Falling Backwards: A Memoir (31 page)

I didn’t know what a deckhand was, but I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to find out. I didn’t have anything to lose. There was no phone number. I guessed I would just have to ask around as to the whereabouts of Norman Earl. What happened next was so crazy that not even I could fathom what I had gotten myself into.

N
orman Earl was the captain of a forty-two-foot salmon trawler, and he needed a deckhand to go out with him for at least a month to help him gut the salmon he caught and to cook his meals. His son, who normally worked with him on the boat, had sliced his Achilles tendon with a rather large knife and had had to bow out of the season’s last run.

Norman was at least seventy-five years old; if I agreed to take the job, I would be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean alone with him. I thought that was really weird and fairly creepy but, considering what had just happened to me, I didn’t think things could possibly get any worse. He eyed me up and down and, honest to God, after a good, long look, asked me if I was a girl or a boy. (I did have very short hair at the time.) I told him that I was a girl and felt stupid about it, for whatever reason. I had never been asked that question in my life, not even when I chummed around with Leonard and Dale. Norm asked me how old I was and if I got seasick. I told him that I had no idea if I got seasick because I had never been at sea.

“It can git pretty bad on them swells,” he mumbled. “I can’t have nobody out there throwing up all day and night with the fish coming in.” I didn’t know where he was from; he talked as if he was from somewhere in Europe, but I couldn’t tell where. Turned out, though, he was just a local fella.

Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, I thought. The idea of throwing up for weeks on end scared the crap out of me. He told me he was leaving in the morning—like, 4:30 in the morning—and he needed to know if I was coming or not. He said he’d pay me three percent of the catch, but I had no idea what that meant in dollars. It could have been anything from ten bucks to two hundred thousand. (A girl can dream, can’t she?) I needed a job where nobody would be punching me out so I told Norman Earl that I would be there bright and early the next day and that’s just what I did. I stuffed three pairs of jeans and some T-shirts into an old knapsack along with my toothbrush and my deodorant and my plastic hairbrush, hopped onto Norman Earl’s fishing boat and we headed towards Vancouver Island.

I still couldn’t believe that I was on a boat, sailing for a little city called Port Hardy on the far northern end of Vancouver Island, where we would stop for provisions. “We’re gonna need to get you a fishing licence,” he said. I told him I didn’t have any money and he said that he’d pay for it, that I wasn’t to worry. I hadn’t thought about needing money where I was going. Norm told me that all the meals would be provided for me while we were out fishing. At least I would be eating three times a day and not have to worry about paying for all the food. I had found my dream job, I thought. We were going to stop in Port Hardy for a day or two—long enough to get my licence and buy enough groceries and supplies to allow us to stay out at sea for at least three or four weeks.

Three or four weeks?
I suddenly felt sick, not seasick, just plain
old thinking-I-was-crazy with a touch of job-remorse sick. There would be no going back now, though; I was a certified deckhand with a fishing licence on an old wooden boat with an ancient dude named Norman.

After we’d been sailing a few hours, I began to realize how wonderful the air felt blowing through my hair. Every breath I took in and released back up into the sky filled me with a sense of peace I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. The water was quite simply gorgeous. I felt like we were floating through a sea of diamonds. I saw Vancouver disappear into the horizon. After an hour or so it was nothing more than a faint line of grey and white sinking into the water. The white-crested waves crashed into the bow of the boat and I felt my stomach flip over itself and fall straight down into my wobbling legs. It was the best ride I had ever been on in my life. I didn’t feel nauseous at all. Maybe I would be a good sailor. Norman told me I wouldn’t know if I was going to be seasick for a few days. I prayed hard to God and Jesus that I wouldn’t be sick. He also told me that there was no smoking on his boat, and I told him that that was fine because I didn’t smoke. (Big lie.) It was a dumb habit I wanted to quit anyway and I figured this was as good a time as any.

