Time Bandit (17 page)

I ran through the aisles scooping groceries into a cart with my arms. Neal, meanwhile, checked his long list. He was hunting for “specials.” We needed to buy enough food to feed seven hungry, active men for two weeks. I concentrated on cigarettes and Copenhagen. Candy came next. The candy drawer on
Time Bandit
empties out first at sea; the crewmen call candy “deck steaks” because often when they are working, Snickers and Hershey’s bars are the only food they have time to eat. Next to go into the cart were snacks like Cheez Puffs and Doritos. I told Russell to load up a separate cart with drinks like Red Bull, Amp and Full Throttle and half-gallon plastic bottles of Coke and root beer. Neal selected a choice eighteen-pound rib-in roast. I scooped in boxes of Saltines. I passed the magazine racks. In the cart went
Maxim,
the latest
Plumpers,
National Geographic’s
Adventure, Sailing, FHM, Vanity Fair, PC, Rolling Stone….
The next items on my list were less-quick snacks, peanut butter and jelly and bologna and salami, Poppin’ Fresh muffins, Hot Pockets. The carts were quickly getting full. Neal bought thirty dozen eggs to cook; I stacked on ten dozen eggs in my cart to throw at the crew. Neal carefully counted twenty big cans of Folgers coffee. I reached for the Tabasco and Reddi-wip. We lined up the carts, and when the checkout woman finished scanning the products, the total came to $5,488.

With the groceries packed in the SUV, we stopped to buy personal gear. Metal racks of slickers and shelves of T-shirts and sweatshirts inscribed with “Eat Crab” and “Eat Fish,” bib overalls, Grundens, gloves, knives, hand warmers, and woolen hats lined the shed. Shea bought new Grundens, and I bought an armful of sweatshirts. The personal gear is less an afterthought than a simple staple; we wear the same sweatshirt and T-shirts for days. Personal items such as shaving cream, razors, gel, and deodorants have no place on the Bering Sea and are left back in port. Some fishermen believe the superstition that shaving at sea brings bad luck. We will probably never know, because no one ever shaves on
Time Bandit
while she is out of port. No one in the crew cares what anyone else looks like or if they smell rank with sweat and putrefying fish slime.

Virtually every deckhand dresses in waterproof orange Grundens’ Herkules bib pants and hooded parkas, often writing their name in black marker across the backs. Baseball hats turned backward, as a practical matter, are de rigueur. Around our waists we string webbed belts to which we attach scabbards for short, razor-sharp knives; on deck the knife, cutting through a line tangled on a man’s leg, has saved lives. We wear thick warm socks in Xtratuf rubber boots and blue-lined gloves to protect our hands from cold and wet. What we wear under our slickers we choose for warmth—hooded sweatshirts over T-shirts or sweat pants or jeans.

Next we made a final stop at the Unisea Sports Bar for a last good-bye.

Sig Hansen was in attendance off the
Northwestern.
He is a great fisherman. I have no higher praise. Larry Hendricks off
Sea Star
was talking; if InSauna bin Russell wanted to torture Larry he would need only to put him in a cell with no one to listen to him. Last year when Larry and I were sharing a hotel room, I ducked into the bathroom to tell him that Andy and I were leaving for dinner. Larry stepped out of the shower and gave me a full frontal. I needed a support group to help me get over the shock. Larry told me that his strategy last year was to “plug the boat,” as if everyone else had a strategy of returning empty. Blake Painter off
Maverick
was looking preoccupied; this was his first king crab season as captain. Keith Colburn, captain of
Wizard,
was trading yarns with the bartender, and Phil Harris off the
Cornelia Marie
was talking about his sons, who were going along as greenhorns. Phil was telling someone, “You get out and get in fast, if you can, to duck death. You always hope it’s not your time.” I overheard one of the crewmen talking to Sarah, the Sports Bar’s cute, blond, Swedish bartender, about “the lifestyle of danger,” and I rolled my eyes at her and she laughed. We sat around a table and swapped stories and bragged. Everyone shared the same feeling of new beginnings, and what was past was past.

Sitting around a table near the bar, while Russell bellowed karaoke—I think it was the Stones’s “Satisfaction”—the captains of five boats
—Cornelia Marie, Time Bandit, Northwestern, Maverick,
and
Wizard—
proposed bets on which boat would catch the most king crabs; to make the betting fair, I suggested that the winner would have the highest numbers of crabs per pot, not the highest numbers overall, since the catch varied from boat to boat according to IFQs. We bet $100 each, which the manager of the Unisea Sports Bar kept for us until the season ended.

The bet was not over money, per se. The highest per-pot numbers would go to the captain and crew who were the better fishermen, knew where to find the hot spots for the crabs, calculated the right baits and soaking times, and in the end just got luckier than everyone else. That was what the bet was really about. Sig, who has an ego, thought he already had won. Everyone else would have raised the bet. A gathering of crab boat captains never wants for self-confidence.

