Time Bandit (22 page)

I was hard pressed to figure out his condition. He was not moving. He was not flailing his arms or swimming. Either he was trying to conserve his energy, and thus whatever heat remained in his body, or he had passed out and was close to dying in the water. It was a challenge for me to track him in the waves. He seemed impossibly small from where I sat. One second I would see his head; the next, he was gone. I felt such pity for him. He was a mere pinprick alone on a vast sea.

I brought the bow up beside him and reversed the engines. I swung
Time Bandit
like it was a skiff. Neal was standing on the starboard rail with a life ring in his hands. The man overboard was bobbing in the swells right off the block when Neal threw the ring. The ring landed beyond the man’s reach. I jogged the boat to keep him close to our starboard side. Neal threw the ring again.

The man was pleading, “Don’t let me die! Please don’t let me die!”

“You’re not going to die. We got you,” Andy told him.

I was yelling at nobody in particular, “We got him! We got you, Bud!”

Andy lifted him onboard. Altogether, once we reached him, getting him on the deck had taken fifteen seconds.

On the deck Caveman grabbed him in a full World Wrestling Federation neck lock. The man was crying and snuffling, “My mom thanks you; my grandma thanks you; my girlfriend thanks you.
You saved my life.
” Caveman was as keyed up as everyone else. We had saved him from drowning. That was true. But he was not yet saved from hypothermia.

Caveman dragged him across the deck and inside the deck door to the cabin. We put him on the floor where the captain had died, and Richard helped him strip off his wet clothes. He wrapped a blanket around him and asked him if he could stand up. Russell walked him to the galley, where he collapsed on the settee. Andy asked whether one of the crew should snuggle naked with him in a sleeping bag to warm him up. The crew looked at one another. Russell started laughing. “I guess he’s going to die,” he joked.

The man looked at me. “My God, was that scary.”

“You’re alive, man,” I told him.

“I just lost it. It was cold and I just…Icy. Caught the chain and…”

“You disappeared, man,” I told him. “You disappeared.” I hugged him, and he was crying with relief. I was too.

I told him, “My legs are shaking. Take your time….”

“Unbelievable,” Russell said.

“I wasn’t going to let you go,” said Andy.

I was puffing hard with adrenaline. “Last time that happened we pulled a dead guy out of the water.”

Andy said, “Not this time, huh, John?”

“No, this time we got him.”

We waited for his body to react to the warmth. His name was Josh White. He had four minutes to shiver, we estimated, or the indication would be that his core temperature had fallen too low and he would die. He was weeping. I had to get away from him, and I was bawling as I left the room. I do not know if it was for Josh White, or the captain off the
Troika,
or maybe for myself, because the curse was off the boat.

I went up to the wheelhouse. Andy was there. “We redeemed ourselves, brother.”

I told the skipper of
Trail Blazer
the news. His attitude struck me as…well, different. He wanted Josh White to
swim
back to
Trail Blazer.

“What was that?” I asked him.

“Put him in a survival suit and tell him to swim back.”

I did not get it. Josh White was telling us that today was his thirty-first birthday. What a gift: fall overboard, get rescued, and swim back? I did not think so, and I told his captain my thoughts.

“Well, tell him to take the rest of the day off and celebrate,” he said.

Andy and I gave each other looks of incomprehension. What was this guy thinking?

We kept Josh onboard
Time Bandit
and dropped him off the next day in St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands from which he could catch a flight to Anchorage. And feeling huge rushes of endorphin, we set out to return to where we had put down our prospecting pots. And almost like night and day, the pots started to show us money. They came up bulging with king crabs, first with sixty-nine in a pot, then seventy-one. I was doing the “crab jig” in the wheelhouse when Russell indicated with his fingers from the deck that the next pot contained 100, and the one after, 106! The crabs had moved north. We had landed on top of their main mass.

I told Andy, “Nobody will believe us. I’m the Comeback Kid.”

The next pot showed 151. We were averaging more than 100 per pot. This was historic.

We dropped another set. Andy put on his cowboy hat for luck. I told him, “I’d rather be lucky than good any day. I found the mother lode.”

The string produced numbers I had not seen before: 106, 134—that was when Andy put on his hat—126, 132, 118. It was like dredging up a treasure chest every ten minutes. Red gold!

And, finally, with no place to put more crabs, we headed back to Dutch.

