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Published: August 23rd 2018
Each time I see Jack he tells me that I should come up to Alaska and spend time with him at his fish camp. This summer I did.
Jack is an old college friend. He and his wife, Ann, have been fishing salmon commercially in Kodiak, Alaska, for 30 years. They are among a small group of licensed setnetters, which means that every summer they move from the town of Kodiak to their rustic camp near where their nets are deployed. Three times a day, like spiders, they harvest several hundred entangled salmon. The fish are stored on ice in a holding skiff. Every other day a tender picks up the fish and takes them to a cannery in town.
Bear Garden
There are several fish camps scattered around Uganik Pass, the body of water separating Uganik Island from Kodiak Island. They have colorful names like Slim Pickins, Bar Tenders, Eskimo Pie, Otter Limits, and Jack's camp: Bear Garden. All of the camps are crude homesteads. Imagine living in a garage with bare plywood walls interrupted by exposed beams of unsanded pine. Tools, pans, and fishing gear hang from nails. The detritus of half-completed projects are strewn about—buckets,
manuals, engine parts, and so on. Conversations about anchors and salmon counts squawk from a solar-powered VHF radio that connects the setnetter community. Water comes from a nearby stream and is heated by propane. A greenhouse provides fresh vegetables. There is no refrigeration, so salmon—the nightly fare—is cured in a smokehouse. Jack has managed to rig a flushing toilet in the outhouse. A pile of animal skulls in a window sill is the only attempt at decor.
Jack
When I look around Bear Garden I see a thousand points of potential catastrophic failure. No repairman will come out to fix this stuff, and defeat is not an option. (Whereas I begin every project by rehearsing the failure speech I'll give when I run out of patience around step three.) Jack has mastered dozens of skills to keep everything running—carpentry, plumbing, farming, welding, engine repair, and of course, fishing. He's an amazing and unusual person—bushy beard, sunburned face, flannel shirt, suspenders, Xtratuf boots, and bright eyes peering through frameless glasses perched on the end of his nose.
He is a man of few words to begin with, but when he does speak it's often hard for me to
a bin of pinks
Or were they reds? Maybe silvers?tell if he is muttering to himself or issuing some critical command (like abandon ship).He often speaks in a soft slur of words that trails off like the last drops of water going down a drain. Sometimes vital pieces of information can be lodged in those drops. I think we were talking about scuba diving when Jack began the following tale about some unknown person:
Jack: She got in it and it killed her almost immediately.
Me: In what, Jack?
Jack: In the water.
Me: The water killed her?
Jack: No.
Me: What killed her?
Jack: Maybe some kinda plant or animal.
Me: Maybe?
Jack: I dunno.
Me: It's your story, right?
When we were housemates in 1969 Berkeley, Jack chose the dark, spider-infested, floorless attic as his room. In a few months he had transformed it into a plush den with a skylight, revolving bookcase, and built-in furniture. The centerpiece was a hookah carved from a massive tree stump. Bear Garden is the logical extension of that attic. Starting with the roughest most inhospitable canvas imaginable, Jack transformed it into a self-contained complex that supports a profitable fishing
knot tying party
Everyoine wanted to teach me these ridiculously complicated knots. business. There are easier ways to make money, but Jack and Ann and all of the setnetters I met belong to a special breed of rugged, independent people who thrive in wilderness, who seem to require wilderness to survive.
Fish
The sea was rough my first few days picking salmon. The routine was this: we pull up along some stretch of net and begin hauling it over the side of the skiff. The net is filled with jellyfish that plop onto the floor of the boat and promptly get squished under our boots. This creates a slippery slime of jellyfish venom. Crew members wear three pairs of gloves to protect against the caustic goo. I'm warned not to scratch my nose. Immediately my nose begins to itch.
Our job is to untangle the salmon from the net and toss them into the appropriate bin. The pinks have small scales and spotted tails. They go in the first bin. The silvers (Coho) have big scales. Their tails have thick necks. They go in the second bin. The chum or dog salmon have small pupils and tails with thin necks. They get tossed on the floor of the boat
Precautions
Sue made me carry an airhorn and bear repellant on my hikes. amid the pools of jellyfish sauce. As far as I can tell the reds (Sockeye) look just like the silvers. I toss them into random bins and hope for the best. The fish are big, strong, slippery, and struggle for their lives. Some just fall out of the net, but most are hopelessly entangled. They make horrible bleating noises. As a novice, it takes me longer to figure out how to free them. Meanwhile, they flap madly; I struggle to maintain a grip. I struggle to stand up in the pitching boat. I struggle not to vomit, and I struggle not to scratch my nose. I imagine my fish are initially grateful, thinking I am some Greenpeace volunteer freeing them from the net. Then, I imagine their feelings of betrayal as I toss them into a bin of their dying comrades.
