PAGE 10
SCHOONERS ACROSS
When a woman I loved left me in fear I would leave her
and run off to sea, I ran off to sea because my woman left me.
My new love was an ocean fish boat. Its name was Falling Star,
and had fallen far, skinny and hoary with rotting wood and flaking
paint and a perpetual starboard list the skipper set me to correct
with heavy bags of salt I wrestled from the dock into the dark
hold that smelled offish and diesel and wedged against the
portside timbers. The Skipper was a few years older than me,
in his late 30s. His were fishing stock and he had worked decks
since his baby fingers could tie a knot. He was bearded and his
long hair was matted and twisted from wind and neglect. His
clothes were oily and smelled offish and sweat. He looked me
over ill-humoredly the day I asked for a fishpuller’s job. "You ever
fished?" he asked. I nodded. Two seasons, I said, and named
the boats, skippers and home ports. He raised a one fingered
hand to his pale freckled face and scratched beard hair that
straggled up his cheeks toward his eyes which burned harshly
out of the mass of hair, and from somewhere in the tangle his
teeth flashed like hungry sharks as I heard terse instructions
to get my seabag on board and be ready to throw off mooring
lines before first light in the morning.
My new love was top heavy and continued to list despite
the salt bags, slouched against ropes holding it captive to a salt
and seagull stained pierhead. A round white topside bridge that
ascended from the deck like a forehead above a pair of glass-
paned eyes in the wheelhouse was cluttered with boxes filled
with lines, nets and crabpots. Tuna poles, each a limbed thin
conifer, rose worn and warped on either side of a spindly wood
mast that made my love a hermaphrodite, and although I was
suppressing sexuality because I missed the woman who took
a new lover, this seahag would be a newer kind of love.
Fog was thick on the river when we crossed the sullen
gray Columbia River bar early the next morning. We tied up at
a cannery wharf for bait at Point Adams then ran in the river
channel awhile and frivolously bounced behind an outgoing
freighter. Plush and gleaming charter fishing boats poured into
the river from a side channel almost on battleline and flashed
arrogantly past, showing no respect for the ugly spinster Falling
Star, and lifted their skirts flirtingly to a ponderous cargo ship as
they skipped into the Pacific Ocean beyond the grazing dinosaur
shape of Cape Disappointment. We turned from the buoyline and
shuffled across turbulent shallows along the south jetty, so close
to its huge black rocks I thought we would scrape white frosting
left by generations of seabirds. The ocean was at flood tide and
rammed into the river, arching over reefs of silt and sand drained
from inland mountains and valleys. A crowd of seagulls watched
us from the jetty's rocks as we plowed head on into roller coaster
swells and into the open ocean.
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
Thirty years ago, in late August 1972, a small fishing boat capsized
in the Columbia River Bar. This story is an account of that incident.
It is dedicated to all mariners and anyone else who has been aboard
a sinking vessel, those who survived and those who died — and to
those who risk and sometimes lose their lives rescuing vessels in
distress. More than 2,000 river and ocean craft have sunk in or near
the Columbia River Bar in the last two centuries, and at least 700
persons have died. No records exist of the losses of native mariners
who crossed the bar for thousands of years.
UNIONTOWN
A Natural/Grocery
&itl974-
1389 'Dibatte'
TONY'S TAVERN
218 WEST MARINE DRIVE
ASTORIA. OREGON 97103
(503) 325-8708
1313 MARINE DR., ASTORIA
(503) 325-5069
i
I crossed the bar the first time two years earlier, coming
up from the south on another old fish boat with a load of albacore
tuna for the Astoria canneries. Just before crossing from the
ocean into the river we sat outside while my skipper of that
season, an old man named George who had fished fifty years,
studied the turbulent river mouth. An unlit cigar poked out of his
ruddy face and his eyes were almost covered by a black knit cap
that stretched tightly over his beachball head. He told the two of
us who were his crew about the hundreds of ships and boats
sunk or scattered on beaches and sandbars for miles on either
side of the bar, the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’ he said seadogs
called it, justly so, he assured us, speaking the names of friends
and boats that had died at the river entrance during his half
century on the ocean. George turned around from the wheel
topside and looked back over the stem while he chewed on his
cold cigar and jabbered his salty palaver. Then he turned back
and hunched over the wheel. He kicked the motor into gear
and we crossed the bar, which threw us around like a dog with
a sock
I stayed ashore after that season ended. I settled my
wages with George and got off the boat in Astoria. I took a bus
uppver to Portland, found a job and got to know a woman whose
smile was like all of the candles in a church lit at once. She and I
shared an apartment but after awhile I started feeling smothered.
I thought I needed salt air to put grit back into my blood. She
knew my thoughts. I thoughtlessly whipped her with them. So
she finally told me to go to hell and found a new boyfriend.
As the Falling Star came out of the river past a large
black gullstained and spraylashed rock into the open ocean, the
fog unclenched its wet stringy fingers and gave us to the rising
sun, a bright wrinkled fire that etched the forested mountains
against a salmon colored sky as if pasted there. The water was
crystalline blue and gentle away from the heaving surge of the