by Josh Harris
“Finally, Dad got it,” Josh said. “Finally, he came to accept the fact this whole situation wasn’t right.”
Phil took the boys into their bedroom while Teresa sat at the top of the stairs and listened, waiting for her husband to fulfill her desire for even more abuse.
Phil loudly screamed at both boys, but then, behind the closed door, he quietly whispered to them, “Listen, I’m going to whack this bed, and when I do, both of you are going to scream like I’m beating the living hell out of you.”
Phil started smashing the wooden bed frame while yelling, “Don’t you ever disobey. You hear?”
Listening out in the hallway, Teresa reveled in the sound of the blows and the screams of the boys, though she didn’t know they were as phony as the whipping they were supposedly undergoing.
When he was done, Phil came out with a look of satisfaction, telling her, “I took care of that.”
The boys peeked out of their room and, as soon as they saw Teresa was gone, started giggling and ran downstairs and out the door to play as if nothing had happed. Because nothing had happened.
The smile on Phil’s face was quick to fade after moments like that. He couldn’t just run out to play and forget about his problems. He still had to deal with Teresa.
“She drove my dad into depression,” Josh said. “That’s when he started building birdhouses. It was his way of getting away from her. He’d head out to a little toolshed he had built in the back so he wouldn’t get yelled at. He’d hang out there all day and night, working on the birdhouses. That’s why they turned out so intricate.”
“We’re not just talking about a tiny wood house with a hole in it, the kind of thing you think about when someone mentions a birdhouse,” said Russ Herriott, Phil’s business manager. “His houses had shingles, lawn furniture, even a Jacuzzi.”
“Making birdhouses was the last thing in the world I ever thought he would do,” said Grant, Phil’s father. “He never seemed to be interested in woodworking when he was growing up.
“But he started making a few birdhouses and people wanted to buy them. He was amazed those little houses were in demand. I could see why. Every one was totally unique, different from any of the others.”
Phil was inspired by more than just public demand. Every time he thought about going back into the house to face Teresa, he decided he needed an added feature, a fancier roof, a bigger porch, anything to justify staying right where he was.
Or staying out at sea, the place where he had always found solace. And now, it was also the one place where he could still bond with his sons.
From the time he could walk, Josh knew there was wealth to be found below the surface of the water. He knew it as a child because that’s where Daddy went to earn the money that provided him and his brother with all their material needs.
And when Josh was just ten, Phil told him that, if he wanted new clothes for school, he was going to have to go fishing himself in order to pay for them.
That summer, Phil took his son on a gillnetter, a boat so named because it employs nets that entangle fish by their gills. In three months, Josh helped catch enough salmon to make six hundred dollars.
More than enough for clothes, plus piles of candy. In Phil’s mind, since Josh had worked like an adult, he had also earned the right to act like an adult.
“My dad put a cigarette in my mouth, bought me my first drink, and I saw my first Playboy magazine,” Josh said.
Like his father and so many others who went on fishing boats when they were young and had tender stomachs, Josh got seasick his first time out.
And he got a bad taste in his mouth that lingered for the better part of two decades. His first morning at sea, he was given eggs. With the boat rocking, he vomited so violently that he couldn’t bear to eat eggs again for sixteen years.
Yet he didn’t get seasick again, and he soon learned to love the time with his father.
“We’d get fish that were bigger than me,” Josh said. “When I would pick them up and try to throw them into the fish hold, they would whack me in the nuts. My father would laugh and laugh. He taught me how to drive the boat and set the anchor.”
He also taught Josh about both toughness and determination on one unforgettable night. The two of them were fishing on a small boat in the middle of a storm. Phil, concerned that his son was not getting enough sleep, insisted that Josh take the only bunk on the craft while Phil slept on the floor.
The boat had a small wood-burning stove in the cabin and, that night, a pot of boiling coffee had been left on it.
When the boat was hit by a jarring wave, the stove came crashing down, coffeepot and all.
