Looking for Alaska (28 page)

Per chose a spot and let his net out. We watched the net for top water splashes, for signs that reds or, even better, kings were hitting the net. The top would move and buoys would pop down in the water when they hit at first. Our hopes would soar—we hoped it would happen again. Per let some sets last an hour, or even less; a few were for three hours, when he would just leave the net fishing without pulling it up. The net jutted straight out from the boat's bow, stretching nine hundred feet and sinking twenty-three or twenty-four feet down. There was time for storytelling and for chats with Per's fishing partners on the radio. Pip called and said that the opening price was set by Norquest at $1.80 per pound for reds and $2.50 for kings. Per felt that the price would go up because the take would be small. He was having second thoughts; maybe we should have gone to another place to catch netfulls of cheap pink salmon. The situation made him thoughtful.

“This life on the water runs in our family. My father, he was studying the information obtained by Gary Power's U-2 spy plane. He is a university-trained physicist, but he didn't want to work for the industrial war complex. So we moved to Alaska,” Per said.

He kept the motor running and his thirty-foot-long bow-picker in gear to keep the net straight. Without the power of the engine, the current or the net could suck us toward the breakers, where several boats have been flipped and fishermen killed.

Per explained how his father, an adventurer on many levels, had taken a huge spruce log from the Northwest and put two axles underneath it. He then towed it from Washington to Monterey, California. There he hollowed it out and sailed it, as a trimaran, from California to the Marquesas and then to the Big Island of Hawaii. He took a sextant and a book on celestial navigation and learned how to guide himself on the way there. Per's dad, also an inventor, fishes Bristol Bay and winters in Fiji. Bristol Bay is believed to have the most abundant run of red salmon in the world.

A Steller's sea lion popped up right along the net. Per had already told me to look for them; he said they knew the sound of the gillnet boats; to them it was the sound of an all-you-can-eat buffet. It certainly was easier for them to just rip the fish from the net instead of speeding through the ocean, darting and cutting, to catch these quick, sleek silver-sided salmon. Occasionally, a seven-foot-long salmon shark would about tear the nets in half, leaving gaping, expensive holes. Dolphin and killer whales, normally, were too intelligent to mess with the nets. Even the salmon could sometimes see the net and avoid it.

Per noticed a fisherman whose boat he did not know making a set close to the beach. Fishermen are tempted to head inland because salmon often run close to the beach. How do the fish find their way for possibly several thousand miles back to the exact place they were born? There are no landmarks underwater to follow; surely they don't “smell” their home freshwaters diluted beyond recognition in ocean waters. The return of the salmon is one of the unknown miracles of nature.

“Last year we lost a fisherman who got too close to the breakers,” Per remembered, his voice tinged with a sadness for the young family in Oregon and a knowledge that most serious accidents are a result of a seemingly small, inconsequential decision. He explained how the fisherman's boat got turned sideways in the breakers. Then the full power of the ocean hits the boat broadside, wanting to turn it over. It flipped this boat; it was upside down, the engine might still have been running. The cabin probably filled with fumes and it was totally black. The man struggled frantically to find air to breathe and became disoriented, knowing he must get out.

Fish and Game happened to be around. They responded and went into the shallow breakers after him in their inflatable. The breakers flipped them, also, into waist-deep water. They spotted gas leaking from the fisherman's flipped gas tanks. The Fish and Game guys got a chain saw and cut a hole in the upside-down hull. One spark could have caused the whole thing to blow up. The fisherman had probably broken bones from being slammed inside the dark cabin by the waves breaking on his capsized boat. And after his boat had rolled, his net had broken loose. Fish and Game could never get to him; he died, Per told me, with no indication that the story was part of the norm for an Alaskan fisherman's life. People died every year and many more came close.

“My sister's boat, a seiner, rolled and sank in deep water three years ago,” Per said. She and her crew were rescued.

Often the gillnetters are hustling around, walking on decks and bows and side rails smeared with salmon slime and ocean water. There's even the simple risk of slipping and falling off your boat, hitting your head on the way into the ocean. Your boat's running, you're knocked out or dazed. The gillnetters often fish all night. I saw no one wearing a life preserver, much less a survival suit. The water is never warm enough so someone would be able to swim to safety unless he's right outside the breakers, like where Andy Johnson the surfer likes to catch a wave. I'd been looking for a gillnet boat with a surfboard strapped to the top but had not seen one.