We pulled $320,000 of crabs in thirty-six hours, for a total of 133,000 pounds. The red crabs for the season grossed the boat $500,000. Two-thirds went to the captains and the boat, and a third went to the crew, which meant six percent or $32,000 for each deckhand, less his share, again six percent, of the food and fuel. Not bad for a couple weeks’ work.

We met up at Latitudes, where I took possession of the $900 prize for the most crabs per pot. All that cash felt good in my hands; I rang the bell for drinks all around and donated most of what remained to the Fishermen Memorial Fund. Even though it was early in the day to be drinking, Russell shouted over the raised voices, “It’s 7:30 in Japan. Let’s get drunk.”

I will always wonder if our good luck had anything to do with getting the bad luck off the boat. Could the size of our king crab catch really have had anything to do with saving the life of Josh White?

Do Flowers Hurt When You Pick ’Em?

Andy

Still nothing from Russell.
I carry my cell phone in my shirt pocket, even now and then needlessly checking on the volume control, distrusting the instrument because it does not ring. I’m sitting on Rio’s back, and Rio is up to his belly in water in the middle of the pond, where the biting horse flies only reluctantly will go. To anyone passing by, we would look strange, a man and a horse in a pond, hardly moving except for Rio's swishing tail. I am finding myself stuck where I am, not knowing about Johnathan.

He has the softest heart of any of us Hillstrand boys. People who do not know him might doubt this; he comes across bold and brash, I suppose as a defensive measure, a sign of fundamental shyness, perhaps? Our mother thought he would grow up to be a veterinarian; he carried insects and small animals in his pockets. He held bees in his hand. He raised and sold teddy bear hampsters to the pet store. When our cat was giving birth to a litter of kittens, she came for Johnathan. He left her to tell us about the babies, and she came back to get him. When we were little kids on the Spit, visitors would leave starfish and other sea creatures on the beach, and John put them back in the water. One time, he asked Mom, “Do flowers hurt when you pick ’em?”

But, notwithstanding any of that, sometimes he can piss me off like nobody else on earth. Before king crab season, he swans into Dutch on a PennAir flight from Anchorage, instead of riding out the rough seas on the
Time Bandit
from Homer; and he arrives like Hollywood with local girlfriends and his buddies all waiting to greet him at the airport. He is the
Time Bandit
’s captain in the king crab season. He knows I will cover for him. That’s what I do. But that makes me angrier still. He is a force of nature that I cannot change. And by now, I would not even try.

I do not know where the fishing and our ages and the ownership of the
Time Bandit
will lead us brothers. We could sell out our IFQs and the
Time Bandit
and walk away with a million dollars each. Our boat is a partnership, and if I can build up the horse business in Indiana, I will never have partners again. Selling the boat would get me out of this endless cycle. I wonder how we have stuck with the repetition of seasons this long: From January 15 to March 31 we fish opilio and sometimes baradai like we are now. Then we run
Time Bandit
home, take the crab gear off, and put gear on for herring tendering. We go to Sitka and deliver to Prince Rupert Sound, Canada, through April. We then go back to Homer and prepare for the herring fishery for two weeks, and once that is complete, the boat goes home again. Now, salmon tendering lasts from June 15 in Bristol Bay for forty days, until the end of August, then in Kodiak until late September. And before king crab begins on October 15 we have to tear down the boat, paint the hull, and attend to the gear. The boat never stops—and that is the real meaning of
Time Bandit.

Are we going to continue as we are now? I just do not know. Johnathan will want to go on, and Neal will go along with him. I may have to keep fishing, but with my head instead of my heart. But what about the long-term future?

Fishing the Bering Sea was a family affair starting with our dad, but I do not see that in the Hillstrand family’s future. My daughters are not interested; Chelsey loves the sea but a career as a fishing boat captain is not going to happen. Neal’s two teenaged boys are not going to fish either. Johnathan’s son, Scott, may continue but he faces a dilemma of how to live off fishing if he does not own a boat. He will be relegated to life as a deckhand. Earning six percent of the catch might work while he is young, but after a certain age, the work gets harder. His wife Ashley faces a dilemma, as well, as a mother, wife, and woman. Her husband will be off the boat or on the boat. There can be no middle ground. He is either a seafarer or a family man. He has to marry the boat. It is the same choice I made as a younger man. Scott is our last family hope on the sea and it is not looking good.