The hot coffee splashed squarely onto the face of the sleeping Phil, awakening him to extreme pain, with blisters soon forming on the scalded skin.
He may have been in agony, but that didn’t stop him from fishing. He didn’t even consider heading back to port.
While Josh was enjoying life on the water, Jake, two years younger, was stuck at home. Always diminutive in size, he had to wait until he was eleven to be considered big enough to fish. He quickly proved he was good enough as well.
“Jake did a really great job his first year up there,” Josh said.
So good that Phil goaded his older son. “He’s doing a better job than you,” Phil told him. Josh responded with work rather than words, putting in the hours and the effort required to become a successful fisherman.
• • •
But while Josh’s life at sea grew brighter with every voyage, his life at home became bleaker every time he returned.
Josh had grown too big for Teresa to punish him physically, so she turned to verbal abuse ever more frequently. It became an endless battle between the two until finally, when Josh reached fifteen, Teresa ordered him out of the house. Phil, all the fight taken out of him by the fear of a financially devastating divorce, wouldn’t intercede on Josh’s behalf.
“Well, I was out when I was young,” said Phil, who had also left home when he was fifteen, “so you’re out when you’re young. And that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
Josh didn’t argue.
“I was fifteen,” he said, “and I was just going to have to find my own way.”
It was a difficult search. Sometimes, he stayed with Grant, his grandfather. Sometimes, he slept on friends’ couches.
Josh still came back to the house to see his father, and one particular visit will forever stand out in his mind. Phil was standing on the roof of his fifth-wheel motor home, parked in the driveway, in order to clean it.
“Like an idiot, he took soap and sprinkled it all over the top,” said Josh.
Phil’s plan was to blast the soap off with a pressure hose, but when he tried to take a step on the slippery surface, the result was predictably disastrous.
He slid off the roof and onto the concrete driveway twelve feet below, landing face-first.
Running over to his father, Josh was horrified at what he saw. There was blood coming through Phil’s hair and streaming down his forehead. One leg was bent awkwardly and his breathing was labored. His sunglasses were cracked in half, still hanging from his ears but drooping down under his chin, the glass shattered.
Still, he was determined to play the role of tough Captain Phil, especially with one of his sons watching. He staggered to his feet, waved Josh off, and, his voice cracking, said, “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Phil then tried to take a few limping steps but conceded, “It really hurts.”
“Dad,” said Josh, “we need to get you to a hospital.”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Phil insisted.
Josh, too young to possess a driver’s license, went into the house to get Teresa.
“You need to take Dad to the hospital,” he told his stepmother, who turned to him in an obvious state of drunkenness.
If Josh was expecting sympathy from Teresa, he should have known better. Coming outside, she spotted Phil in shaky condition, dragging one
leg as he stumbled around, and yelled at him, “Quit being a pussy. Walk it off.”
When Teresa refused to help her husband, Josh went to a neighbor, who drove Phil to a nearby hospital.
Diagnosis: six broken ribs, a broken leg, a massive cut on his head, and a concussion.
For most people, outside of maybe stuntmen and hockey players, that would mean a long recuperation. Phil behaved himself for a week. Then he took the family to Washington’s Lake Chelan, east of Seattle, where he yanked off the cast on his broken leg and went water-skiing.
“You could never stop my dad from doing anything,” said Josh.
Teresa was the same way. Those who spent time around her sometimes felt there was no way to stop her from drinking to excess.
Mike Crockett, one of Phil’s old friends from Bothell, remembers the time he and his wife, Susan, and Phil and Teresa went to a John Cougar Mellencamp concert in a gorge in eastern Washington. While Mike drove his motor home down the narrow, tree-lined back roads to the gorge, he and his three companions entertained themselves with alcohol and drugs.
Then, glancing in his rearview mirror, Mike sounded the alarm.
“Time to behave yourselves,” he yelled to the others in the back. “There’s a sheriff’s car right behind us.”
