Gone Alaska

by Dave Barrett

  Apologizing, Swanson explained that he’d been waiting here three days for a puller he’d hired through an employment agency in Juneau. He’d had his wife give the guy his .30-06 rifle to bring with him. It was dumb ass stupid of himself, he told me, yet he’d gone ahead and done it anyway.

  Rubbing my neck and collarbone, I tried my best to sympathize with him.

  “Where you from?” Swanson asked, smiling as though our little scuffle was ancient history.

  “Coeur d’Alene, Idaho,” I said, looking round the room for a place I wouldn’t need to stand hunched over.

  “Coeur d’Alene!” Swanson said. “Ain’t that up near that place where that Aryan Nations guy, Randy Weaver, got in that big shootout with those U.S. Tobacco and Firearms boys?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  Swanson smiled big, obviously impressed.

  A famous place, this hometown of mine.

  Randy Weaver was a member of a growing organization in our neck of the woods known as the Aryan Nations; headed by a Reverend Butler, out of Hayden Lake, Idaho (about ten miles north of my hometown). The organization got its start, in part, because of an incident on the mountaintop property where Weaver lived with his wife and children and other Aryan Nation members. The ATF had attempted to get Weave to rat on the going-ons of his fellow members, and when he wouldn’t, they decided to raid his mountaintop compound on illegal weapon sale charges. Of course, something went wrong. When the first wave of smoke had cleared, Weaver’s 13-year old son and guard dog were dead and so was a deputy U.S. Marshal. 48-hours later, the standoff between Weaver and the ATF was national news. When ATF agents killed Weaver’s wife with a sniper shot while she was holding her ten-month old daughter, even the most unsentimental of us found ourselves siding with Weaver. Why hadn’t the ATF simply waited to arrest Weaver when he came to town? Why put the women and children at risk? There were even humorous moments: when the Weaver clan took a pot shot a news reporter Geraldo Rivera flying over top of the compound in a helicopter. The standoff had all the makings of the rugged individualist versus the Federal Government drama so popular especially here in the Wild Wild West. We watched ex-Green Beret, one time libertarian Presidential candidate Bo Gritz, walk like John Wayne into the Weaver camp and talk them into laying down their arms. Later, when Weaver finally surrendered, we watched this same Bo Gritz walking practically hand-in-hand with Reverend Butler and a small army of Weaver supporters coming down from the mountain at the end of the standoff. Suddenly, because of the media hoopla, our town was filled with skinheads from Seattle and Portland, Oregon and all points in between. It was a strange sight to see these tattooed, milky-white Nazis crawling over our beach turf like that maggots that they were; but it was horrible also, reminding us of the black Jewish student at the University of Idaho found swinging from a tree, his hands tied at the wrist behind him with bailing wire; or the explosion set off at the Catholic Church in Coeur d’Alene by the Aryan Nations two years before.

  Great theatre, this.

  “Hmm... ” Swanson said, resuming his semi-lotus position on his stool. “Idaho. I like that. Last jackass I hired was from some preppy college back East—Dortmouth or Princetown or Harvard—something like that. Couldn’t get a day’s work out of him if I gave him a week. It was all ‘what’s this’ and ‘what’s that’ and ‘what for’ with him. All back talk and no back. Did us both a favor and fired him second day out. ‘This is a fishing boat,’ I told him, ‘not a goddamn classroom.’”

  It occurred to me that Swanson was getting round to offering me a job. Yet, in spite of the luck of such prospect, I was having second thoughts about signing on with this half-crazed dope smoking Weaver-sympathizer who’d practically crushed my voice box over a case of mistaken identity.

  “Something wrong?” Swanson said, holding up his roach clip. “You don’t go for this stuff?”

  “No. I mean yes. I mean no I don’t mind—“

  “Good,” Swanson interrupted. Then asked,

  “Ever done any pulling before?”

  “Pulling?” I repeated.

  “Fishing?” Swanson restated.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What kind of fishing?”