Fishing as a lifestyle does not get passed down anymore. I do not need to wonder why.

It used to be all or nothing. It was a gold rush. The risks were exhilarating. If we did not pull it off, we lost the boat. Our backs were constantly against a wall. We lived for pressure, the rush, and the adrenaline. But what young person wants that? My brothers and I have fished from the age of twelve. It was ingrained early on in our character. We had the ethic for stress-related work. We were mentally tough. Our dad, mean as he was, gave us this character. We worked hard. He yelled at us, “Pull on the goddamned line, you stupid sonofabitch!” I was pulling 250 fathoms of purse line and every muscle in my body was popping. If I let up for a second, he would yell at me again. That does not happen anymore. Those times are gone.

My brothers and I grew up with nothing. We knew what hunger was like. Today, parents give their kids everything. Parents know that they are not building their children’s character but are helpless to do anything else. Few young people know hunger and real want. They have not experienced what it is like to have nothing. And just something small like a hard life at sea with little to show for the work will not satisfy them. This is America as it is today. And America today is no training ground for Bering Sea fishermen.

The Bering Sea crab industry is moving in a direction that eliminates even the romance of the sea. With rationalization, the industry is consolidating and shrinking. Some 300 boats in the king crab fleet not long ago crowded Dutch Harbor during Derby Days; now 80 boats are registered and about 65 boats actually cast off and go fishing. The canneries are taking over the business from ocean floor to retail shop floor. The deck crews of the future will be hourly workers. The captains will earn salaries. We are dinosaurs.

I Was Tango Uniform

Johnathan

Last December,
after king crab season ended,
Time Bandit
’s crew and Andy and I took a short break over Christmas. My girlfriend at the time flew down from Homer to be with me. One evening we rode my Harley to a local bar. We were minding our own business, enjoying a few drinks, when three guys I did not know parked themselves beside us at the bar and started hitting on her like I was not there. She brushed them off politely but she made it clear that she wanted them to leave her alone. I let her handle it.

These guys left the bar and came back more stoned or drunk than before. They would not leave her alone. She is beautiful, admittedly, but this went way beyond that sort of attraction. They were looking for a fight. With a few out-of-bounds remarks from them, she went quickly from uncomfortable to angry. The situation was heating up fast. They started to pump up their aggression. My girlfriend gets hit on often. Most guys get the message and move on. These guys were not taking no for an answer.

I do not get mad easily. But when I do, I can fight to the death. I am focused and I can smite an army with the jawbone of an ass, as Ezekiel said, I think.

It came to that. I took one guy down on the floor and held my fist in his face. I said, “I don’t want it to be this way.” He said okay.

I turned around and he got off the floor and punched me from behind. The whole bar began fighting. I tried to stay out of it. The three guys who had bothered my girlfriend went outside. We turned back to face the bar. They came back in and a big sonofabitch grabbed her hair and slammed her forehead against the bar and said he would find her, rape her, and kill her.

I told him, “It’s time for you to leave.”

The bartender was on the phone to the police when I was taking these guys outside. The fight was quick. I threw the would-be rapist/killer down on the ground and pulled his head back and kicked as hard as I could. Blood flew everywhere. He went limp. His two friends jumped me and hammered away; I have a head as hard as a helmet; you can pound the shit out of me for hours and you will not knock me out. I was wearing them out, and in a real fight that does not take long. My girlfriend screamed and scratched and punched. She fought like a wildcat. She bought me a few seconds to run over and slam-kick the big sonofabitch in the face with my boot. The only thing that moved on him was the blood from his ears.

The police arrived and handcuffed my girlfriend and me. As it turned out, I had kicked the rapist dude into a coma, but the coma could not have been that bad; it gave his brain a rest. He was out of the hospital in three days. I was held in jail over Christmas and New Year’s. At the arraignment a woman judge told me that I was looking at 92 months to 120 months. I counted twice to make certain and said, “TEN YEARS!! For a guy defending himself?”

I was Tango Uniform—Tits Up, in other words, Fucked.

I just hate being in jail. It is my greatest fear.