We drank and bragged and smoked until we were, most of us, drunk and hoarse. We wandered in groups according to boat crews out into a cold starry night ready at last to face the Bering Sea for a share of the $60 million jackpot of Alaskan king crab.

No Such Luck

Once he had cleared
the Kasilof estuary Russell discovered that
Rivers End
had no single sideband and the VHF channel 16 had a range of only 20 miles. Russell used his cell phone instead to call the Coast Guard while he was still in range. When he was patched through to the Kodiak duty officer and inquired whether they had heard from
Fishing Fever,
the Coastie told him no, he had not. Russell asked him to keep a watch on the general area where he thought Johnathan might be found. The Coastie asked him why he thought that Johnathan might be missing and Russell told him that Johnathan was his friend and he
was
missing, or overdue anyway. The bit about being late into harbor did not seem to move the Coast Guardsman, who recorded the information dutifully, Russell was sure, but they both knew that the Coast Guard could do nothing until daylight, if even then. Normally they did not leap into action without definitive information that a boat was lost or capsized and dead in the water, and they had a general fix. Russell had nothing of that sort to give him. He asked if Russell knew whether
Fishing Fever
was carrying an EPIRB emergency beacon. Certainly not, he told him, adding to the list a survival suit, a life raft, and maybe not flares or a life jacket. Russell heard him say, “Sorry, sir.”

The magnetic darts that the men in camp threw in the direction of the naked lady drawing on the van and how Johnathan’s had hit the lower regions gave Russell a general direction to follow. Dino had said, “He went south of the line.” That sounded like Johnathan marching to his own drummer. He would have chosen that area, the magnetic dart notwithstanding, because he was the better fisherman among the men in camp. He would have known, for instance, the direction the sockeyes were taking toward their home rivers. He can smell the fish. He gets inside their heads. He knows even before they do what they will do. He might as well
be
half salmon. He would have been trying to find them as soon as they entered the Cook Inlet. That would mean fishing closer to shore and farther south toward the Inlet’s wide mouth in waters that become increasingly dangerous the farther south and west a boat goes. He would have tried to separate himself from the other boats no matter what. Johnathan’s
Fishing Fever
was fast, easily reaching sustained speed above 20 knots. He would have been away and off radar before anybody noticed.

Russell had a thought. The Alaska Wildlife Troopers, a division of the State Police, had a surveillance system for boats in the salmon fishery, which was the largest in Alaska. Fines for infractions were hefty but to find violators the State Police patrolled immense areas of ocean with only 80 field officers. And therefore, they had brought technology to bear. The State Police patrolled the Cook Inlet salmon grounds in airplanes. From the vantage of height, they viewed the entire fleet and marked any boat that set its gill net as few as two seconds before the 7 a.m. opening. Could spotters in the airplane have seen
Fishing Fever
?

He called them on VHF patched through the phone system. He spoke briefly with an officer on watch, who told him no, that his department did not keep records of boats in the fishery; only violators had names. And Johnathan clearly had obeyed the rules. Not for the first time, Russell wished every commercial fishing boat—and not just the Bering Sea crabbing boats—carried VMS (Vehicle Monitoring Systems), which were global positioning systems that transmitted a crab boat’s geographic position at all times to federal National Marine Fisheries’s computers in Washington, D.C. But no such luck.

Russell headed west-southwest and continually scanned the dark horizon for a light. His gut told him Johnathan was heading toward Augustine Island and the Shelikof Strait.

The Greater the Greed the Faster the Pace

Andy

The telephone has not rung,
which probably means that Russell is out of contact in the Inlet. And he has not found Johnathan. Sabrina is asleep and I brew a pot of coffee, which I carry out to the back porch. Today is going to be hot with plenty of humidity. The air is heavy and the sun, recently risen, is already mean with shimmering intensity. It is peculiar of me to go from a working life on the Bering Sea, where the temperatures go well below zero, to the summer heat of southern Indiana. I do not know which I like better and am glad I can have both.

That reminds me of the conundrum that Johnathan faces. I do too, but to a far smaller degree. It is that he will never leave the sea. I already have left it in my mind; but my heart refuses to follow. Johnathan’s soul would be robbed of its sustenance without the ocean, a boat to work on, and crabs and salmon to catch. He would become someone different from what he is now, someone neither he nor I know. And yet staying on the sea could well kill him. The odds of survival never lengthen on the Bering Sea as the years go by. The equation for Johnathan (and anyone who tests the fates on the sea) becomes existential. Do you stop what you love to stay alive? Or do you continue to do what you love even if it kills you? It is a question of what a life is worth. I swear John would rather be dead.

