Passage to Juneau Read online

  Greenhorns walking the dock, hoping for a piece of this action, would find a frontier that was all but closed. True, you could make $1,000 a day long-lining for halibut. But the halibut season had been squeezed down to a few days, and the captains of the halibut schooners were able to pick and choose from a throng of experienced hands. No chance for the greenie there. Most gillnetters, and trollers, too, were family boats, husband-and-wife or father-and-son concerns with no room aboard for a stranger. A big crabber … maybe. A purse-seiner would be the greenie’s best bet; though the boats themselves were small (58 feet the maximum length permitted in Alaska), the encircling net was maneuvered in the water by a big, slab-sided aluminum skiff with a 350-horse inboard motor. Crewing the parent boat and its skiff required at least four people, and sometimes six or seven; so purse-seiners sometimes took on an extra hand from outside the circle of family and friends.

  As the saying went, 10 percent of the fishermen catch 90 percent of the fish, and the crack purse-seiners in the fleet were known to everyone. When they hired extra hands, they chose people they knew. There remained the “shit-boat”: a floating catastrophe, its captain on the sauce, its hydraulic power-gear on the fritz, its nets riddled with holes, its bronze sea cocks crumbling away with electrolysis and turning into waterspouts. Shit-boats took on greenies.

  On the dock, I was summoned by the captain of the Glenda Faye, a 58-foot purse-seiner. “You want to see a living miracle?” He had a paintbrush in one hand, a bottle of phosphoric acid in the other.

  “Watch this—”

  He brushed a swath of acid across a nasty-looking fish tray that had taken on the appearance of an old, brown, badly oxidized oil painting. As the brush touched the surface, the rust dissolved and the original white metal showed through. “Magic! I never used this stuff before—”

  “You could serve it up with a dash of soda and a slice of lemon.”

  “They do that—in Cana-nada.”

  The Glenda Faye looked like a crack boat: built of steel and massively deep-drafted, the hull freshly painted in maroon with black trim. It carried more electronic gear than most, the wheelhouse roof fairly bristling with antennae. Through the galley window I could see mugs and dishes newly washed and neatly stacked to dry, spotless teak cabinetry, the wink of polished brass. A tidy ship.

  Last year’s season had been good, the captain said. In one day, they’d netted $5,000 worth of “pinks.” That was their red-letter day, but they’d come close to matching this haul several times as the boat worked round the inlets north of Dixon Entrance. He and his cousin ran the boat together. Each season they took on a crew of two or three. “College kids. Hard workers. No drugs, no smokes.” Always family, or family friends. Last year, at settlement time, when the cost of fuel and grub had been deducted from the gross, each kid pocketed nearly $11,000 for his two months’ work—big money for a student’s vacation job, but a far cry from the legends of instant wealth that kept the greenhorns coming to Seattle.

  “Did you talk to the blond guy with the bedroll who was here a bit ago?”

  “Which guy? There’s a hundred like that.”

  “Would you ever take on someone like him—a stranger, walking the dock, looking for a boat?”

  He laid a lick of magic acid on another fish tray. “Most of those guys? I wouldn’t use ’em for bait.” Swiveling on his haunches to take a closer look at me, he guffawed at what he saw. “Hey, mister, you ain’t looking to be taken on? Oh, boy!”

  Happy to contribute to the mirth of his afternoon, I shrugged and went off to do my shopping.

  Foraging for marine ironmongery in the strip-lit gloaming of Seattle Ship Supply, one could read the character of the fishery from the goods on display. A drum of 3-ply rope, considerably thicker than my arm. A pile of elephantine lyre-shaped galvanized shackles. You’d have to be in weight training to pick one off the floor. Everything—fenders, wrenches, blocks, turnbuckles, chain—looked designed for use by hulking giants, and made the fishermen who roamed the store seem puny beside their massive hardware. The stuff spoke grimly of the punishment inflicted on boats by the Alaskan winds and seas—the huge destructive tonnage of the breaking wave, the turmoil and violence of the fishermen’s workplace.