I worried that Mom would find out what happened. I felt bad for her. She came down from Oregon to visit me, and I felt ashamed. She said she loved me, and there was nothing I could ever do that would make her love me less, and that made me feel worse. Once the district attorney reviewed the evidence and testimonies and checked up on the men I had fought, he dropped all charges against me. I was free to go. It seemed that my so-called victims had outstanding felony warrants. Who had started the fight was never in doubt. Still, it was the worst trouble I was ever in.

I do not know what I could have done differently. Maybe I should have left earlier, before the fight got going, but I do not like to be chased out of bars by loudmouth women haters. And I do not go into bars looking for fights. I watch out for some people and avoid them if I can. After all, I am getting older. One thing I can say: I never fought with knives or guns. Not once. If you carry a gun, you are only going to get shot. I learned that when a guy at a party asked me to take him to buy some liquor. We were driving around and he said, “Liquor stores are closed. Stop. Stop over there. I’m going to get some booze.”

I said, “What a weirdo.”

He smashed the front window and grabbed a case of beer. Back in my car he asked if he could check out a pistol I kept between the seats. While he was robbing the liquor store I had emptied the bullets. I said OK. He stuck it against my ribs. I beat his ass and left him on the highway. I quit carrying guns after that.

T
his is what I think of now: It is dark.

I can only guess that I have drifted southeast of Augustine Island; I started fishing 45 miles south of the line. It is unlikely that the rip turned me directly south out the Kennedy Entrance and into the Gulf of Alaska; if that had happened I would have encountered—and probably seen lights on—one of the Barren Islands, like Ushagat or the two Amatulis. I could have reason to breathe easier. Those islands can be treacherous without smooth sandy beaches and gentle surf to welcome ashore boats like mine. The downside is the alternative to missing the Entrance. I am moving into, if I am not already in, the entrance to the Shelikof Strait. My course has to be one or the other.

The real point is, I do not know where I am. I have no way to find out. At daylight I might be able to sight a feature that will orient me, but in this darkness, my only hope is for light, or rescue.

On my hands and knees I look for the flare kit, which I think I stored in a locker under the bunk I have been lying on. I pull open the hatch and feel around with my hand until I find a flashlight, which is nearly out of power, with a tenuous dim orange glow at its business end, but the beam allows me to see into the locker. I pull out my Ruger Super Red Hawk, a .44 magnum with bullets in a black Mexican holster and belt. And I find a knife. I open the flare kit. I know better than to hope for a parachute flare. I am not disappointed. These flares—there are three—are simple signal versions consisting of shotgun shells loaded with the flare; they are shot from a plastic pistol frame. They lift up in the air about fifty yards and come down with gravity and burn a bright red for twenty seconds before the sea extinguishes them. If a searcher is looking in my direction and sees that small light, I am rescued; a flare on the sea calls for immediate response from all boats that see it; but if a searcher turns his eyes away for even a second, the flare might as well be invisible. In other words, these signal flares provide a means to reach out to someone on the water but not much of one. I should be more optimistic. The night is black, and a flare is bright; even twenty seconds can be enough. That said, when should I fire the first flare? I look for a light on the water. I see nothing for 360 degrees around the
Fishing Fever.

On the deck I balance the flare gun in my hand. What comes to mind is the unbelievable profligacy the crew and Andy and I showed last season opilio fishing on the Bering around the Pribilofs. One night—a night as dark as this one now—we were heading back to Dutch with full tanks, in high spirits, and in a rough sea, when Richard mentioned that he had brought on board $1,000 worth of out-of-date flares, in numbers close to 200, some parachute and some signal flares. That gave me an idea. On our plotter I can see where other crab boats were located around us, those passing us, and those moving across our course. The plotter’s program identifies the boats by name on the screen, and when I checked the plotter, I saw F/V
Jennifer A,
a crab boat owned by Ian Pitzman, who I grew up with, heading toward us from about three miles out.

We radioed the Coast Guard on Channel 16 that we would be conducting a flare drill.

The crew gathered up armfuls of flares out of Richard’s cache. Neal the Eel modified his flares by removing the parachutes and stuffing the tubes with seal bombs. I turned off the deck lights, including our sodiums on the boom.
Jennifer A,
of course, knew our distance and direction relative to them, and who we were. But Pitzman would not be able to see us with his own eyes. We planned to attack with a full salvo at the moment we came abreast of their starboard side. The crew took up battle stations on the rail, like pirates about to take down a king’s ship.

