by Carl Safina
But not necessarily good times. Vietnam was hard on morale, and the U.S. draft was a looming death sentence for thousands of young Americans, and Vietnamese. Faced with being fodder for an unjust war, many found that getting high was a shortcut to a false escape.
Tim admits, “I was a full-blown alcoholic and cocaine addict by the time I was twenty.” He’d graduated from high school with a D average; but he did graduate—the only one in his family who did. He went to trade school to learn boat building, and developed an admiration for fishermen. Tim was soon fishing himself. He spent six summers netting salmon. He spent winters in one of the most savage fisheries there is: Bering Sea King and Tanner Crab fishing. “That crab fishery,” he says, “draws the most brutal people. And some of them—skippers included—are not the sharpest tools in the shed. It’s about the most dangerous, ferocious fishing there is.”
Jim chimes in, “Almost no one working the deck of a Bering Sea crab boat is over thirty years old.”
Eventually Tim got a friend to introduce him to the union long-liners in Seattle, and he has remained in this fleet since. “In five days, I’ll be fifteen years clean of cocaine. A lot of my friends never got clean and now are dead.” He says he lost ten years to drugs and is still playing catch-up. Tim sees lots to like in fishing. “It’s now more serious and safer, no room for alcoholics and druggies. I like the task-oriented work in fishing. I really like coming into the dock with a load of fish. Fishing gives me a culture that I like. A lifestyle. I like the freedom. Some people have lots of time and no money; others have lots of money and no time. Fishing gives me both. Guys in this fleet can actually raise a family while working on the deck of a boat—not just in the pilothouse. And we’re some of the last guys that actually produce something.”
Tim asks if this is my first time in Alaska. When I say it is, Tim says welcomingly, “You’ll be schooner trash in no time.”
I feel proud to hope he’s right.
Callahan, a.k.a. Cal, wears a T-shirt that says SAVE THE ALES. He grew up on Whidbey Island outside Seattle, in Puget Sound. His mother had married a salmon troller, so at age twenty-three, this is his tenth season fishing, his fifth with Mark. In addition to fishing along with the others, he’s the boat’s cook.
Jim Fitzgerald is the crew’s most taciturn member. He grew up in North Dakota and dropped out of college as a senior chemistry major after reading an article about fish canneries that prompted him to sell everything he owned and drive to Alaska. Jim has been here twelve years and is now thirty-four. Jim says that breaking in, “developing the back for it,” was difficult.
“Yeah, it’s hard breaking in,” emphasizes Shaun Bailey, twenty-six, who has worked on long-liners since he was seventeen and has been on the Masonic three years. But he also emphasizes that he loves fishing. Shaun came from a troubled family beset by alcohol, and became an alcoholic himself at a young age. He sees this job as his ticket. Mark left him ashore for one trip after he appeared drunk at the boat. Now he is the happiest member of the crew. On this trip, he will also be the luckiest.
Mac is thirty-seven and has been fishing for seventeen years, the last six on the Masonic. Mac was drawn to fishing by the challenge of mastering the work. Now he says, “The older I get the more I enjoy the things I did as a kid, like just being around the ocean. I am a visually oriented person, so I like looking at the sea, seeing the changing view.”
Most of the younger crew members speak of other jobs and other skills they want to develop in their off time. Cal does glassblowing; others speak of carpentry. In the back of their minds is fear. Fear of the accidents that often befall commercial fishermen, fear of fatal weather, fear of the grim prospect of working as a deckhand in Alaskan waters if you live to be past fifty. Mac says he feels guilty about not working during the off-season (but not too guilty, apparently) and keeps himself occupied working on his house in Springfield, Oregon. But he’s ready to move to Alaska, saying, “I find Oregon to be pretty used up by my standards.” Mac may have another long-term strategy. He excuses himself to go place an order for two hundred shares of stock in an oil-drilling company.
