Captain Phil Harris (25 page)

Along with the designation came the opportunity to ride with the Blue Angels, the Navy and Marine flying acrobats.

Being Seafair grand marshal was a big honor to those living in the Northwest. Others selected have included Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren and quarterback Warren Moon, speedskater Apolo Ohno, a Seattle native, and comedian Drew Carey.

But what bothered Phil the most was that Sig was getting into a Blue Angels cockpit ahead of him. Phil loved to push the boundaries, whether it was roaring through the Bering Sea or down a Bothell highway. To him, the Blue Angels offered the ultimate thrill ride, a trip to the outer limits.

“Get me on the Blue Angels,” he had been telling Russ for a while, “before anybody else.”

As Phil hung up his phone in the car, he let out a loud “F-u-u-u-ck.”

“The more guttural it was,” said Russ, remembering his friend’s speech pattern, “and the longer he sustained the vowels, the angrier he was.”

Looking over at his fuming companion, Russ asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Fucking Sig,” said Phil. “He’s riding with the Blue Angels. I told you to get me on one of those planes first.”

“Phil, I called the commander of the Blue Angels,” said Russ. “He is not going to let a guy who had a pulmonary embolism dive at a force of three Gs at five thousand feet in a flight suit only to have another embolism and die. So I’m sorry, but I tried.”

Phil was pissed off all day.

Barred from the Bering Sea on doctor’s orders, Phil hung out at his trailer, built his beloved birdhouses, worked on the grounds surrounding the fifth wheel, and still smoked like a 1959 Buick with bad piston rings. At least he wasn’t completely off the show.
Deadliest Catch
cameras kept America in touch with their favorite captain through frequent airings of his activities and progress.

During this time, he surreptitiously broke all the rules doctors had placed on him, but he acted like the perfect patient when he was around them in order to get the medical release he so desperately wanted in order to return to the boat.

Phil figured he could tough it out. Those who knew him well expected nothing less of him.

“I want to go back,” he told Thom.

“No,” insisted Thom. “Just stay home.”

Phil didn’t listen to Thom, didn’t listen to his family, didn’t listen to his friends. The pull of the sea trumped them all. Phil decided to go back to the Bering Sea in 2009, assuring doctors he would keep all harmful substances out of his body.

Good luck with that, said anybody who knew Phil.

Nevertheless, he was going to return to his favorite place in the world, the wheelhouse of the
Cornelia Marie
.

“Are you coming back too early?” asked Keith Colburn, captain of the
Wizard.

“Yeah,” said Phil, lowering his eyes. “I probably am.”

He made it through that year at sea, but it was obvious that the personal storms he had battled in life had battered him far more severely than anything he had encountered at sea.

On December 15, 2009, Phil came to see Mary at her apartment
in Bellevue, east of Seattle. When she asked him how he was feeling, Phil bragged that he was down to three cigarettes a day.

“He told me he was sorry he had kept the boys from me for all those years,” Mary said, “and that he was going to try to make my life better.”

Phil presented her with a gold and ruby ring and offered to pay for her to go back to school.

Then he again asked Mary the question he had first asked thirty-one years earlier: Would she marry him?

It was as if Phil knew that the party was over, and he wanted to go home with the girl he had brought.

Mary turned him down. “You are a much better friend,” she said, “than a husband.”

Phil understood and walked out the door. It was the last time Mary ever saw him.

When he left, it was like a hole in the universe was created that nobody will ever be able to fill.

—Lynn Andrews

Whenever the captain was about to head back up north to chase the crab, Lynn, who cleaned his fifth wheel and occasionally cooked for him, would come by to “batten the hatches,” as she would describe it. That meant removing the rotten-smelling leftovers inevitably found in the fridge, cleaning up the perennial mess, and locking every-thing up.

After doing her chores prior to Phil’s departure in January 2010 for what would prove to be his last trip up north, Lynn sat around on the porch with Phil, Jake, and several others.

Phil could be a gruff boss, but Lynn had long ago seen through the bluster to the good-hearted soul at his core. But even she was surprised at how openly grateful and complimentary he was that day.