The same quandaries do not preoccupy me. And for that I can thank Sabrina, who gave me a life that I love away from the sea. Our parents told us that Sabrina and I met when we were kids; neither she nor I remember being neighbors in Homer or that we played together before her family moved outside of town. We did not see each other again until our teens; she was working as a chambermaid out at Land’s End, the hotel that my grandfather owned. My brothers and I knew who she was. I did not ask her out on dates, and her parents probably would not have let her go out with me. The Hillstrand boys had bad reputations and there were fathers who would have locked up their daughters rather than have them go out with any of us. We met again when we were in our twenties; she had given birth to Chelsey, who was around two when Johnathan’s girlfriend, Tammy, introduced us at a party. It was love at first sight. What could have ended as a one-night stand grew into a solid marriage.

Sabrina was working as a real estate agent at the time. Her father, LeRoy, was a developer subdividing land and her mother, Rita, was the president of a Homer real estate office. Her family had nothing to do with fishing or the sea. In Homer, that was unusual. The differences in upbringing intrigued us both and brought us closer together. I would spend the night with her and sneak out the window before the babysitter arrived in the morning. One day, she asked me why I was sneaking out. We were married not long after.

Marriage did not change me and that led to trouble. I went on with my life much as before, working for my dad on the
Time Bandit.
As if we were both still single, Sabrina and I hung out in bars and drank to see how plastered we could get. I would call her on the way home from the boat, drunk, slurring my words. I knew what she was thinking. But it would be too easy to say that alcohol nearly destroyed our marriage. Our lifestyle did it. We faced what hundreds of fishing couples face but fail to overcome.

Crab fishing gave me a sense of adventure. Nobody could tell me what to do. I was strictly my own man out there. That kind of thinking did not leave much room for Sabrina. It was the opposite of sharing. I could not talk to her about my life. I was not certain what I could say. I had my life and she was the landside part of it, the unadventurous, unexciting, routine part of it. She was not at the center of us together because there was no center; there was fishing and
after
fishing. That made her feel lonely and resentful of fishing, of my fishing family, and of the fisherman in me. She buried her resentments in booze. I stopped talking about fishing, about the risks, the dangers, the thrills. We had nothing to talk about, except that we had everything to talk about.

Sabrina could tell you what that life was like. When a boat broke or went down, she was in the circle of wives who called and talked continually. In that sense, it was as old as men going down to the sea. She knew whom to call. When Clark Sparks was lost overboard in New England, the boat’s skipper, Thorn Tasker, asked her if she would call Clark’s mom. He did not know to call anyone else but Sabrina. That was the worst phone call she ever made. Life for the women ashore was a series of calls. We talked through a marine operator and we would have to say “over” and “over-and-out.” Anyone could listen in. People got divorces over the radio; nothing was private. That radio grew into a nightmare for us working on the boat. We did not want any attachment to the land. We hated when wives and girlfriends called with nothing to say except “Hello” and “How are you?” The last word we wanted to hear was about a drowning or another boat going down. The wives would call about that but we usually knew anyway, and we did not want to know from them. We would brush off catastrophe. We could not let ourselves get emotional, or else we would be basket cases all the time. We had to finish what we were doing and could not stop and mourn a tragedy.

Sabrina knew and respected that code but other women did not, or simply ignored it. She was like a den mother to them. Johnathan had a sequence of girlfriends who called her up all the time. “Have you heard from him? Is he okay?” Sabrina would tell them, “Chill out. If they are going to call you, they will.” She had to teach them to go with the flow, not to be rigid, and to be open-minded. Sabrina had started out very rigid but she learned to let it go. Otherwise, she would still be tilting at windmills.

One time, Sabrina visited Dutch in the middle of a blizzard, and the temperature was 30 below zero. At that time I was working on a catcher processor called the
Optimist Prime.
Sabrina and I had come to an agreement that I could not be gone more than sixty days. After two months’ separation, I either had to go home or Sabrina had to come to where I was working. I had been gone for three months and we had a four-month-old baby, Cassie. Sabrina thought she had landed in Hell. I was a lowly deckhand and I had to ask the captain if I could go to town. I got off at 8:30 in the evenings, went to the Grand Aleutian hotel, where Sabrina was staying with the baby, spent a couple of hours with her, went back to the boat, and after several nights, I was nearly dead with fatigue. I asked her, “Why don’t you come out on the boat with the baby?”

The boat was anchored in the middle of Dutch harbor. One of my buddies took a skiff to pick up her and the baby at the dock. She was out in the middle of the harbor with an infant in her arms praying for her life; the baby was screaming for hers. The skiff motor died. Sabrina had met the guy in the skiff minutes before and did not know whether to trust him. He started the engine, but the motor kept dying. At last, she reached the boat and she handed up our new baby to me. She spent a few days out there, more days than she would have liked, I think, but she did not want to take that skiff back to the dock.

