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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , AUGTEMBER 2002
corpses in bins down in the hold. It took almost the rest of the
night and filled half the hold. We covered the dead fish with
blankets of ice, layer by layer like one would frost a cake.
None of the other nights were as eventful. We killed the
motor after each sunset and drifted with the current, smoking up
our supply of marijuana and awakening long before dawn each
morning. The boat was usually surrounded by blue sharks and
birds were asleep on deck or clinging to the mast when one or
another of us stepped out on deck for the day's first piss before
the coffee was ready. Each morning the sharks scampered away
in terror and the birds flew off shrieking when the skipper started
the motor and the screw took a bite out of the ocean. Kamiju
and I climbed into the pit astern and carefully eased out the
lines on each side to prevent them from tangling. From sunup
to sundown we plowed through a gentle blue lump and pulled
aboard albacore that gulped our hooks.
The weather changed, preceded one twilight by a sheet
of clouds that lay over the sky like a shroud over a corpse. Wind
blew cold and nasty in the darkness before dawn. Daylight was
gray streaked with sleet and flying spray.The old boat shuddered
like an epileptic in the wild ocean. We skittered through its trough
all that day running for shore. We were thrown around crazily,
tossed halfway up the spumy sky on the breaking crest of a
mountainous swell one instant, then fell sickeningly down its
back, repeated incessantly as’if a furious mother had grasped a
child by the shoulders and fiercely shook it. For the first time I felt
a little seasick and Kamiju laughed at me.
In the late afternoon we came abreast of an abandoned
lighthouse on Tillamook Rock a mile offshore from Cannon
Beach and turned north against the wind and current and beat
ourselves senseless against unceasingly oncoming swells.Tons
of water crashed into the bow and washed across the deck to the
stern. We were beat around so roughly it was virtually impossible
to stand even when we clung to supports. We sat at a table in
the house whenever it was not our turn at the wheel and stared
wordlessly out at the seas that roared past after punching Falling
Star in the nose or watched whoever wrestled the wheel. The
Skipper had come down from the topside bridge when it got
too nasty to remain up there. His face and beard were a blur of
windlashed rainwater and his slicks dripped large puddles at his
feet when he took over the wheel inside the house. We took
turns at the helm and peered out the wet and fogged windows
while fighting to stay on our feet. We watched anxiously for
deadheads which were partially submerged logs that had got
away from timber rafts on the Columbia River, so called because
of their capacity to put holes in the sides of wood boats like
Falling Star and sink them. We looked also for other boats
running for home like we were but didn't see any. I was relieved
after an hour at the wheel by the Skipper before dark. I dropped
down into the dingy dim foc'sle and crawled into my cramped
bunk that stank of ancient fish, dirty clothes and countless
seasons of unwashed deckhands. I lay awake in the darkness
and stared up through a small hole at the Skipper’s black rubber
boots as he fought the wheel. I listened to the water pounding
against the hull next to my head. Sometimes on gentler nights
the water against the hull sounded like voices of children calling
out my name.
We stumbled gracelessly across the bar after midnight.
Huge black swells grappled to crush us or roll us over but we
escaped and limped into the main channel and quieter waters.
The lights of Astoria climbed its hills as if they were on Christmas
trees, and the beams and taillights of automobiles and trucks
on the high arch of the steel bridge that crossed the wide river
shone like gems.We tied up behind a rotting abandoned cannery
building and carefully walked along a collapsing dock. We were
cold, wet and exhausted and stumbled across Marine Drive on
tottering sealegs. Traffic hardly noticed we three who had battled
Davy Jones. If any saw us at all in the darkness they probably
thought we were drunk. We drank a beer at last call at a fisher
men's tavern. The place had salt. Knotted hawser butts and
rusted ships' lanterns hung from ceiling beams. The walls were
cluttered with nets, floats, corks, photographs and faded prints of
sailing schooners, steamships, battleships and fish boats, some
shown grounded on the beach or hull-over and breaking up on a
reef. Wall tapestries of deer and elk covered large front windows.
The place was called Hazel's, and she stood behind her bar like
a warm sea.
We unloaded tuna the next afternoon. I was not much
help. My left arm was sore and stiff from my turns at the helm
the day before. We untied from the rotting pier and slipped into
THE OLD FISHERMAN DIED IN THE WATER
A tiny anchovy went mad in the quiet waters of Fish
Harbor Sunday afternoon. Ernie and his new-found dog were
sitting on the back deck of a boat when the small silver-bellied
fish broke water and danced its gleaming body through insane
flopping circles around a floating clump of rotting seaweed.
Far off a jet turned in the blue sky filling with fog and a large
freighter disappeared over the hazy rim of the world.
The dog barked at the fish and Ernie spit at the sun-
washed dance floor. Out there, where the big freighter was
chugging through Angel’s Gate was where they had found old
Chuck Verran floating face down.
“That old man was just about the last of the old fisher
men on this island," Ernie said, taking a swig of wine and spit
ting over the side again. “Only Blackie’s left, and maybe a
couple of others.”
Ernie, when he's not in jail or sleeping near trash cans
or atop cakes of ice in Terminal Island's fishermen’s icehouse,
is a commercial fisherman. Old Chuck (when he was alive)
used to say, "Ernie, you’re about the best hand on a fishboat
I’ve seen, but on the beach you ain’t worth an empty bottle..."
“I think he was trying to get back to his boat,” Ernie said.
“We’d been drinking a little and he went off to get some shuteye.
He must’ve slipped or something — He had a bad heart. He was
an old man, you know, 70 or mtfre. He said to me once, when I
told him he should take care of himself better, ’Ernie, I'm already
living on borrowed time.”