  “Oh, a little of everything, I guess. I mean I don’t know how to fly fish or anything... but living by a lake like I do... ”

  Swanson or no Swanson, I knew I’d get stumped here when a skipper asked if I had any actual experience on a commercial boat. My actual experience of fishing in Coeur d’Alene consisted largely of cutting the cobwebs that had gathered round my pole and gear each spring and then throwing it back in that same Godforsaken corner of the garage come mid-July: cursing my luck and vowing never to bother again. I’d figured my actual lack of skills as a fisherman would be overlooked once they saw how big and dumb and ready I was to haul in them ropes or nets or whatever it was they used to catch the things with.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” I said. Then, thinking better of it, “I mean nineteen.”

  “Well,” Swanson said, obviously having sport with me now. “Which one is it?”

  “Eighteen,” I said. “But I’ll be nineteen—“

  “O.K.,” Swanson interrupted, grinning ear to ear. “Nineteen. Good enough.” Then—leaning forward threateningly like when he’d asked me about his wife and the rifle—added:

  “You ain’t on the lam, are you?”

  “Lam?” I repeated. “Like from the law?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Any kind of criminal record?”

  I shook my head, getting pissed with his third degree.

  “How about a girl?”

  “No,” I said, continuing to shake my head.

  “Big good-looking guy like you—“

  “No.”

  Tapping his chin with one finger, Swanson said,

  “’Cuz if you got some girl pregnant back home and go running off on me the minute you find out she’s fucking Fat Joe—“

  That did it. The hell with this! The hell with all these bloody fishermen! I’d take up some new hobby... maybe go out on that whale watch... get a job washing dishes at the Ivory Inn... see if I couldn’t get back on the construction crew I’d quit in Juneau to come here in the first place.

  And I was already one foot out the door when Philip Swanson called out:

  “Hey, now! Hold your horses, kid! I was just trying to figure out what in the name of God’s green earth gave you the notion of wandering out here to the edge of the world?”

  I moved back inside the wheelhouse, my pack slumping on my shoulder.

  “A job,” I said. “What else?”

  “Oh,” Swanson said, letting his head fall a little on his chest so has face was at the same diagonal as mine. “Why didn’t you say so in the beginning... ”

  He rolled up another joint. And we smoked it before he set me to salting herring out back.

  Chapter Five

  Red of 10,000 Years—Cheesehead Pirates!

  My late great Uncle John always said,

  “There are three things you don’t talk about in a bar. Religion. Politics. And SALMON... ”

  Even as far inland as North Idaho I’d been raised on salmon lore of the great runs before the dams. “Before the Dams” was a catch phrase from a time when Coeur d’Alene lake banks and tributary stream bottoms burned day-glo red and green in the fall. “Before Grand Coulee came along... ” Uncle John used to say. “The hearts and veins of these lakes and rivers burned RED with the blood and fury of spawning salmon. I’m told it was truly a sight to behold: like Monday Night football, 4th of July and an electric light show all rolled into one... ”

  I was ten years old when I witnessed one of these “light shows” for myself.

  I’d been shipped out to spend the summer with some cousins that lived along the Clearwater River near Lewiston. The Clearwater is a tributary of the Snake and, in those days, it still hosted one of the largest sockeyes runs east of the Cascade Range. For years I’d been h
earing stories how my Uncle Albert harvested the fish with a pitchfork; how my cousins Bill and Ted “clobbered the critters” with boulders and baseball bats in the shallower pools; of the “infernal and unGodly stench of their spent and rotting carcasses” from Aunt Mabel.

  All that August I’d awoke at the crack of dawn to walk down to the river’s edge to see if the salmon had “moved in” during the night. (From Uncle Albert I’d learned that salmon move mostly at night... and I remember lying there in the coffin-like dark and quiet of the country night... thinking I could actually “feel” the salmon moving into their spawning redds the way you might “feel” an intruder entering your home.) All month this had been my morning ritual. And every morning... as I grumbled my way back from the river to the chicken yard to gather eggs for breakfast... I remember being disappointed by it. Aunt Mabel said she didn’t know what was up. But every year the salmon were showing up later and later in the season. Uncle Albert said it was the dams and fish ladders on the Snake that was slowing them down. Bill and Ted—grinning and patting their baseball bats—said “the slimers” had gotten wind of what was coming their way.

