The Fisher Queen (15 page)

The laundry gods were with me on this turnaround, and as I entered the laundry room, a sturdy old fishwife in gumboots, red mackinaw and flowered kerchief looked me up and down, smiled indulgently and said, “Here ya go dear, you go ahead and take these two free washers, I can wait.” For a second, my throat tightened up and I had the urge to curl up in her ample lap and cry, but I just smiled back and thanked her.

Being female in the fishing industry was a lot like travelling in some remote and exotic country. I'd thrill to the sights and sounds, revel in the sheer otherness of it all, but the longer I was gone, the more I secretly yearned for my tribe. And the longer I was gone, the less particular I was. Pretty soon just speaking the same language, or in the case of fishing, being female instantly bonded us. If you were a girl or ever had been, you were my new best friend.

While the first two loads washed I went next door and parboiled myself in the shower. While the first loads were drying and the third load washed, I bought groceries and left them behind the counter. While the third load dried I folded the first two into clean bags, left them on the washer and carried the groceries back to the boat. By the time I returned, the last load was dry and I carried the three bags to the boat.

In the meantime, Paul had helped shovel out the ton of ice in the hold overboard while the fish were hauled out, graded, weighed, tabulated and taken away in bins. He'd hosed and scrubbed the deck, hold, compartment boards, hatch cover and checkers with detergent and collected his fish slip and whatever cash he'd decided to take out of our earnings to pay for fuel and supplies. Sometimes we ran a tab if the trip was poor. There was nothing more demoralizing.

When Paul took our fish book and crew log up to the office to record our catch and workdays for Employment Canada, our take was $634 for 10 days.

We untied from the unloading dock and motored over to the fuel and water dock, where he supervised the fill-up while I put away the dry goods and laundry. Last stop was the ice house, where he rearranged the compartment boards in the hold and directed the stream of fresh ice pouring in through a huge, segmented aluminum pipe. It looked like a dragon's neck and mouth as it reared up from the side of the ice house on a huge boom, then dropped straight down into our hold. The ice travelled up from the ice house on an auger, a massive slowly turning steel screw inside the pipe. Very low-tech but very tough and effective. Not much to go wrong unless someone in the ice house got caught in the auger; then it was all too horrible to even consider.

Once the ice was down, I dropped the perishables to Paul in the hold and he stashed them away. One more tie-up at the regular holding wharf while he showered and shaved and bought and bullshitted and I made up the bunks and planned our meals. With fuel, gear, food and cigs, we'd have just enough left for beer and burgs at the Seagate pub with fisher friends we'd run into at the camp. They'd heard the hotel had just installed a new technology that would show rock videos—the cutting edge of musical entertainment, here at the edge of the world.

Our pilot part had come in on the float plane—another good omen, I figured—and Paul would install it on our way to the west coast of the island the next day, while I steered. All was well with the world and hope ran high as we drank and smoked and laughed and danced the night away. While gyrating to Roy Orbison's “Pretty Woman,” a particularly stunning Viking throwback effortlessly lifted me onto his brawny shoulder and I was handed a clutch of red roses bought from a little hippie girl in the bar and anointed Queen of the North to the roars of approving males and my smug, proud boyfriend, whose smile said, “Lust all you want, but she's coming home with me.”

We were leaving behind our bad luck and the growing fears that the fish were disappearing—that was all people talked about on the radio and at the camps. Even our pal Gerry, the hottest highliner we knew, couldn't seem to find fish on the north end, even on the Steamer Grounds and Barogh Shoals, 30 miles offshore. In this game, it was better to laugh than cry, and people dragged tables and chairs over to our growing party, attracted like moths to the bright light of our belief. We vied to outdo each other with more outrageous stories and jokes and damn near choked when one of the old salty dogs cracked up the table by announcing his tab was stretched thinner than a mosquito's foreskin over a 40-gallon drum.

Late that night after we closed down the bar and drank the last of the beer and smoked the last of the cigarettes around Davey's galley table, we heard the story about what had happened to Big John, the halibut fisherman, the previous winter.

In a land of wild excess, of raw survival, Big John was the wildest and most excessive human being anyone had ever seen. His massive, hulking body would fill a doorway, usually to a bar, and the room would fall silent, folks considering the next closest means of escape. He was so vulgar he made even the saltiest dog stammer and blush. Everyone knew he would never go hungry—he had enough congealed food stashed in that mud-brown matted beard to feed on for days. So it wasn't surprising he'd found his way to the West Coast fishing fleet. Lots of misfits hid out here and this wild and dirty life suited him to a tee. Where could he get away with not bathing for days and days? Where else could he wear the same long underwear for months?

The thing about Big John was that he was a working machine. He was virtually indestructible. As long as you had a bunk big enough to hold him and enough food to feed him, he'd work through anything and never complain. In fact, it seemed he hardly noticed the difference between being on land or sea. He was a skipper's dream, if you could stand the smell and lack of conversation.

But it was the harbour time that always got him into trouble. He'd drink 'til he dropped, a long and formidable event. People only had to see him brawling in a bar once. Then it would be time to cruise the docks and look for another job. There was always a skipper looking for a new deckhand and he seemed tame enough.

But even Big John couldn't cheat the sea of its due. One frigid night the past winter, the halibut boat he crewed for went down in a midnight gale north of Cape Scott. No matter what, he was one of our own, and when one was lost it brought the imminence of death a little closer to all of us.

