Wild Caught
by Burke De Boer
Author's Note: "Wild Caught" is a manual for the work of repairing salmon gillnets and baiting halibut gangions. It is not a manual for how to survive the work. It's also a manual for finding connection and camaraderie through loss, but it's not a manual for how to make that loss any easier.
1.
The Son of Saint Patrick was moored in Seattle when Kim called and asked me to come help ready the boat for the season. “But don’t let me put you out,” she said. “Only come if you’re sittin’ around, gatherin’ moss.”
“Not a problem for me, man, you know I’m a mossy girl.”
“Lichens.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you know,” she said, her tone accepting an excuse even though I hadn’t given one.
“When do you have work?”
“Right now. I got so much work I don’t need to worry what I’m gonna do for New Years, I’ll tell ya that.”
It would take a day of driving to get up there from Coos Bay and I’d need to share swigs of my water with the coolant reservoir every rest stop but I figured Mom’s old truck could make it. I spent the night stuffing some shit in my old duffel bag while raindrops pelted the singlepane. Truth was, I had been sitting around. “Gatherin’ moss.” The studio had come to be a stifling, silent closet in the wake of everything. I’d sold Mom’s old place but because of her reverse mortgage and the constant economic calamity that was life on the coast I didn’t have much to show for it. This had been the pull of fishing seasons past: right when the bank account reached levels of panic, a seasonal gig came along. Opportunity tossed out of the great chum bucket in the sky.
2.
It had been two years since I last worked for Kim Fitzpatrick. That final summer replays so easily in my mind, with all the vivid sense as if it were on film reel playing right in front of me. Complete with wildfire smell-o-vision.
We were sailing back to land the catch at Port Orford, a little town huddled up where Humbug Mountain rises out of the sea. Before we saw the town, we saw the smoke. It lifted above the horizon line. Kim radioed in about mooring and the Coast Guard said the town was on Go Now evacuation orders - the fire had gone over the top. They said we’d need to offload at Coos Bay. Kim asked if we could be of service. Well, fire crews needed as much help running supplies as they could get while Highway 101 was slammed with evac traffic. So we tooted to Coos.
“I gotta run to the Coasties as soon as we land,” Kim said to me as she piloted past the rocks and mountains on our starboard side. “I need you to get a hold of the broker. Let him know where we’re landing.”
“Fuckin’ why me, dude?”
“‘Cause you can string a fuckin’ sentence together, College!” That only abated my indignation a little bit. (No matter how much Kim talked about her dream of running an all-woman crew, she had a way of pushing me, then the only girl on her crew, out of the job when it called for truly heavy lifting. Never mind the men would all use cranes and pulleys anyway.) “And you’re from Coos,” she continued. “I never landed there. Can they just pick up at the dock or we gotta sell to someone else or what’s the fuckin’ deal?”
We tied up at the docks. I couldn’t get through to our fish broker. Before anything else, I called Mom. Couldn’t get through to her either. Figured she was on the fire, and I wish I could say I had the bad feeling everybody talks about when these things happen. I mean of course I was worried. But I just did what Kim asked of me and got us offloaded at the processor. Then a crane swung supplies around and loaded up the Son of Saint Patrick as if it were a freighter.
We sailed back towards the fire. The crews were able to get tactically between it and the town beneath it. (Fire burns slower going downhill than up, they say. Mom used to say the first rule of fire was “never fight from the high ground.” The second rule was “unless you have to.”) We had these big, rubber bladders of drinking water to keep the crews alive and hydrated, and didn’t find out until we got there that there was no support crew to pack them in. Up we went, heaving water.
The hike pulled sweat from every pore of my body and the wildfire steamed it away. I hoped to see Mom up there, shoveling dirt over ashes. But every member of the fire crew looked the same in their green pants and yellow jackets, reflecting every look back at me from their dark and shiny visors.
3.
At the Port of Seattle, the Fishermen’s Terminal was teeming with pre-season activity. Vehicles and vessels in all directions. I weaved through work trucks hauling pipes and welders and air compressors, ducked around forklifts toting tarped pallets, and made my way down to Dock 7.
