My hands are laborer's hands; large, ugly mits with dry, veined skin. I can smash things with my laborer's hands, can violate a guitar with intention, can pick my nose with expert precision...no booger is safe in my nose...can give a decent back rub...but I can't, it seems, fish very well with my land loving paws.
A few weeks ago I went Halibut fishing 27 miles off the Olympic Peninsula in 35 ft Wellcraft with three other men. After an hour long ride that pounded the piss out of me (especially since I was nursing a few cracked ribs left over from Cinco De Mayo), we found the coordinates Capt. Rusty had been given by one of his clients, where we were sure to catch our one fish per person limit in a matter of minutes.
Sure enough, less than five minutes after dumping my three pound lead ball weighted line, baited with frozen fish bits, 520 ft down, I felt the familiar pull, like a pal with something urgent to say tugging at your sleeve.
"Reel him in!" someone yelled. I then began a fifteen minute struggle to commit fish murder.
To my surprise, my hands gave out very quickly. It was like a switch had been turned off. The muscular power in my hands and arms was halved and I wasn't even a quarter of the way through my battle. As I gasped and shouted obscenities Capt. Rusty remarked, "I'd help you, but that's against the rules". I didn't want any damn help. My biggest fear was that I'd lose my grip and his 600$ designer fish slayer would be lost. I had 50$ for gas...losing equipment wasn't in the budget.
The victim didn't seem to struggle against my line, but to hang limp and heavy; it was like pulling up a large piece of plywood out of 500ft of molasses. I struggled and batched, rested and bitched and struggled some more.
After what seemed like a half an hour, mercifully, his green-gray body appeared next to the boat. Gasping for air, my arms useless rubbery flesh, I gazed down at him anxious to see what he was. As I was making out the size and form of him, Capt. Rusty, balanced next to me (as the boat rocked and careened) thrust a harpoon through the poor creature and pulled him up out of his home and onto our boat in one quick murderous maneuver, where he removed the harpoon and began clubbing him on the side of his head with a small steel pipe. The Halibut gagged for life, opening his strange mouth as if a sound would issue forth, but there was only the sound of me chasing my breath and the other men whooping and cheering me as he bled around our feet and succumbed.
In no time three more fish between thirty and fifty pounds were harpooned, clubbed and stuffed into holds on either side of our boat. Soon we were ankle deep in bloody water that sloshed and splashed around us as the boat danced and bowed in the swells. Capt. Rusty surveyed the situation, bloody sea water trickling off his nose. Every few minutes one of the doors would rise and fall as our catch wriggled and jerked with echoes of life. My stomach, though medicated wanted to leap out of my mouth, so I gazed at the horizon as the others rested and discussed where we could go to catch some Cod.
I was done fishing. My fingers were unable to perform the delicated operations needed to switch weights, lures and baits...thus I was reduced to a fishing invalid and my mind drifted off from the tasks at hand. I left the others to the killing and couldn't stop thinking about my hands and their alarmingly quick loss of power (as I watched the others I soon discovered I was using the wrong form, all arms and no leaning and reeling, leaning and reeling, using weight instead of brute strength). I felt as meek as a kitten marveling at the outrageous power rolling and crashing all around us. I was a feather being tossed by the furies, a speck of drowsy dust on the tip of a sneeze.
My hands throbbed and we were lifted on a tremendous swell like the ocean took a deep breath. Capt. Rusty started screaming, it was a Grey Whale rolling on his side perhaps 50 yards from our boat. I was awed by the size of him and instantly concerned for our safety...Are we going to get smacked by that monster? My ribs were very tender and each unexpected lurch of the boat made me wince. What if we get thrown out? I couldn't swim with these ribs and my ruined arms, and what good would it be if I could swim, we were on our own!
The ocean has no sense of rhythm...at least not where we were. Capt. Rusty said "She doesn't know what the hell she wants to do today", as waves crashed into each other to form larger waves only to be nugged into submission by a gathering swell. The Gray was spotted again off in the distance and I relaxed as much as I could, trying not to look into the boat to keep from being sick.
We pounded around for three or four more hours in vain looking for Ling Cod. I was content to gaze at the giant cliffs near Rialto Beach as we worked our way back towards land. I pondered the last few minutes of my Halibut's life. Maybe it was getting close to lunch in his world. There he was, lurking about in the darkness, feeling a tad peckish when he saw what looked like (or smelled like) lunch, and the next thing he knows is the sense of being pulled, probably a first for him. As my arms reeled and reeled, he could feel my stregth waning. At some point he may have thought whatever force was pulling him was about to expire. Then there was this foreign light, then a piercing pain as the thrusting harpoon was sent home...then what? Was there pain...terror?
Back at La Push we docked our boat, got measured by a young woman who worked for the Government and ambled up a slippery plank to the cleaning station where men stood around in groups of three or four, cleaning the days catch and eyeing everyone else's. "Nice fish" a guy said to me as I carried the 30lb victim to his last station.
An eccentric Indian boy was pretending to be in charge of the place. I say eccentric because he spoke with a slight British accent and used a fake sing songy high pitch voice. I've never known a Native American to sound British so I kept my eye on him out of curiosity and because there was nothing else for me to do since the fingers in my left hand were numb and useless.
The boy fetched plastic bags from inside a small shed for us to put our meat in. "Here you are gentlemen" he said like a limey waiter. I watched Capt. Rusty deftly dismember my victim and felt a slight sense of shame for having murdered him, and an even deeper sense of shame and regret for not cleaning him. It was disrespectful, and made me look like an ingrate.
The British Indian boy played with the Halibut carcasses, skillfully removing organ systems, laying them out on the ground and examining them. He found a half digested fish in my victim's guts and held it up for me to see before tossing it to the crazed seagulls fighting and shrieking over discarded flesh. As I watched these giant birds swallowing large pieces of fish matter whole, a Sea Lion swam underneath a gull and swallowed most of him before thrashing him from side to side, completely obliterating the bird as his mates gazed upward to the heavens hysterical for more heads, innards and soft, slippery flesh, unaware of his demise.
As we left town, sitting in the back of an old Chevy pickup we saw a battered Ford upside down, fifteen feet up in a craggy dead tree with both doors hanging wide open like the wings of a dead bird. Tribal police stood outside their cars gazing at the truck like it was an alien craft. There was no ambulance, no one being arrested...just perplexed repose.
I watched the dilapidated homes file past as we drove slowly towards our cabin. There were no residents visible. It seemed like a ghost town but for the fishermen from out of town coming and going, towing giant boats; wide shouldered men in ball caps with thick wallets and coolers full of beer.
I thought of the curious, weird little boy who didn't seem to know who he was, holding up the yellowing eyes of my fish's last meal, the vicious power of the ocean and the savage, unromantic struggle for survival that teams all around us. And having glimpsed some of the larger, timeless, and terrifying realities we have managed through technology to run away from, I was, for the first time, fully aware of my complete and utter removal from them.
We are aliens.
