhouse on some wild night trying to get into the shelter behind the north side of Unimak Island. We are grinning madly at the camera, our eyes red in the flash, the green glow of the radar screen and the orange dial lights from the radios and Lorans behind us. It looks exactly right as far as it goes, but just looking at the picture you cannot hear the wind screaming through the rigging above us so loud we had to shout to hear each other above it. You cannot feel the shudder of the hull slamming into the waves, or smell the stench of diesel smoke back-drafting up out of the engine room as the wind jams it back down into the stack. And definitely the picture does not show the scratching thought that really, this might not be very cool at all, that right now the last wave of our lives was forming up out there in the wind—the seventh son of the seventh son. Our own personal last wave, the wave that would come through the windows and sweep us all away in a million tons of water as black and hard as basalt, leave us smashed, bleeding, and sinking in a swirling white trail of foam.

  And missing, too, is the other end of the experience spectrum, the basic animal joy at simply being alive and present in the world as the sun came up out of the sea after a long night. The smell and heat of cups of the first fresh coffee since midnight in our hands, a full load under the hatches, a good forecast for traveling, all of that was part of our lives, too. So little of any of that came across in any of the pictures we took, the emptiness and exhaustion of countless freezing hours on deck before dawn, or the redemptive scent of bacon and eggs and coffee at sunrise. The good, the bad, the horrific, and the sublime, none of that ever got recorded in a way we could bring home and show to people on a screen after dinner. And even the stories we told, that other, older way to explain our lives at sea to people on land, to our girlfriends on the phone from the dock in Dutch Harbor, as wild and exaggerated and true as they were, were like trying to describe the taste of a lemon, or what sex felt like, to people from another planet.

  Things happened that seemed too bizarre and too horrible to be true. People would just smile and nod their heads politely when I told them about the helicopter rescue where the pilot had to fly into the wind at eighty knots to keep station above the four men floating in the water below him, after their boat had sunk 150 miles off Yakutat. How he had to fly up and down in thirty-foot dips at the same time to get the basket down to them, because they were rising and falling on thirty-foot waves. All of this at three in the morning, in snow so heavy the crew chief could only see the floodlit deck below him intermittently through the snow squalls.

  They got two guys up with the basket in two hoists, but when the third guy came up they couldn’t get the basket to swing into the helicopter. It kept hanging up on something on the lip of the door, and the chief and the medic kept pulling hard, and then real hard, before it swung in. But as they did, they watched in horror as the last man dropped off the bottom of the basket and fell a hundred feet into the water. They lowered the basket to him but he was unconscious or too broken to climb in. They were redlining on fuel, and it was eighty miles to the beach and the pilot had to call it. They left with the waves breaking over the red hood of the survival suit down there in the water, the arms outstretched, the white face staring up. The air station in Sitka sent another helo out at daylight, but everyone knew what they’d find, which was nothing but wind and snow and water. They flew a grid pattern all morning and then headed back, light on fuel, nobody talking, as they stared out at the water below them.

  Seven hundred miles west of Dutch Harbor, 1,400 miles from Anchorage, almost at the end of the long arc of the Aleutian chain which divides the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Sea, was the island of Kiska, and the harbor it enclosed. Kiska was closer to Asia than to the North American continent, but during the two winters I fished in the western Aleutians, we often anchored up there during storms. The Japanese had captured Kiska in June of 1942, in the northern prong of the same offensive that tried to take Midway, and they immediately began building a massive base around its deep natural harbor. A few weeks later they took Attu, the last island in the chain two hundred miles further west of Kiska, and they held both islands until the next summer. Kiska and Attu were as remote as the moon, but by forming an island chain linking Asia with America they were intensely strategic. They were also the only American soil occupied by foreign troops since the British captured Washington in the War of 1812, and during the fall and winter of 1942 and 1943, the Americans flew hundreds of B-24 bombing missions against them from bases near Dutch Harbor. Flying 1,500 miles round trip, through some of the worst weather in the world, the Americans lost far more planes and crews to storms and fog than to Japanese anti-aircraft fire, but they flew almost every day, and dropped 7 million tons of bombs. They sank dozens of Japanese troop ships in Kiska Harbor. In May 1943, the Americans and Canadians invaded Attu. The Japanese had been cut off from re-supply for months by a naval blockade, and in the end, hopelessly outnumbered and thousands of miles from home, they charged the Allied lines with banzai attacks and died for the Emperor. Of the nearly 2,400 Japanese troops defending the island, only 29 survived.

  The Americans waited until August to invade Kiska, expecting a similar battle, but instead when they came ashore they found the island deserted. Five thousand Japanese troops had boarded transports and managed to disappear into a dense fog, a frequent occurrence in the Aleutian summer. It was one of the great withdrawals in military history. While the American destroyers chased phantom flocks of birds on their radar screens, the fleet of Japanese ships slipped through the blockade and sailed home to Japan.