“So for starters,” Kim said after I’d come aboard, “My gillnets are dogshit.”
Her move to Alaskan waters had been coupled with converting the vessel to multipurpose, adding salmon nets to her catch. That was when I bowed out of the operation. She said Oregon couldn’t hack it. Captain Fitzpatrick and her Son of Saint Patrick were off to Alaska. Since her business model meant taking out a loan before each season and hoping to catch enough to pay it off, she had no other choice. Never mind the high dollar mark a single halibut can bring in, especially one of those barndoor ones, the Oregon waters just didn’t have enough of them. I once shuffled through the reports Kim had left on the counter in the galley. Halibut takes down 18%; price per pound down by $3; average halibut weight down 50% over 50 years; ocean temperatures rising; ocean pH falling; all of these data points stained with spilled hot sauce and semicircled by coffee cup rings. These were on my mind when she asked the crew who wanted to do Alaska. I counted on my fingers how many months that meant working. Imagine working most of the year. I couldn’t do it.
“I never used gillnets,” I said.
“Well, you don’t need to use ‘em, just need to stitch ‘em up.” She pulled a length of net across the deck and pointed out the holes within the holes and gave me a plastic netting needle for the twine. It was a simple process: cut out the broken lines, clean up the areas of mesh where the diamonds turned to wide open craters, then weave the new twine in, over, under, and through the loop. “If you wanted glamorous,” she said, “You wouldn’t of come here!” I’d heard it before, but in fishing it’s worth repeating.
4.
I fell into the trance of work: upon the bobbing boat, between the weaving of the needle, beneath the gray ceiling of a Seattle day and against the cold breeze flurrying frozen mist, there’s no other way to bear it, I believe, but to fall in. Don’t look at how much you’ve done or how much you got left to go. (And if you can figure out how to do that, let me know. I kept looking up at the mountain of mesh which across the hours of work would not shrink.)
My first season on the Son of Saint Patrick I thought was just going to be an adventure for one summer. Something exciting to brag about when I got back to campus. As an inbreaker, I didn’t have many serious responsibilities and spent a lot of time at the big tin buckets of gangion lines: clips on one end and hooks on the other, baiting them with chopped up bits of herring and squid and salmon bellies. All that first season my gloves never made it through a baiting unscathed. Even when I thought I’d made it through perfectly I hadn’t. I said to the guy on the other side of the bucket, “Alright, a clean round!” and proudly held up my hands, and only then saw the pockmarks in the neoprene. He was one of those strong silent types of fishermen, and I would sometimes see him talking with the other guys but he never said a word to me. He smirked for a half-second. That’s as close as I ever saw him get to laughter. I grew to ignore the rips the hooks and barbs would inflict and the blood they would draw.
There’s no other way but to grow accustomed.
5.
On New Year’s Eve Day, a strong rain broke through the weeklong drizzle and swept in, pounding the marina.
“You wanna work below?” Kim asked while coffee sputtered and spewed into the old, stained carafe. The galley filled with the steam of its warmth. Every knuckle popped as I tried to warm my hands up over the flapjack griddle. Each night they shriveled into claws no matter how much I stretched them. “We can pump the bilges so ya don’t get soaked. Need to pump ‘em out anyway.”
“Naw,” I said. “I wanna get these nets finished. Today’s the day.” I looked out the window at the silver sheets of falling rain and said, “It is a fine day to excel!” One of Mom’s favorite maxims.
“Fucking God,” Kim said. She wasn’t a morning person.
I pulled up the hood on my rain jacket and went to work. Mom was right, it was a fine day.
I’ve always felt best during winter and its hundred days of downpour. Could have something to do with how spring and summer was when Mom would leave. She worked, depending on the year, for the Forest Service, or for a Forest Service fire contractor, or for the Confederated Tribes, and would be called to wildfires across all the western states. Usually someplace far away, for weeks at a time. My grandfolks used to say it was me who brought her home after she’d run off at sixteen to tramp across the country. “Chasing the party,” they said. She said all she was chasing was freedom. Sunshine. A world larger than the coast. As a little kid, I felt bad that I was the one who took that from her. Then I grew older and figured fire season gave her plenty of freedom. Clearly I wasn’t holding her back.