“I just want you to know,” Phil told her, “I’m really happy that you work for me. You do a good job and I’m very appreciative.”

He then handed Lynn a small white box. Inside was a sapphire stone.

“I wanted you to have something to remember the old captain by,” said Phil.

“What do you mean,
remember
?” said Lynn. “You’re just going to Alaska.”

It was a conversation she’ll never forget.

“Phil had never talked like that before,” said Lynn after he died. “It just didn’t feel right. Maybe he had a premonition something was going to happen.”

To this day, Lynn keeps the stone in a safe, but every once in a while, when she misses having Phil in her life, she takes the sapphire out and gazes at it, thinking of him.

Joe Wabey, Phil’s first captain, came to visit him on the
Cornelia Marie
just before he pulled up anchor for his last voyage.

There was a look of joy on Phil’s face as he watched the
Deadliest Catch
film crew installing their cables and adjusting their cameras. Soon, Phil knew, those cameras would be focused on him, showing him on the high seas where he belonged.

Joe didn’t share the happiness of his friend of thirty-six years. Looking into Phil’s face, Joe could see a weariness beyond Phil’s years, a man in an alarming state of decline. “You don’t have to do this,” Joe said. “Why don’t you just get yourself well, starting with giving up smoking?”

“Are you kidding me?” snapped Phil. “My lungs were tested and they are so good I can absorb all the oxygen I need.”

“You are so full of shit,” Joe told him. “Five packs a day and you’re okay?”

Before he left, Phil called Mike Crockett, admitting that, while he loved the idea of returning to the ocean, he hated opilio fishing.

“Then don’t go,” Mike told him.

“I got to do this,” Phil insisted.

When Phil got back on board the
Cornelia Marie,
it was soon obvious he didn’t belong there. His characteristic nervousness, evident even in the best of times, was now amped up to an alarming degree. Josh could see the stress ingrained in his father.

Jake didn’t help the situation when he attempted to steal a few
pain pills from his father’s quarters to feed his addiction, but was caught by Phil. Jake’s use of drugs and alcohol had been a constant source of tension with his father for about six years, but when he got caught with his hand in the prescription drug jar he felt the full wrath of Phil’s anger. Jake broke down and admitted to his father, in front of a
Deadliest Catch
camera and a worldwide audience, “I’m an addict.”

“Dad and I were glad,” said Josh, “that Jake was finally being honest with us and, perhaps for the first time, with himself as well.”

“Then go to treatment,” Phil told Jake. “That’s the only thing that’s going to save your ass.”

For once, Jake listened, agreeing to check into a rehabilitation clinic in Seattle when the trip was over.

While that eased Phil’s tension a bit, Josh remained concerned about his father’s uncharacteristic sleeping pattern on the trip. As long as Josh could remember, Phil never slept more than two hours a night when he was at sea, awakening with a full supply of energy. Then, when the boat would come into port to unload its crab, he would catch up on the lost hours of sleep. Unlike in his younger days when he would party away the time in the harbor, Phil, by then in his fifties, would be sound asleep for the full sixteen to twenty hours the boat was docked.

But on his first trip back from his year of recuperation, Phil spent much of the time at sea in bed. He’d sleep eight hours, then pull himself up and try to retake command of the ship, but it was obviously difficult. He dragged himself around the boat, struggling just to keep his eyes open.

“I thought it was really weird the way he was acting,” Josh said.

One night, as the
Cornelia Marie
headed toward St. Paul to off-load its catch, the
Wizard
was leaving the island after bringing in its load of crab.

Captain Keith Colburn vividly remembers the moment when their two ships passed a few hours out of St. Paul. Their radios remained
silent, no words spoken, both captains busy in their respective wheelhouses.

“I’m kicking myself to this day that we never even spoke,” said Keith.

There was, of course, no way for him to know at the time that it was the last chance he would ever get to speak to Phil.

When the
Cornelia Marie
docked at St. Paul, Phil went to bed, saying he’d be sleeping in the next morning. The rest of the crew got up at dawn, but eight hours later, Phil’s door was still shut. When some maintenance issues arose, Steve Ward, the engineer, called him in his stateroom.