As a fisherman on the Bering, I have to look my own mortality square in the eye not only for myself but for Sabrina and the girls. Sabrina had to be ready to lose me and be okay with that. Otherwise, she would be a nervous wreck. People ask her, “Aren’t you worried about him out there?”

“No,” she replies. “I had to turn that over to God. I had to let it go.”

But the strain persisted. You cannot love someone and just let go the worry that he may die in a profession where dying is very real. You can learn to live with that reality. Like the time I was on the
Polar Star,
an eighty-six-footer. Sabrina got a telephone call that my boat had sunk. She did not believe that to be true. For some reason, she told herself, “That’s wrong.” If my boat went down, she knew the Coast Guard would have called her. She waited and worried. I had heard a Mayday that identified my boat as sunk. I looked around.
We’re not sinking.
It was just confusion. A second boat named
Polar Star
had indeed sunk.

Sabrina may have put worry behind her, while living with the worst-case scenarios. She cannot walk around thinking I can die at any minute. It would be an unacceptable way to live. On TV she sees the wives of soldiers in Iraq. Those women say good-bye to their husbands and cry like they have already lost them. Sabrina could be doing the same thing every time I go away. She did, too, for a while. She would act brave and strong when I would leave. When she was alone, she would cry. People asked her how she did it. She answered them. “I just do it.”

She did not blame her drinking on me, but the truth was, she hid her emotions in a bottle because of my inability to share mine and because we were both silently trying to spare each other of what we were really feeling. She grew up drinking and was an alcoholic when we met, and so was I and Johnathan and our dad. The Hillstrand men were not known for their social drinking; our DNA is soaked in alcohol.

For Sabrina and me, drinking went abruptly from all
to
nothing. We stopped together and started to change our lives after she made a conscious decision to leave the life of a fisherman’s wife. The self-destructiveness had reached into her soul. She determined not to live a life anymore in bars, surrounded by oblivion, drinking, staying up, fights, disruptions, and tension. Together, we learned how to communicate better—and all that.

But by its nature, my life was disruptive and for Sabrina, as it is for all other fishing wives, it created challenges for us to overcome. To an extent, fishing wives see their husbands off, wait for them to come home, and then a big reunion celebrates their return. Distance does make the heart grow fonder but only up to a point. I would go home, and I automatically assumed that I was the head of the household. I sat in the easy chair and took command of the TV remote control. But Sabrina was used to making the decisions at home. She did not call the boat to say the car broke down, what do I do? She fixed it. Women are the natural organizers and the captains of the house. I was the captain of the ship out on the Bering Sea. I would come home and think I automatically was the captain of the house, too. Who was the captain? We sat down together and agreed. “OK, you be in charge of this, and I’ll be in charge of that.” Sabrina and I ended up asking, “How important is being in charge anyway? Why do I have to play it only my way?” It’s a constant balancing act.

Ten years of marriage went by before we spent more than sixty days in a row together. There was always another opening: salmon, herring, crab. And I worked at the whim of my dad. In American society everyone, on paper at least, is free to do what he wants to do and be what she wants to be. In marriage, the other person had to change. But when both people wanted the other person to change, friction and failure were the result. Sabrina had her own income. She had started a real estate company and worked as a bartender and waitress and a journalist for the Homer
Tribune.
She ran a donut shop until donuts made her sick when she was pregnant. I tried to run the shop for a while, but it was destroying me. I learned that she did not need me. We had to work out who was in charge and when and what were our individual responsibilities. Learning to work as a team was the hardest and most rewarding work I have ever done, or will ever do, because we worked side by side.

Sabrina comes out on the porch where I am sitting with a cup in hand. She sits down and looks at me.

“Did you sleep?” she asks.

“A little,” I replied.

“What would you like to do about Johnathan?”

“What can I do?”

She stares in the direction of the horse ring. “It’s still dark there,” she says, referring to the three-hour time difference between Indiana and Alaska.

“You mean the Coast Guard?”

“Would it do any good for you to fly up there?”

I think about that. I can tell that she is worried about Johnathan, too. She is used to not showing her concern. She has had years of practice. “Not until Russ calls,” I tell her. “I think that’s what worries me, that I can’t do anything but sit here and worry.”

She laughs softly and goes inside.

M
oments like these lead me to introspection, which is something I usually manage to avoid. As I walk over to the barn to check on Rio and the other horses, I think about change. For instance, one of the changes I enjoy, I am able to live thousands of miles from the
Time Bandit
and the Bering Sea fishing grounds. But not all the changes in the last ten years or so have been as welcome. Commercial fishermen like Johnathan and me are many things: We are born optimists; we are fierce competitors; we are hard workers and harder to lead than a herd of cats. Above everything, we can’t tolerate change, despite its inevitability. Take the change that came to Alaskan crab fishing. We are still trying to get comfortable with that.