RUNNING WATER, SLIDING LAND
We went to the Land of Rushing Water to finish the season. Down and down in torrents, seeping, accumulating and rumbling out mouths of streams into the great pool, to the ocean. The fresh rainwater is the color of earl grey tea. We motored through it and displaced it and the native water, a milky blue green mint churned up in swirls.
The land surrounding Sitka is distinct from the South. The peaks more pointy, the pinnacles more jagged. It feels as if we’ve been transported to Fjords in Norway, or to the wilderness of Sweden. I said so to Amy one time too many and she told me to focus on fishing. I climbed down the ladder and said more or less the same thing in the galley. No one looked up from their books.
Sitka is a wonderful town. Sitka with trails, with a wonderful bookstore where I cash out my bank account. Sitka with a charming down town scene and a brewery. The Land of Rushing Water yielded deaths as we arrived. The night before we rolled into town after a wet, strange night of running and anchoring, running and anchoring through Peril Straight, there are massive landslides in the mountains and hills surrounding Sitka.
Two brothers were killed in a slide that swallowed their house in the middle of the night. In every shop and on the streets the talk was of these slides and the deaths. Perhaps other fishermen felt, as I did as if they’d walked into a sorrow, a moment in a community they had no right to witness or take part in.
The fleet was confronted with a loss of its own the next week. A skiff man from a friendly boat decided he wanted to jump off the Sitka Bridge, to swim ashore, for a rush, in the middle of a drunk closure night. They'd find his body two days later in the farthest harbor. He never came back up. I spoke to him the morning of his death, walking into town.
Upon hearing of the fisherman’s death, not knowing his identity, his face swam into focus in my mind's eye. I’ll never know how I knew. The following week, a man is stabbed in the chest in a bar fight. Just to the left of his heart. Amy was in the fray as they held pressure to his chest and waited for an ambulance to arrive. The man was in the hospital and his skipper, an acquaintance of Amy’s looked for a replacement to finish out the season.
Late August breeds insanity in the fleet. For some a single-minded urgency to leave, to be done. Others a loathing of their surroundings and of the content of their work. Loathing for others, men who have worked side by side will bloody their fists on each other's faces. Fights every closure, men who pull at women’s clothing and shout. Chuckling, muttering, stares. Red ringed eyes, drooping faces, men and women both blunting themselves again and again, spending their money on drink.
I walked back from the bookstore, over caffeinated and observed a slight native woman in her thirties stumble off the sidewalk, lurch and careen towards me. I was on the phone with my dad and was in very good spirits having had the morning to myself and from time in the bookstore that reminds me so much of home. “Don’t look so fucking serious,” she slurred. I glanced at her. “Don’t look at me" she said, already passed by.
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