No Pity

As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment. You’ll go back to your old habits once you meet a little resistance. You need the samurai’s desperateness and his insanity.
Burn the bridge. Nuke the foundation. Back yourself up against a wall. Have an opinion one way or the other, get off the fence and rip it up. Cut yourself off so there is no going back. Once you are committed the truth will come out. - Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill

A slate blue stained glass hole in the evening sky hangs over the water as the boat turns for our eighty third? Forty eighth? Hundred and seventh? buoy setup of the day. Black/orange stripe, blue tag, little yellow reflectors, peanut (trailer), keg, diver…Marty’s buoy’s for sure. Dave taps on Marty’s window with the long bamboo buoy pole. He pulled out his wrist wrestling difficult buoys earlier but still seems able to work. I hope he is. He has four sons at home, one just born back in December. He is a good block man, fast and safe. He reaches the pole out and snags a buoy line. His hands fly up the bamboo as I guide it back with an open grip. At the moment he releases it my grip tightens and I slam it down onto its place on the sorting table. It will be there when he reaches for it, next buoy setup.

The buoys come flying at me, thrown with the quick intense violence of working fast on a crab boat. I throw them back towards Jeff and reel in the ganyon, past the taped carrick bend, until I have the shot in my hand. “Pull it tight!” I reel faster with an angry internal cringe that quiet Dave had to say something. Pull up the wheel on the coiler, slam the line in.

“GO.”

High pitched whine. Line flying under the coiler’s rubber tire. I try to guide it into the garbage can into which it spills with my hand but it is too fast. The coiler does a good job of making loops upon loops by itself. The carrick bend that ties the 33 fathom shot to the bottom shot comes through fast and fine. The thicker bottom shot coils in neat circles up the sides of the trash can. The ascending whine from the line in the block says the pot is near, so I watch coils and stand ready for it. Pot at the rail. I pull the line coiler up, grab the bottom shot, turn to land the pot. Why did I bother? Dave grabs one end, I the other. We balance it on the rail. I unhook the latch stretched with pieces of cut-up rubber inner tube across the top of the round crab pot, three feet in diameter. We open the door and slam the crab out of the pot in one tilting, rocking motion. Eight females and a pathetic, softshelled, undersized yearling fall down onto the coca mats. Dave’s expression is drawn tight. We lay the pot flat. He fills the orange Scotty Diner, a small cup with holes in it and a screw-top lid suspended on the inner tube rubber bands, with squid and I fill a flea jar, a larger square jar hanging from the lid on a hook, with ground-up mackerel. I turn backwards. Jeff has already coiled the line from the pot to the trash can. I pick up the can and slam it down on the top of the closed pot lid. Dave folds the lid back and I step back. Jeff grabs the pot as Dave grabs the buoy pole and I stand ready by the coiler for the next pot.

Jeff’s stack leans forward. We pull and coil more pots. We dump undersized crab and females onto the bristly coca mats amidst a pile of spent slimy bait dumped from the pots already fished. Night falls. Far off glowing yellow sodium lights ring our horizon. Other crab boats, grinding as we are. The only boats doing well have a shallow draft and are fishing the beach. Sunshine and flat calm seas made what crab there are go to the beach. In a stormy year the crab would be in the deep and bigger boats would be the only ones able to fish them in the rough water. Not so this year. Big boats, such as F/V Betty Lee, are shit out of luck. As Marty, the captain, says: “We’re getting our asses kicked by little boats.”

Still, these little boats only have about twenty thousand pounds. On a normal year that number would be doubled or tripled in this first intense seven days of fishing. Why are the crab not here? Where are they? There are no conclusive answers. This is a very political fishery; some people blame the Indians. According to the Boldt Decision, a 1972 court ruling interpreting what ‘legal and accustomed fishing grounds’ meant in the world of modern fishing, Washington tribes were given fifty percent of all commercial and non-commercial fisheries in the state. The implementation of this in the Dungeness crab season means that natives fish for 40 fishable (good weather) days before the ‘white’ season starts. If natives do not reach 40 days by January 15th, everyone else starts anyway. The tribes (Quinault, Quileute, Makah) then have ‘boxes’ near their tribal lands that only they can fish. Natives usually fish the white grounds first, then move into their boxes. I do not know if their catch ends up being fifty percent of the total Dungeness take. I do know there is a lot of hatred for these implementations of treaty law amongst the non-native crabbers in Westport. The natives did not have a good year.