For me, rain was home and sunshine meant only absence.
But winter? Winter brought back rich smells of overabundance. The smell of mud, sawdust, and diesel fumes in Mom’s pickup cab were etched in my sense memory, stuck to my mind like the Bikini Kill bumper stickers on the back window, clinging to my skin like Halloween costumes made to fit under rain jackets. Now each year that passed without her felt like summer the whole year through.
6.
It was a fight to stay awake for the New Year. I didn’t see the point in it. But I’d finished the nets and the rain had passed and Kim said we might as well take tomorrow off. Celebrate victories.
Kim went out to get bottles of rum like we were real sailors. I couldn’t get Mom’s truck to start no matter how hard I cranked and cursed at it, so for my part of the supply run I hiked down the railroad tracks a couple blocks to the nearest dispensary and got some one dollar pre-rolls, the whole way chewing my thumbnail over how I’d get out of Seattle once this gig wrapped up.
We stayed up talking and laughing about dead parents in a way that only orphans can. I told her about the mortician at the funeral home who started the meeting by saying “Despite what you may have heard about me, I am not racist. I understand your mother was some sort of Indian? We are happy to accommodate any tribal ritual.” Which is exactly what you want to hear when grieving. And Kim told me about the last thing her dad did while on hospice care. She said, “I guess when my old man pulled back the veil to the spiritual realm they were still running commercials ‘cause in between nurses he got in his pickup, drove to the nearest dealership, and traded in for a brand new Subaru Forester.”
“I didn’t know your dad was a lesbian.”
“Had to get it from somewhere. But he called me up to come over and see it. Family’s all in Pendleton, fuckin’ five hour drive. Kinda saw that as an indicator and headed out. Got there just in time to watch him pass. A week later the license plates arrived, the letters were KOD. KOD863. I said ‘Hey, that stands for Killed Our Dad!’”
I laughed. She said her siblings didn’t. Said her brother just asked if she was going to pick up the payments on it since she thought it was so funny.
It was weird to imagine her family being from Pendleton, a high desert mountain town. I always imagined she had sea salt in her blood. This meant there was a time when she too was a greenhorn with no connections in the industry but, somehow, no other options.
She said, “Well. I’m fifty this year. When you get to be my age, losing your folks is inevitable. But hell’s bells, College, you’re too young for all this.”
“That’s what everybody tells me. Still haven’t figured out who to take it up with.”
Later in the night she asked if I wanted more work. Halibut started in March. A massive sockeye run was predicted, starting in June. “I think I can really do it this year. An all-woman crew. Been talking with two girls out of Clatsop, for one. Gen Z’ers. Y’all are gonna solve the Graying of the Fleet. Well, I say ‘y’all,’ but you know. Only if we’re still enough adventure for ya.”
At midnight we stood on deck and watched the fireworks over the water.
7.
We were reeling in on Womens Bay. Afternoon and the sun was shining high over Kodiak, bright and stinging our squinting eyes into permanent wrinkles. I stood at the winch controls bringing the longline back in. Motor whined and spool groaned and the line clicked along. Nothing, nothing, nothing, halibut. Kim swung the handhook into the fish and lifted it off the line. It dangled from her chest to her knees. She hip tossed it into the deck bin. Nothing, nothing, nothing, too small toss it back, nothing. And the nothing carried on and the motor groaned and the spool filled. Then Kim yelled, but I couldn’t understand her words, swallowed by the sound of sea and motor, and the rest of the crew yelled and all at once the ass-end of the boat tilted and a Pacific sleeper shark came crashing onto the deck. I hit the switch and killed the reel. The sleeper’s tail whipped and flailed, seafoam and blood spilling in all directions, the crew falling over themselves, trying to get hold.
Burke De Boer is an Oregon-grown, Texas-based writer and wine farmer. You can read his short work in Cowboy Jamboree, BULL Magazine, and Roi Faineant, and his western novels In Sheep's Clothing and North, to Hell! available from Third Eye Sockeye. You can also drink his work from Local Customs and at Terry Black's BBQ in Austin. He is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Texas State University.
by Burke De Boer
Author's Note: "Wild Caught" is a manual for the work of repairing salmon gillnets and baiting halibut gangions. It is not a manual for how to survive the work. It's also a manual for finding connection and camaraderie through loss, but it's not a manual for how to make that loss any easier.