THE ABUSED SECRET CODE

The brotherhood of Per, Pip, Art, and Marc didn't talk to each other much at first. Was it because the excitement and anticipation of netfuls of salmon, what keeps all fishermen coming back, turned to disappointment? Per checked in with Pip and he was doing worse than we were and that was bad. Neither Marc nor Art were catching much either, or so Per discerned from the code-speak over the marine radio. Marc, who was from Washington and a rabid Washington State football fan, found out I was from Tennessee. The big debate this year in college football was over who would be the better pro quarterback, his Ryan Leaf of WSU or Peyton Manning of the University of Tennessee. I offered up all my reasons why Peyton would smoke Ryan. Marc knew it would go the other way—Ryan was the man. The argument over the radio went Peyton, Ryan, Peyton, Ryan, PEYTON, RYAN, until Per had to step in and referee.

Per had made several sets, laying out the net, letting it set, reeling it in and picking out the salmon. The faster the net came in, the less picking, the smaller the amount of salmon, the less money to survive. And the twenty-four hours were ticking, ticking away. Who knew when the sonar god and biologist god would let them fish again?

We moved down by Strawberry Reef, southwest of the steep Ragged Mountains, which shot up right from the beach. We made a set and then moved east some more toward Kanak Island. To our north was a potent maze of rivers, lakes, deltas, bays, marshes, and wetlands channeling the running waters, the apparently still waters, the waters controlled by the tides, the waters coming out of the glaciers. One prophetic past Alaskan governor had realized the worldwide value of pure water. And he understood the billions of gallons stored up in the glaciers and running through Alaska's pure wilderness filters of rock and wetland. He proposed that Alaska ship supertankers full of pure water to the rest of the world. Some people thought he was crazy; more and more think it may happen someday.

Close to dinnertime, a conversation not in code came over Per's radio between Pip and Marc:

Marc: “Tell me a good story to improve my mood.”

Pip: “One night I had seven fish in the boat. I was off certain islands where we've done bad and done good.”

Marc: “Yeah. So far my mood hasn't improved.”

Pip: “I woke up around 3
A.M
. from a nap and there were three hundred fish in the net. I ended up by the end of that morning with twelve hundred fish on ice.”

Marc: “That's like Santa Claus. You go to sleep and when you wake up, there are presents under the tree.”

At 6
A.M
. the morning of June 25, after fishing for eleven hours, Per delivered 502 pounds of salmon to the tender. Tenders are large boats that have holds filled with ice. They anchor near groups of gillnetters. After they harvest a decent amount of salmon, Per and other fishermen deliver a load to them to lighten their boats and keep the salmon as fresh as possible. Our last set before we delivered held only twelve fish, and six of those were dog salmon, called chum; they only brought between ten cents and forty cents a pound. The first set Per had made was forty-two fish, forty reds and two kings, a fine beginning. It was never better. Pip finished stronger than Per but had started slower.

All these humans with their nets and fast, sleek boats, putting themselves up against what the misinformed think are dumb, small-brained fish. Yet these salmon are able to make their way down from the cold creeks in which they hatched to places of mystery hundreds and hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, then orient their way back again. A human can't get from one airport to another in the protective metal skin of a plane without sophisticated electronic navigational devices, often assisted by multimillion-dollar satellites. How do these salmon do it? The humans pit themselves against these fish; if they make a good catch, they come back. If they don't, they find other, less demanding work such as, as I heard several fishermen say, working for the government or working by the hour.

This set of four fishermen could be a mash of moods, all depending on the fishing. They were grumpier than old men when the fishing was bad. They could be poetic; there was almost no way to ignore the fullness of the beauty and wildlife all around them. They were in survival mode from the ever-present death waiting behind one tired, overdaring, or stupid mistake. They could be funny as long as one of them responded. If they were tired, especially Per and Marc, the more verbal ones, they'd make jokes, amuse themselves. Pip, on the other hand, was a stickler for detail, all work and intensity until it was time to party.

