Time Bandit (9 page)

As for girlfriends, I was jaded before I knew the meaning of the word. I had chicks all over me because I was a new boy in Homer each summer, and I went back to Coeur d’Alene in the fall with my pockets bulging with cash. And in girls’ minds I lived for adventure. We were like honey to bears. I dated several—girls, not bears—at once but kept them in the dark, as much as I was able. Strictly speaking, I did not date the type of girls who went to the proms or sat on the honor society. But in my senior year I decided to attend the prom. When I picked up my date, she walked down the stairs to greet me wearing a ball gown and high heels; she tripped on the hem and down came her strapless top, exposing a glorious view of her tits. At that moment, her mom and dad were preoccupied with the view out their front window of the Winnebago camper I had parked at the curb. Making matters much worse, and leaving nothing to their Christian imaginations, in front of the Winnebago on the lawn by the sidewalk two dogs were fucking like survival of their species depended on it. My prom night was over. Her father said no way. I did not argue.

Mom “saved” us in church. Or she tried to. We were raised religious. But I saw only hypocrisy. For a while, my brothers and I attended a Christian school in Coeur d’Alene, and those Christian girls, who talked the talk but did not walk the walk, had trouble keeping their panties on. The Christian schoolboys were as bad, smoking weed. I came out of my religious training, with apologies to Mom, being who I am. I made my own peace with God and do not push my beliefs on anyone. I do not care what people choose to believe: Seventy-two virgins in Heaven are fine with me if that is what Muslims hope for. All I ask of anyone: Please do not judge me.

Up or Down, Broke or Flush

Johnathan

Earlier, before Dido sang
her mournful “down with this ship,” I was laughing with myself, naturally, about last season red salmon fishing on a day when I was scouting the water for jumpers, and I swerved
Fishing Fever
to avoid a huge log floating with the current. I slowed the boat to take a closer look. The log was posted. A metal sign with bullet holes nailed to its trunk warned, “No Trespassing. No Hunting. No Fishing.”

Another year in the red salmon season, up near the Kenai River—there was no wind and the thermometer read about 80 degrees Fahrenheit—a million big black biting flies descended and blacked out the sun. I am talking biblical. I could not fish. They were Single White Black Flies Looking for Mates; they mistook my face for a mate. A fly swatter was not big enough. I needed a gun. I hid from them in the wheelhouse with the doors and windows shut. They tried to get in. I could not see through the glass. A forest fire apparently had forced them out of the woods, or the devil himself had shooed them over the water. I threw Clorox around the deck and shot the hose in the air. I told the crew, “I cannot work under these conditions,” let go of my net, and hauled out about a mile to get free. When I came back my net was black with flies.

Not long afterward, I was salmon fishing near where I am drifting now. I was off Kodiak coming home from Sitka when I heard “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” on the single sideband radio. The voice was weak. I thought the caller was using a handheld VHF radio. I asked what was their problem. “A man shot himself,” I was told. “He shot himself in the hand.” An hysterical woman’s voice on the other end said, “He’s in pain. He was fooling around with his gun.”

The radio signal was weakening. I relayed her call to the Coast Guard in Kodiak. The injured man had blown his hand off intending to prove a wild theory about the safety of the gun’s hammer. He did not think the gun would fire if he pressed the muzzle against his hand. He was bear hunting with his wife near Bear Mountain. Through my relay, the Coast Guard asked the woman about her husband’s pain. On a scale of 1 to 10, what would she say it was? She said 15. The Coast Guard did not evacuate him from the beach. They used a helicopter and harness and plucked him out of the woods. With him flying to the Kodiak hospital, I started toward Homer, still twelve hours away. The Williwaws were whipping up the worst seas I had seen around Kodiak up to that time. The weather kicked my butt. The temperature turned bitter cold. The deck iced down. I was in forty-foot seas in icy conditions. I limped into Homer glad to be alive.

I
wonder if I can repair the batteries just enough to get power off them to call on VHF. For the second time, I wedge myself down in the engine housing on the port side against the wall. I have no reserve power. This effort only serves to stain my clothes and hands and arms with grease. The reduction gear is junk, and the boat will not move under its own power. I crawl back out of the compartment and look to the north and west. The weather continues to deteriorate with a low from the north. I look for other boats, but other captains must be staying in harbor until this blow moves through. I ration my Winstons. I search for survival gear, just in case, and
mirabile dictu
! Rolled in a life jacket—I do not carry a survival suit on this boat—is a sealed bottle of Crown Royal for medicinal use. My getting drunk now is not going to help me into port. I light a cigarette and my stomach moans. I go out on the deck to the hold and reach down for the salmon I filleted for the barbecue. I place the filets on a cutting table on deck, and with a knife I slice into the salmon’s thick red flanks. I eat the strips one by one, like sashimi. The Japanese, to whom most of the sockeye are shipped this time of year, would probably pay me for a place on
Fishing Fever.
I taste the wild goodness of the fresh salmon and smoke a cigarette and worry.

