PAGE 12
In the evenings I turned into the Mermaid Tavern and
drank myself senseless at a table next to large windows that
overlooked the river. The windows were sacred. The loggers,
longshoremen and mariners who patronized the Mermaid did
not throw furniture, beer pitchers or each other through them
whenever a fight erupted Nor did they knock each other against
a large wood carving of a mermaid inside the door. I looked out
the hallowed windows and watched the bobbing lights offish
boats that barked like terriers as they wallowed past big ships
going up or down river, and later in the night I would see images
of my former girlfriend's face splayed upon the glass out in the
darkness where I could not reach.
Finally I was fit to go back on deck. I still had to wear the
brace, but I convinced the Skipper I was able to work. I told the
temporary fishpuller we could split a wage share if he wished to
remain aboard. He agreed and spoke his name as Kamiju, which
he said meant clown in Okinawa where he spent military duty
and where, apparently, he had been a clown. A day later we
provisioned Falling Star and crossed the bar in pursuit of
albacore. Two hours later the wind chased us back into the river
and blew up a nasty gale that whipped the bar all night. We
sheltered in the lee of Cape Disappointment and dropped anchor
just offshore. The looming black mass of rock folded over us that
night while we smoked marijuana and slept with colorful dreams.
DRAWINGS BY PAULA PIUKKULA
SCHOONERS
FROM PAGE 11
were expropriated from Mexico). Lewis & Clark ended their
overland trek there, though namesake John Jacob Astor never
visited the small settlement he financed and sold when his
ambitions to dominate the Pacific fur trade failed. The city's best
years, when tallmasted ships and sternwheel riverboats crowded
its wharves and the river swarmed with the winged sails of fish
boats, were long over. Astoria had been infamous for its sleazy
waterfront saloons and brothels; many of its rowdy loggers,
reckless mariners and careless farmers were shanghaiied to
China-bound ships by an army of crimps, brothel madams and
saloonkeepers. For nearly a century most Astoria men were
fishermen or worked with hundreds of women in dozens of fish
canneries on the riverfront.
I got to know a robust old logger who shot bear hunters
and protected eagles Every day he gave flowers to waitresses
in a downtown coffee shop where I met him. He told me greed
killed off the old forests and wiped out the salmon that were
once so plentiful folks claimed they could cross the river on their
backs. His basso voice seemed to bellow from a barrel even
when he spoke quietly. He said Astoria started going downhill
when the red lights were taken off the whorehouses and put on
traffic signals.
At least once a day I walked along the almost empty
riverfront that a century earlier had exchanged Victorian finery
for raw furs, fish and timber. I walked past silent deserted fish
canneries that had once shipped salmon everywhere and the
burned ruins of buildings on pilings over the river, remnants of a
fire that had burnt out the city's heart more than half a century
earlier and deteriorated almost as slowly as classical ruins.
Forests of broken pilings ate into the river like bad teeth. Old
unused fish boats disintegrated on blocks or in marshes and
rocks along the riverbanks. The railroad tracks I walked on were
rusted and broken though scores of trains once hauled canned
fish into the interior and thousands of tourists to the coast. Each
sunset it seemed the sun reluctantly withdrew its last rosy light
from the old city that once prospered from reckless disregard for
the resources its citizens ravished. I wondered what being native
to Astoria might be like, its dead past more palpable than present
or future, its failed history a coffin that each passing moment
nailed shut.
I usually hung around for awhile each day at the port
docks and watched longshoremen load logs onto Asian ships
from log rafts kept together by small darting tugboats. I also
spent time at the fish docks among my mistress' sisters swap
ping lies with their crews, catching lines and throwing them off
as boats came in and went back out onto the big blue pond.
I felt about other fishermen as a combat soldier does about his
war comrades, aware that any of them as well as himself might
be killed. Astoria's families mourned a long succession of
parents, spouses, lovers, children, neighbors and shipmates
who perished with their vessels on the ocean or the river. The
fishermen warred with wind and water; the town watched them
come and go like wartime sailors and soldiers.
LOOK INTO THE EYES
OF A DYING FISH
There were three seagulls. They flew over the
water which was green, hunting a fish that had been hurt.
They hovered over the tiny harbor where all the fishermen
empty their nets on Terminal Island, waiting in the Sunday
afternoon sky for the weakening fish to finally become too
slow for their swoops.
And the fish, a white gash in its back, a wound from
somewhere, was weakening. It surfaced many times, gulping
the oxygen so desperately needed as life oozed from its small
body and stained the water already polluted by the imperious
civilization ashore Overhead, the gulls waited their chance,
three ominous reflections riding the wind-speckled water.