1.
The Son of Saint Patrick was moored in Seattle when Kim called and asked me to come help ready the boat for the season. “But don’t let me put you out,” she said. “Only come if you’re sittin’ around, gatherin’ moss.”
“Not a problem for me, man, you know I’m a mossy girl.”
“Lichens.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you know,” she said, her tone accepting an excuse even though I hadn’t given one.
“When do you have work?”
“Right now. I got so much work I don’t need to worry what I’m gonna do for New Years, I’ll tell ya that.”
It would take a day of driving to get up there from Coos Bay and I’d need to share swigs of my water with the coolant reservoir every rest stop but I figured Mom’s old truck could make it. I spent the night stuffing some shit in my old duffel bag while raindrops pelted the singlepane. Truth was, I had been sitting around. “Gatherin’ moss.” The studio had come to be a stifling, silent closet in the wake of everything. I’d sold Mom’s old place but because of her reverse mortgage and the constant economic calamity that was life on the coast I didn’t have much to show for it. This had been the pull of fishing seasons past: right when the bank account reached levels of panic, a seasonal gig came along. Opportunity tossed out of the great chum bucket in the sky.
2.
It had been two years since I last worked for Kim Fitzpatrick. That final summer replays so easily in my mind, with all the vivid sense as if it were on film reel playing right in front of me. Complete with wildfire smell-o-vision.
We were sailing back to land the catch at Port Orford, a little town huddled up where Humbug Mountain rises out of the sea. Before we saw the town, we saw the smoke. It lifted above the horizon line. Kim radioed in about mooring and the Coast Guard said the town was on Go Now evacuation orders - the fire had gone over the top. They said we’d need to offload at Coos Bay. Kim asked if we could be of service. Well, fire crews needed as much help running supplies as they could get while Highway 101 was slammed with evac traffic. So we tooted to Coos.
“I gotta run to the Coasties as soon as we land,” Kim said to me as she piloted past the rocks and mountains on our starboard side. “I need you to get a hold of the broker. Let him know where we’re landing.”
“Fuckin’ why me, dude?”
“‘Cause you can string a fuckin’ sentence together, College!” That only abated my indignation a little bit. (No matter how much Kim talked about her dream of running an all-woman crew, she had a way of pushing me, then the only girl on her crew, out of the job when it called for truly heavy lifting. Never mind the men would all use cranes and pulleys anyway.) “And you’re from Coos,” she continued. “I never landed there. Can they just pick up at the dock or we gotta sell to someone else or what’s the fuckin’ deal?”
We tied up at the docks. I couldn’t get through to our fish broker. Before anything else, I called Mom. Couldn’t get through to her either. Figured she was on the fire, and I wish I could say I had the bad feeling everybody talks about when these things happen. I mean of course I was worried. But I just did what Kim asked of me and got us offloaded at the processor. Then a crane swung supplies around and loaded up the Son of Saint Patrick as if it were a freighter.
We sailed back towards the fire. The crews were able to get tactically between it and the town beneath it. (Fire burns slower going downhill than up, they say. Mom used to say the first rule of fire was “never fight from the high ground.” The second rule was “unless you have to.”) We had these big, rubber bladders of drinking water to keep the crews alive and hydrated, and didn’t find out until we got there that there was no support crew to pack them in. Up we went, heaving water.
The hike pulled sweat from every pore of my body and the wildfire steamed it away. I hoped to see Mom up there, shoveling dirt over ashes. But every member of the fire crew looked the same in their green pants and yellow jackets, reflecting every look back at me from their dark and shiny visors.
3.
At the Port of Seattle, the Fishermen’s Terminal was teeming with pre-season activity. Vehicles and vessels in all directions. I weaved through work trucks hauling pipes and welders and air compressors, ducked around forklifts toting tarped pallets, and made my way down to Dock 7.