  Then, on Labor Day weekend, the morning before the day I was to return home, it happened. I remember it was a strangely overcast morning: clouds hanging so low I couldn’t see the mountains in the distance. Thunder and lightning had rippled through the bedroom window all night long. I remember tiptoeing through the house... carrying my boots... and not putting them on until I was out of the back stoop past the kitchen door. (The last thing I wanted—should I be so lucky as to see these salmon-- was Bill and Ted standing beside me, pelting the fish with rocks.) I had to climb down a mess of boulders to get a view of the river bottom. I remember the reflection of the red leaves from the sumac bushes along the opposite bank seeming more marked than usual. A dozen times I’d mistaken the shimmering of these sumac leaves for schools of sockeye. Then, reaching the big granite boulder that I’d singled out as my observation deck, I saw it. Beneath the RED of these Sumacs was another RED. A deeper RED. The RED Uncle John had spoken of. The RED of my dreams and streamside visions. RED of 10,000 years.

  Up and down.

  One side to the other.

  Far as the eye could see.

  SALMON.

  “O.K. All right, already!” Swanson hollered out, lashing the last trolling pole into its fitting as I held the dangling pole aloft with block and tackle. “Now hold her! Steady... steady, damn it!... one second... one—there!”

  Pole in place, Swanson bounded over to the dock to help me lower the block and tackle from the crosstrees.

  We’d brought the new poles down for a fresh sanding and shellacking. Swanson had cut the forty-foot trolling poles out two Yellow Cedars in the front yard of his Juneau home: chopping down the trees in commemoration of the last mortgage payment he’d made on his trawler. He’d taken great pains to point out how the yellow wood of his poles stood out amidst the forest of graying poles around us.

  “Just look at ‘em!” Swanson exclaimed. “Ain’t a slicker pair of poles out here this season. No, sir. Look around for yourself!”

  Once again I grinned in acknowledgment. What else could I do today but grin? Less than 24 hours here on the coast and already a job on a salmon trawler! Brian Connelly had called me a “romantic fool” to give up digging foundations for his Uncle’s construction company back in Juneau. He’d given me no more than a week before I arrived back in Juneau with my tail between my legs begging his Uncle for my job back.

  “Mr. Brian Connelly,” I could already hear myself saying after the long distance operator had hooked me up with Juneau. “Eat this!”

  I was living the dream!

  While we worked, I learned that the Western World was a 1940’s Finn-built boat. Philip Swanson had known the original owner, builder and skipper, Hans Linderman, personally. Hans had been a vodka-drinking buddy of Philip Swanson’s father. Swanson had even fished a summer aboard Linderman’s trawler when still a boy (before the accident on his father’s boat). Like Swanson’s father, Hans Linderman had fished the coastal water of the North Pacific from Cape Foulweather, Oregon to Cape Fairweather, Alaska for almost 40 years (fishing more and more in Alaska as the salmon catch rates dwindled in Oregon and Washington states). Then, fall of 1986, the U.S. Coast Guard discovered the fifty-foot, twenty-ton trawler adrift off Cape Fairweather—unmanned. Noting the stove-in planks and the bruised, rotting carcass of the 180-pound halibut on the back deck... the official report on the 68 year old Linderman was he’d probably been caught unawares (vodka? senility?) and knocked overboard by the powerful tail of the halibut.

  When I carelessly asked Swanson whether a fish could really toss a full-grown man overboard, he winked and answered,

  “Guess you’ll just have to wait and find out... ”

  Five years later Swanson happened upon the Western World dry-docked in Sitka, Alaska. A family of hippies had set up a commune aboard the trawler. The new flower-and-sandal bearing occupants had let Linderman’s trawler “go to pot”—as Swanson put it. The trawler’s bow and two trolling poles were missing; the galley stove-pipe was bent in the shape of an upside down L; the busted wheelhouse windows were sealed with yellowing newspaper and cardboard; and the anchor laid red and rusted in a clump of weeds sprouting up amidst the surrounding gravel. On the rear deck, naked children were playing on a tire swing hung from the steel hayrack—where the blocks and pulleys for the lines were formerly fastened. The new occupants had even given the trawler its name: spray-painting WESTERN WORLD across the paint-chipped in bright day-glo colors. (Hans Linderman, Swanson told me, had fished aboard the trawler for thirty years without bothering to give it an official title.)