This drifting is not relaxing me. The quiet slap of waves makes me lonely. The sound helps me to sleep when I am safe, but it makes me jittery now. I am accustomed to the crash and boom of crabbing on the Bering Sea. An odd thought occurs to me: This is getting hairy. While I am fishing for either salmon or crabs I am always moving and reacting. I am thinking about crabs with barely a moment for reflection. Now I have nothing else to occupy me. Here, I just wait, passively, for someone to come along. I am alone, and I hate being alone. When alone, I think too much and for me that is dangerous. Survival is not at stake here, I tell myself. My eventual recovery is only a matter of time.

For a moment, I try to calculate the cost of this interruption. As a fisherman, in the best of times, I let the bills pile up on my desk. I pay my creditors at last, and the money is gone, until I start fishing again. Up and down, broke and flush. With this busted reduction gear, I will be in the hole $10,000 for repairs. I have $2,000 in fresh sockeye salmon in my tank. The season is only starting. If I can fix the engine and stay out for five weeks and can clear $10,000, the season will be a success despite this hiccup. In most seasons I make $20,000 off red salmon before I pay the IRS and fix the boat. That is not going to happen this year.

Twenty years ago, I learned the hard way that the Internal Revenue Service means business. As a young crab fisherman, back then, I neither paid withholding nor saved to pay the IRS at the end of the year. I was a kid. I would tell myself, “I’ll pay the taxes the next trip,” and never did. By the time I sobered up, the money was gone. On the next trip I forgot about saving. But the IRS did not hesitate to get in touch. I wound up owing them $130,000, with interest of, like, 3,000 percent per month. I was paying taxes on the money I earned to pay taxes. I was moving in reverse. I wrote a check for $6,000 and the next month I owed $130,000 all over again. I do not understand how this worked but it worked—for them! I declared federal bankruptcy when I was twenty-five. The government took my cars, motorcycles, and a house. I paid them back over five years. And from then on, I shoved my assets, except for
Time Bandit,
which I own in partnership with three brothers, in the name of a woman from Homer I was living with. That may have sheltered the money from the IRS but it did not keep it from her. She left me with only my pickup truck. She was a woman scorned and not one iota more compassionate than the IRS. When we were dating, I put a tat of a wedding ring on my ring finger that says “Autumn,” which is her name. For several years, I have whittled away at the tattoo with a knife to make it disappear under scar tissue. The process has caused me pain. Sometimes I wake up at night to find myself trying to peel the tattoo off. It hurt going on, and it hurts coming off. You would be surprised how a tattoo can sink to the bone.

Morosely, I return to the wheelhouse and tuck myself up on the shelf and get back to the events of last year.

W
e said good-bye to Homer finally in mid-September. Waving to girlfriends and wives and other well-wishers, we steamed out of the harbor into the Kachemak Bay, heading toward the Aleutian Islands chain and the crab fishing base in Dutch Harbor on Unalaska. In those moments, everyone in the crew felt the thrill of another season. The summer was ending, tendering was behind
Time Bandit,
preparations had been thorough and complete, and now we were heading out to do what we love. Soon we would feel the pleasure of full pots, plugged fish holds, and the incomparable pride of knowing we had beaten the odds one more time. As Andy says with only a touch of melodrama, “We look over the abyss and we survive.” We moved out of the Kachemak Bay and pointed our bow toward the north side of Kodiak Island.

The cold wind and spray hissing against the wheelhouse windows gave me an almost overwhelming joy of freedom. I had cast loose the immediate past, and out here on the sea, my “other” land-side life of girlfriends, debts, obligations, family and friends, worries, and children was behind me. Those I knew on land could not reach me where I was going. My mind was cleared. I was free as any man at any time anywhere on earth and I was about to do the thing I truly love: fish for crab on my own boat in an inhospitable sea. Other men work for the benefits or money or both. My idea of being rich is doing what I want. In life, I have a good deal. If I were to be gone tomorrow, I would have no complaints. I have lived the way I wanted to live. The exhilaration of crabbing in a new season, last year and every other year, was impossible to measure. It could only be felt deep within the heart.