Fishermen
Even though the setnetters are rugged individualists engaged in constant battle with nature for their survival, they import some social niceties from civilization. On one occasion the word went out over the radio that so-and-so was having a potluck party. Ann and I cooked a bunch of stuff and loaded it into the skiff. With Jack
Bear
Spotted this bear near town! at the helm we sailed passed three inlets that all looked the same to me. Jack turned down the fourth inlet. We came to a "parking lot" of skiffs, dropped anchor, and waded ashore. A group of young, scraggy fishermen stood around a campfire talking about outboard motors, types of anchors, and, of course, fish. A space opened up for me and someone handed me a cup of homemade ale mixed with rum. Music was provided by a boom box. It was raining, but no one cared. The food was laid out in a toolshed. There were only a few forks, so we had to share or simply eat with our hands (a challenge when you're eating spaghetti.)
One of the Alaskan murder mysteries I read said that there are two types of people in the Alaskan wilderness—those running toward something and those running away from something. Both types were present at the party (I was warned not to use any names). The seekers included high-minded students in the mold of Thoreau. They probably answered an ad in some college newspaper -- FISH SALMON IN ALASKA -- MONEY, HARD WORK, ADVENTURE, BEARS. At the end of the summer they
hero time
You can see Jack treading water near the skiff, waiting for an opportunity to climb in. will return to their dorms, tuition in hand. The fugitives in the crowd were drifters who would go whichever way the wind blew them after the summer.
In either case, seekers and fugitives would leave Alaska with a first-class education in how to tie knots. They were happy to find among their company a city slicker whose knowledge of knots ended with the dubious bows in his shoelaces. They jockeyed for turns to teach me different types of knots—bowline, sheepshank, trucker's hitch.
The drive home was tense. It was past midnight, the sun had set, and we were all a bit drunk. I could barely make out the silhouette of distant mountains as we crossed the ink-black water. But those silhouettes were all Jack needed to get us home.
Bears
Soon after I arrived Jack's 11-year-old granddaughter gleefully presented me with a copy of a book titled
More Alaskan Bear Maulings. I guess it's the sequel to
Alaskan Bear Maulings, volume I. Living in Zimbabwe I came face-to-face with a variety of dangerous animals—lions, hippos, crocs. I eventually got over my fears of these creatures—stay calm, no sudden moves, live and let live. Only two beasts
an island appears
In the distance a mammoth barge shelters from the wind. still strike fear in my heart, the great white shark and the Kodiak brown bear. The Kodiak bear is the modern-day equivalent of the cave bears that our prehistoric ancestors had to fight. What chance would I have against a ten-foot tall, one-ton predator? One swipe with its paw would take my head off. Also, Jack's fish camp is located in the middle of the National Kodiak Brown Bear Refuge. I looked over the helpful table on page 122 of the book. The columns gave the date, location, description, and probable reason for each attack. The last column contained check marks if the encounters were fatal. The most common reasons for attacks were "surprised bear" and "sow protecting cubs." One attack was caused by "bear attracted by squeaky noise." There were 172 entries in the table! No bears wandered into camp during my stay. (I made plenty of noise late at night when making my way to my cabin.) On off days Jack and I went up a couple of streams to look for bears. We didn't see any. I was actually disappointed. Ironically, I only saw one Kodiak bear, and that was while driving through the town of Kodiak
I feed everyone!
Caught this halibut on a pole. I complained to Dan about how hard it was to reel in. He shook his head and said, "Killing's hard work.: on my way home.
Wind
When the salmon counters who work for the Game and Fisheries Department notice that the rate of fish returning upstream to spawn slows, the word goes out on the radio for all of the setnetters to reel in their nets for a few days. I was relieved when we got such an order. Jack pulled his nets and stored them in one of his skiffs. (Taking the nets in and setting them out are grueling day-long jobs.) To further inoculate me against more fishing, a fierce windstorm began. At night 40-knot gusts shook my cabin. Branches scraping the walls sounded like bears living in the attic. The next morning a new island appeared in the form of a gigantic freight barge piled high with shipping containers. A tugboat had pulled it into the pass from Shelikof Strait to shelter from the blow. One look at the frenzied waves told me that the mail plane scheduled to take me back to Kodiak for my flight home wouldn't be coming. (And thus I would need to buy new tickets to get home.) The skiffs bobbed in the surf like toys. The ebbing tide brought one
View from above
Flying in a float plane was like riding a ski lift: slow and low. dangerously close to the break. Waves were throwing it high into the air. Some waves were breaking in the boat. This was a double concern because it was the skiff that Jack had stored his nets in.
What to do? Shrug it off, have a stiff drink, then call your insurance agent? That would've been my plan. But not Jack's. He slipped into a wetsuit and swam through the freezing surf. He dog-paddled next to the flailing skiff, waited for a lull, then quickly hoisted himself into the boat. Bailing with one hand while holding onto the gunwale with his other, he rode the bucking bucket like a rodeo cowboy. Boat sufficiently bailed, he fired up the engine, took it out another 50 feet, re-anchored it, then dove into the water and swam to shore!
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Raksha Bandhan Online Gifts India
Great post, really like the way you share the details.