“Teresa was really freaking out,” Mike later recalled.
He slowed to thirty-five miles an hour and drove like the motor home “was on rails, straight and steady.”
In the back, however, Teresa had become quite unsteady.
“I don’t know what came over her,” Mike said, “but she announced that ‘we can’t have any evidence in here, so I’ll drink it all.’ ”
Frantically, she gulped down all the alcohol she could get her hands on, draining the motor home of all the incriminating booze.
“She understandably proceeded to get really, really wasted,” said Mike, “beyond anybody’s comprehension.”
The sheriff’s car followed for about twenty miles, but Mike was smooth enough to avoid suspicion. They made it to the concert and Phil, Mike, and Susan had a great time in the gorge. As for Teresa, she passed out in the motor home and there she stayed for the rest of the evening.
Phil soon found a new refuge from Teresa: Dan Mittman’s spread in Duvall, Washington, east of Bothell. He had a beautiful home on seven acres.
“Phil would come up and do a big pile of cocaine, but later, he’d groan that he had to get back to Teresa,” Dan said. “Teresa hated me, so I wasn’t about to go to his place. She was a master manipulator, very good at what she did. If she didn’t want you around, you weren’t around.”
Phil would apologize for Teresa’s behavior, but that wasn’t really necessary, since most of Phil’s acquaintances didn’t care what she did as long as they didn’t have to be around to watch.
Josh had to be around Teresa if he wanted to see his father, but that soon became impossible. When Josh would show up, Teresa threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. He would look to his father for support, but all he would get was a finger pointing to the door. Then Phil would dejectedly head out to the backyard and the refuge of his birdhouses. If he had been small enough, he might have crawled into one of them.
Josh tried to stay in high school while working hard enough to support himself, but he couldn’t maintain that balancing act long enough to graduate. So he quit school and, like his father before him, became a full-time fisherman.
It’s not as much fun following in your dad’s footsteps if he’s got his back turned to you, so Josh longed to resume his relationship with his father.
He figured he had found a way when he learned Teresa was cheating on Phil. Josh came to see him and broke the news, but Phil refused to believe it. Or didn’t want to believe it. So rather than turn on his wife, Phil turned on the messenger. He and Josh didn’t speak for three and a half years beginning in 1998.
Like his father and his grandfather, Josh felt the lure of the sea. And that pull was so strong, it washed away some of the anguish he felt over his estrangement from his father. It was an opportunity, he told himself, to prove he didn’t need Phil to be a successful fisherman.
“I didn’t want to live in my dad’s shadow anyway,” he insisted.
Josh got his first job at eighteen on a dragger, which catches fish by pulling a trawl net behind it. Not exactly the Cornelia Marie, but at least a deck to stand on and a paycheck to live on.
He did well enough to attract another job offer. Josh was hired by a floating cannery to work the slime line. If that doesn’t sound glamorous, it’s because it wasn’t. His job was to gut and fillet pollock being off-loaded from boats. It was the equivalent of working on an auto assembly line, except the parts at an auto plant don’t smell and they don’t stick to every part of the body.
Nobody was going to get a reality show out of the slime line. It was not only disgusting, but exhausting work. With the cannery processing 120 tons of fish every eight to twelve hours, Josh was on duty sixteen hours a day.
And that didn’t count his moonlighting job. Anxious for a way out of the slime business, Josh learned that the ship’s engineer made a lot more money than he did. So Josh had dragged his tired, smelly body over to the engineer and asked for a few additional hours as his assistant, doing whatever was needed.
What the engineer needed was someone to keep the generator well oiled. Josh was glad to have the work and, when the engineer left after learning he had cancer, Josh became the oiler for all the machinery on board.
Dealing with oil, or dealing with slime for less money? It seemed like a no-brainer. But it was a decision that almost proved to be deadly, an assignment more fraught with peril than anything he would subsequently face on the Cornelia Marie.
