The Cards Do the Talking, Part 3

After standing frustrated on the dock all that first day, we met at Chris’s house to hash things out. We decided that as much as wanted to fish, we wouldn’t go until we got a straight answer from someone who knew what that would mean. We agreed my first skipper, Jim, would be the person to ask. He had experience and perspective, and he would be honest with me. I’d ask him the next day if it looked like the strike would continue.

         I found Jim at mug-up the next morning. The canneries hadn’t budged on the price, and there was a growing tension and an angry tone to the fishermen’s talk around us as I asked him if we could have a private conversation on his boat, the North Sea, after coffee. He agreed, tight-lipped with a short nod of his head.  I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking naive, perhaps sensitive questions of him in public, so I left him in the mug-up room with the old-timers, and walked out to the boardwalk to listen to the fishermen complain: “Fuckin’ canneries. They can settle this in a heartbeat if they wanted to.”  “No use fer us to sit on the beach, goddamit.” This is a waste of time. I swear I’m leavin’. I’m sellin’ downriver if this doesn’t end soon.  We’re always gettin’ the lowest fuckin’ price. Fuck these guys.” It was the beginning of a long education.

The Skookum Too and other vessels tied to the

 dock at Columbia Wards Fisheries, Kenai, c. 1983.

         I joined Jim half-an-hour later in the cabin of the North Sea. I sat in the doorway as he worked on a windshield-wiper motor. His actions were slow and deliberate. So was his speech. “You don’t want to go fishing, Pat. Not during a strike. I know how bad you want to go, but you risk losing a lot more than a few dollars if you do.” He told me a story of a guy who had done just that, years ago. He fished while everyone else was on the beach striking, and for that he was ostracized by his friends and competitors alike. Other fishermen quit talking to him, even the cannery workers lost respect for him, and as a result he always had trouble getting the services he needed, couldn’t count on help if he got in trouble, and lost the friendships and support he had taken for granted when he decided to make money at someone else’s expense. After years of diminished support, he eventually sold out. His reputation followed him, though, when he moved to the Bay, and he eventually got out of fishing altogether. “You don’t want that,” he advised with a shake of his head as he tightened a screw on the wiper motor and looked over his glasses at me. “That’s not the way to start your fishing career.”

         I sat on the step of the cabin and nodded. We visited for a few more minutes, and then I thanked him and took the long walk up the ramp to meet Chris, Gigi and Veronica. “What’d he say?” they asked.

We stayed off the grounds with the rest of the fleet until the canneries upped their price a week later. Wrapped in that decision was my first realization that I was really a fisherman, not an outsider looking in. In the meantime, we couldn’t stand not using this boat we’d spent so long getting ready to fish. We loaded her up with sport fishing rods and a case of beer and went trolling for salmon in the river mouth. The other fishermen thought we were crazy, and of course they were right. But that’s another story.

Waiting to fish: the lower floats at  CWF, c. 1980.

The Cards Do the Talking, Part 2

Here is the next installment. I'm going to try and keep these at 500 words or so, so you don't feel overwhelmed with the reading. There is a tense change here - from present to past. Which do you like better? Let me know...

We were stunned. What does this mean? We asked. Who is on strike? Everyone? We found it hard to believe that every boat in the Inlet, over 700 of them, were all in agreement to do this. We were teachers, for Chrissakes! We’d never experienced a group of teachers agreeing to do something like this. They couldn’t even agree on what made a student tardy rather than absent. Shit.

We asked ourselves WHY are we striking? For a better price? Why? What’s wrong with the price we have? We had no knowledge of markets, of expenses vs earnings, of price-fixing or what was fair or not. All we had experienced since the decision to get involved in fishing was the hard work. Now we had to deal with politics???  “Bullshit. Let’s just go fishing,” we argued to ourselves, “Let these guys work out this crap. We need to figure out how to catch fish.” Plus, we reasoned, we’ve got a ton of debt to recover. Our expenses were overwhelming. “We can’t afford to sit at the dock and wait for the processors to come to us. We need to start making money NOW!”

         I was a teacher before I fished. I knew intellectually that breaking a strike was the wrong thing to do. It had always been a no-brainer to me that if a teacher strike were voted, to be an effective tool everyone needed to participate. My confusion in the matter wasn’t about my belief in supporting a strike. The problem I had was that I didn’t see myself as a fisherman. I bought a permit and a boat; I worked as hard as anyone I saw to get ready for the season; but I still hadn’t fished a day in my life other than as a deckhand; I hadn’t yet earned the right to be a card-carrying member of the club. No one had shown me the secret handshake. I supposed I’d merit it eventually, but until then, I was just a “teacher who fished.” The concerns of the fishermen weren’t my concerns, really, were they? If I went fishing while the rest of the guys were on the beach, how could my small effort create a problem for all these other professionals?

         But the other fishermen around the cannery who saw us as green and dumb made it a point to talk about strikebreakers when we were around. As the first scheduled fishing period loomed, they mentioned guys who had gone fishing during the last strike, in less than complimentary terms. Though the stories weren’t clear or complete, we started listening more attentively. They were speaking about us, to us, without ever actually mentioning our names.

In the fishermen's bunkhouse, CWF, Kenai.