The North Coast times-eagle., August 01, 2002, Page 11, Image 11

PAGE 11
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , AUGTEMBER 2002
THE BAR
bar, and it walked with us while we chugged a few miles just
beyond the surf that broke onto a reef. We passed the shining
charter boats that sniffed like hounds for fish, and we saw the
rusted and half buried bones of the Peter Iredale, a fourmasted
squarerigger that was driven ashore and stranded on the beach
while navigating toward the Columbia River one stormy October
night in 1906. Nothing but its skull and ribs stuck out of the
tidewater sand, which made it resemble a desert skeleton. Its
steel plates had been stripped away by storms and tides and
also by human carrion, and its bowsprit had fallen off and was
buried in the sand. We turned toward the north within sight of the
town of Seaside and the huge mastiff of Tillamook Head where
Lewis & Clark first saw the Pacific Ocean — into the wind, and
the pungent smells of squid and clams I had cut up for bait
slapped me in the face.
We were fishing for dungeness crabs that day. The
Skipper pointed his one-fingered hand at a string of bobbing red
bullet shaped buoys that were hardly more than a few yards off
the reef that paralleled the beach. Underneath each buoy was a
crab pot. That was our line, he said.
I had never fished crabs. I was an albacore tuna man,
but I wanted to think I was willing to try anything. We worked the
line for almost 12 hours without a break, moving from buoy to
buoy, more than 300 of them. I was in command of a long wood
handled boathook which I used to reach out over the side to
snag the buoys. If I missed one the Skipper shouted at me from
the wheel aft of the house and spun the boat in a tight rocking
circle for another pass. I pulled each buoy aboard with enough
sodden slippery rope to throw around a hydraulic block which
was operated by the Skipper and grindingly pulled pots from the
ocean bottom several fathoms below. The Skipper quickly
emptied the pots, which were actually wire meshed baskets that
were round like large cheeses. He flung male crabs into a big
wooden box, the females back into the water to breed and the
young ones to grow. I emptied the bait bottles I took from each
pot and replaced with two others I had already filled with squid
and clams. When the Skipper was finished with a pot I pulled
the rope off the block and pushed the pot overboard. I baited
the empty bottles. Then I grabbed the boathook as the skipper
splashed the boat alongside another crimson buoy. It was an
exhausting and backstraining rhythm that reprieved my brain
from the continuing sting of my former girlfriend's departure. In
the afternoon I reached too far for a buoy and a choppy wave
heaved me into the water. A rope flew after me and the Skipper
hauled me aboard. He looked at me with disgust.
That evening we unloaded almost a thousand pounds
of angry snapping crabs at an ancient cannery on the Astoria
riverfront We tied up alongside a grease blackened wharf and
I started pitching crabs into a steel bin mounted on canisters.
Each bin that was filled was wheeled through an open door
into a vast enclosed space that was shot through with russet
sunbeams from western windows. I breathed the smells of
rendered and steamed fish. Gulls weaved and shrieked around
my head. The Skipper taunted my wariness of pincers. They
don't hurt much, he said and almost instantly a crab clamped
onto my arm which hurt very much. I pulled it loose and hurled
it past the skipper's suddenly surprised face. Then finally home
to a gray weathered woodshingled house on a hill above the
pink and purple sunset stained river and a deep dreamless sleep
outside under stars, the first such sleep since a lonely rupture
whirled me into angry jealous fantasies of an alien body
plummeting down into my former girlfriend.
Days and weeks somersaulted with tides and suns and
lonely dreams. Our tiny battered old boat rolled and tumbled like
a walnut shell through a kaleidoscope of surging mountains of
water that rose and fell with the intensity of lungs. We hugged
the surf rimmed shore and pulled crab pots from the ocean
floor or we went far out to sea and danced with seabirds and
porpoises and great gray whales, and hunted albacore tuna.
On those trips the long poles were freed from the mast and
spread like bony wings, with various lengths of fishing lines
trailed from their tips and flanks. The skipper piloted Falling
Star through hunting waters while I stood at the lines in a narrow
cockpit in the stern, swaddled in yellow slickers and braced
against the swell, and watched past the bubbling jello of our
wake for the big blue and silver fish. The albacore that took our
lines died hard and bloody on our deck, pounding their deaths
into the wood like the drums of our hearts. Long quiet or stormy
days, nights windblown, clear, the sky gouged with stars, or
heavy and chilled with rain and images of dead ships from other
times, a few stricken or missing from our own joining them in
DAVID EWEN
a long plunge into darkness never reached by sun or stars and
crushed, men and boats, into sea dust. I heard frantic calls for
the Coast Guard on our radio and kept watch for other boats that
might swell from specks on the enormous poker chip horizon that
surrounded us.
We were free prisoners chained to a splinter of wood in
a limitless space, kin to the families of seabirds crowded onto
passing watersoaked and barnacled logs, related also in the
briefness of our passage to the fiery trails across the night skies,
the falling stars that gave our mistress its name.
Some of the Skipper's peculiarities were revealed during
those two or three week trips in pursuit of albacore, during which
we seldom saw other boats and moved away from them when­
ever we did. which was one of his traits. He did not like to travel
in schools of fishboats but preferred to hunt alone on isolated
deserts of ocean. Almost immediately he told me cocaine was
his main joy and that it took a lot of dead fish to feed his nose.