We arrived in Port Hardy after hours of cutting through the waves and, once we were tied up for the night, we set off to get my fishing licence. I forget how much it cost, but Norm paid for it with one-dollar bills. I remember him counting them out one by one on the counter for at least an hour. (I am lying again. It was at least two minutes.)

After I had my licence, which was just a plain old piece of paper with my name written on it, we headed over to the Overwaitea food store to stock up on our “provisions,” as Norm called them. He grabbed a cart and told me to grab one too. “Are we going to need
two carts?” I asked him. He told me that we might need three, but we’d start there. Norm bought more groceries than I had ever seen in my life. He bought about a dozen cans of salmon, which I thought was crazy because we were going to be catching a million pounds of the stuff. He bought pasta and beans and all sorts of meat and poultry. He bought fifteen loaves of bread and package after package of bologna. He bought canned tomatoes and frozen vegetables of every kind and colour, jars of peanut butter and three or four different kinds of jams and jellies, and ten pounds of maple-cured bacon. He bought chocolate bars and potato chips and salted mixed nuts. It was fun shopping with Norman Earl. He told me to pick out whatever I fancied, but the only things I ended up grabbing and putting into the cart were four boxes of Kraft Dinner. Our giant shopping excursion cost Norm almost a thousand dollars. It took three guys to help us put it all into a taxi. We headed back to the boat and spent the next hour and a half putting all the food away. I was tired out and I hadn’t done a single day’s work yet.

We set off on our fishing journey at sunrise the next day. Norm said we’d be sailing about six hours to get to the grounds where all the salmon supposedly were. He had his nautical maps spread out before him in the wheelhouse, but I don’t think he even needed them. I’m pretty sure he knew the part of the Pacific Ocean we were floating in like the back of his hand. He told me that he came from a long line of fishermen, and that there was a cove, aptly known as “Earl’s Cove,” named after his grandfather. He showed me where it was on the map. I thought it was amazing that his grandfather had a place on the planet that was named in his honour. Norm told me that he and his father had built the very boat we were fishing in, that it was almost sixty years old. I hoped it was going to see sixty-one years and not sink somewhere in the middle of the great, unknown deep.

It dawned at me after the third or fourth day at sea that my parents didn’t have a clue about where I was. I should have called from Port Hardy, but it hadn’t crossed my mind. I was probably in shock from everything that had happened to me in the past few weeks. Norm told me we could call them from the boat on his two-way radio later that day, so that was a relief. I wanted someone to know where I was and who I was with. I wasn’t afraid of Norm at all, don’t get me wrong. He was such a decent man. He had kids of his own, a daughter in fact, and grandchildren. I didn’t think I needed to be afraid of anything, apart from possibly drowning or being eaten by a killer whale.

I found the ocean inspiring. The sensation of the water splashing against my face and the sound of the seagulls that circled the boat like squawking clouds made for a wonderful day on the water. There were thousands of birds, all different kinds, that followed the boat, waiting for me to throw the salmon guts overboard. They were with us until the sun sank into the water at night. I always wondered where they went when they left us. Was there a sandy shore within flying distance? If only I could fly …

My first and main job was to gut the salmon as Norm hauled them onboard with the hydraulic lines. There were multiple lines in the water with multiple hooks on them, so when he started bringing them in there could be dozens of large salmon dangling on those hooks.

I learned to gut a salmon in mere seconds. I had to work quickly, as they were coming at me like the chocolates on the conveyor belt in that famous Lucille Ball skit. I was very mindful not to cut any of my fingers off. The boat was always bobbing up and down wildly, so I had to be very careful at all times.

I think I probably gutted five or six hundred fish a day. We stopped for half an hour for lunch around 10:30 in the morning and
then carried on until the sun set. I cried the first day I saw the sun set. It looked like a giant ball of fire being sliced in half and then in half again. It was unforgettable. I could honestly feel myself waking up.

