Autumn 1983, aboard the Silver Sea on the water between Port Townsend and Seattle

By Michael Daley

Passing through Ballard Locks, I don’t know how to describe the craving I feel, at the bow of the Silver Sea, as we slide down walls of intensely green algae, gulls haunting the air.

To them we become small as the water leaves the locks, lowers us to sea level — thalassa, green algae, muck on the surface, pleasure boats at moorages in the harbor, on our way to the sea lands, ship wake, ferry traffic, gull road, salmon-leaping paths.

After a while, in my bunk reading, I hear a squeak like music. I’m proud I could recognize the sound. We have tied up to a purse seiner, fenders sing on gunwales. Donovan and Sherman will hoist salmon into our boat while I keep records and watch so I can spell one of them when the next boat comes. They put on slickers resolutely in the middle of the night. Sardonically grim, they strap on valor, chastened by what is to be done.

As they work, even as they joke with the captain of the seiner, they pass precious cargo, yet brusquely slap fish on deck, leaving a shine there. There are blood drops everywhere, even on my sweater, though I sit in the cabin recording in pencil the number and weights they call out of Brights and Darks, Chum and King. Once, on deck for a breather, I saw a fish fall alive overboard and escape.

In the industrial and romantic glare of seiner light, some of the crew fillet fish, some pass them, huge 10- or 20-pound salmon, eyes wide and elegant. It’s a factory at sea. The Greek word “thalassa” reminds me of an old poem, not Homer’s but William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” death, and earth its containment.

On the Paragon, the seiner, fish are alive in the ship’s hold. Turning them over to us, the buyer’s boat, they drain the hold and hundreds, hundreds of fish thrash, writhe, splash, and bang against one another, racing to follow the water out. Then men go down and put them on deck, lifting gently, not to bruise, each sacramental fish into our arms.

In the box, weighed and counted for market, they still thrash until, dumped on ice, the spirit finally leaves. Having been kept alive so long, they make the freshest servings. Fish blood turns the surface of Shilshole Bay scarlet. A skiff slides across blackened foam and scales; someone going to the bar for last call. I watch the white wake of Alaska Blues, another seiner, stripe the black water. November will be the month for chum, its skipper told me. He’s been fishing Alaska, where they have had a good season. We’re not. I close the door to the hold where they flap to death, eyes red open.

Under the sign of “Cash Buyer,” our competitor, skipper of Myrna Rose, has painted a shamrock on his wheelhouse. He comes over the VHF. His name is Bud Royal. “This is the Myrna Rose.” He says what he’ll pay for bright, not dark, red chum or dogs up to 5,000 pounds. Then he says he’ll only buy from gill netters, who won’t be in until early in the morning. He will fillet what he buys and send the fish by air to San Francisco, that’s what Donovan guesses. But when I ask Bud where he does send them, he says, “Texas!”

Working for himself and not a company, the way Donovan does, he can pay any price he wants, but now that he has announced well in advance, he has raised the stakes for all buy-boats. Donovan doesn’t want to get on the VHF to confer with his boss because he’d be announcing to everyone in the fleet that he has this problem. So we must row in to a pay phone. This might be an elaborate excuse to head for the bar. He says most gill netters won’t come in before dawn, and anyone who shows up before midnight doesn’t have shit.

We get into the dinghy like a pair of smugglers. I row of course, and try to keep the oars quiet as possible, which seems stupid since Donovan laughing at his own jokes makes us as conspicuous as an outboard motor. Sherman is content to stay on board with his dog Higgins, whom I am just as glad to be getting away from.

I don’t remember how we got back on board. I must have rowed again, and I’m sure we were pretty noisy. We didn’t leave the bar until closing, and Donovan got word from his boss to price just below Bud.

At dawn I don’t feel well, and the first gill netters tie up to us, thick as flies: The Ballerina, Twin Sisters, and Astro. On deck, a cup of Sherman’s gritty coffee in hand, I’m swimming in fish. They sail into the weight bucket. Even dizzy, I feel the romance of the salmon, but different from last night under the lights of purse seiners. As I unload, I remember my dream of seeing a big submarine go past us starboard, too small to have been a Trident. A bigger one did go by, and we all saw, in the gray pre-dawn.