T
he run out the Aleutian chain 750 miles from Homer to Dutch, past islands with Aleut names of Unga, Sanak, Sutwik, Unimak, and Akutan, and Russian names like Popov, Korovin, and Ivanof (that allude to the history of this long peninsula), took the better part of an uneventful week. We were excited to see Dutch Harbor again. Some undefined mystique about Unalaska and Dutch Harbor confirms that we have severed our connections with normal life. Dutch is like what the border towns in Mexico were once like, and maybe still are—places of complete abandon, implied risk and even danger, of the exotic and unfamiliar, a nearly fabled place committed to hard work and hard play, a place devoid of beauty or softness, and a launching pad into the unknown. In winter, Dutch is like being on a hard ship at sea.

We tied up in Dutch’s outer harbor in a crowd of other boats with names like
Storm Petrel, Morning Star, Golden Alaska, Northeast Explorer, Chelsea K,
and
Aleutian Challenger.
As quickly as we could secure the lines to the dock, we were off on a visit to the world headquarters for crabbers, Latitudes, a bar of longstanding notoriety. Once known as the Elbow Room, “the second most dangerous place on earth,” for the number and ferocity of the fights there, remnants of Latitudes’s earlier incarnations can be found today in the fading purple paint under the flaking blue paint of a recent remodeling. Nothing like a sign of welcome marks Latitudes, but the crabbing fleet knows where to slake its thirst for alcohol and its hunger for companionship.

Latitudes is about the size of a doublewide trailer with cheap linoleum floors, a long scarred bar, and a stage, now a storage area, where Jimmy Buffet played a gig in his younger, less renowned years. Music now comes at ear-melting levels from a jukebox. The one false note in the décor, such as it is, is a large painting on a remote wall that depicts sailors drowning. It seems too unlikely to be true, but there it hangs. To protect the art from destruction from the likes of me—I hate this kind of reminder—the painting hangs behind a Plexiglas shield in a shadowed corner. Over by the bar, a ship’s brass bell, with a clangor tied to a braided rope, signals drinks all around paid for by the one who rings the bell, who may have struck the mother lode of king crabs or may be drunk and generous.

People who do not know us wonder why crabbers in particular, and fishermen in general, drink as much as we do. I answer them honestly. If we did not get drunk when we came in from the Bering Sea we would not forget what we had just gone through and we would probably never go out again. We do not want to be sober in port, coming or going. We are about to leave for the sea on a boat with no women and indeed, no life to speak of. We will work. That is all we will do. And so we fortify ourselves against that imminent reality. And we meet friends in the bar and drink because that is what happens in bars. Drinking is a social activity, and if we sometimes get too social and get drunk, there is no excusing it. And all the explanations in the world never really hold up to reason.

The young women tending bar at Latitudes do not serve so much as push drinks in the nicest ways, with smiles and chatter; they listen to our tales sometimes as if they are even interested. They laugh, and they are women, which is often enough of an encouragement to keep us ordering drinks. Like the crabbers, the bartenders too must make money to last them a year in only weeks. A breed of adventurers every bit as dauntless as the crabbers, these young women handle the male bar clients with humor, cleavage, and sisterly affection. Lisa, the bartender at the Grand Aleutian, told me last year that she wondered whether her life’s role “wasn’t to take care of crabbers. These guys are the life—the soul, really—of this sea-based business and the link between the past and the present.” She makes certain that a full shot glass appears before the last one is finished. Someone else pays, I pay, the bar pays—the economics mysteriously work out. The women bartenders love us partly because we throw money around like confetti. We believe that generosity and good cheer count as much as breathing. Here today and gone tomorrow, and the barmaids cheer that attitude. They see it nowhere else in this high a dosage.

Alaskans in general have a drinking problem. I handle my part of it. Growing up, locals called Homer a “quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.” The same could be easily said of Dutch and a thousand other Alaskan villages. Maybe the dark winters, or the cold, contribute to this thirst for booze. Could it be explained at Latitudes that heat does not come from a furnace? Warmth pours from bottles of Crown Royal, cans of Budweiser, and from human bodies crammed together. While the once-famous, never-ending line that snaked across the potholed parking lot waiting to enter the Elbow Room is shorter now outside Latitudes, the bar has retained its soul, when the crabbers come to town.