Some people get seasick at times like this. I notice people who get horribly seasick are the ones who can never get over their desperate need for the ground to be still. Some people just can’t come to terms with the idea that everything in their world will always be in motion. The little technician inside the truly seasick mind refuses to push the reset button. And seasickness throws every breaker in the brain. Nausea coats the mind like roofing tar, smothering all thought. The torso heaves uncontrollably, rejecting all sustenance. The eyes close like a kitten’s and the arms instinctively clutch in a weak hug around anything on deck level: a pump handle, a five gallon bucket, the leg of a fellow crewman.

I remember one morning ten years ago, looking down with alarm at the limp body of Frank Cool, a hippy who had hitched a ride across the Gulf with us from Kodiak to Seattle. We were halfway across, with four more days to travel.

His head lolled out the galley door, beard drifting in the salt water. His eyes were glazed and rolling independently in his head like Marty Feldman’s. His fingers twitched convulsively. The only thing that indicated that life still clung to him was a low pitiful moan that escaped between long, slow, mournful dry heaves. I remember Jordan and me looking at each other. This was Frank’s second day of not being able to hold down water, and the third since he’d spoken English. We looked around us. The boat, a tough, scrappy seventy footer, was skipping her way sideways in the wide valley between majestic waves whose tops were high and foamy white, like snow capped mountains. Afraid that Frank would die and we might not know the difference for days, we adjusted the course until the water stayed inside him. The next day the weather came down and Frank popped up. Then he sat down again and ate every speck of food on the boat. He lives far inland now, in Montana.

The brain of a boat person accepts the motion of the ocean. I like to think of my feet standing on a giant boogie board, even when I’m on land. What you learn from the ocean is you never really know what’s coming next. You can keep your knees ready to flex, but you can’t predict what the next wave will do to you. Because no two waves are exactly alike, anywhere on earth. Every wave has its own determination and destination, its own winds and currents, to push it down or make it rise up.   More?

Now if a new wave really wants to make something of himself he should start running with a promising storm kicking off the Japanese Current and into the Gulf of Alaska, or north of the Aleutian Chain, up around the Pribilofs. The Gulf and the Bering Sea are places where big storms go to party. Sometimes it’s just a crazed riot, like the last Woodstock. The real danger then is a rogue wave.

Let’s say an angry wave with a windblown punk rock haircut comes charging in from the west and chests up with a hard partying wave grunging in from the northwest. Somehow they are dancing to the same drummer and their two crests coincide. They now exist at the same time in the same place. Add the cruel keening Stratocaster of a hard northwest wind and these two twenty five foot waves can mosh up together to become one fifty five foot green Godzilla.

And they call that monster a rogue wave.

 Most of the time, if you’re out on the Bering Sea crabbing in winter, and a rogue wave comes to visit, you get a quiet moment to watch it grow on your doorstep, like the Incredible Hulk, before it hits you. It’s a Twilight Zone moment. Time stands still as a big green wall of water  builds up on the other side of the rail, second by second, getting taller and taller, impossibly tall, until you realize that it must come crashing down, and that you are right under it. Often, the best place to go in this instance is up, onto the stack or maybe up on the bow.    

The problem is, you might be kind of tired as you attempt your life saving leap. Commercial fishing is not for those who love their beauty sleep. In an old style crab or cod pot season they start you up like a Briggs and Stratton engine at the start of the season and you keep on running until it’s through. Some don’t last the season. They overheat and seize up. Or they never really run that well in the first place. Pot fishing is running, unless you’re Hydroman. And he has his own problems.

