Two things you encounter on the water that guarantee misery: ghost riders and logs. Logs are logs. They wash into your nets, get spun up, and tear the hell out of them. Heavy rain means inland floods, and floods wash woody debris into the inlet. At its worst the debris forms a log jam — a net so full of wood it looks like a broad, arced beaver dam. A nightmare that takes hours to pick and destroys everything caught in it.
Ghost riders are worse. You see them coming.
“Ghost rider!” the skipper calls out, and everyone checks the advancing net. There, tangled in the webbing, is the rotting corpse of a salmon, halibut, or whatever other deceased bit of sea life — or land life — found its way in. Whales. Dogs. Young deer. Anything made of flesh that used to be alive.
They get their name for two reasons: the haunting grayish-white color, and the fact that when they come over the roller and hit the deck, what’s left of them liquefies. Like a coffee-logged chunk of donut dropped from the diner counter. The smell is not of this earth, and it will cause at least one crew member to vomit, as sure as the sun rises in the east. And you have to keep picking the net.
When you’re done, you hit the deck with bucket after bucket of water, trying to clear the gelatinous putrescence. Bits of the ghost rider turn up for days in hidden corners where you drop a glove or a tide chart. The smell sticks around. Just like a ghost.
It is undoubtedly the worst natural odor I’ve ever experienced.
And then there was Bob.
Bob was an ex-carnie from the Lower 48 who came to Alaska for one fishing season twelve years back and found selling cocaine so profitable that he stayed.
Bob was missing half his teeth and one of his eyes. He had blurry blue tattoos on his arms, chest, and neck. He was muscular but in a very animal way, like he could drop to all fours and give a pit bull a run for his money. He had a gruff, growling voice when he spoke, which wasn’t often. He was the meanest, roughest-looking guy I’ve ever met. Hands down, no contest.
It turned out his reticence wasn’t a boiling disposition. Bob was just very shy. He was one of the sweetest guys on the crew, although I didn’t learn that until the following year fishing herring, because I was frankly afraid to get near the man.
But Bob etched a place in my heart one afternoon on the water. He turned his back to me to relieve himself over the bow of the boat, wrestling with his rain gear and various layers of undergarments, and over his shoulder he grunted:
“Well, goddamn if this ain’t the dictionary definition of frustration.”
“What’s that, Bob?”
“Tryin’ to pull three inches of dick through four inches of clothes.”
So true, Bob. So true.