“So for starters,” Kim said after I’d come aboard, “My gillnets are dogshit.”
Her move to Alaskan waters had been coupled with converting the vessel to multipurpose, adding salmon nets to her catch. That was when I bowed out of the operation. She said Oregon couldn’t hack it. Captain Fitzpatrick and her Son of Saint Patrick were off to Alaska. Since her business model meant taking out a loan before each season and hoping to catch enough to pay it off, she had no other choice. Never mind the high dollar mark a single halibut can bring in, especially one of those barndoor ones, the Oregon waters just didn’t have enough of them. I once shuffled through the reports Kim had left on the counter in the galley. Halibut takes down 18%; price per pound down by $3; average halibut weight down 50% over 50 years; ocean temperatures rising; ocean pH falling; all of these data points stained with spilled hot sauce and semicircled by coffee cup rings. These were on my mind when she asked the crew who wanted to do Alaska. I counted on my fingers how many months that meant working. Imagine working most of the year. I couldn’t do it.
“I never used gillnets,” I said.
“Well, you don’t need to use ‘em, just need to stitch ‘em up.” She pulled a length of net across the deck and pointed out the holes within the holes and gave me a plastic netting needle for the twine. It was a simple process: cut out the broken lines, clean up the areas of mesh where the diamonds turned to wide open craters, then weave the new twine in, over, under, and through the loop. “If you wanted glamorous,” she said, “You wouldn’t of come here!” I’d heard it before, but in fishing it’s worth repeating.
4.
I fell into the trance of work: upon the bobbing boat, between the weaving of the needle, beneath the gray ceiling of a Seattle day and against the cold breeze flurrying frozen mist, there’s no other way to bear it, I believe, but to fall in. Don’t look at how much you’ve done or how much you got left to go. (And if you can figure out how to do that, let me know. I kept looking up at the mountain of mesh which across the hours of work would not shrink.)
My first season on the Son of Saint Patrick I thought was just going to be an adventure for one summer. Something exciting to brag about when I got back to campus. As an inbreaker, I didn’t have many serious responsibilities and spent a lot of time at the big tin buckets of gangion lines: clips on one end and hooks on the other, baiting them with chopped up bits of herring and squid and salmon bellies. All that first season my gloves never made it through a baiting unscathed. Even when I thought I’d made it through perfectly I hadn’t. I said to the guy on the other side of the bucket, “Alright, a clean round!” and proudly held up my hands, and only then saw the pockmarks in the neoprene. He was one of those strong silent types of fishermen, and I would sometimes see him talking with the other guys but he never said a word to me. He smirked for a half-second. That’s as close as I ever saw him get to laughter. I grew to ignore the rips the hooks and barbs would inflict and the blood they would draw.
There’s no other way but to grow accustomed.
5.
On New Year’s Eve Day, a strong rain broke through the weeklong drizzle and swept in, pounding the marina.
“You wanna work below?” Kim asked while coffee sputtered and spewed into the old, stained carafe. The galley filled with the steam of its warmth. Every knuckle popped as I tried to warm my hands up over the flapjack griddle. Each night they shriveled into claws no matter how much I stretched them. “We can pump the bilges so ya don’t get soaked. Need to pump ‘em out anyway.”
“Naw,” I said. “I wanna get these nets finished. Today’s the day.” I looked out the window at the silver sheets of falling rain and said, “It is a fine day to excel!” One of Mom’s favorite maxims.
“Fucking God,” Kim said. She wasn’t a morning person.
I pulled up the hood on my rain jacket and went to work. Mom was right, it was a fine day.
I’ve always felt best during winter and its hundred days of downpour. Could have something to do with how spring and summer was when Mom would leave. She worked, depending on the year, for the Forest Service, or for a Forest Service fire contractor, or for the Confederated Tribes, and would be called to wildfires across all the western states. Usually someplace far away, for weeks at a time. My grandfolks used to say it was me who brought her home after she’d run off at sixteen to tramp across the country. “Chasing the party,” they said. She said all she was chasing was freedom. Sunshine. A world larger than the coast. As a little kid, I felt bad that I was the one who took that from her. Then I grew older and figured fire season gave her plenty of freedom. Clearly I wasn’t holding her back.