Skipper Mark has shorter-term concerns. He has spent the morning calling buyers in Seattle. Homer, Seward, and Kodiak, developing his fishing plan based on prices. A story is circulating here, of one boat that ran for two weeks all the way down to Seattle for a better price on their fish and ended up getting five cents per pound less there than he could have gotten in Alaska. Weather and fish prices dominate Mark’s concerns, and his crew’s. “What we will hunt depends on the price.” The weather broke last week, giving Canadian boats a good shot at halibut, bringing the price down. Sablefish is a good fish to go for when the halibut price is dropping. So for now, Mark, is targeting Sablefish, which entails going to certain places and fishing deeper.
IN THE RESTAURANT other fishermen talk price and weather and locales—and how to keep their fishery open by avoiding bird kills. Mark is saying, “I think it’s important to have an indefinitely sustainable fishery as far as the whole ecosystem goes: the fish, the birds, and everything else out here. That’s the main reason I don’t want to catch albatrosses and other birds. I want to be able to make the claim that we can keep doing this forever. I never said it that way before, but it just seems so obvious.”
Mark speaks to me of his affection for the fleet. He says he respects and likes the fishing community much more than the academic community he once knew. Mark says these fishermen are not only smart but very thoughtful people. “They live a life in which they are immediately responsible for what they do.”
A fisherman comes over to tell Mark about one night from his last trip. “It was one of those nights you see about twice in your life. Flat calm, full moon, and a hundred yards away was a pod of Sperm Whales in a circle, snoring. God,” he says almost prayerfully, “it was neat.”
Another fisherman from the bar who has just come to sit with us waves his hands and complains about Sperm Whales. He says they eat fish off the hooks, and wouldn’t mind seeing a few killed.
Mark hints that if anyone from their fleet started harming whales, “the public boycott of us would happen so fast it would take your breath away.”
The fisherman says, “At today’s prices, who cares!”
Apparently, not all these guys are reading poetry in the wheelhouse or feeling inspired to find their place as both user and steward of a whole, healthy ecosystem.
Tim says to me that anyway the Sperm Whales are not nearly as problematic as Killer Whales. Mark adds, “In the Aleutians., Killer Whales somehow know when you have found the fish. They somehow get you on their radar. When you finally start catching Sablefish—it takes a while to find them in the Aleutians—you’re excited and the fish are coming up on the line, and all of a sudden you look toward the horizon.” He mimes a distant look of combined disbelief, recognition, and dread. “And in the distance you see these white puffs—not spouts but these animals bursting through the wave tops as they’re rushing for the boat at thirty-five miles an hour. Usually big males lead, with those high dorsal fins slicing through the surface. When they get to the side of the boat they turn and the winch man just helplessly watches them pull, pull, pull; eating those fish off the line like stripping grapes. And they don’t take ninety percent; they take one hundred percent. Half of your brain is in absolute awe—and the other half of your brain is saying, ‘Oh crap.’” Mark suggests that the answer could be to develop fish traps so the fish don’t come up on hooks where the whales can get at them. They’d better be strong traps on strong lines. Jim says that in the Bering Sea, Killer Whales sometimes try to bump seals off ice floes. He says that occasionally, trying to get away from Killers, seals would run right up the stern ramps of dragger boats.
Mark emphasizes how tough fishing in the Aleutians is: The way that the currents run so hard. The way that the weather is so cruel. The problems of icing up. The dangers of boats accumulating ice faster than the crews can break it off with bas
eball bats; how iced-up boats get top-heavy and turn over. The williwaws—capricious, dangerous, swirling gusts of wind that can pick up water. The way the ordeal of fishing the Aleutians is reflected in a nickname for the place that even these men use: “Hardball Hotel.”
BUILT NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS AGO, the wooden, seventy-foot Masonic was the last of a breed of sail-powered halibut schooners, hybrids between old-style Gloucester cod schooners and Norwegian workboats. Mark has owned the Masonic for about fifteen years. He knows who all of the previous owners are, going back to when the boat was built. Mark says this boat is made of “original wood”—old growth. It would be impossible to make this boat today, because fully 95 percent of North America’s ancient forests have been cut down.
Nowadays the Masonic’s sail masts remain, but rather than sails she is propelled by a 365-horsepower six-cylinder diesel. She carries 4,500 gallons of fuel, enough for twenty days of cruising. Mark says, “We don’t run full-tilt. We use under three hundred horsepower to make it last.”