Each time one of the noisy birds came close, the
dying fish let its body fall deeper into the water, farther than
the hunters were willing to venture with their hungry beaks —
but each time the climb to the surface was harder, slower.
For a time the fish was safe. It was too close to a ship
for the gulls to risk a dive. But the current against which it could
no longer struggle slid the fish back out into open water.
Two of the gulls made shallow dives but the fish just
managed to duck under in time: then it was over.
As the two gulls were skidding back into the sky, the
third made a silent glide and grabbed the fish as it resurfaced
for another draught of precious air. The successful gull had to
evade the other two as they tried to steal its catch, and a fishing
boat chugged out to the ocean a few minutes later.
The morning was a mariner's prayer, scrubbed clean
and fresh by the night's storm. The sun caught fire to rolling
swells that heaved us gently in their troughs as we recrossed the
bar We dropped the tuna poles beyond the Columbia Lightship
and ran west. We reached our destination when the sun was
there with us. Seabirds trailed into its final fire, gliding with the
wind over gelatinous lumps. Only one hungry albacore grabbed
for a hook and it fought desperately while I struggled to bring it
aboard. The fingers of my left hand were without the assistance
of a thumb and kept slipping on the taut wet line. Finally I bent
over the stern and speared the tuna's gills with a gaff hook and
jerked it aboard. Minnows and blood spewed onto the deck from
its mouth and gills, and its large body, shocked by its sudden
extraction from the water, heaved and pitched in a frenzy for
oxygen. Far away in the last light in the west a long drumroll of
clouds took the shapes of jungled islands for an instant, then the
light faded to a smear of rust. The darkness chilled me while I
waited for the fish to die before I dropped its blue and silver
corpse into the hold.
We hunted albacore a few hundred miles offshore in
warm currents from Japan for two weeks. We trolled back and
forth with and against the swell, plowing the water with our hooks
like farmers. The Skipper worked the wheel in the house while
Kamiju and I shared the cockpit in the stern. Kamiju pulled six
lines that trailed aft from the tuna pole on the port side and I
pulled six lines on the starboard side Whenever an albacore
took a line the Skipper swung Falling Star into a circle to
encompass the fish it traveled with, and we raced for seabirds
when we saw great flocks of them dive for living islands of
plankton in the hope that tuna were feeding from below.
One evening after sunset we started rolling up the lines
and were about to shut down the motor for the night when we
were struck by a school of albacore. In an instant all lines had
fish on them, including one I had been coiling which was jerked
out of my hands. Kamiju pulled at a wire attached to a bell inside
the house The Skipper appeared in the doorway. How many?
he shouted over the motor and evening wind. All lines got fish,
I yelled back. He disappeared into the house and switched the
wheel onto automatic pilot so that Falling Star would make wide
sweeping loops. He crossed the deck and wedged himself into
the cockpit between Kamiju and me. The deck quickly filled with
frantically dying albacore. They kept coming at us, following us
around our orbit through the ocean. No sooner was a line
cleared of a fish and tossed back into the water when another
fish grabbed at it. We pulled them aboard for nearly two hours.
By the first hour I was exhausted, my healing arm protested with
pain, and I spent the rest of the time praying for the fish to stop.
Kamiju the clown laughed and kept up a running stream of erotic
wit The Skipper was silent. I heard his hoarse breathing and
smelled the rancid sweat that steamed from underneath his
slicks. All three of us lurched against the pitching deck as Falling
Star rolled and tumbled through its rotations around the ocean.
We stumbled into each other and hit each other with fish. Lines
tangled, hooks got caught on clothing or on things in the cockpit.
A gaff was lost overboard My hands were slimy with fish scales
and guts and stung from dozens of hook punctures mixed with
salt water Above the chaotic sounds of wind and water and the
straining of the boat motor I heard the death drums of hundreds
of albacore all over the deck. The entire stern and walkways on
either side of the house were piled with dying fish. Some fell into
the cockpit and flopped around our feet. I also felt about to die:—
When they quit as suddenly as they struck. We stood awhile and
numbly waited for a line to stiffen but none did Behind us the
last dying fish beat their bodies into the bloody deckboards. The
Skipper shook his head like he was emerging from a dream and
climbed out of the cockpit. He lurched and slipped over the fish
until he reached the house. He swung the boat in a reckless
turn that threw Kamiju and me into each other and threatened
to broach the boat. When he got the prow pointed downhill the
skipper leaned out of the house and shouted for us to stack the
- michael M c C usker
(North Long Beach Herald American, 3/27/1969)
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