Going Home: If you chase fish long enough, sometimes they lead you home

Gierach

Introduction

Water collects in the deeply rutted highway, is sprayed across the lanes by vehicles, then runs back into the chutes. It’s a bad time to be on the sidewalk, especially if a truck hasn’t passed for a few minutes. The storm which brings the rain also kicks up the narrows and gently rolls the fishing boats in the harbor. It doesn’t bother the seagulls which look for the last of the salmon pushed down the swollen river. Some never made it up to the spawning grounds and the mix of fresh and salt water combined with time has them slowly rotting. They painfully prowl the rocky shore waiting for the end. If the gulls get at them, they’re lucky to keep their eyes before they die. If not, awakened by the pecking, they meander blind - their final hours dark and brutal.

Their instinct to survive led them back here, just across from the café where I’m eating smoked salmon and eggs with coffee. Some tried the falls and failed. Some made it up the creek to smooth, thin water to spawn, then died. The cycle will repeat uninterrupted whether the fish I see would have made it or not. This whole scene is tragic only if the fish knows, or to an observer who contemplates depth. The salmon have escaped untold dangers from infancy and during their long cycle in the ocean to return to their natal river. I’m back where I started too. I’ve seen death, but not known it. I’ve seen falls. Made it up some, others, I don’t know. I do know that there will be more, and I hope it’s a long time until the gulls show up to pluck my eyes.

Most of the time I’m not that serious. But when I’m away from the simplicity of fishing, hiking, hunting or making jokes at my own expense in print, I’ll occasionally wonder how I got here. Life doesn’t work on a plot diagram. There isn’t an inciting incident leading to a climax. If anything, it’s inverted. Life moves steady, then dips. When it does you hope it’s a hole, not a chasm, and at some point you get out. My life was a string of fishing stories until it got serious and I had to combat real things I thought were for older people. I’m back to fishing stories again which is nice, but I’ve gained a little perspective. What follows is a memoir told in essays, most of which were published at some point somewhere, but needed a common thread to tell a larger story. I wouldn’t consider these pages an edited version of my life, but rather the exciting parts with commentary and a fishy motif. I was tempted to change some of the diary-type free writes I used in a feeble attempt to articulate answers to questions I didn’t know to ask, but decided to go with the feeling of the moment, and not edit with the benefit of hindsight. In other cases I filled in some gaps. What was left was this memoir about universal contemplations regarding identity, purpose, direction and death on highways and rivers from California to Alaska.

Part I

The first years

When my parents finished college the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, they enrolled in a teacher placement program that would send them packets on school districts with openings around the country. My parents started their careers in Ordway but were frequently enticed by exotic and not too exotic locations away from the flat half of the Centennial State. Twice my parents were set to move and Dad had even accepted a job but returned to Ordway when students came by the house to tell Dad how much he would be missed. Dad didn’t feel he could leave, so we didn’t. I was either not old enough or not born enough to remember any of these decisions.

My memory starts shortly after placement information from Alaska arrived. Alaska then seemed to be the ultimatum. It was Ordway indefinitely, or a new exciting story in Alaska. It would be impossible to properly state the directional change this would bring the family, but there was something about moving to the wilds of the North (and double the salary) that my parents could not resist. The 1980s were a blank-check period for Alaska, and Dad would make twice what he did in Colorado, so we moved without Mom even having a job. We left the plains of Colorado in the summer of 1986 for Klawock, Alaska, a town of 700 on an island in Southeast Alaska, to join a surprising amount of other educators who had been driven north from Montana, Colorado or Kansas.

My memories are limited since we moved when I was five. Dad remembered driving off the ferry into the unlit night of an island thousands of miles from comfortable familiarity. Mom remembered thinking of her expensive china rattling in boxes as the station wagon bounced down the gravel highway toward our new home. My brother Mark remembered climbing out of the car in the rain and dark to repack the dishes. I guess I was asleep because I don’t remember a car ride or dishes. The way my mind recalls the first days; it was sunny, there were a billion trees, endless water and kids playing on the side of a hill with Matchbox cars. I had always liked playing with cars in the mud, so I had no objections to our new digs because it came with built-in friends. That fall, Dad started as the new music teacher, Mom had a long-term substitute job as Mark’s third grade teacher and I started kindergarten. Mark and I developed friendships with kids our own age for the most part, but in such a small community friends overlap. When there was an age split, Alaska provided plenty of forest for his friends and they vanished beyond the safe radius of home, only to return and ambush us, hurling pine cones and inciting a war that would last until someone was hit in the face or it was time for dinner.