On the Masonic’s foredeck lie coil after coil after coil of ropes with buoys and anchors, for securing the ends of the longlines to the bottom. Elsewhere on the boat: coil after coil after coil of fishing lines. And thousands and thousands and thousands of hooks.
The wheelhouse sits up high amidships. It contains the skipper’s private bunk, as well as all the navigating electronics—radars, sonars, GPSs—and radios and maps. The boat’s aft deck is a large baiting station that can be closed against the weather. The stern rail accommodates a chute for sending the baited lines overboard. The boat’s rear deck also has the toilet, or “head.” The privileged view from this seagoing outhouse is of a limitless horizon, a great ocean, and some of the world’s most magnificent seabirds sweeping by.
The galley occupies the bow of the boat belowdecks. To get to the galley, you step down an almost vertical set of steps that is more ladder than stairs. It contains a diesel-burning stove and oven (for cooking and heat), a sink, and a table shaped to fit the wedge-shaped bow. Surrounding the table are hidden storage space and five tiny bunks barely wider than a man’s shoulders, tucked into the bow of the boat. Each bunk has a bare bulb and a cramped storage rack. The galley is thus kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, and, because it has a television with a video player, entertainment center.
Space is severely scarce, privacy scarcer. People make a particular effort to show excessive politeness while going in and out of their bunks around the table and in moving around the cramped and crowded galley. Stories abound of crewmen on boats getting on one another’s nerves, with violent, sometimes fatal consequences. On one Alaskan vessel, one crewman stabbed another more than twenty times because he could no longer tolerate the way the man chewed his breakfast cereal.
Not counting sea spray and rain, there is no shower aboard. A good T-shirt lasts a week, getting stronger with age. On my six days aboard Masonic, no comb will part my hair. And I’ll quickly outgrow the habit of glancing into a mirror. I will become, in short, schooner trash.
WE’VE WAITED ABOUT A DAY and a half because the weather forecast calls for steady forty-five-mile-an-hour winds. The days in port make the men a bit anxious, because time spent waiting for good weather adds to the weeks until they return home to families or sweethearts. In the derby days, much worse anxiety derived from being forced to fish despite dangerous weather. Time was money. But now with individual fishing quotas, time is merely time and money is merely money. They’ve paid for their share of the quota, and the only question is how long catching it will take them. And the weather largely dictates that.
It looks like we will leave tomorrow, so today there’s plenty of work loading bait and ice. In a misty snow shower that is half drizzle, ninety-six hundred pounds of herring and squid frozen at -20° Fahrenheit come aboard via crane. We move to a different dock for ten tons of ice powdered like snow.
Least of the provisions on the Masonic, though with deeper implications for the crew, is one pack of cigarettes. All smokers aboard intend to quit during this trip. They do this almost every trip. Mac refers ruefully to “the demon tobacco.”
Well over thirteen thousand hooks need a piece of bait, applied by hand. Baiting takes the afternoon. After dinner, it will take much of the evening.
DREAMING AND DREADING ON ALBATROSS BANK
“ONE OF THE FIRST things you’ll notice about the place we’re going is that it’s all wilderness,” Mark Lundsten is saying as he starts the Masonic’s engine. “And—though it’s beautiful—I mean wilderness that swallows people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
Slushy early-May snow covers decks and docks. Midday fog encases the harbor. And the drizzle has turned suddenly to the biggest snowflakes I’ve ever seen, falling like feathers from a shredded comforter, whiting out Resurrection Bay. But the forecast has improved sufficiently that we loosen the lines and Mark eases Masonic from the slip and out toward the unseen mouth of the bay.
The sea turns thick with cold as slush clots the water’s surface into pancakes of ice, dampening the light swell. Wet snow frosts the pilothouse glass. We’re navigating on instruments. Mark keeps a sharp eye on the radar, which shows the fjords we cannot see, and the GPS navigator, which tracks the boat’s position via satellite and gives Mark information for getting where he wants to be.