  There was a video we used to watch, taken in the wheelhouse of some boat out west during a storm, a tape that got passed around the crab fleet in the Bering Sea for a while. The first time I saw it I was sitting at the galley table while we waited out a blow, anchored up in Kiska Harbor. The masts of Japanese transport ships still stuck up out of the water along the west shore, where their wharves had been, sunk by the B-24s. Hundreds of Imperial troops were still down there, surprised in their sleep, or caught in daylight, all now drowned and forgotten, and we were always talking about going down to the wrecks, getting souvenirs, or just looking. But Kiska was a haunted place, awful and lonely even in daylight, and at night it was only worse, our twenty-watt mast light the only light in a bay full of dead soldiers, immense and treeless mountains rising up into the mist around the bay that made it an appropriate place to watch a video like that, a video from the wheelhouse of a boat whose name we never knew. It was short, under five minutes, but on a certain level it described perfectly everything we knew about the Bering Sea but never found a good way to explain. It was a view of a wet nightmare through windows covered with wind-whipped spray, the anodized gray steel of the anchor winch in front of the wheelhouse, the black bow rails, the white-lipped edges of the waves, all blurred and indistinct, as streams of water across the windows smeared the view entirely for seconds at a time. The only sound was a high keening wail, the sound of the wind sucking at the corners of the wheelhouse, pulling on the antennas, with the odd comment from one of the men in the wheelhouse, or a squawk from the radios. Then there was one last shout from someone, and a quick visual snap as the bow dipped and the last great wave came over the rail
and through the window. The tape ends there, with a screen full of silent and patternless video noise, and the part that came after, a wheelhouse full of water, electronics blown, steering and engine controls shorted out, none of any of that long list of bad possibilities is recorded or revealed. And though the tape is evidence that they made it, you can only guess at how far from land they were, or what they had to do to get back from that, bolting plywood over the windows, hand steering, relying solely on a compass for navigation, dealing with injuries, who knew. It was like a last dispatch from The Lost Patrol, out on the far edge of the galaxy, and we used to love showing that to the green guys. “Hey Jerry,” we’d say, “How’s your reflexes? Think you could duck in time?” But when the green guys asked, and they always asked, like we had wondered ourselves at first, what happened to the boat, did everybody live, which boat was it, what year did that happen? We’d laugh and tell them to forget it, they were missing the point. Because they were looking for hard details, the “facts,” a way to understand something that was essentially primal, beyond names, dates and insurance reports. Maybe those existed somewhere, on land, in a civilization we had left behind, but they were details that had nothing to do with the true reality of the video for us—just the wave itself, caught in the brief and ineffable moment of its power, the blank screen afterwards, and the fact, the only fact that mattered, that there were no witnesses except the men themselves, and that only by surviving was this video even in existence as a record of the event. The men themselves could have been any crew, on any boat, in any year since men first sailed in ships. That they had lived to bring their cryptic story back, that they had brushed up against the edge of the thing we all knew surrounded us, and that it might just as easily have gone the other way, with just another missing vessel alert from the Coast Guard, was what was true and significant to us.

  In the early winter of 1998 a boat named the Dominion was fishing on the west side of Kodiak Island during the winter pollock season. They had just hauled a bag with 60,000 pounds of fish up onto the deck, and were pumping enough refrigerated sea water out of the tank to make room for the pollock. They started spilling the fish out of the bag into the tank, but they pumped too much water out too quickly and the water in the tank went slack, suddenly had what we called “free surface,” and sloshed to one side of the tank, heeling the boat over. The bag of fish on deck spilled across the downhill side of the deck and the boat kept going, rolled completely over, and they were upside down in less than fifteen seconds. The deckhands walked up the deck, stepped over the rail onto the side of the boat and then up onto the keel like walking on a rolling barrel. They didn’t even get wet.

  A friend of mine was the hired skipper on there that winter, standing in the wheelhouse, looking out a window at the back deck when it happened. There was no outside door in the wheelhouse and when the boat rolled it went so quickly he didn’t have time to climb down the ladder to the galley and run out on deck. He found himself paddling in 38-degree water in a corner behind his captain’s chair with the boat upside down above him, the wheelhouse floor overhead, in an airspace just big enough to get his head out of the water. There was plenty of light coming in through the windows below him so he could see what he was doing, but when he tried to swim down and open them they were wedged shut. He came back to the corner, got some air and tried swimming up the stairs and into the galley but ran out of air again partway through and came back up into the wheelhouse. The air was going bad fast in the little pocket he was breathing from and he knew he had maybe one more try in him. He made it through the galley, pulled the floating refrigerator out of the way, and swam out the door and up to the surface. The other guys pulled him out and gave him some of their dry clothes to put on. It was January and cold, maybe twenty degrees, but it was flat calm, it was daytime, and there were two other boats fishing less than a mile away. They came over, and one of the boats came right up alongside the overturned hull, and they all just stepped across and were handed mugs of hot coffee.