For me, rain was home and sunshine meant only absence.
But winter? Winter brought back rich smells of overabundance. The smell of mud, sawdust, and diesel fumes in Mom’s pickup cab were etched in my sense memory, stuck to my mind like the Bikini Kill bumper stickers on the back window, clinging to my skin like Halloween costumes made to fit under rain jackets. Now each year that passed without her felt like summer the whole year through.
6.
It was a fight to stay awake for the New Year. I didn’t see the point in it. But I’d finished the nets and the rain had passed and Kim said we might as well take tomorrow off. Celebrate victories.
Kim went out to get bottles of rum like we were real sailors. I couldn’t get Mom’s truck to start no matter how hard I cranked and cursed at it, so for my part of the supply run I hiked down the railroad tracks a couple blocks to the nearest dispensary and got some one dollar pre-rolls, the whole way chewing my thumbnail over how I’d get out of Seattle once this gig wrapped up.
We stayed up talking and laughing about dead parents in a way that only orphans can. I told her about the mortician at the funeral home who started the meeting by saying “Despite what you may have heard about me, I am not racist. I understand your mother was some sort of Indian? We are happy to accommodate any tribal ritual.” Which is exactly what you want to hear when grieving. And Kim told me about the last thing her dad did while on hospice care. She said, “I guess when my old man pulled back the veil to the spiritual realm they were still running commercials ‘cause in between nurses he got in his pickup, drove to the nearest dealership, and traded in for a brand new Subaru Forester.”
“I didn’t know your dad was a lesbian.”
“Had to get it from somewhere. But he called me up to come over and see it. Family’s all in Pendleton, fuckin’ five hour drive. Kinda saw that as an indicator and headed out. Got there just in time to watch him pass. A week later the license plates arrived, the letters were KOD. KOD863. I said ‘Hey, that stands for Killed Our Dad!’”
I laughed. She said her siblings didn’t. Said her brother just asked if she was going to pick up the payments on it since she thought it was so funny.
It was weird to imagine her family being from Pendleton, a high desert mountain town. I always imagined she had sea salt in her blood. This meant there was a time when she too was a greenhorn with no connections in the industry but, somehow, no other options.
She said, “Well. I’m fifty this year. When you get to be my age, losing your folks is inevitable. But hell’s bells, College, you’re too young for all this.”
“That’s what everybody tells me. Still haven’t figured out who to take it up with.”
Later in the night she asked if I wanted more work. Halibut started in March. A massive sockeye run was predicted, starting in June. “I think I can really do it this year. An all-woman crew. Been talking with two girls out of Clatsop, for one. Gen Z’ers. Y’all are gonna solve the Graying of the Fleet. Well, I say ‘y’all,’ but you know. Only if we’re still enough adventure for ya.”
At midnight we stood on deck and watched the fireworks over the water.
7.
We were reeling in on Womens Bay. Afternoon and the sun was shining high over Kodiak, bright and stinging our squinting eyes into permanent wrinkles. I stood at the winch controls bringing the longline back in. Motor whined and spool groaned and the line clicked along. Nothing, nothing, nothing, halibut. Kim swung the handhook into the fish and lifted it off the line. It dangled from her chest to her knees. She hip tossed it into the deck bin. Nothing, nothing, nothing, too small toss it back, nothing. And the nothing carried on and the motor groaned and the spool filled. Then Kim yelled, but I couldn’t understand her words, swallowed by the sound of sea and motor, and the rest of the crew yelled and all at once the ass-end of the boat tilted and a Pacific sleeper shark came crashing onto the deck. I hit the switch and killed the reel. The sleeper’s tail whipped and flailed, seafoam and blood spilling in all directions, the crew falling over themselves, trying to get hold.
Burke De Boer is an Oregon-grown, Texas-based writer and wine farmer. You can read his short work in Cowboy Jamboree, BULL Magazine, and Roi Faineant, and his western novels In Sheep's Clothing and North, to Hell! available from Third Eye Sockeye. You can also drink his work from Local Customs and at Terry Black's BBQ in Austin. He is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Texas State University.