Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Sunday, August 24, 2014
The FisherPoets Anthology is a Reality. And it's for sale!
Labels:
anthology,
Bering Sea,
books,
commercial fishing,
Cook Inlet,
crabbing,
family,
Fisherpoets,
fishing,
gathering,
history,
ocean,
Price William Sound,
risk,
sea,
survival
Saturday, June 29, 2013
This is for my friend Cyndi and her son, Logan
Thirst
I sat alone with my dying friend
in the back room of her house, where she reclined
on a bed of pillows. It was getting close,
and even the ice chips weren’t effective any more.
She was delirious and drugged, just like mom
all those years ago in the hospital back in
Logansport,
lost in the morphine of that Indiana spring. I sat
next to her
for hours that night, trying to slip between the
haze
of the drips sliding into her arm; to find my way
in once more,
back to her heart. But it was a closed system, and
I was empty
and outside it. All I have is her brief surfacing
long enough to flutter her eyelids like butterfly
kisses, and
(is this memory or what I wanted to
happen?)
– a reach of her hand to mine.
I know she said, “Oh, you’re here.” And I was, even
now.
I thought of that moment as I sat vigil next to my
friend,
and considered what it was I wanted to say to her,
her son in the next room with other family and
friends.
Her eyes opened wide then, and she sat upright. In
a rush
she threw her legs over the edge of the bed, and
tried to stand.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked as I gently
stopped her.
“I have to leave.”
“I know. Wait a little bit first, ok?”
She sat back. I struggled to find my words, and
watched her
raise a glass that only she could see to her lips,
lips that hadn’t felt a sip of water for days.
She took a long drink. She looked at me as she
wiped her mouth
with the back of her hand. “You know it’s ok, don’t
you?” I whispered,
my throat suddenly parched. “We’ll take care of
him.”
She nodded as if she heard me and relaxed a bit.
I helped her lie back down on her pillows.
I don’t know if I got through to her either. It
seemed to me
she was breathing a little easier when I finally
tiptoed from the room
on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
The Guitar
Though this one isn't about fishing, it has a bit of it tucked inside...flavored with how hard it was to leave fishing and Alaska for me, and the first steps I took to recover. But mostly this is about my brother, Mike. I feel a need to provide a disclaimer here that is extremely important: I have a wonderful family. Both my brothers and my sister are kind, loving and thoughtful people, and the families they have created, one and all, and I know this is unbelievable to many people, but it's true: are all a fantastic bunch of folks I am proud to call family and delighted to know. This story is just one special example of how I feel about them all... except maybe for Jeff, Mike's son. And my two sons, Dylan and Kessler. Except for them, and oh, yeah, Jeanne. And Amy. And, well, Monte and his daughter Savannah. But that's all. Really. Well, there IS Mike Smith... heh.
________________________
I opened the door of the apartment to find a tall cardboard
box on the top step. Reaching over the top of it with his hand holding the
electronic signature pad was the man in brown. "Package for Patrick
Dixon," he said. "Sign here."
Surprised, I took the pad, signed it and gave it back.
"Have a Merry Christmas," he said, and walked back down the sidewalk
to his truck. It pulled away as I read the return address, from Mike Dixon in Maryland. No mistake, then. My brother, the woodworker, the
musician, eight years older than I, and the one who had shown up unannounced with
his wife Alice on our doorstep in Olympia a year ago to help my family get
settled three days after we moved here from Alaska, had sent this package. I
picked it up and carried it into the dim living room of our cheap rental
duplex.
"Who was that?" asked Veronica.
"UPS. A package from Mike." I walked into the
kitchen and grabbed a paring knife out of the laminated wooden knife block Mike
made us years ago.
"Your brother?"
"Yeah."
"What is it?"
"No idea."
"Well open it and find out." She came into the
living room, wiping her hands with a towel.
Of all my siblings, it's ironic that I feel closest to the
one who tortured me the most while growing up. Mike sat on my six-year-old
chest as a fourteen-year-old and dangled spit in my face and sprinkled handfuls
of grass in my eyes and mouth; Mike would play "Patrick is a fat
boy," on his guitar just to make me angry whenever the family was gathered
around to hear him play; Mike was the one who held the lazy-Susan with his
thumb when we were eating dinner one night with mom and dad and I was trying to
turn it. When I pulled harder, he let go and the pitcher of milk flew onto
dad's plate, spilling in his lap. I was the one who got sent to my room without
dinner. Yet it was Mike who loaned us the last $2,000 we needed to seal the
deal on our fishing permit when we bought in twenty years ago. It was Mike who decided
to come to Alaska and be with me after our mom died, and I couldn't afford to go
to the funeral.