Pip was especially concerned with the use of their secret code. It was important to speak over public airways without any excitement or depression in your voice. If one of them got into the fish, had two hundred fish in the net when most others were thrilled to have twenty, the last thing Pip wanted was to give that location away to anyone but themselves. The other fishermen pay attention to the high-liners, try to break their codes. That's another reason Pip changes their code often. Their group had been known at times to be “in the fish.” When Art, who was maybe in his fifties and the oldest guy in the group, got into the fish, or one of the others got into the fish, he tended to get too excited.

Say Per made contact via the radio, speaking in code, where any word beginning with
A
meant 6 and any word with
D
meant 7. So Per would say, “Anywhere doggy,” meaning he just got sixty-seven in a set. Breathlessly, with a thrill infusing each word, Art would repeat, “Anywhere doggy!” They had letters that stood for the depth they fished in, their location, and so on. Some fishermen did anything, legal or otherwise, to gain information, even used illegal cell phone scanners. If the technology existed and could be bought, some fishermen would stop at nothing to get into the fish.

At least two hundred of the fishermen wanted to keep their nets out until the last allowable moment. We were fishing a riptide outside Grass Island Bar, our last set of this opening. Every set, Per hoped for a net load, the splashing of caught fish all along the corkline, the dream of a full box of layers of salmon and ice, some of the best-tasting salmon in the world, Copper River reds and Copper River kings. The riptide created a long line in the sea, the brown water filled with glacial silt coming at us from the Copper River delta meeting and overcoming the retreating jade-green clarity of the sea. Fishing in the rip was known to produce. We were a couple miles offshore. A couple orcas were hunting here too. Until the last fifty feet of the net was rolled up, Per expected abundance and accepted two last fish. The last two reds were worth about $9 each, plus fifteen to twenty-five cents a pound because Per layered his fish in ice and rushed them straight to the fish house, Ocean Beauty.

Our twenty-four hours together on Per's
Terminal Harvester
were over. Now the horses, these gillnetters, were headed back to the barn. From everywhere around us, from the east, the south, and the west, came almost all the gillnet boats, their throttle levers pushed forward to drive the boats as fast as they'd go. Some tenders, lit up like a tiny city, waited to unload in Orca Inlet. Most went straight into Cordova. We raced past several boats to catch up with Pip. From the highest strung to the seemingly most laid-back, these fishermen are intensely competitive people. We sped part of the way home through the delta running full blast down Pete Dahl Channel. The channels are the main fingers that carry the most water; this water spreads far out into the mudflats but is exceedingly shallow. It's easy to get stuck.

Boats that lingered closer to Cordova had beat us to the cannery and fish-processing place. We lined up and waited our turn. Family, wives, and girlfriends, children and other dependents, gathered at the docks to see the hunter-gatherers return. The gold, the meat, was iced and hidden, waiting to be lifted up in metal baskets by small cranes and weighed. After unloading, we headed back to Per's dock space, where Neva, Rebekah, Seth, and Keith waited. I held up a fat, silver, twenty-five-pound king salmon. Per had said he wanted our family to have it. Seth and Keith were totally focused on their father. They knew he'd waited all winter and most of the spring to be fishing again. They knew his mood—the mood for all of them—and their town depended on catching salmon. The catch wasn't fantastic, not even really good. But some money was made, bills would be paid, with still a month or so of gillnetting to go. The fishermen of Cordova would take it one opening at a time, one throw of the net at a time, to gamble with the sea.

Per was jovial, joking, his face was a healthy red, and he was content and full of himself. Per lived in Alaska so he could go out into the unknown, his net ready to unroll, and come back with these exquisite-eating wild salmon on the
Terminal Harvester
on a dark-blue-sky day. He wondered why people wanted to live in other places. He knew of nowhere else in the world he would rather be. These moments hunting the unseen salmon made the isolation and frigid, gray winds and the lack of any other jobs and life in a trailer worth it. On this Alaskan summer evening, the sun shone on Per's triumphant moment. His gamble, their gamble, had paid off once more.