The few deciduous trees began their transformation amid the evergreens. The days of rain and a high of sixty degrees became rainy days with a high of forty. We welcomed the snow as a break from the cold and wet. Usually it was a light dusting sometime in October, followed by substantial accumulation then out came the sleds.

Totem Pole Park was a grassy slope that crested into a plateau providing a panoramic view of the harbor and bay. During sledding season, it was the best hill in town. On long Saturday afternoons that chapped our skin and sucked our energy, Dad would hoist the video camera on his shoulder and document our runs, whispering the obvious like a low-budget hunting show. The season wasn’t continuous though, and rain inevitably turned the hill’s puffy frosting to gray slush. An overnight low would then encase the town in ice.

Mark and I shared similar interests and chores, but we had the familiar filial rivalry. When I was in third grade, we moved away from the sledding hill to a house with a bunch of new chores. Dad would take us to school an hour before the first bell and we played basketball. Even during the winter, when the temperature dropped below freezing or powdery snow whirled under the covered play area onto the cement basketball court, we still played. Some days there would be six of us, skin red from exposure, blood frozen in elbowed noses.

Once fishing was done for the year, basketball monopolized the town’s attention and energy which is why it was worth it to endure those cold mornings. The mood of the town was directly impacted by the score the night before. Dad directed the pep band, so I always had a ride and never missed a game. In elementary school I snuck candy into the gym and watched the high schoolers who were so big and fast. One day that would be me.

My academic path continued as any normal kids’ would. Elementary school was a blur of numbers, letters, catching fish in tide pools, and fundraising for class trips. We raffled guns, knives, dinners and had bake sales and dances. After school the boys would gather at the river fishing or picking up crabs off the beach and bringing them home, fort building, tree-chopping, fishing and layers of dirt and sweat. Cleanliness became more relevant to a fish with no guts than hands without dirt.

In the spring Little League started. When I first started playing baseball the backstop was old fishing nets nailed to green boards, a perfect shade that blended nicely into the forest, though it provided little protection. A teammate standing took a foul ball to the face as the net did little to stop the trajectory. A gymnasium is a staple with new high schools, baseball fields are not, for the simple reasons of cost and popularity. Many of the diamonds were little more than treeless clearings. Outfields were gravel or moss and, if the team was lucky, grass. Infields were crushed rock so the field would drain well enough as to not force cancellations on account of the rain. Gravel scars on knees, shins and elbows became badges of honor. I spent most of my time at shortstop fielding weird hops off patches of loose gravel or golfball-sized stones. Deep shots to right field sometimes landed on the beach. There were no fences, so nothing officially signified a home run, but retrieving a ball from the rocky beach (or from the ocean if it was high tide) in time to make a throw to the cut-off man and then to home was essentially impossible.

Fielding teams wasn’t easy on a island with a few thousand people. The league managed to field six or so co-ed teams from around the island, some parents dodging deer for more than an hour to get their kids to practice. By the time I had reached Little League, the old backstop was replaced with a chain-link fence and the massive boulder that slightly protruded near second base was removed. Another important modification was the snack bar. On particularly nasty spring afternoons where teams were indecipherable since everyone was wearing winter jackets and exhaling clouds of warm breath, my coach took half a dozen balls, and put them in the oven of the snack bar along next to the hot dogs.

Hey, if you need a ball, get one from me, not the ump, okay? he said with a half smile as he placed the heated ball in my glove.

The summer months are the reason Alaskans tolerate the cold seasons. Some families visited relatives in Montana, Colorado or Oregon, but always returned in time to enjoy the vibrant summer life. Others simply went to Seattle for a couple days. As the school year ended and gave way to summer we’d head back to Colorado for a month or so. When I was old enough, I signed up for Little League in Greeley, where my grandparents lived. It started before my school year was over, so I would have to join the team after the season was underway.

I had a dual existence. For nine months out of the year I fished, shot hoops, burned broken branches, hiked and camped. The remaining three months I did what Coloradans did, and attempted to fit in. I still had a good time, but I was careful not to get too Alaskan and risk being ostracized. Bike rides to the store, or walking around the mall replaced my treks to the river and into the woods. My parents used the vacations to show us what was out beyond the island. As a result, big cities didn’t intimidate me. Being in downtown amid the vertical blocks of Denver, Los Angeles and Seattle, and traveling alone built up my tolerance for life away from the sound of trees growing and the tide coming in and out twice a day.

