Blessing of the Fleet

Opening day on the trolling grounds and a glassy ocean receives the fleet after their long, bucking ride up from Sitka.  Sometimes July on the Fairweather Grounds is like this, like old friends returning to each other. But this July there will be only three more days of good weather.  The other days it will blow. Westerlies, southwesterlies, white caps and swells, twenty five knots winds that come whipping off the open ocean through the trollers’ welded bait sheds making a sound like a locomotive humming in the near distance.  With the winds there is rain, there is usually rain even in calm seas. It does not storm, exactly, but mists, sometimes aggressively; it is never warm. 

Thirty miles in the distance the Fairweather Mountains, the largest coastal mountain range in the world, hover like, like, well, like a mirage. There is no other way to describe it, though there used to be: for thirty million years the whole coast was a glacier but now is not and will never be again. Now: the radiant white peaks thaw, sending crystalline water down the banks over a tree line carved by a falling chunk of glacier that caused the largest tsunami in history, one so big that the waves from it moved at six hundred miles per hour and flung anchored fishing boats miles out to sea like some sort of absurd slingshot.  Others were luckier, riding their boats on the aftershocks like giant, lumbering surfboards, returning years later to fish there again and marvel at the placid emerald bay as it teemed with shrimp and iridescently scaled black gummed King salmon who had grown to 30, 40, 50 pounds, monstrous sizes, and drove the fisherman to take dozens of photos in which they –the fisherman- smiled widely while holding the beasts and later showed to their bored wives and children.  In the photos, now old, because even that was 40 years and thousands of deaths at sea ago, their expressions say: This is forever. 

On the deck of the Nerka John and Angela run the gurneys.  Their gaffe hooks swoop through the air and the hydraulic lines pulse like arteries clean of plaque; they have a rhythm that deckhands, that husbands and wives get with years of practice. They are “in them,” gliding the boat and their hooks through a large school of salmon, and that is all they can ask for.

John is captain and Angela is first mate and at sea that makes sense.  At sea there is a plan.  We will fish here.  We will eat then. We will work until dark.  We will love each other in this way. At sea there are problems, yes, obstacles, yes, but not confusion; at home there is much confusion. There are the usual problems: Joel drinks too much and Angela feels herself getting too old.  Fishing does not make them much money and Angela is thirty-five with a feeling like glass shards in the tendon of her left index finger from shaking fish from lines (she’s done this since her dad first put her to work on his boat at eight years old), and she has sharp lines around her eyes from too much time outside and too much work and too little sleep and too much worrying about buyers and by-catch and frayed timing belts, and and and…paperwork? No one told her when she bought the boat with John there would be so much damn paperwork.  Why didn’t her dad ever tell her this? That fishing was really only ten percent about catching fish and the rest of it filled in all the corners of your life like silt. How can she even think of having a child when half the year she is on the boat and the other half she is fixing and recovering and filing papers promising the federal government she will clean all salmon on only kosher surfaces (kosher surfaces, really?) and mark all boxes containing salmon with the word “salmon” (being sure to also include the species) so in case someone breaks into the boxes and starts eating the fish raw they will be aware that what they are doing is eating uncooked coho and that that might not necessarily be a good thing. She tires of this.  She tires not of life itself, just of all the time in it, the way it stacks up, the way it repeats itself in a way that makes the meaning so hard to find.

A half mile away Michael slams the King salmon onto the deck of Charity and smiles to himself.  It is a keeper.  It is beautiful. He bends over the fish and slits its belly from anus to just below the collar.  He says thank you.  He says thank you to each fish he kills.  Sometimes he says it aloud.  There is a quote in his galley above the stove that says: “When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart, ‘By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; And I too shall be consumed.’”   He does not know the author and has never tried to find out because he only wants that person to be everything he imagines him to be and nothing less.  He found the quote written on the back of an old tide book in the fo’c’sle when he bought the boat and has spent a lot of time contemplating the meaning.  He thinks he has it all charted out in his head, the meaning, though he could be wrong.  He kills for a living and this can be difficult.  Just like it can be difficult to remember how to feel.  He has to remind himself often.  Who knows?  Maybe, if he forgets to feel, he’ll start killing more, even become a seine boat captain and kill by the millions.  So what he does is remind himself.  He reminds himself to feel thankfulness for one body giving itself up for another.  He whispers ‘thank you’ into the wet, whistling air and the fish returns the words with the last wheezing gasps of its life, blood running fast from its gills and head before Michael removes it all with a few deft flicks of his knife, leaving heart exposed, still pumping in the collar even after everything else is gone.

At home in Sitka, Michael’s father has the television on.  He eats dinner in his den and watches the baseball game.  He grew up in Seattle.  He remembers before satellite radio the torture of fishing in the summer and not knowing the score of the game. Two weeks between updates in the standings and he couldn’t stand it. The other captains made fun of him, but he still loves his Mariners after all these years. Ten years ago he had a stroke and then his wife died of cancer three years later and now he watches every game, every inning, every evening.   It is what’s left filling in the time, along with a vague feeling of hopefulness and anxiety that always happens when summer comes and the fleet leaves to go fishing.

Michael’s father rises and goes to the refrigerator for a beer.  He allows himself this one luxury: a beer a week with his Sunday dinner.  He walks to his porch and cracks the beer open, placing it on the wooden railing and slumping into his wicker chair facing a pink setting sun that looks like it’s vacuuming silhouetted boats up into the horizon.  Michael’s father misses his son.  He pleaded with him for years not to become a fisherman, not to follow him into the profession.  He told him the story of the Saint Patrick, that blew a main in the night and listed to ninety degrees.  He told Michael how his friend, the deck boss on the boat, ordered the others into their survival suits and tied each of them together.  He told them how the survival boat had been knocked from the boat by a rogue wave and how all eleven of the crew had to dive into the water together and wait for help in the inky dark.  When Michael was older, he even told his son how his friend on the boat had looked into the eyes of a dead crewman as he cut him loose from the human chain, freeing the ballast from the others all because a pin sized hole in his suit had killed him.  He told Michael of the eternal bitterness that followed for his friend who survived when he found out the boat had righted itself on its own and never sank, and also of the eternal darkness that followed for those who died.

Michael’s father looks out into the sound and the sun and sips his beer. He tries to think of the prayer they say each year to bless the fleet, the thanks they gave to God before heading out.  Michael’s father is not religious but he sometimes feels, he sometimes believes in something greater.   He believes like he believed in not leaving port on a Friday, like he believed in never using a dirty knife to clean his fish: superstition, maybe, but something greater too. He cannot remember the exact words of the blessing of the fleet and this frustrates him.  It has been too long, and he was always too focused on the fishing when he heard it, already plotting his next run, his next place to set gear.  Michael’s father leans forward in his chair. He massages his temples and waits for it to come to him but it never does and so finally he thinks: Please God, watch over my son.  Watch over all the sons and daughters and bring them all back home. Amen.