My spirit distilled grapes, but we shared a common interest in
cannabis sativa. Things were different in the fishing fleet since
the younger men bought the boats of retiring and wornout
fishermen who had trained them, he said one night as we sat
out on deck and passed several joints between us. He meant the
use of drugs, which would not have been tolerated before. But I
thought of a day late in the season I worked for old George. We
anchored outside the small California fishing town of Avila for
gas and groceries. Waiting on the pier was an ancient man
George had known for half a century. I listened to them talk
of the years they prowled the Pacific Ocean together, from
Nicaragua to Alaska, fishing for tuna, salmon and cod. They told
me that the great days of fishing were over, that we younger
fishermen would never know how great it had been, we would
know only the problems.
One morning coming out of the river a party boat knifed
out of thick fog that lay over the bar straight for Falling Star. I had
the helm and swung hard to starboard as the puker slashed past,
headed for the south jetty. I hit the air horn to warn it away from
the rocks but it disappeared in the fog. I started to bring Falling
Star back on course when the puker came at us again. I almost
broke my shoulders throwing the wheel to starboard and cursed
the other boat driver in a frenzy of angry fear. On another day a
crabline snapped in the block and exploded its tension into my
right thigh with the impact of a bullet. The pain was so intense
that I simply fell to my knees on the deck and wept like a bruised
child. I met a woman in a bar and loved her a few nights ashore
until a husband she neglected to inform me about returned from
several months of fishing in the Gulf of Alaska
CLEARCUT OCEAN
The soon to be beached trawl fishermen should have
done some conservation work of their own while they were
pointing to farmers, ranchers, miners and loggers as resource
degraders.
Yellow rockfish and others are not replacing themselves
because, just like salmon, there are too few to get the job done.
It was not cows, chainsaws or dams that killed the fish. They
were systematically overfished, and roller gear nets ruined
thousands of square miles of ocean bottom reefs forever.
The ocean was clearcut and not replanted. In fact,
pre-spawning fish were killed by the billions, the catch culled
for bigger fish
-JOHN THOMAS JR
John Thomas lives in Monmouth, Oregon
BUCK’S
BOOK BARN
★ USED BOOKS & RECORDS ★
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Most of the nights I spent away from the boat I slept
in the yard of the house above the river, which was rented by
friends who also fished or worked in fish canneries on the
riverfront. I was generally surrounded in my sleeping bag by
a menagerie of snuffling, scratching and squirming housepets
which included a white rat that seemed to be a pet of the rest.
May Moon and Willow were two women who lived in the
house. They worked in one of the canneries on what was called
the "slime line" stuffing cutup fish into cans. Willow shared her
bed with a man who worked on a dragnet fishboat. May Moon
preferred occasional one-night stands and had a bedroom to
herself. Both offered themselves for sex to help me feel better
about recovery from my former girlfriend. They acted as a team
and teased me constantly, especially about my resistance to
make love with them.
“Celibacy isn’t going to get her back," Willow said.
“You have sex with us, you won’t want her back," May
Moon declared.
“I've got to work it out my way,” I said lamely.
“You're not working anything out," Willow scoffed.
I got drunk one night with a friend from a previous
season who told me about the deaths of other friends who
seemed to have died in a cluster, most of them drunk and falling
off boats or piers, a tradition among fisherfolk not unlike the
resolve of cowboys to meet their maker wearing boots or Vikings
to die in battle.
And one day I tore the ligaments of my left arm reaching
too far for a buoy while we were crabbing and afterward
attempted to pull up a crab pot that snarled in the screw I was
beached for almost two weeks. My arm and hand were encased
in a plastic brace that shielded the lower arm like a Roman
gauntlet. It was wrapped tightly with an Ace bandage, only
my thumb was left free and jabbed out of a hole in the brace,
absurdly useless except for hitchhiking.
I did not like being ashore. I spent the first few days
hanging around the boat until the Skipper hired a temporary
fishpuller and shoved off for a tuna trip. Most of the rest of the
time I walked around Astoria, which was built on steep hills
above the Columbia River. I floated like an insect up and around
the hills among old wood houses and churches that rose from
the downtown waterfront in layers of Victorian clutter. Houses
were badly weathered and deteriorated or were burnt shells
rotting among weeds and wild blackberries, but most were
brightly painted with small neat lawns surrounded by trees and
gardens. From almost everywhere in the hills, from streets in
old neighborhoods or forested slopes, were commanding views
of the river, which was four miles wide, fattened by streams
and lesser rivers and bulged with bays that resembled large
aneurysms. Across the river stacks of purple/blue mountains
that always seemed under clouds and often obscured by
morning fog were stubbled with new growth forests Beyond
Cape Disappointment at the river's mouth was the furry dark
caterpillar line of the Pacific Ocean. Looked down upon from the
hills, ships anchored in the river in front of the city while awaiting
berths in upriver cities were as small as toy boats in a pond, and
gillnet fishboats resembled waterbugs skittering around on the
water.
Astoria was at the end of the Oregon Trail and claimed
to be the oldest city in the American West (a few older pueblos
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