I ran the knife along the seam of the cardboard, cut open the
top and peered in. A round, black shape was there, made of some sort of vinyl.
I put the box on its side and pulled out a guitar case. "Oh, my God,"
I breathed. "It's a guitar!" Mike had been promising to make me a
guitar for two years, ever since he'd converted his wooden cutting board and
humidor business into hand-making custom guitars. An accomplished musician, he worked
with wood for most of his career, and nearing retirement decided to reinvent
himself as a custom guitar builder. I had jokingly been asking him, "Where
is my guitar?" every time we talked on the phone since.
What slid out of the case was not a guitar he had made, but
one of the several he had collected over the past couple of decades. Hand-built
to Mike’s specifications by a craftsman from Hawaii, it was a jumbo cutaway - a
guitar I had played and admired the last time we had visited in Maryland a few
years before. Inlay abalone doves on the neck, the box was polished bubinga
wood with more abalone along the edge of the top and down the center of the
back. It was a work of art.
For a brief moment I strummed the strings. The sound was deep
and warm, like diving into a tropical lagoon of resonance. It was too much. I
didn’t deserve this gift. Mike was an accomplished guitarist, while I fumbled
at it at best. Suddenly overwhelmed at what I held in my hands, I felt the
crush of what to me had been a year of bad decisions press down upon me. Nine months
ago we packed up the home we built in Alaska and moved to Washington for a job
at the local state college that hadn’t gone well. For 23 years I was proud to call
myself an Alaskan and a commercial fisherman. But last spring we sold the house,
the boat and permit, and I nose-dived into a different lagoon: one filled with
the cold water of depression and self-doubt. Our family was in crisis. More
than once I had gotten into my truck and driven off, intending never to return,
heading north, heading east, heading anywhere but here. And suddenly in my
hands was this thing of beauty and creativity, and I could neither accept it nor
give it back. To Veronica’s amazement, I slid it back into its case and clipped
the latches.
“Aren’t you going to play it?’
“Maybe later,” I answered, and for a short moment that
evening I did. When my twelve-year-old son Dylan went to bed, I pulled it out
and sat on his bed and played in the dark. In a letter I wrote to Mike three
months later, I described the experience:
I closed my eyes and played...and the music
filled the room. Full and deep, my fingers felt as if they were touching glass,
not wood and metal. Even my voice, my rhythm, my soul resonated in ways I never
felt before. I played the guitar far less than it played me.
Afterwards, even more besieged by my feelings, I put it back
in the case and avoided it. After the emotion of the moment faded, Veronica and
I talked it out in the dark of our bedroom and I did my best to explain my
feelings, but I’m sure I was less than honest – even with myself – and far from
articulate. Inside I continued to dance around the fire of my own self-immolation,
burning brightly against the darkness surrounding me, and the gift that my
brother sent me sat silent in its case in the corner.
*
By March the rains of that first winter in Olympia began to
ease. We bought a yellow house in a wooded neighborhood that promised to be a
better fit for us. As we prepared to move, my sixteen-year-old son Kessler was
packing boxes in the basement of the duplex. He picked up the box the guitar
had shipped in, and out fell a plastic bag with documents about the guitar in
it. There were picks, strings, the receipt and a letter. Kessler bounded up the
stairs and said, “Dad! Look what I
found!” waving the bag at me.
Indeed.
The letter is dated December 21, 1998. Winter solstice, the
darkest day of the year, at 3:00 am. In it, my brother describes the forces
that mysteriously wake us up in the middle of the night with their voices
echoing in our ears, telling us what we need to do. Somehow he knew how hard my
life had become, how the trough of my sea was threatening to drown me, and that
this, this gift was not a Christmas present – the timing just happened to be the same, he said – but was a
lifeline, a buoy for me to grab to pull myself up to the next crest. In pencil,
I still have his counsel:
Use it wisely. When in doubt about future
decisions concerning life’s crossroads – meditate with it. It’s like a wisdom
tonic if you use it appropriately. Strum it softly and it will speak back to
you... it is a magic wand which I can only loan you. I don’t really own it. I
just happened to possess it for awhile and then pass it on. Someday you do the
same.
