On my first day back on the water, we putter by the Time Bandit on the way out the harbor in Homer, AK. The sky is beginning to show. Seagulls are joyful or fussy I can never tell. I look it up–Time Bandit is the boat that featured on the Deadliest Catch for years. I already knew that part. I just don’t know if it still is. Google’s no help. Either way these crab boats are small for where they’re going. I might be headed through the Bering Sea myself, but only later in the season and it’s just to get somewhere north and protected. No wonder king crab’s so damn expensive.
Around here, salmon’s caught all year and a $100,000 tournament is right around the corner for the largest king. There’s a medley of fishing rods on the stern I’m standing on. I smell fresh fish fries and bakes. There’ll be time, too, I think. We’ll have to wait around a lot for the high tides. Fish on, bitches.
I’m still not exactly sure what we’re hauling nor from where to where, but I think it’s gravel.
Gravel.
I know I should marvel at the beauty that is Alaska, and I do. By day’s end, I’ve seen more sea otter lounging near oyster farms which lined both sides of the channel to the quarry. The water a clear blue-green.
I should be thankful for the work outdoors. All that fresh air. The able-bodied strength with which to do it. Geezus, even paper towels are heavy on tugboats.
Something happens soon in that makes me remember one of the very first things I was taught about these mooring lines on the deck. They’re lengthy and girthy. Their pulling strength is ridiculous. How many gorillas, I wonder, before they part and cleave an unsuspecting crewman clean in two halves? Their properties are such they’re supposed to stretch and stretch and finally part, but predictably. You know where to stand in other words so that you’re not going home in pieces.
“Fuck!”
I look at the Mate and he looks at me. We don’t know what to say. The captain from his control station yells it again: “Fuck, fuck fuck! That was close. Everyone okay?”
He’d used a strap to hold a chain and it wasn’t strong enough. Fucker parted and I was nearly beaned in the head by a sonic shackle traveling what, two three hundred mph? My Mate was close, just not as. I don’t get medevaced to Anchorage with a permanent dent in my head head or brained, but still. I don’t know about this captain. He’s a self-professed “cowboy.”
The gravel turns out to be more this river rock. Its quarried along the Jackolof Bay and wheeled on to the barge in real life Tonka toys. I look up the hill from the water and berm where these monster trucks and loaders stage. I picture being the one putting explosives up and down the slope to blow up the mountain into pieces of rock. Anything to make gravel more exciting.
Gravel.
It’s the current backdrop for my reinvention, what can I say.
That and some dopey otters.
-tmc
Things Men Carry 