People said he had managed to struggle into a survival suit before the boat broke up but didn't make it to the Zodiac with the other two. He just disappeared in the roaring hell. They said the other two were picked up the next morning by the Coast Guard, much the worse for wear, but still alive thanks to their suits. The search for Big John was hampered by the furious southeast gale but the Coast Guard would keep trying. Everyone knew what the chances of survival after the first 24 hours were for a regular human being, even in a survival suit, but what about someone built like a woolly mammoth?

It was one of the worst storms anyone could remember, raging and hurling itself against the west coast for two days. Not even Big John could have survived, and even if he had, God knows where it would have blown him. Folks figured the Graveyard of the Pacific had cut another notch in its gatepost and wished him good journey to whatever and wherever the Creator had planned for him.

The storyteller's serious face and hushed tones didn't look like good news—we prepared ourselves for a grisly account. “They found him way up near the Charlottes after three days, out there bobbin' around, still alive, barely.”

We stared dumbfounded.

Lowering his voice, he leaned in closer over Davey's green Arborite galley table jammed with elbows, bottles and ashtrays. “He pulled through okay, but they say he's not alright in the head. Took him up in the helicopter babblin' away about seein' stuff. Bein' thrown around out there in a blow all by yourself would blow anyone's mind. Poor bastard.”

As the frigid halibut season had lurched on, people heard bizarre bits and pieces of what had happened to John out there. Tales of lights and voices and visions and, most surprisingly, of prayers. No one paid much attention to accuracy or reality; it would have ruined a perfectly good story. Everyone knew the creative powers of time, beer and imagination and relished the tellings and retellings in bars and fishboats all along the coast.

Someone ran into the skipper of the doomed halibut boat at the Fisheries dock in Vancouver's False Creek a few months later, and after a little prompting and a couple of beers at the local pub, they got the whole story.

Big John's massive blubbery body and shaggy hair and beard had helped keep him alive, buffered the relentless pounding of waves and wind and kept in his body heat. He wouldn't have starved in three days; his fat supplied the energy he needed to keep his body upright. To save him from dehydration, the deluxe-model survival suit he was wearing had packets of water with attached drinking tubes embedded in the lining of the upper chest. It also had a self-activated blinking light fixed to the top of the close-fitting hood to go along with the brilliant orange colour and the flares stashed in leg pockets.

For two days his powerful body had protected itself, sometimes hurled like a stick, sometimes dragged up and down the roller-coaster waves. By the third night the seas had calmed to a heavy sickening swell, but he had reached the end of his endurance. Feeling there was no hope of rescue, he made the decision to hurry the end and unzip his survival suit. Just before he did, he found himself stumbling through some kind of prayer, an entreaty to something, for help and forgiveness for a life poorly lived.

“Yeah, thanks, I will take that beer to wet my whistle. Wait 'til you get a load of what happened next,” the storyteller said and lit another cigarette. Paul pushed a fresh bottle of Labatt Blue across the table to him as we all took a long silent pull on our beers.

As Big John's hand felt for the zipper release, he heard an eerie, unearthly sound, a penetrating hum, and thought he must be dying or having a stroke. It grew louder, and though he had tried to keep his eyes shut to protect them from the corrosive effects of salt water, he opened them to the smothering darkness. Suddenly a pinpoint of light appeared just above the water and slowly grew larger and more nebulous, like a luminous fog. As he blinked rapidly to clear his vision, the fog seemed to collect into wavering shapes that stretched back into the distance, human shapes that gradually took on bits of detail—a plumed hat, a jewelled sword, a heavy duffel coat, a shell necklace. Every shape and size and feature of human imaginable, some alone, some in clusters.

This endless line of misty figures that hovered just above the waves terrified Big John more than any storm and he screamed, “No. No. Go away. Leave me alone.” The gates of hell had opened and they were all evil spirits coming to take him to his just desserts. Closer and closer they came 'til they seemed to cluster around him, drifting and murmuring.

“The damnedest thing about it,” the storyteller said, taking a big gulp of his beer and slowly shaking his head, “is that John heard these voices in his head telling him not to be afraid or give up hope cuz it wasn't his time. They told him help would come soon and his life was meant for somethin' else. They told him to keep lookin' up.”

John must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to a heavy whump-whump sound through the pre-dawn grey and looked up to see the lights of a huge Coast Guard helicopter coming toward him. The Coast Guard guy said that the pilot was just about to turn to move farther down the coast when he told the crew he'd make one more circle. That's when they saw the tiny blinking light and the glimmer of orange.

It was days before John could talk, weeks before he could tell his story. Though battered and dehydrated, his body recovered amazingly well and quickly. It was his mind they worried about. When he did speak, it was to recount again and again the story of his rescue, how it was the spirits of drowned mariners who had gathered to give him hope, how God had spared him to carry on his work in the world. He spent hours slowly mouthing his way through a King James Bible and attended hospital chapel as soon as he was able.

Apparently one of John's therapists did a little research and it turned out that John's detailed descriptions of his spectral saviours matched historical records of dress, hair and weaponry from the various cultures who had plied those waters in the last 200 years: Spanish and English explorers, Russian trappers, Kwakiutl warriors. How could someone like John, an early high school dropout, have known such detailed information? He was barely literate.

John was eventually released into his mother's care and became deeply involved in an evangelical church group. A few fishermen had visited him and said he was almost unrecognizable. He was lean and quiet and groomed to within an inch of his life. His bellow had been replaced with a whispery monotone.

“But it was his eyes that gave you the willies. Looked right through and past you, like he was always watchin' somethin' far away. Last anyone heard he was a missionary in the middle of Africa, safe from that haunted sea.”

With that, we murmured our goodbyes and padded back to our boats to be alone with our mortal thoughts.