The newspapers said old Chuck was found in the outer
harbor, near the breakwater. The men on Fireboat One found his
body fully clothed, floating at just about the time the sun came
over the canneries, making the water glow pink and orange like
it usually does. That was the last sunny day for more than a
week. The skies and waters stayed gray and dreary until the
old fisherman was buried in a shoreside hole.
“I ain’t going to his funeral," Ernie had said then. “He’s
gone. They're just planting the old hulk that carried him around.”
Sitting on a moored fishboat with a shaggy dog that had
just adopted him, Ernie — dark and tanned, wearing always
black trousers and shirt because he doesn't have to wash them
so often — remembered when old Chuck was shipwrecked on
an island off the coast of Mexico.
“It was a long time ago, Clipper Island they call it. The
Navy left there after the war and left food and water and quonset
huts still standing just in case somebody got shipwrecked — the
waters are pretty rough down there.
“Well, Chuck's boat turned turtle and he and the crew
swam for shore. When rescuers finally got to them a couple
of months later, the guys had set up a still and were brewing
their own liquor. They were having a ball, eating that chow and
coconuts and drinking their homemade juice and just laying out
in the sun. When they were finally found, Chuck and the other
guys threw rocks and coconuts and told them to go away...."
Ernie was shipwrecked once himself. A freighter came
out of the fog off Monterey and put a hole in his fishing boat big
enough for a whale to swim through. The boat sank in three
minutes and Ernie was in the water three hours.
Ernie stood up and walked across the boat deck,
stopped a second at the gunwale and then jumped into Fish
Harbor’s polluted water. A strong tide had flushed out most
of the scum poured into the harbor by the imperious civilization
ashore and the afternoon sun dappled on the silvery curves of
Ernie’s smooth plunge.
Two fishermen on the pier who had just released back
into the harbor a bird they rescued and scrubbed clean of oil with
dishwater, saw Ernie drop over the side of the boat and they fell
down laughing. A few moments later they too dived into the dirty
water. There was much laughter and splashing and after awhile
all three clambered like first amphibians onto a slippery, oil rotted
log secured by cables to the ancient and equally decrepit pier.
Ernie’s dog barked at them from the boat deck and old Blackie,
Honorary Mayor of Terminal Island, glanced a sunbeam off a
bottle of cheap wine he raised in salute from the pier. Wino John
the shipwright was with him. He often quoted Omar Khyam in
conversation: “/ came out the same water I went in," he said
A red wine sky over the old cannery buildings ended
the day. Ernie, Blackie and Wino John finished a last bottle
on the boat and dropped it into the black waters for a journey
by the tides. Ernie lingered with his dog after the others went
ashore. On the beach, until the boats go out again for the
summer catch, he's washing dishes in a waterfront cafe
“You know, there's a place behind Pete The Greek’s
where Blackie and me and old Chuck used to drink wine and
watch the ships go by Both those guys knew every ship —
where it was coming from and where it was going, who owned
it and what signals it put out. Blackie’s a lot like old Chuck.
They were the best hands in the fishing fleet maybe 30 years
ago — Chuck was still fishing when he died, but old Blackie’s
been on the bottle so hard and long he hasn’t been out in years.
Him and Limey Bob used to run around until a fisherman found
Limey dead over a gas pump one day about a year ago."
Ernie said a railroad once altered a stretch of tracks
on the island because Honorary Mayor Blackie kept stumbling
over the rails after a few bottles of the grape. “And now he’s just
about the last one left from the old days when the fleet was three
times as big and busy, and maybe when I'm one of the old ones
all of us might’ve left this island for someplace else."
A fishboat, white as all of them are, with a name of a
saint or a woman, came into Fish Harbor low in the water with
its catch and pulled up alongside a cannery wharf. They come
in like that all day and night every day from just about every
where on the Pacific Coast, and there are fishermen all over the
world like Ernie, Blackie, Limey Bob and dead old Chuck, drawn
to the lonely magic of the ocean by a madness not unlike the
dance of the silver-bellied anchovy
“At least old Chuck died in the water," Ernie said.
- michael M c C usker
(North Long Beach Herald American, 5/15/1969)
the stream away from the crumbling cannery building. A flock
of seagulls perched on the cannery roof leaped into the air in
pursuit, drawn by the pungent smells of the dead fish in our hold.
The weather was sour and the river gray and choppy. A big ship
bellowed for us to get out of its way. We hit the horn in taunting
shrieks and stoutly chugged past as a pilot tug escorted the steel
behemoth to an anchorage just offshore the city's downtown. We
tied up at a cannery. The Skipper climbed up on the dock while
Kamiju put on a pair of slicks and went down into the hold. Soon
a steel bin was dropped to him on a cable and he started filling
it with frozen albacore bodies. Each time a container was filled
with stiff fish it was winched up to the dock and a forklift pushed
it into the cannery building. The Skipper was somewhere inside,
carefully watching the scales as each bin was weighed and
credited to Falling Star before being wheeled into another part
of the large fish barn where cannery workers lopped off the
hides, heads and tails. The albacore were cleaned, cut into bits
and stuffed into cans which were stacked on trays and steamed
in huge cookers. At some point in the process the tuna lost their
wild ocean flavor.
The weather cleared two days later. The Skipper and
Kamiju visited me at the house above the river late in the
afternoon The river was pink from the lowering sun and
mountains on the Washington side were blue. Above them
purple and brown clouds scuffed across a yellow sky. Big ships
anchored in the river in the lee of Tongue Point turned on their
city lights. We sat at a window and watched the sunset while
passing around a joint. The Skipper asked if I would help him
CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
Cannon Beach, Oregon
1287 COMMERCIAL ST.
ASTORIA 325-5221