  Seeing Linderman’s trawler in such disrepair, Swanson said he felt obligated to inquire within about the FOR SALE sign crudely spray-painted along the outer wall of the wheelhouse in the same day-glo colors. Six hours later, after a half-dozen of the first and best joints he’d ever smoked, the Western World was signed over in his name: three budding marijuana plants included. Ten years had passed, and Swanson had made his final mortgage payment this April. Now, he pointed out to me, all he had to do was pay off the string of loans he’d taken out for restoration and repairs.

  “That it?” I said, dropping the heavy block and tackle in a wooden crate.

  “That’s it!” said Swanson, tossing me a rag to knock the sawdust off my hands and clothes. “We’ll make a fisherman out of you yet!”

  I accompanied Swanson up the narrow gangplank to the boardwalk and the Elfin General Store for supplies. Although it was eight o’clock in the evening, the sun was in the same position it had been at noon. Many trawlers were already shoving off for tomorrow’s fishing grounds. Below me, deck hands loosed their trawlers from their moorings and leapt back aboard as their vessels inched away from the docks. Last minute bartering for needed but forgotten supplies were made between these soon to be competing fishermen: a roll of toilet paper here for a box of matches there. Some of the younger skippers had boom-blaster speakers hooked up to their stereos and they cranked the rock and rap music to spite the older fishermen:

  “Ha! You play ‘dat lout musik and scare my fish—I wreck you and yore boat out ‘dare!”

  And the youth’s reply:

  “Take it easy, ol’ Sweedy! The soakers love it! Sets ‘em off in a feeding frenzy!”

  My shiner, which I’d taken such pains to conceal that morning, I now realized, was a badge of honor amongst these men. I was no longer ignored by them, but saluted as such myself:

  “Better watch your step out there, Swanson. Big brawler you got there! Liable to chop you up and use you as bait!”

  Everything was rolling my way! The antipathy I’d felt toward Philip Swanson had dissipated in the glow of the coming hunt: to such a degree, in fact, I was pleased to have him as my skipper. He was the perfect Wolf Larsen to my Humphrey Van Weydon! Ahab to my Ishmael! Names of shops, structures of buildings, positions of objects,
patterns of traffic—which had set me off in such a panic when I’d first arrived—seemed suddenly familiar and most significant now. Clancy’s Bar and Grill... that little patch of ferns growing atop the caved-in, rotted-out roof of the old outhouse behind Carol’s Laundry and Shower Shack... that pile of rusted rebar lying tangled and half-submerged in the purple-tinted rocks and water below the boardwalk... the choking spluttering blast of an ancient diesel engine’s carburetor firing up... two grizzly-bearded men bumping into each other outside the Elfin General Store—the one walking in, the other walking out—at first exchanging sneers and curses, then, upon recognizing each other in their new beards, exchanging hugs and tugs at each other’s beards and HOW-THE-HELL-ARE-YA’S! All these things—all these sights, sounds, smells, voices, faces, gestures—mine because I’d joined up with Philip Swanson.

  The Elfin General Store was as crowded with fishermen as it was with goods. We had to excuse ourselves just to get through the front door. A long line was formed at a right angle in front of the lone checkout stand: a broad shouldered woman with a red bandana across her forehead working the register. Fishermen and fisherwomen were dressed in flannel shirts torn at the elbow and greased at the sleeve; in baseball caps speckled with paint; sleeveless sweatshirts; overalls with one shoulder strap unbuckled; jeans hanging halfway down their crack. Those who weren’t actually shopping or waiting in line were huddled around the magazine racks in collective disregard of the NO LOITERING signs overhead... sharing smiles and chuckles as they passed around porno magazines... the fisherwomen in on the jokes.

  The walls of the store were painted olive green. All kinds of lists, charts and graphs were stapled there: Debt Lists for goods bought on credit (to be paid by season’s end); Tide Table charts; Salinity charts; Geodetic survey charts advertising the best routes for trawlers to locate schools of salmon; a graph from the Environmental Protection Agency indicating the decline in catches over the years (this graph, I noticed, somewhat buried beneath the others). From the ceiling, a half-dozen bug zappers were hung like chandeliers. Because the one-room store had not storage area in back, the aisles were overstocked. Item was stacked atop item. If you wanted to get a can of cat food for your boat’s cat, you’d first have to lift off the10 lbs. bags of flour stacked atop it.