by Dylan Tomine
This creates a compressed frenzy of activity in waterfront communities throughout the area. Hood Canal, the epicenter of the spot prawn harvest, gets particularly crazy. Local sporting goods stores stack their aisles with specific, obscure brands of cat food – Puss ’n Boots mackerel reigns supreme – for bait. True fanatics mix up their own top-secret shrimp baits, the fouler-smelling the better, with recipes involving fish emulsion fertilizer, canned tuna, rotten salmon guts, herring oil, and other ingredients that I could be killed for revealing. On opening morning, outrageous lines form at boat ramps well before daylight, with enthusiastic shrimpers jockeying for launch position. All this to drop and pull shrimp pots – heavily weighted, wire mesh traps – up from 200 to 300 feet deep.
If spot prawns didn’t taste so good, nobody would go through all this. Averaging six to eight inches long and occasionally even bigger, spot prawns are an oxymoron come to life: jumbo shrimp. And they’re not just big. A spot prawn’s delicate, sweet flavor and firm texture make other shrimp – tiger prawns, white gulf shrimp, bay shrimp – seem coarse in comparison.
This year, we have an opportunity to avoid most of the hassle and enjoy all the rewards. Another salmon-fishing buddy, David Smart, already has his boat on the Canal, secret bait mixed, pots rigged. Better yet, he has invited us to come along. All I have to do is show up with the kids on a certain beach at a certain time and wait to be picked up. Maybe this spot prawn business isn’t so bad after all.
Smarty, as he’s called by nearly everyone, including his mother, just happens to be the world’s youngest old salt. He’s been plying the waters of Puget Sound on a daily basis since his parents turned him loose in a miniature Whaler when he was 10 years old. Now just 26, he possesses the kind of deep, intuitive understanding of the Sound you might expect from someone three times his age. The mysteries of tide, weather, and season – so unfathomable to most of us – make perfect sense to Smarty. He’ll limit the boat with king salmon at Skiff Point one evening, and the next morning, when the rest of the fleet converges there (and finds little success), he’ll be 20 miles away, limiting out again at Point No Point. It happens all the time. If you ask how he knew to make the move, his thought process is so instinctive that he can’t articulate a clear answer. “It just seemed right,” is about all he can manage.
Smarty drives a boat the way most people drive their cars – with the unconscious ease of something done every day for a lifetime. On the water, he’ll run the boat, watch the fish finder, rig gear, catch bait, fight and net fish, all without missing a word of conversation on his cell phone. I’ve seen him find a football-sized crab pot buoy amid acres of heavy chop on the open Sound. In the dark. This kind of competence, though, comes with its own set of hazards. As a mutual friend says, “Smarty does things so well and so easily, he gets impatient with everyone else.”
Like any good old salt, Smarty does not suffer fools gladly. And yet beneath his sometimes crusty demeanor lies a thoughtful, generous spirit. He goes out of his way to be kind to Skyla and Weston, and they both look forward to time aboard his boat. And he does share his accumulated knowledge freely with at least one fool: me. It’s humbling to admit that someone young enough to be my offspring is, in fact, my mentor, but there you have it. A lot of what I know about the Sound comes from Smarty.
After four days of brilliant sunshine and calm wind, the morning of the shrimp opener dawns to a stiff southwest breeze and charcoal clouds stretching from horizon to horizon. It will be 25 degrees colder than it was yesterday. The weather service calls for rain, heavy at times. While the kids eat breakfast, I dig through the winter clothes bin I thought we’d put away for the year and come up with a heavy parka and ski pants for Skyla and a shelled, insulated jumpsuit for Weston. I wonder if their life vests will fit over it all.
We drive to the appointed beach, pushing our way down an overgrown dirt road with salmonberry canes scraping both sides of the car, and park where we can see the water. I keep the windshield wipers going and wait until a boat peels off from the distant fleet and starts toward us. Smarty runs full bore through the whitecaps, twin geysers of spray blowing over the bow, until he’s nearly on the sand. There’s no time to waste.