I navigated as close as I dared, without making Pitzman uncomfortable, and at the moment we crossed, I yelled on the loudhailer. “It’s war!” and the crew let loose a barrage that crossed
Jennifer A
’s decks and lit the night sky an eerie bright red; seal bombs exploded with loud claps and puffs of smoke.

Immediately, Pitzman was shouting bloody murder on the single sideband. What in hell did we think we were doing? We were laughing too hard to reply. Pitzman’s crew returned fire, pitifully, we thought, with a couple of signal flares, and by then we had passed each other, and the fight was over. We talked about the attack for the rest of the night.

What I would give for a parachute flare now.

I aim the flare gun at a 45-degree angle and pull the trigger. I feel the recoil in my hand as the flare lifts across the night sky. It creates a pitiful streak and plops into the sea. It burns for a few seconds and goes out. This then is my connection, my communication network, and my outreach to the world. I shake my head and go back inside the wheelhouse.

A
fter the Christmas break last year, I joined the crew back in Dutch to prepare for the opilio season opening on January 15, when the crabs’ “in-fill,” which means the solid meat in their legs, thickens. The Bering Sea at that time of year is a drama waiting to play out. There is never a script. But the backdrop for everything that happens is made of ice and sleet, freezing temperatures, Arctic ice pack, mean and cutting winds, and high seas.

Opilio season is the crab fisherman’s ultimate test. The worst accidents and most harrowing incidents call for heightened vigilance, stoicism, and discipline; in this environment, even small errors can spiral downward into unforeseen and lethal threats. The authorities prepare for the worst: the Coast Guard moves a fourteen-man team with a rescue helicopter to a temporary base on St. Paul Island; the Alaska Wildlife State Police stations its boat, the
Stimson,
a converted 156-foot crabber, in the port at St. Paul, ready to be called out for emergencies.

Before leaving Dutch, our crew, Andy, and I spent a couple of leisurely days resetting the pots with smaller openings and repairing those that had taken a beating in the king crab season. After several years of decline, opies are coming back. With an IFQ of 400,000 pounds, we were confident this season would be safe, short, and happy. We attended the same rituals as before at Latitudes and the Unisea Sports Bar; we ate Chinese food and stocked our cupboards, and we stuffed four tons of herring in the forward reefers. We planned to catch our own cod. An opie can sniff out nothing faster than fresh bleeding cod.

We were contracted to deliver 90 percent of our opies to the 316-foot
Stellar Sea
seafoods processing vessel anchored off St. Paul as a convenience to us and to comply with the rationalization program’s goal of distributing the proceeds of crab fishing to varying areas of Alaska. Nearly 142 workers live on the Peter Pan Seafoods vessel and work eighteen hours a day for $7.15 an hour, every day, in what must be one of the worst jobs on the planet.

One hard challenge of the Alaskan fishing industry is to find men and women year after year to work these miserable jobs. Last year, a friend named John “Double Wide” Nordin, a partner in a small—“We shouldn’t even be here”—specialty processor called Harbor Crown Seafoods, and one of the nicest and most generous men in the industry, had his Dutch plant humming when, in a lightning raid, INS agents and state police took away most of his key workers, who happened to be illegal immigrants from Guatemala, San Salvador, and the Philippines. These workers kept Harbor Crown’s lines moving in freezing temperatures on a hardscrabble island about as far from home as they could go. Nobody was waiting in line for the jobs. The police and INS quarantined them like diseased animals and flew them off the island, leaving Nordin as adrift in his processing of crabs as I am in
Fishing Fever.

Nordin and his brother James are Americans from Seattle, but they love the country of their family’s origin. Each summer, they return to Sweden. Everything Swedish seems not just different but better to them. Alaskan moose were not good enough for brother James. He had to collide with a Swedish one. He told me he was racing down a highway in northern Sweden with a relative behind the wheel of an Audi A6 at 160 km an hour. James was messing with the climate control dial on the dash and looked up in time to see a huge moose trot into the road. He only had time to tell himself, “Aw fuck, I’m dead.” He ducked his head; bad things happened. The car T-boned the moose with the loudest explosion he had heard since his time in the U.S. Army. When the car stopped, he and the driver were alive and covered with moose hair and broken glass. The animal was dead in a ditch. The police said Nordin would have been dead, too, if the moose’s right front leg had not collided with the column on the driver’s side and thrown the animal over, instead of through, the car.