Fattening up for the winter

When my time at my grandparents’ house in Colorado ended I returned home with a renewed sense of adventure. Colorado provided a different forum which satisfied my desire for a fast-paced lifestyle. Back home, still reddened from the thin-aired sunburn, my friends and I reconvened for long afternoons outside. In the weeks that passed while I was away, vegetation exploded thanks to eighteen-hour days. The shoulders of gravel roads were overtaken by berry bushes and alder trees. Long strips of fireweed colonies provided a red contrast to the greens and browns.

But nothing really changed. Life crept. People still walked from their homes to the store, and back again with a plastic bag or two of groceries only without a winter jacket. At the post office, people chatted, then engaged in more conversation as they walked down the covered breezeway that lead to the grocery store. Trucks stopped in the middle of the road for casual chats, or until traffic urged them along. There was no honking, just a slow deceleration and patient creeping until the motorist bid farewell and continued along. And of course, being back meant it was time to fish.

At the time I was too young to step back and see just how rampant fish was used in my life. During the late summer and fall it was a verb. After school in the spring it was an adjective modifying the type of net. It was a noun when Dad cooked it on the grill with brown sugar and season salt. Catching fish meant fun, killing them meant food, helping to raise them meant a paycheck. Maybe that’s why I fell so hard for it again after I left. I don’t recall ever saying I loved it. It’s just what we did. Basketball got the modifiers because you have to love things when you are in high school, and there were levels of competitive achievement. There was no hierarchy of fishing. It was assumed that most people caught fish, so there was no real reason to state what was understood.

As the days shortened and summer ended, my brother and I supplemented our family trips to the river with our own adventures. He had a 10-speed, I putted behind with a Huffy. He’d burst ahead, then loop around taunting me. After we moved from the hill across town, we began fishing with our neighbor who was a year older than my brother. Since he knew better it officially became taboo to keep anything but a coho salmon. Thanks to ridicule from friends for bringing home pink salmon when so many coho were available, we learned what was socially acceptable and fished accordingly.

A few years into my family’s Alaskan adventure, my parents bought a boat. Even though I was young and spent most of my time sleeping in the bow, I helped Dad sort out the male Dungeness crab that were big enough to keep from the females that we threw back. We bought a few shrimp pots once we had crabbing down and caught exactly four during our first set. There was stress, and plenty of empty pots, but the result is never really the only point, especially in hindsight.

Whenever our salt water episodes fell into a nice routine, the engine caught bronchitis and coughed till it stopped, leaving us stranded somewhere between adrift and shipwrecked. If the kicker was healthy, Dad, veins bulging, would man the controls of the 15-horse motor, as I slept. It shouldn’t be too surprising then that I developed a stronger liking to the control of river fishing to that of ocean. I could walk, move and see the fish for the most part. Ocean fishing relied on tides, trust and a 45-minute run to some spot where the fish might be. Even then, you could spend three hours missing king salmon by 20 feet in any direction. If the weather is particularly sporty, you can still feel like you are on a boat the next morning. My brother didn’t mind, mostly because he was patient. I preferred the river.

As my brother and I got more involved in school and sports, and the boat engine broke down with greater frequency, it was pulled from the water and took its place on our property where it sat until someone offered to buy it. For something like $1500 it was pulled out of the driveway forever.

No Child Left Behind

Middle school was grades six through eight. The middle school was a pair of double-wide trailers down the hill from the rest of the school. For those three years, we had a break from the other building that housed every other student in the district. I would like to pretend that we were able to look beyond the inevitabilities of pre-and early teen development, but we had girl problems, cliques, smack talk and jostling for political power. Words and actions had to replace the simplicity of building forts and pine cone wars, though we still thought everything could be solved over a little campfire in the woods. Summers were spent working, usually as a hand in the fishing industry, and couldn’t be wasted running amuck as before. Chores around the house intensified, and rather than helping, tasks were left solely in our charge. The introduction of hard work hardened us a bit, either from the reluctance to let go of the world we had conquered, or seeing we might possibly be already starting our careers.

If ever there was a place today in which kids could see past the you need to know this, it is Alaska. Many of my schoolmates knew college was a fantasy, or a waste of money, since they could