After reading the letter for the first time, I walked into
the living room where the guitar had spent the first three months of its stay
with me, and it was halfway out of its case when I opened the lid. It seemed to
leap into my hands. Together we went outside and sat on the step in front of
the duplex I was happy to be leaving – the same step I stood on three months
earlier when it arrived – and we played. And as we played I began to understand
that life is full of changes. Some we control, some we don’t. Some we choose,
and sometimes those choices don’t work out as we intended. Some changes come to
us dressed in cardboard, yet contain gifts beyond measure. I still play – not
as often as I feel I should, but each time I do, I think of my brother Mike –
and how lucky I am to have him in my life.
Labels:
Alaska,
brother,
depression,
family,
guitar,
selling out
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
So Much Has Gone
I got an email from a good friend
in Kenai the other day who said she'd gone down to the old Columbia Wards'
Cannery I used spend my summers at as a fisherman - and the warehouse where I'd
spent so much of my time, where my locker was, where I stored supplies, used
the crane to haul shackles of web up and down from the loft, where I'd driven
my truck to grab gear, driven forklifts to haul it, where fishermen for decades
hung their nets, where I'd walked hundreds of times with my camera, was no
longer there. Gone were the beefy rafters in the egg house, where cannery
workers of all nationalities scrawled their names and the years they worked in
the plant – some of them as far back as the 1920’s, when the cannery was
rebuilt after the fire. But now that warehouse was no more. The entrepreneur
who bought the cannery after Wards' Cove shuttered it in 2000 decided it was a
bad investment and sold the warehouse for its lumber - old growth Douglas firs
made up those massive rafters. Work crews tore down the structure this past
summer, hauling the pieces away while the fishermen who used to dock there tied
their boats to buoys downriver, and like all good fishermen paid more attention
to the fish, the winds and the tides than to a piece of their history sinking
in their wake.
I've visited the cannery every
time I've returned to Kenai since I moved away in 1998. Far more so than
Indiana, where I spent my childhood, it was really where I grew up, and it had always
been a second home to me. Except for when they were rebuilding right after the
sale - putting in a restaurant and making hotel rooms out of the old fishermen
bunkhouses - it felt like a ghost town. Through the thin veil of time and
memory, I could hear in my mind fishermen long gone still laughing on the dock;
forklift backup alarms beeping as they moved fish totes into the freezer plant
from the dock; boats starting up with the throaty roar only a Jimmy can make.
I thought about what to write in tribute to this passing, and decided I
needed to re-publish the following piece. It's about a warehouse that's
fortunate to be still standing across the Inlet. Some fishermen (not
entrepreneurs) bought it a few years ago. They're trying to keep it alive and
working - not as a cannery, but as a lodge. They haven't changed it much, from
what I've been told. They're trying to keep it from going further into
disrepair. They "get" what it is that they purchased.
------------------------
Snug
Harbor Cannery
Chisik
Island, Alaska
Deck slippers sound muffled
on wood. The thick plank floor of the cannery, worn smooth by decades of
footsteps, transmits the noise of my passing with little more than a whisper. I
walk back in time. My eyes adjust to dim yellow light. I pick my way through
strewn manila line and coiled electrical cords. The warehouse echoes silently
in my head with years of engine repairs and assembly-line canning of salmon.
Rusted saws and axes still lean against rough-hewn plank walls and stout
support beams. Palette after palette of diesel boat engines wait silently in a
row, wrapped in dust-covered plastic. Nets bundled in torn and ragged burlap
bags sit piled high in dark, forgotten corners like old fat men in a steam bath.
Nestled sheets of fiberglass roofing lean against a wall beneath broken
windows.
Below my feet I can hear
the small waves of the incoming tide roll the gravel of this remote Alaskan
beach. The warehouse sits on pilings above the tide line of Tuxedni Bay,
Alaska. Mesmerized, I drift up the stairs to the web loft, where I find wooden
floors worn smooth and bare with years of dragging nets and line to racks for
mending or hooks for hanging. Outboard motors hang in a row on racks of their
own under a ceiling of huge, latticed wooden beams. The immensity of the
structure, of the beams themselves, lends a cathredral-like quality to the
experience of standing under them. They are dark and dry, old-growth Doug fir I
am told years after, with deep, rough grooves in their sides and white and
yellow words and numbers scrawled on them. “Gebenini,” “Mohr,” “Humbolt,
“Showalter,” “63,64,65,” 58, 59, 60.” “Tanaka, 34.”