Everyone aboard – Smarty’s mom, Helene; his girlfriend, Sammy; our buddy Neal; and his six-year-old son (and Skyla’s classmate), Alex – is already soaking wet. I pack the kids into life vests on top of rain gear on top of snow suits and we waddle down to meet them. The crowd looks a little grim until Weston calls out his greeting. For some reason, he has taken to pronouncing the letter “s” in combination with other consonants as an “f”: smoke becomes foke, spider is fider, and so on. “Hi David Farty!” he shouts. The mood lifts.
We pile in and hammer our way back out to the shrimp grounds, slamming into each wave with a spine-crunching jolt. Hood Canal is not, as the name might imply, a man-made waterway, but rather a 65-mile fjord carved by glaciers more than 15,000 years ago. When the great Cordilleran ice sheet made its final retreat, seawater poured into the steep-walled canyon, connecting it to the main body of Puget Sound. Underwater, the vertical topography makes an ideal spot prawn habitat; topside, it works like a wind funnel, gathering a brisk southwest breeze and accelerating it into the gale we’re dealing with now. With apologies to Stanley Kubrick, on Hood Canal, the wind doesn’t blow, it sucks.
At the first pot buoy, the real fun begins. Smarty idles up to it and Neal and I begin the two-man haul. I reach down, grab the rope with two hands and pull as far as I can, at which point, Neal reaches down and pulls. Then me. Then Neal. Five minutes into it, my arms and back burn with strain. I can feel my hands losing their grip. Smarty looks at the sonar and says “Only 150 feet to go…keep it moving, boys.” And, because he’s 26 years old, “Come on, let’s see some of that Old Man strength.”
After an eternity of cramping forearms and muttered expletives, we have the pot at the surface. An anxious crew peers over the side to see what we’ve caught. Smarty takes pity on his exhausted deckhands and reaches over to bring the heavy pot aboard. Forty-seven luminous orange prawns, each with a pair of glowing red eyes and long, whip-like antennae, flip around the mesh enclosure like alien bugs. Huddled in the corner, a small octopus explores its new situation with suction-cupped tentacles and a knowing stare.
Helene opens the pot lid and, with Sammy keeping count, starts grabbing shrimp and dropping them into a bucket. The count is important; limits are strictly enforced at 80 prawns per person, which is how I know we have forty-seven. The kids gather around the pot on their knees, fascinated by the creatures inside. Neal holds up the octopus and Skyla allows it to wrap a single tentacle around her finger. “Dad,” she says, after it’s dropped overboard to parachute into the depths, “I think we should have brought it home.” “Why?” I ask, adding, “It wouldn’t live long out of the water, anyway.” “No,” she says, “I mean to eat. They’re good, aren’t they?”
Smarty rebaits the pot with one hand while steering with the other, tosses it overboard, and we’re already motoring toward the next buoy. The heavily loaded boat heaves through the chop, showering us with salt spray. In these conditions, it won’t be easy making two more sets before the deadline.
As we approach the next buoy, Weston walks unsteadily on the heaving deck, gripping the rail with both hands, until he can reach out and tug on Smarty’s rain jacket. It’s taken him awhile, but he’s finally mustered the courage to ask. “David Farty?” he yells over the wind and motor, “May you please…can I drive with the steering wheel?” He’s been eyeing it all morning, enthralled by the big stainless steel wheel, which our tiller-steer skiff lacks. “We’re a little busy now, buddy,” Smarty says. “How about after we have all the pots in the boat?” Weston nods his head and shuffles back to the bow.
To his credit, Weston exhibits great patience. He only asks, “Is it my turn to drive?” 84 times over the next three hours. During that time, we’ve pulled and reset the pots twice more, collected 594 spot prawn
s, and reached total exhaustion. My hands curl into claws with barely enough strength to coil the lines. When the last pot comes aboard, at 12:59 pm, there is a collective sigh of relief, and we idle in closer to shore, trying to find some protection from the wind.
Spot prawns need to be cleaned and iced immediately or their flesh breaks down and softens, so everyone gets to work. Skyla and Alex grab the big shrimp out of buckets by their antennas and hand them to grown-ups, who twist the heads off and drop the tails into plastic bags. Someone – okay, me – produces soy sauce and a tube of wasabi for a quick lunch of sweet, raw shrimp tails. Weston stands off to the side, staring at the coveted steering wheel, trying to gauge whether it’s time to ask again. “Weston,” I say, “why don’t you help the other kids grab some shrimp out of the buckets?” He looks at the big prawns flapping their tails and rocketing around in the buckets. “No,” he says. “They’re too feisty.”