Fishing was hard, exhausting work. Norm was seventy-five, so it must have been extremely taxing on his body. He made it look easy, though. I couldn’t believe how much the guy could eat. Another part of my job was to cook all the meals, which entailed opening a lot of cans and heating them in a big pot on the two-burner stove. I would dump two cans of Alpha-Getti into a pot with a can of beans and a can of corn and voilà! Dinner. Norm thought I was a good cook. I told him I was a good can-opener.

After we ate dinner, we’d have to go back out onto the deck and get the fish ready to put in the freezer. That was the hardest part of the day. Norm showed me how to dip the gutted and cleaned salmon into a big plastic barrel full of salty sea water in order to put a layer of ice on them, which would protect them from freezer burn. You’d have to repeat the process about three or four times for it to work properly. My fingers were frozen by the time we finished dipping all the fish in the barrels and throwing them into the hold.

We did the same thing every day. We’d get up at 4:30 in the morning and I’d toast half a loaf of bread, boil a dozen eggs and fry up a pound of bacon to eat between the two of us. It seems impossible that two people could eat so much, but we had to in order to keep up our energy. We’d drink two pots of coffee and then head out to catch the salmon. Some of them weighed over fifty pounds. They were as long as I was. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Norm would have to help me gut the big ones because I could not, for the life of me, cut their heads off. We’d save them for the end of the day. These giant, delicious fish had teeth! I couldn’t help but think about the movie
Jaws
, which my dad had taken us to see at the
drive-in a few years before. The giant salmon were so powerful and so wilful. When Norm hauled them into the boat with a gigantic, bloody steel hook, you could tell by looking in their black eyes that they were saying “fuck you!”

I slept on the kitchen table, which conveniently converted into a bed. On my first nights on board, I found it hard to go to sleep. The constant motion of the boat rocking on the water kept me awake for hours. I tried to read to help myself nod off, but the only books Norman had on board were written by Stephen King and they weren’t conducive to falling asleep. I got halfway through
Cujo
, the novel about the St. Bernard that goes crazy after contracting rabies and eats everyone he comes across, and thought I was going to have a heart attack right there. I pictured the frozen salmon crawling up from their icy graves and throwing me overboard for having cut their innards out. I vowed to never read a Stephen King book again.

I could hear the sea whispering to me as I lay there in that pitch-black, tiny cabin. The salty, muffled voices made my mind wander off to the strangest places. They made me think about home. They made me think about mom and dad and Pat and Duray. I wondered how Duray was doing. I worried about him. I hadn’t seen him much in two or three years. He would have loved being on Norm’s fishing boat. I wondered if he’d ever get a chance to go on an adventure like the one I found myself on.

I had been on the boat three weeks before I realized I hadn’t had so much as a beer or a single cigarette. My head felt as clear as it had been in a long time. I could see myself again. I knew how I felt! (I felt wonderful.) The boat turned out to be the world’s best and most inexpensive detox program. The ocean had taken me back from the evil forces of the world, and I was beyond grateful.

For the longest time I hadn’t known how I felt. I thought that if I didn’t think about how I felt, all would be fine. I had my head and my heart so deeply buried in the sand that I couldn’t see or hear what I was doing. But I was rediscovering who I was, and it was all because of Norman Earl and his mystical, magical salmon trawler.

Only a week into the trip I had begun to feel happy for no reason at all. I woke up on the fifth or sixth morning and felt as light as a seagull. I felt free and hopeful. I was tired of feeling guilty about all my mistakes. I had to get past them and move forward. An Emily Dickinson poem I had memorized in college came into my head like a bolt of lightning.

I didn’t feel pain anymore. I didn’t know when it had even begun to go, but it was gone.

I saw so many amazing things that month on the ocean. Pods of orcas swam beside us for miles. Their beguiling eyes would look right through you as if to say, “We know who you are and we know what you’re thinking.” It was so lovely having them glide beside the boat, watching over us. I couldn’t believe how gentle and quiet they were. I had a hard time picturing any one of them chewing on a baby seal. At one point
there were nine or ten of the black-and-white whales skimming right alongside the boat. I know they were interested in the salmon more than anything, but it was still so flattering having them so close.