Over the years, countless
cannery workers, tendermen and fishermen crawled high among these rafters to
write their names. After their names they put the dates of the summers they
spent working the cannery: from as recently as last year to well before I was
born. Filipino names, Japanese names, Italian, Norwegian, Native Alaskan. Some
with only one date after them, others with repeated, sequential numbers,
testifying to summer after summer spent working fish. The gear locker
doors below the beams display more names written in marker pen. Names crossed
out, one after another, in a legacy of the owners of the lockers’ contents,
until only one was left uncrossed: Hoyt: -xed-out; Pugh: -xed-out; Hansen:
-xed-out; “Thompson.” Behind the mute locker wire wait stores of gear: buoys,
line, nets, props. I find a piece of chalk on the floor near one locker door
and bend down and pick it up. I look up, and for a moment consider writing my
name, too. But I am only a green deckhand at the start of my first season, and
I think I haven’t yet earned the privilege. Maybe another year, if I survive.
So I put the chalk down, and walk away.
Ten years later, after ten
seasons fishing as a crew and skipper, after finally learning ropes I hadn’t
even realized were there to learn, and learning how to catch fish, fix boats
and survive rough weather, I return, this time looking for chalk. I find it,
pretty much where I'd left it.
***
Ten years after that I find
myself back again, this time with my eleven-year-old son. Together we climb the
old stairs to the loft. I show him my name on a beam near the windows, and the
years that are written next to it. There are some more to add today. It is his
third season with me, and neither of us know it’s to be our last. I ask him if
he wants to put his name up there too, next to mine. Together we find half a
piece of chalk on a table filled with old mending twine and needles. As I had
done alone so many years ago, together we climb steep steps up to the planks
that weave through the center of the latticed rafters. We lie down and stretch,
one at a time, to reach the beam waiting for us. Our beam. It’s just above the
window that looks out on Tuxedni Bay. Looks out on Snug Harbor. I add my years
to the space beyond my name, then hand him the chalk. “Hang on a minute,” I
say. I go down the stairs, and as he writes his name above mine, I take his
photograph.
***
After the film is
developed, back at home later that month we see it together: the picture is dim
and blurred, but he is there forever, more in my mind’s eye than on the film,
writing his name upon the rafters of our history, of our past, of our lives.
In her email about the Kenai
warehouse, my friend said, "I was blown away by the size of the area it
enclosed." That's true in more ways than one.
Labels:
Alaska,
cannery,
commercial fishing,
CWF,
family,
fishing,
history,
Kenai,
Snug Harbor,
Wards Cove,
warehouse
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Fukishima and my granddaughter
The 9.0 earthquake that generated the tidal wave that took out four nuclear reactors on the northeastern coast of Japen occurred March 11, 2011. A little over a year later, Ella Dixon Geyer was born, on April 28, 2012. This is a short poem about those two very disparate, but powerful events.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Same-Sex Marriage - Destructive? Really?
>Let me get this straight...Charlie Sheen can make a "porn family", Kelsey Grammer can end a 15 year marriage over the phone, Larry King can be on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with EVERYONE. Yet, the idea of same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really? Really? *sigh*
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Fallout
We need to respond to what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico with all the creative energy we can bring to bear. This is so huge in such a negative way, if you are someone who is disturbed by what is slowly smothering us day by day, then let's rise up and DO something about it. Join together. Create. Write songs, poems, stories real and imagined; paint, draw, photograph, sculpt, carve. Create a body of work as vast in scope and size as this ever-growing spill, and let the oil companies and politicians know how many people all over the world are being affected by this catastrophe!
Send examples of your creations or post them on the new Facebook Page: "Artists Respond to the Gulf Oil Spill."
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Artists-Respond-to-the-Gulf-Oil-Spill/122378651135559
Here's one from me, written 21 years ago, after the Exxon Valdez disaster:
Fallout
Innocence in your eyes,
you ask,
"Daddy, we will be safe from the oil?"
I swallow hard.
How can I say to you,
"No! One day it or something like it
something we have created
something I have given my blessing to
(if only by my silence)
will kill us all."
instead I lie,
"Yes, punkin. We'll be safe."
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