Finally, all the shrimp are cleaned, packed eighty to a bag, and put on ice. “Did somebody say they wanted to drive?” Smarty asks. Weston leaps from his perch and runs to the console, shouting, “Me! Me! It was me!” He reaches up to grab the bottom of the steering wheel and, puffed up with pride, stares ahead into the rain with fierce determination. Smarty keeps one hand surreptitiously on the wheel and eases the throttle forward as the boat putters up and over waves.
Five minutes later, Weston is still gripping the wheel, still standing up, still smiling, but now with his chin on his chest and eyes closed, rainwater streaming down his face. He’s sound asleep. Helene scoops him up and he curls into her lap without waking.
Sammy has to pee. “David,” she says, “I need to go to shore right now.” Smarty looks at the steep shoreline and wind-driven waves breaking white over rocks. “There’s no way. We’ll wreck the boat,” he says. A short, sharp discussion follows, and after much encouragement, Sammy accepts that her only option is to crouch in the motor well and hang out over the transom. The rest of us promise to face forward and not look back, offering what privacy is available on a small, open boat full of people. She’s not happy, but, pushed by the urgency of her situation, she hesitantly steps to the stern.
Smarty idles the boat along, fighting to keep it pointed into the wind. A large cabin cruiser steams past on the starboard side, throwing a heavy wake. Smarty tries to turn into the wave to avoid swamping, but the wind pushes our bow back. He hits the throttle and we jump forward, turning just in time.
The boat rises up and over the first wake, hits a second, and then a third. Long seconds pass, and I glance back to check on Sammy. She’s gone. My eyes follow our prop wash and about fifty yards back I see her bobbing silently among the whitecaps. In dreamy slow motion, I yell something and Smarty hammers the throttle down, spins the wheel, and banks hard back toward Sammy. Everyone is yelling now, scrambling around for the best position to bring her aboard. Sammy says nothing. She looks at us calmly, then reaches up when we come alongside. Neal and I grab her arm and the shoulders of her raincoat and – maybe it’s the drag of her water-filled clothing, or our weakened state from pulling pots – we can’t pull her over the gunwale. I feel her jacket slipping through my cramped fingers, and for the first time, a flash of panic comes into her eyes. Her legs are under the boat now, sliding back toward the prop. In a blur of more yelling and chaos, all I can do is try to hold on.
Smarty slams it into neutral, grabs Sammy’s sleeve, and the three of us haul her over the side and into the bottom of the boat. Water pours out of her rain gear, flooding the deck. And still, Sammy says nothing. It must be shock from the icy water – she’s safe from drowning, but her teeth chatter and her shivers look more like convulsions. Hypothermia is a very real possibility. We wrap her in towels and Smarty heads for the ramp at maximum speed, flying off wave tops, vaulting into the wind. Alex and Skyla hold on through the pounding ride, clearly shaken, and I find myself shocked, too, at the speed with which things happen. Weston, on the other hand, has not even stirred from his deep and happy sleep.
With a full low tide, the near-shore water is too shallow to beach the boat. Smarty coasts in as close as he can, then shuts the motor off, jumps out into knee-deep water, and with Sammy draped over his shoulder, scrambles up to the car. I do the same with a still-sleeping Weston and lay him down on wet sand in the lee of a driftwood cedar log.
By the time we’ve finished transferring shrimp pots, buoys, lines, and ice chests up to the cars and hauled the boat out, Sammy is warm and dry, quietly sitting in the car with heat blasting and Skyla and Alex chattering in her ear. She’s going to be fine. Mad, perhaps, but fine. I walk back down the beach to get Weston and find him exactly where I left him, his eye sockets now filled with rainwater, small puddles with eyelashes poking through the surface. He snores softly and smiles in his sleep, dreaming of the Great Steering Wheel.
We’re nearly home before Weston wakes up, and we spend the last few miles talking about dinner. Skyla says she wants the shrimp “fried real crispy,” the way she had them at a restaurant in Poulsbo. Weston and I are leaning toward boiled with some Old Bay and sea salt thrown into the water. And we remember Stacy mentioned a stir-fry, something with fresh ginger, garlic, and a little black-bean sauce.