  I collected a handful of baby shackles, some clevis pins, a bottle of lamp oil, and ten feet of quarter-inch shock-cord. At the checkout, the man behind me, who was toting a coil of rope and a five-gallon can of paint, looked over the contents of my basket and said, “Going yachting, huh?” Then, thinking of all the damnfool pleasure boats that were the bane of his profession, he said gloomily, “Well, it’s the season for it, I guess”—the only person in my hearing to greet fair weather as seriously bad news.

  Beyond the net-mending area lay the terminal’s focal point—the Fishermen’s Memorial. High on his plinth stood a bronze fisherman, in the classical-heroic mode, his hair shaped by the wind into the laurel bays of a Roman conqueror. He was hauling in a giant halibut on a longline. Around the circular base of the plinth there swam—or scuttled, or clung on with sculpted suckers—all the major species of the fishery: bronze salmon, cod, herring, squid, crab, snapper, hake, prawn, octopus, dogfish, clam, flounder. On the low wall nearby were inscribed, in diecast metal lettering, the names of those lost at sea. In six years of living in Seattle, I’d watched the list grow steadily by a column and a half—seventy people, mostly men and boys. Cut flowers, in jelly jars and plastic vases, were set out on the ground before the wall, with handwritten messages, their ink blurred by rain. I miss you, Daddy. Matt—I love you always. Ben—in sad remembrance—Mom and Dad. Kirk—we miss you so much! We will love you for ever. Terri and the boys. Happy Birthday, Daddy! Love, Jeffrey.

  Winter was the memorial’s busiest season, when the big crab boats were raiding the gulf and the Bering Sea. Top-heavy with stacked pots and deck-cranes, the crabbers were the most prone to capsize. In Arctic weather, when spray froze instantly on everything it touched, and the sea stuck to the boats in great dollops, like leaden glue, the crews would be on 24-hour duty, smashing ice out of the rigging with baseball bats. Every so often, one of these overburdened 125-foot vessels would ease into a normal roll, then go on rolling, until it rolled right over. It happened in a couple of seconds—no time to radio for help or clamber into survival suits. Steer into the roll! was the injunction passed down in maritime folklore, though Coast Guard postmortems deplored this practice and advised captains to keep the rudder amidships. In other words, do nothing! A terrible precept when the world is turning turtle and the frigid water yawns.

  The bodies of these crews were rarely found, and the boats themselves sometimes sank without trace. Missing, presumed lost, the usual epitaph, was cruel in the room it left for loopholes and crazy flashes of hope. Long-drowned fishermen were sometimes spotted in the crowds at sports stadiums and on TV. Once in a blue moon, dreams of miraculous resurrection were given credence, when a dead man was arrested for a traffic violation and found to be alive and well, living a new life in Anchorage or Santa Fe.

  That afternoon, the memorial was awash in flowers. The centerpiece was a lifesize anchor made of white chrysanthemums and roses. It was ironic that the most intractable, weighty, and shin-bruising piece of hardware in the entire stock of the marine supply store should be the chief symbol of Christian hope; yet as Saint Paul, himself a shipwreck victim, wrote to the Hebrews, “Hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.” So the floral anchor stood at once for the fisherman and his dangerous trade, and for his expectation of the life of the world to come.

  A crowd was beginning to gather as I arrived. From every finger pier, men were leaving their boats and converging on the memorial in twos and threes. At just before three o’clock, the dead man’s family arrived, conspicuous in Sunday suits and ties, their faces still raw with shock. They were led to the memorial by a man, clearly a minister, in buttoned dark blazer and
white rollneck sweater—a combination meant to put one in mind of the priest’s costume of cassock and dog collar, though in a studiedly informal, democratic, unpriestly sort of way. He stood by the anchor of hope, gravely smiling, chatting with the family, a fresh-faced, young-old hand at death and grief.

  As he brought us to order, I realized that the crowd had swollen, suddenly, to more than 300 people, pressed in a broad crescent around the parents of the dead man. Some took off their caps and stood, heads bowed, as if in church; others sucked reflectively on cigarettes throughout the proceedings. The terminal fell silent, except for the complaining gulls and the bronchial rattle of generators aboard the emptied boats. When the minister spoke, he barely had to raise his voice to be heard from the back of the crowd.