About the only thing we can actually see is the boat itself. Mark peers out a cracked-open window to watch for drifting logs. Mac is furtively forming a snowball in his gloved hands. Shouts signal the eruption of a full-scale snowball fight on deck. Inside the warmed wheelhouse, Mark comments, “The real job requirement is to have the emotional maturity of a fifteen-year-old. And,” he quickly. admits, “I’m not exempt.”
As the snowfall lightens and visibility opens a little, the toes of fjords become visible on both sides of the bay, showing from under their flannel fog nightgown. The chart shows them rising to twenty-six hundred feet in height. The opaque air forces me to imagine them.
We see light-on-their-wings Arctic Terns (whose Arctic-to-Antarctic annual migrations let them experience more daylight than any other living thing), stocky Herring Gulls, foraging Glaucous-winged Gulls, Mew Gulls.
The crew sets up fish-sorting equipment on deck, then goes back to baiting the hooks, which will take hours more.
At a modest nine and a half knots, we pass Rugged Island, a jagged, snow-dusted saddleback of scree and trees. This is a transition zone where the open ocean, though still some distance away, first makes itself felt on the protected inshore waters (and your stomach). This rich intersection attracts a collection of foraging birds: Forked-tailed Storm-Petrels, impressive numbers of Thick-billed and Common Murres like flying penguins, various dark and diminutive murrelets, pretty kittiwakes, a whale’s briefly glimpsed blackish back, and the first of many thousands of Northern Fulmars we will see and see and see. The fulmars look like small, stubby, uncouth albatrosses. Also here, on the rocks, sprawl the tawny forms of half a dozen endangered Steller Sea Lions—the world’s largest sea lion, the one whose serious decline is likely due to a combination of getting killed in nets, fishery competition for their food, and food reduction caused by a warming ocean.
MOST OF THE SKIPPERS and crew have experienced seasickness. Many still do. I like knowing that I’m in good company. Not long after we pass Rugged Island, we begin to feel the long rolling swells of the seas that had kept us in port for two days. Soon I don’t feel too rugged or swell myself. That is to say, I cannot in all honesty describe the early-May Alaskan sea conditions as calm. I take a seasickness pill. Too late. It—and my last meal—don’t stay down long. While I’m on the stern deck puking, a large cold wave hurls itself aboard, soaking me and accenting my momentary misery—but saving me the need to wash off the deck.
How long will ye round me be swelling,
O ye blue-tumbling waves of the Sea?
—Coleridge, 1793
At this very moment, in fact, the sea is throwing a lot of water, wh
ich eagerly covers Masonic’s deck but only grudgingly finds its way out the scuppers. The running sheets of water swirling around my boots give the sensation of fording a stream, although the analogy to sinking presents itself.
The gray light, flying snow, cold, and lack of visibility—and how I feet—give the place a foreboding dreariness. In the long-lingering light at 9:30 P.M. the first Laysan Albatross crosses our foamy green wake.
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came.
—Coleridge, 1798
In the dim Alaskan snowlight the albatross and I both seem to float along together for a minute or two, haunting the edges of each other’s worlds.
Meanwhile, Amelia’s chick is coping with heat stress in the sun-seared tropics. Hard to imagine. The blinding beaches and gleaming lagoon of French Frigate Shoals seem like a dream vaguely remembered. Does it seem that way to Amelia, too? At the moment, she’s wandering east along the northern edge of that North Pacific Current, two thousand miles from Tern Island. Amelia’s undulating flight has stitched these worlds together, causing me to experience—perhaps a little too viscerally—how connected the far-flung distances of the great circle of our planet really are. My lofty musings coincide with another bout of seasickness. When I look up again, the albatross has ghosted from sight through the cold, snow-flecked gloam.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold.
—Coleridge, 1798
In the wheelhouse, Mark is listening to a Vivaldi opera. Water and music are companionable because both are fluid. Music is a highly abstract art, and so is fishing. With only the rhythm of the sea surface as a starting point, all else is orchestration. Like a composer, a fisher inhabits our world but labors in an imagined universe that remains always unseen. Success of a musical score is in the sound it suddenly conjures to your senses. If the skipper succeeds, fish from another dimension appear suddenly on deck, before your eyes.