It began innocently enough. While the processing boat was leisurely making its way back to port, Josh went down to the engine room for his routine check of the equipment.
He was immediately hit with the usual blast of heat, in a room where the temperature could soar to 120 degrees. Upstairs, Josh had been wearing overalls with a T-shirt underneath. He pulled off the overalls, wrapped them around his waist, and, cooler in his T-shirt, began his inspection. When he reached a generator, he bent down to check a gauge.
“The generator was going full tilt,” he said, “and the turbo was screaming, sucking in a huge stream of air.
“It sucked the T-shirt right off my back and into the intake and took me with it, right off my feet.”
Josh’s shoulder banged up against the generator, and there he stayed as if he were a sliver of metal and the generator were a giant magnet.
“I was hanging in midair by my shoulder,” he said, “and I couldn’t break free. I grabbed a nearby pipe and pulled, but I wasn’t going anywhere. The suction was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It felt like my skin was going to burst and all my guts were going to get sucked out through my shoulder.”
As concerned as he was for himself, Josh was also able to focus on the generator, even in that moment of extreme peril. Here he was, just a kid trying to survive on a meager salary, and he might be destroying a piece of machinery worth seven figures.
The generator began to sputter.
“Exhaust was coming out of places where it wasn’t supposed to be coming out of,” he said.
Fortunately for Josh, that black, smoky exhaust came spilling out of the engine room onto the deck, alerting the crew.
When they discovered the helpless teenager in the grip of the powerful machine, it took two deckhands, grunting and groaning, to pull him free. Josh’s T-shirt didn’t make it, the generator instantly reducing it to burned threads.
Though he couldn’t move his arm, Josh was still more concerned about the generator’s condition than his own.
“Screw the motor,” said a deckhand.
When the boat reached port, Josh was taken to the ER, where a doctor told him, “If you had been on there eight to twelve seconds longer, your guts would have been sucked out.”
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“Half of me would have wound up inside that engine,” said Josh. “They said it had happened before and that I was very lucky to survive.”
Marie, his girlfriend at the time, did not want him to test his luck any further. She begged him to come back to dry land and find a safer job.
Josh tried sandblasting buildings. Quickly bored with that, he moved on to painting water towers but didn’t like working at such heights and he certainly didn’t like the sporadic nature of the job. Painters don’t work in the rain, a severe limitation in a city like Seattle.
“There was just no excitement for me in any of those jobs,” he said. “It just wasn’t crazy enough for me.”
Josh’s search for a new career ended abruptly when his phone rang in 2001. It was the call he had hoped for. On the other end of the line was his father telling Josh he was short one deckhand on the Cornelia Marie.
“If you want to prove you’re a man,” Phil told Josh, “you’ll come up and go fishing with me. This is your opportunity to shine. It’s red crab, so it’s pretty easy. If you do good, you can continue to work on my boat. I know you can work hard, but I really don’t expect you to make it. Still, I’m willing to give you a shot.”
Phil figured that was the best way to challenge his son, and Josh, anxious to show he was a true Harris, responded.
He started as had his father, as a greenhorn. Phil knew that, if he showed his son favoritism, he would lose the respect of the rest of his crew, but that didn’t stop Phil from worrying about Josh.
His concern was heightened because that first trip was undertaken under conditions that would frighten the most hardened of veteran seamen. The winds roared up to one hundred miles an hour and the waves rose to nearly fifty feet.
Josh’s job was to crawl into the pots after they had been pulled from the water and the crabs dumped out, yank out any lingering bait, hook up new bait, take a quick glance around to look for any crab that might have been missed, and then get out of there as if his life depended on it, because it just might.
At that point the pots were not tied down. If a big wave hit the deck at that crucial moment, the pot could be swept overboard with Josh in it. Or it could go rattling across the deck, colliding with any person or object in its path, leaving anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped inside severely bruised. All Phil could do from the wheelhouse was to maneuver the boat so that, if the pot got swamped by a wave, it would at least stay on deck.