No answer.

Ward went up to wake Phil, and within a minute Josh got an urgent call.

“Get up here now,” Ward said firmly.

When Josh arrived, he was horrified.

“My dad was lying on the floor in a contorted position,” he said. “His left leg was twisted at a perpendicular angle. His left arm was also in an awkwardly bent position.”

A hundred-pound bench that had been bolted to the wall was beside Phil. He had apparently ripped it off with his last burst of strength as he fell.

He was muttering as if drunk. The left side of his face seemed frozen and distorted. Josh assumed that was the result of forcefully hitting the floor. But when he and Ward gingerly turned Phil over, they realized the paralysis extended all the way down the left side of Phil’s body.

Josh ran downstairs and found Jake in the galley.

“There’s been a problem,” Josh told his brother. “Don’t freak out. Just go upstairs and sit with Dad. I need you to talk to him.”

Josh called 911, and paramedics soon arrived at the dock. Just getting Phil off the boat was going to be no easy task. He was heavy to begin with, and his paralysis made it even harder to move him.

Josh knew it would be easier to handle his father if Phil was cooperative, but even in his diminished state, that was only going to happen if he felt comfortable leaving the
Cornelia Marie
in the hands of his crew.

“Once he understood I was going to take care of the boat,” Josh said, “he left without a fight.”

Phil was strapped to a backboard and then tied into a basket, the type used to hoist stranded sailors up from the ocean or from disabled boats into rescue helicopters.

Everything hanging on the walls had to be removed and all the furniture moved just to get Phil out of his room. The stairs on the
Cornelia Marie,
as on nearly all fishing boats, are steep and set in a passageway so narrow that the shoulders of a man Phil’s size would normally brush the walls on either side as he moved.

At one point, it was so tight that he had to be stood straight up, backboard and all, to get him through.

He was taken up to the wheelhouse, where the basket was attached to the crane that Phil had used for so many years to move pots around. Now it was being used to enable the captain of the
Cornelia Marie
to leave his ship for the final time.

He was lowered to the deck, quickly transferred to the ambulance on the dock, and taken to the only hospital on the island.

With a population of around 500, St. Paul had just one doctor and a sparse amount of medical equipment. One crab boat captain referred to the treatment procedures at the hospital as “voodoo medicine.”

Fortunately, Phil was medevaced out that same night and flown to the Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest hospital. There, doctors determined that he had suffered a massive stroke.

•   •   •

As Phil lay on what would become his deathbed, Thom Beers found himself in an awkward position. On one hand, the star of the hit show he was producing was dying, and millions of viewers around the world
wanted to be with a man they had come to know and admire, even if it was only through the lens of a camera.

But, having spent much of the previous seven years working with Phil, and then Josh and Jake, Thom and his fellow producers felt like they were part of the Harris family. Families respect the privacy of each member.

“We weren’t just interlopers,” said Thom, “who were going to walk in and say, ‘Hey, you’re dying. Can we film it?’ ”

He talked with Josh and Jake and told them, “We would like to film everything but won’t air anything until all of us, including, hopefully, your dad, make a decision on what is proper and respectful.”

With the boys still considering the options and Thom thinking it might be better to back off, Phil, watching the uncertainty from his bed, did what he always did: took command of the operation. Unable to speak coherently, he motioned for paper and pen and scrawled, “You’ve got to finish the story. It needs an ending.”

This is amazing, thought Thom. In the condition he’s in, he’s producing the show. That took some of the burden of proceeding off Thom, but it still wasn’t easy.

Emergency brain surgery was performed to relieve intracranial pressure and swelling.

“Our cameras were there when they opened up his skull,” Thom said. “Oh my God, it was so tough.”

To ease the awkwardness of being in the room while Phil fought for his life and to avoid intruding too much into the delicate work being performed by doctors, the
Deadliest Catch
film crew tried to focus much of the time on Josh and Jake as they tried to cope with their father’s dire situation. They used camera angles that would allow the audience to hear Phil without seeing him.