  My friend told me that story in his kitchen in Kodiak one afternoon about three months later. We sat on stools with our elbows on the tiled counter, drinking Coronas, looking out the window at the rain falling in the trees. From where we sat we could see out across Monashka Bay, see a squall moving into the bay from Marmot Island. His wife and kids sat out in the living room watching TV, the sounds of a game show coming in over the sound of the surf on the beach below the house. Though you’d never know it by the rain and by the ice still in the driveway, spring was coming, but they were moving back to New York; they’d be gone when summer came. “She freaked pretty bad over the whole deal,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do in New York, but her mother’s there, and her sisters. She wishes she never even knew about that part of it, about being trapped under the boat, and having to swim out like that.” All I could do was take a hit on my beer and look out the window and nod my head. I could think of another way, the only other way it could have gone for her to never have had to listen to a story about her husband swimming out of a submerged wheelhouse with his last breath. But of course that possibility was the one she couldn’t stop thinking about, the reason for the cardboard shipping boxes piled in the middle of the floor.

  Somebody on one of the boats that came to the rescue of the Dominion had taken a picture of the crew just before they were taken off the overturned hull. They are standing on the keel like birds lined up on a floating log, and they ran it on the cover of National Fisherman. The picture has a very casual look to it, as if the men standing there are workers, painters maybe, taking a break. Inside there is a little blurb explaining it but from the picture alone there is very little to suggest what the odds might be of the weather being that nice, or of the other boats being that close by to take the picture in the first place, or indeed of what may have just happened at all.

  One winter I was working on the Irene H., fishing king crab. We had been fishing hard since the January start of tanner crab season, working in the shipyard all summer, and started king crab in September. We came into town only long enough to unload the crab and get food, fuel, and bait.… The unloading took all day. I finished my engine room chores, helped the other guys fix a burned out sodium bulb up on the mast and then in a small miracle found I had an hour to myself before the boat took off again. It had been weeks since I’d been ashore, three months since I’d had a day off.

  I went across the street to the B&B Bar and sat on a barstool in the warm room, watching the girl moving behind the bar, listening to Willie Nelson on the jukebox, nursing a beer, feeling a hundred years old. In the mirror over the bar I suddenly caught a flash of a guy with his sweatshirt hood pulled up over his halibut cap walk past the street window and up to the door, as if he were coming in. There was a pause, but the door didn’t open, and then the guy crossed in front of the window again, headed back down the street the way he’d come, and I saw a red beard peeping out around the side of the hood. For a second, still looking in the mirror, seeing a left profile under the cap, I thought it was Jim Miller, the skipper on the George W., something about the red beard and the white cap, but I knew that couldn’t be right. The George W., a fifty-eight-foot trawler, had disappeared the winter before. They were dragging for cod in the Shelikof and something happened and the boat went down. A life raft with the two deckhands was found drifting twenty miles off the south end of Kodiak Island, many miles south of where they had been working, but there was a hard northwest wind that week we knew had blown the raft far from where it had been launched. It was very cold and something had gone wrong with the canopy and it had failed to inflate, and even with their survival suits on the two crewmen had frozen to death lying on top of it, exposed to the wind. The body of the skipper was never found, nor was the boat, though if you follow the bottom curve along that edge just right you can still see it down there, an irregular red smudge on the orange bottom of the depth sounder screen, a sudden hard spot on the soft sand of glacially deposited morai
ne fifty fathoms down, where Uyak Bay opens up into Shelikof Strait.…

  I sat there in the B&B, warm and drowsy with the beer I’d drunk, wondering what I’d seen in the mirror, a stranger with a red beard and a white hat who’d hesitated at the door of the bar, and then decided to go back down the street to the boat harbor, or something else.… I knew without being told that one way or another the dead were as much a part of us now as they had ever been when they were alive. And in a way I knew, more deeply the older I got, that the glimpses of long-dead men I saw turning corners around buildings in broad daylight, or standing bright and forever young before me when the room was dark or my eyes were shut, were really them, not just my memory of them. And I knew too they were with me for keeps, that they weren’t going anywhere, they were permanent visitors inside my head from all those last trips they’d never come back from.…

  The skipper was already in the wheelhouse, glowering at the fog that devoured his vessel’s bow. The helmsman stared fixedly at the compass. His anxiety was palpable. I checked the radar screen for traffic, but we were alone. Boom. I stumbled slightly with the impact. The skipper muttered a gloomy “shit.”

  To starboard and to port, white zeppelins slipped past, grown large and menacing as our little ship penetrated the ice pack we blundered into at dawn. The fog bank began to thin. Within moments we could see the ship’s bow, then glimpse the shattered ocean. It was littered with rubble-like shards of frozen milk below a hard blue sky. The skipper slowed to one quarter ahead and the helmsman did his best to avoid the larger ice rafts, steering a circuitous course around them.