  Lester, he said, had been a rich man—not in the goods of this world, but in the multitude of relationships he had forged, both here and in Alaska. The number of us gathered here today to remember Lester stood as a testament to … The words, if trite, were proper and comforting. The minister made a decent, priestly job of cloaking the meaningless shipyard explosion in which the man had died in a language of moth-eaten dignity.

  A letter from a friend in Kodiak was read aloud. An uncle delivered a halting reminiscence. “Farewell, Lester—and smooth sailing …” he said, and broke down.

  The minister took over again. We mumbled an Our Father and recited the doxology. The entire service lasted twelve or thirteen minutes; no longer than a coffee break, yet long enough to show the parents that their son had belonged to a real village, and that the village cared.

  The surrounding city was a honeycomb of soi disant “communities” that were empty fictions: the “arts community,” the “public-radio community,” the “retail community.” Fishermen’s Terminal was perhaps the last place in Seattle where that poor, overextended word still had meaning. The fishing community really was a tight, intimate, memorious society, cruel and kind in equal parts. It gave its members ribald nicknames—Pus-gut Chadwick, Three-Finger Bob, Truthful Tom. It rejoiced in cutting people down to size. It nourished old slights and grudges over the decades, and was divided by resentful factions—seiners versus gill-netters, Sons of Norway versus The Rest. But when a boat went down, or a fisherman went into the cancer hospital, or a child died, the community closed around the survivors. His seagoing—incommunicable to outsiders—set the fisherman far apart from his suburban neighbors; only here at the terminal could the full dimensions of his life be comprehended, and given their true weight when his name was added to the list on the wall.

  On the last “Amen” the crowd dissolved as fast as it had formed. Droop-shouldered still, in deference to the occasion, the men trooped back to their boats. From the piers came the first ding of a hammer, the shrill churring of a sander, and, in death’s warning afternoon shadow, the cheerful business of fitting out again got under way.

  I walked back to my boat, which lay moored at a small boatyard on the Ship Canal, a quarter-mile east of Fishermen’s Terminal. Built in Sweden in 1972 as a smart cruising ketch, expensively outfitted in varnished mahogany and teak, it had deteriorated in the six years of my ownership into a comfortably down-at-heel floating cottage, cluttered with books and pictures, box files, two manual typewriters, furry animals (my daughter’s contribution), wine, photographic stuff, curling manuscripts, dead ballpoint pens, and all the rest of the impedimenta of a singularly untidy writer’s life. Its dark ultramarine hull was coated in a layer of black dust, thanks to the shipyard next door; the foredeck was a spaghetti of uncoiled ropes. I had no taste for nautical spit and polish. The boat was a working vessel—my narrative vehicle.

  Though I lived in a house overlooking the canal, and could see from the upstairs deck whether or not the boat still floated, I usually spent several weeks each year, and sometimes months, aboard the ketch. When a concentrated bout of reading was called for, or a wrong chapter needed righting, or when my Furies dogged me to distraction, I’d take off for the nearby scribble of islands and let go the anchor. With the floor sashaying underfoot, the chain grumbling on the sea-bottom, and the view from the boat’s windows revolving slowly on the tide, I found the equilibrium that I was prone to lose on the unstable land. On winter mornings, the mud foreshore hoar with frost, forlorn gulls circling under a misty sky, I’d fire up the heater, light the lamps, and work with an intense single-mindedness that evaded me at home. The creaks and groans, the smells of paraffin and diesel, were conducive to thinking and remembering. Afloat, the boat was an unplace—a bubble world, off at a useful tangent to the insistent here-and-now of the American shoreline. Cramped, dark, and coffin-like, it was my Yaddo, my asylum, my ark.

  It was it, not she. Its first purchaser had given the boat a woman’s name, sign-painted, with curlicues, across the stern. But the name meant so little to me that it would take me a moment—a catch of breath—to recall it. It was just the name of somebody else’s wife or girlfriend, and anyway, the couple had probably split up now. Whenever possible, I preferred to identify the boat by its Washington State registration number, Whiskey November Eleven Ninety-six Romeo Bravo—a suitably complex mouthful for a complex lozenge of space that held three rooms, a shower-toilet, a honeycomb of concealed lockers, an engine compartment, a center cockpit, a wraparound deck, two masts, and a suit of sails. As Whiskey November etcet., it had a rational particularity that went nicely with its intended function.