The Hydroman is always cold. He has to run the hydraulics as you haul gear, which means standing with his icy fingers on a set of crane controls for days at a time , slowly, painfully, freezing to death even though he is swaddled in all the expensive mountaineering fleeces and polar worksuits that he can wear at one time.  Since I’m insane and dyslexic they don’t let me work the crane very often. So I get to run. Mostly I have been the Stack Man, which means I get to run the picking hook back and forth and stack the pots. A crab pot is a big trap. It’s basically a seven foot by seven foot box frame made of one inch steel covered in sturdy nylon webbing. You throw it off the boat and it sinks to the bottom to lure the desired seafood inside with oily bait, usually herring.  Once inside the delicious victim finds it much more difficult to leave, like a fisherman in a bar. The pot is secured to a series of buoys on the surface by strong ropes (which we will call lines from this point on, landlubber) as big around as your thumb.  To “run” the pot the skipper drives in close to the buoys and a deckhand throws a grappling hook, snagging the trailer buoy.  The Hook Man quickly pulls his line back along with the buoy set-up, which he throws into the power block.

 A power block pulls line, better than anything on earth. With a big Marco power block you could beat the State of Vermont in a tug of war. Fat hydraulic hoses feed a motor the size of a watermelon bolted to a pair of stainless steel sheaves three feet across. The line slips down and wedges between the sheaves, the Hydro Man cranks the lever, and with a howling crackle, you are off to the races, with the line peeling off the back side of the block a mile a minute.  Nowadays, a gadget called the Marco Kingcoiler does the coiling for you, which is a shame, because almost no one knows how to coil under the block anymore.

Once the pot is hauled aboard and emptied, the lines and buoys are thrown inside, and it’s stacked on deck to be reset later. The average pot weighs about a thousand pounds, but with a few good rolls and the right crane operator one person can easily stack it. The Stack Man hooks it up and the Hydro Man pulls it off the launcher with the crane and swings it into position. The Stack Man follows the pot and artfully counterweights, bumps, shoves and slides it into its place. The deck is filled first, and then the following pots are stacked on top, like blocks, higher and higher. Each pot is tied to the other and his brother with clove hitches. As he clambers up and down the stack, the Stack Man must climb like a monkey, cling like a spider, and push like an offensive lineman. Over and over, incredibly repetitively, all season long.

Luckily I was born with the body of a mutant gorilla and a mid-level case of Tourette’s. I’m about five ten, one eighty five. My legs are about two feet long and one foot across. My wide back slouches down into two long Popeye arms. A shag of untamed hair the color of sandy dirt twists and sprouts from my misshapen head. I haven’t tried to comb my hair for almost fifteen years. It just doesn’t want to. My angular features and short beard are usually framing a crooked smile. In the movie I would be played by Sean Penn. Sorry Sean.

Something happens to you as the season progresses. You become a dire wolf. No one is in fishing shape before the season. You can’t be. I have seen fine athletes melt into puddles of uselessness during a season. Sometimes a trained athlete thinks he already knows how far he can push his body; he thinks he knows the point at which a person must collapse, and rest. And when he reaches that point and he watches the other deckhands grind on with a lean animalistic fierceness, he is filled with a kind of fearful despair. A blinding visceral rejection of time and place. I worked with a weightlifter from Huntington Beach California who told me he once seriously considered hurling himself off the boat and making for the distant beach, not caring whether he made it or not. A friend told me of a guy who did just that, and when another deckhand tried to fish him out with a long hook pole the jumper fended it off. He batted at it, yelling “No! No! I won’t come back! I won’t!”
                In another notorious example, a deckhand had grown quiet and morose in the last days of a cold, grey season. His eyelids sagged shut and his shoulders slumped to the deck. “I can’t do it.” he mumbled all day, “I won’t do it anymore. Who cares? It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter.” Then he looked wistfully off to the horizon, “I don’t care. Who cares? What’s the use?” Pretty normal stuff, really, until the day he was missing.

They searched the boat desperately, knowing in their hearts that he probably had thrown himself into the water while they had drifted and taken a one hour catnap. Failing to find him aboard, they joined with other nearby boats and began a grim search, cutting the ocean into a checkerboard and scanning it one square at a time. Finally the Coast Guard gave them leave to quit and they made the somber drive to Dutch Harbor to fill out the required paperwork.

The minute they tied to the dock the missing crewman popped out from inside the crane base, where he had hidden with a supply of Snickers bars and Dr. Pepper. Personally, I would have gone ahead and killed him and filled out the forms.

(To be continued)