Where are the crab? Biologists don’t really know. Marty says they are here, but buried in, not feeding. Biologists say next year will be big, as there are so many small crab. Every next year seems to be a big year in fishing. That’s how it traps you. The quick money traps you, when it is there. The debt you go into waiting to fish and spending in anticipation of the big bucks traps you. The hard work on the water – which I admit I love with that still-kicking poetic corner of my older wiser wayward soul – traps you with its freedom from the nine to five grind. Five months to do as you please with no work to do traps you. Fucking up and celebrating too much before, during, after fishing (of this I am guilty) traps you. Gillian Welch sings a traditional tune, One More Dollar:

One more dime to show for my day
One more dollar and I’m on my way
When I reach those hills boys I’ll never roam
One more dollar and I’m going home

Problem is this: where is home? I call this blog dirtbag heaven. That's where I live: not so much a place but a state of being. A life of adventures and explorations into realms of society and the natural world I had no idea existed growing up in suburban New England. Life stays fresh and new. But there are rough stretches, too. There are tipping points one might not even realize as such when in the midst of them. These times of great uncertainty, of blank future, are very very important. It shakes me out of the comfort I found in gliding season to season through my fun transitory life, figuring out living situations and health insurance and gainful employment along the way. This is the first time in a long time it has not worked. I took a gamble on some crustaceons and lost. This is from 1995, a year not unlike this one. I worked ski patrol at Crystal Mountain until the Pineapple Express melted our base and we all got laid off.

The Trade

Living wild and free
at the edge of nothing
is to dance fully alive
with the terrible taste
of destruction rising like bile
under your tongue.

Onward, it says,
inertia shall be your demise.

Though I have known
more than most ask
of many lifetimes
I live
within the fear and promise
of never having enough
to survive.

Damn the maintenance
of this vital heat! I say,
make me pure spirit,
banish the sacrifice
of the flesh,
the trade we make
for being alive.


Back to the slate blue window into the sky. Back to the beautiful ring of crab boat lights. Back to the flat green water sliding by the powerful warhorse of a 72-footer. Back to this anomaly standing five foot nine in pigtails and a Grundens jacket with ice tools drawn up into a heart on the back in permanent marker. Out over that water a desolation stretches something in my soul tight as a rubber band, ready to snap. The sun will come up when we work through the night and Rainier will stand floating in the dawn’s new light. Old light. Same light from the same sun and the same round earth that doesn’t care what little decisions we puny walking piles of carbon make in our day to day that determines the course of our all-consuming self-important lives. Out on the ocean, sans big bucks, I am yes a woman doing this Dungy crabbing and yes the only woman doing it on the biggest fishing port on the west coast and yes I suppose this makes me strong and hardcore and all the things people want to call me and yes I also suppose it makes me flighty and seasonal and unsettled and yes it is all true and none of it is. It depends on the lens through which you view the actions which comprise my life. That lens is yours to use and there are as many as there are people. Use it and enjoy.

I am here. I have anger and frustration but no pity for myself or these circumstances. I don’t want any from you. I have made a choice and this is what happened. I am fucking here and going to make the best of it. I decided to do this. I am going to do it until I can afford to step into something else without taking any more of a financial hit. In this stark naked warm coastal night, twelve miles offshore, truth bites as hard as a crab claw in the soft of my hand between thumb and forefinger. This was for money. This was for challenge. This was to see if I could crab at all.

I can. Whoopdee fucking doo. If there is no money I don’t want to be here. This is not what I love. Being on the water does not make that thing without a name rise up in my chest and fill me with the total satisfaction of using everything I have to the end result of not wanting to be anywhere but where I am, when I am, who I am. Climbing does. Writing on a really good story, words coming so fast it feels like I am but a channel through which they flow, does. Fishing is great but I am not quite sure how I got so far into this. I remember a young man my age who I knew in Alaska. He was a New Hampshire kid who had reinvented himself as a survivalist and trapper. We shared some time for a few weeks before he found out I didn’t hate queers and n---ers and Mexicans and etc, and I found out he did. At one point he was showing me a hunting rifle of his. Showing me his life. “I’m way deep into this.” The look on his face said it all. He was. Have I gotten that far into anything? I’ve danced around climbing, waiting for the approval of better climbers, of guide companies who might hire me, before I go all in. I’ve written and published a poem here, a little article there, but never fired up the big guns and gone for it with all my energy. I’ve worked and fucked around with my friends and fun and some microbrew beer and the surprising knowledge I as an adult am popular and loved and socially acceptable. I’ve told myself I am setting up a life in which those two things that make me feel alive can take the forefront, a nice comfortable life where someday in the magical future I can somehow write and climb and have plenty of what I need. I’m so sick of waiting. Fuck it. I’m going for it. Nothing else matters because nothing else really makes sense to me. Dumb inspirational posters tell you to follow your bliss. From that you’d assume that following your bliss will be blissful. Bullshit. It’s hard work. It won’t always feel good.

I’m a couple grand in the hole in a broke-ass fishing town on a bad year.

I’ve got a degree in something useless but for my unwritten novel.

I’ve got ice tools, ropes, pro, skis, shovels, probe, partners, mediocre ice lead and good rock lead and great ski experience and half a winter left.

This is it. I’m against the wall. Fuck fishing. I love mountains.


I’m ready for it.