After the wave of gill netters subsides, the Washington State Fisheries biologist comes on board. He decides how many fish go to Indians, how many to whites, how long it should take for Indians to get their allotted percentage of the catch, and for whites to catch up, and vice-versa. Each boat has to sell all its fish, can’t keep any, but the buyer can sell fish back to the fisher. Because some fishermen keep their own fish to take home, although it is illegal, the biologist can’t estimate the total catch and can’t decide allotments of fishing days. Sports fishermen take the biggest percentage of unrecorded fish, and sell to restaurants, also illegal. Little private buyers like Bud Royal represent another big percentage because by the time the biologist comes along and tries to record, Bud’s gone.

Two men stand on deck and discuss the deaths of friends. They are unsentimental and laugh sadly. Donovan tells me the story of the Alki, his own boat which he sold to two “children” helped in the purchase by an elderly man in Anacortes. The man gave them whatever thousands of dollars and took an I.O.U. He wanted to go to Alaska one last time. When he fell overboard, they got the boat and who the hell knows where they are now. Somewhere in Alaska with or without the Alki, they got right with the Lord and who knows, maybe they don’t even owe the estate anything anymore. “Full fathom five thy father lies; … Those are pearls that were his eyes.”

I sit on deck most of the time in transit. A group of orcas raced the Silver Sea yesterday. Black and white flashes cut across the bow. On the stern now as Donovan, Sherman, and Higgins are in the wheelhouse, I imagine myself afloat on the wake. I can’t grab anything, they can’t hear me. I wave, they move away faster and I can’t swim. My boots drag me down, my clothes heavy, arms cold; the wake bubbles into my mouth and tastes bad. I choke for 20 minutes before they are a speck.

The fishermen’s faces are haggard and hard, heroic like Odysseus. Hercules, the tug, pulls a barge big as a floating skyscraper. The captain of the Brenda Rose, a young man with a face that’s lived a century, heads down the Duwamish. I wave to him as his boat passes us. Donovan tells me get back to cleaning the deck. I say I did already. No, he says, there’s a lot of minor blood-scrubbing left. Luckily Higgins, who hasn’t left the boat, hasn’t pissed or shit in three days. I stay on deck because the wheelhouse smells of cigarettes, exhaust gasoline, and fish blood.

By the time we’re ready to walk on pavement, or, as we’ve been saying for days, to “get the fuck off the boat,” the boss calls; there’s another opening on Hood Canal, another day or two for white commercial fishermen to haul in everything they find. It means another 10,000 pounds of fish and maybe $100 for me. “Maybe $500, maybe $1,000,” Donovan says. So far I’ve made $86. Greed competes with exhaustion; I tell myself I don’t want the money that much, but it’s no use.

The competition is incredible, the opening a secret. We arrive too late, the catch already sold. We beat them last week, Donovan says, and they beat us this week.

After we sit for hours waiting for gill netters to sell us some fish, we take what we have back to the fish buyer’s pier. From Hood Canal off Whiskey Spit, we head for the Duwamish River, cluttered with shipbuilders. In among moorages is Booth Fisheries, which buys not only salmon, but apples, wheat, anything they’re brought. I’m told they own the Northwest. A guy at a bar one night told me, “Hang around Donovan Dunkirk long enough and you’ll see everything there is to see about how the Northwest works.”

This is how it works: I shovel a ton and a half of ice and unload 8,000 pounds of salmon. Saturated by the bodies of swimmers, I remember how they pass without dignity into the huge bucket the buyer lowers into our hold and hoists up to fillet, ice, and sell. Thousands of iced open eyes look at me in the hold; I grow panicky in the small, tight place. I think about the totem of good harvest, and sit down on the remaining ton of slippery fish.

As soon as we unload, we head for the Wharf Tavern and I begin spending the few dollars I draw against wages which will not amount to much. We drink to somebody’s birthday; everyone lifts a drink bought with a hundred dollar bill. A man from Las Vegas is up on stage; he’s never gone out on the water, but his entire audience has. He croons late ’50s tunes, wearing a sequined shirt, fish scales open to the chest. It’s one of the saddest stage routines I ever saw.

Michael Daley published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays, from which this piece is taken, in December 2006. The publisher is Pleasure Boat Studio.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 | Email This Post

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