  That afternoon, the hatches were open, and an electrician was inside. The boat had once been owned by a San Diego electronics engineer who had installed a circuitry of marvelous, and perverse, sophistication: a maze of cables and crimped, multicolored wires more appropriate to a mainframe computer than to a 35-foot sailboat. The current was never permitted to flow straight from A to B; it was diverted, at every possible opportunity, through a succession of shunts, bypasses, inner-ties, voltage regulators, resistors, fuses. My electrical control panel, admired by everyone, had a complement of 43 switches that would have looked reassuring on the bridge of an oceangoing tug or a medium-sized coaster. Several electricians had been baffled by the labyrinthine ingenuities of the system; but, after three years, I found someone who looked at it, exclaimed over it, and basked in his intellectual mastery of it. He was now building-in a series of emergency shortcuts, adding a few dozen more wires to the maze for simplicity’s sake.

  With the floorboards up, he was crouched in the bilges, holding a pair of pliers in his teeth. Six-feet-plus of swarthy, cadaverous skin and bones, he had the raccoon’s knack of being able to insinuate himself into impossibly tight spaces. He had now reduced himself to a helmet of straggly black hair and a toilet-brush beard encircling the teeth that held the pliers. His right arm, severed at the shoulder, had been lost, or so I’d heard on the dock, to a runaway anchor chain in the Alaskan fishery, and his left hand was constantly being assisted by his mouth, his knees, or his feet.

  John Munroe was agile, fast, and a perfectionist. He labeled every wire and installation in his beautiful copperplate handwriting. He was tolerant of my mechanical illiteracy, and would explain things, over and over in a machine-gun tenor, until I believed that I had caught the essential drift of the boat’s myriad rivulets of electricity, as they coursed, trickled, and, sometimes, went as dry as a prairie creek in summer.

  What I now wanted him to explain was his past in the gold-rush fishery. What led him to Alaska in his greenhorn days?

  “Herring.” His voice came, on echo, from deep in the bilges. “In 1979, they were paying three thousand a ton for herring. Just poking around with a gill net, you could bring in maybe a hundred tons. Guys were making these gobs of money.”

  After five years at college in San Luis Obispo, studying to be an aeronautical engineer, Munroe was employed as a jobbing electrician at a winery in Napa County. Nine-to-five suburban California was “boring, dull, and hopeless.” He was a receptive listener to the stories of high adventure and easy money that were circulating on the d
ocks of San Francisco, his hometown. And he had the sea in his blood. His father was a naval architect; John had grown up with boats, big and small. Laying circuits in the winery, he nursed a consoling, fugitive daydream of sailing alone to the South Pacific. With the Gauguin maids, / In the banyan shades … He’d put away $10,000 against this imagined other life of blue-water solitude and palm-fringed dalliances; a decent start, but it would be years before he could quit his job and cast off for Oceania.

  “But if I could get up to Alaska, and parlay that into, like, a hundred grand, I’d be fat.”

  An elderly San Francisco fisherman—nicknamed Joe Shaft, supposedly for sexual rather than financial wolfishness—offered to sell Munroe a wooden gill-netter, Vagabond, only six years old and in fine nick, for $40,000. Ten thousand down, with the balance due at the end of the season. “If we were going fishing in Alaska, we could be trusted. The money was as good as in the bag.”

  Two college friends, Curt and Joe, were as bored and footloose as Munroe himself. The three formed a partnership around the purchase of Vagabond and its attendant gear. “It was a chance to get out of this insane thing—dicking around in second-rate jobs with no futures.” They trucked the boat to Seattle and shipped it on a barge to Alaska while, back in San Francisco, they provisioned for the summer. In the parking lot of a Berkeley co-op, they loaded a ’53 Chevrolet with tofu paste, brewer’s yeast, lecithin powder, lentil loaf, sacks of flour and garbanzo beans. “We were manic vegetarians. That’s how long we’d been living in California. Way too long.”