The unanimous choice turns out to be not choosing at all. Instead, we spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen, cooking up a spot prawn feast. Stacy cuts tender spring spinach leaves from the raised beds, dips them in boiling water and presses them into bite-sized piles. Then she pours a mix of soy sauce, mirin (Japanese sweet cooking wine), and toasted sesame seeds over the top. The kids help me prep, season, and chop all the other ingredients, then stand back and watch with amusement as I try to maintain control over the range. Finally, we sit down to a lavish meal of “shrimp three ways.”
After dinner, Weston builds an elaborate diorama with his plastic dinosaurs, growling and laughing to himself, but Skyla seems a little reserved. I’m concerned she might be upset about what happened to Sammy, but I don’t know how to talk to her about it. Or if I even should. “Are you worried about Sammy?” I ask. “No,” Skyla says. “I know she’s okay, we talked to her in the car when she was warming up.” “Oh,” I say, “then why are you so quiet tonight?”
“I was just wishing we’d brought that octopus home,” she says. “You know, to eat.”
SUMMER
DIGGING DEEP
Bob Dawson is 83 years old. His wife, Joanne, is 85 and recovering from a stroke she suffered – and miraculously survived – on vacation in Mexico last winter. For the time being, she’s confined to a wheelchair. The Dawsons are among the last of the Old Islanders here, country people who built their small, neat house overlooking Port Madison from salvaged lumber Bob dragged to Agate Point by boat nearly 60 years ago.
“Why don’t you grab a handful of skinny sticks and your kids and come over here in about an hour,” Bob says on the phone.
“What?” I say, looking for context.
“Just get the sticks and the kids and come over. Oh, and wear boots.” Dial tone.
Bob grew up in the Manastash, a remote, mountainous region of central Washington, where his father scratched out a living trapping coyotes and running a mink farm. As a teenager, Bob drove the old road to Seattle and back twice a week, hauling truckloads of fish scraps to feed the minks. If he started in the middle of the night, he could make it home just in time for school, which his father required. The farm boy’s work habits stuck with him long after he left home, graduated from the University of Washington, and settled here on the Island. For 40 years he worked as a schoolteacher while running a successful contracting business on the side. Generations of Islanders were educated in his classroom and raised in houses he built.
Joanne is no stranger to hard work, either. When the infamous Columbus Day storm of 1962 blasted through the Northwest with 100-mile-per-hour winds, Bob was away deer hunting. Joanne simply took their four small children down into the basement and stayed there for a week without heat, power, or
running water. When she finally got through to Bob (on a neighbor’s phone) and explained what had happened, he told her he’d come home immediately. She asked how the hunting was. He said pretty good, and she told him to stay there and keep hunting – they could use the meat. She’s known around the Island for her years as a nurse at the local clinic, but even more for her steely resolve and quick wit.
Together, Bob and Joanne raised their family on whatever they could catch, shoot, grow, and forage. They’ve been jigging salmon, digging clams, picking mushrooms, hunting deer and grouse, growing vegetables, and cutting firewood for as long as anyone can remember. How they ever found time to do it all with four kids and multiple jobs is beyond my grasp. Were there more hours in the day back then?
Most of the time I can barely keep up with half the number of kids the Dawsons had and maybe a third of a “real” job. I once happened to overhear another parent ask Skyla what her daddy did “for a living.” “Well,” Skyla replied, “he mostly hangs around the house and goes fishing a lot.” I was about to interject with a vigorous defense of my character when it occurred to me that her answer wasn’t so far off base.
I do fish a lot. And, as a freelance writer, I work from home. Which leaves plenty of time to fish, cut wood, look for mushrooms, and, as a result of that freedom, worry about money. It’s a tradeoff. I usually end up working in the middle of the night and trying to juggle everything else by day. Stacy designs commercial light fixtures, which allows her to work from home as well, only she does it with a lot more grace and far less complaining. I like to think that what we give up in security, we gain back through our ability to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. So, when Bob says get some sticks and come over, it’s easy to put off work until after dark. I know we’ll learn something and enjoy the company doing whatever he has in mind. The kids and I walk up the road, grab a handful of twigs, and head for the Dawsons’ place.
