Time Bandit (12 page)

Imagine! He did not know he was going to die that day. Then suddenly, he faced death and had two chances to save himself. If the
Marchovi
had grabbed him on the first try, he would be alive. But
he
was the one who made the critical choice to save the boat instead of himself. To be fair, maybe he did not think he was in trouble and if we had come up to him right away, we would have saved him. I knew that. I felt guilty for that. I blamed myself.

We brought his body to the Pribilofs. The EMTs who met us at the dock pronounced him dead. The crew and I used the crane to take off his body. We were standing around in the snow, smoking. We did not talk or look into each other’s eyes. A nice lady came up to us. She asked who we were. I had not seen her before on St. Paul. She was crying softly. She said, “I know the family of this man. Thank you for what you did. At least they have a body to bury. He has six young boys.” I turned away from her to hide my tears.

We stayed off
Time Bandit
that night. It did not seem right to go back, out of misguided respect. I looked at the sky the following morning. Dark and brooding, it suddenly came alive with bright white gulls. I took off my cap as if I were inside a church. In that moment I believed. A sailor had lost his soul to the sea, and a gull had scooped it up and would follow boats like mine until the end of time.

We returned to
Time Bandit
with trepidation. In the stateroom by the deck door we noticed a dried salt stain on the carpet in the outline of the dead man’s body. The sight made me quake. Nobody wanted to talk about it. Nobody made a move to wash it away. I could not confront an image that seemed that directly spiritual. I found a brass key in among others in a galley drawer. I locked the door and hung the key on a string around my neck, like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, where it stayed until last year.

Like Tides in My Veins

Andy

People might laugh
if they were to see a Bering Sea crab boat co-captain shoveling horseshit in 90-degree heat, but that’s me, and at night, too. My shirt is off and I’m sweating like someone put a hose on me. I am wearing shorts, a straw cowboy hat, and cowboy boots. Attracted by the electric light, moths the size of my fist fill the air, which smells so bad of shit an intake of breath catches in my throat. My stallion Rio stands in the corner like a foreman nodding his approval, wanting me to hurry up so he can go to sleep. This life is not a vacation I am taking from the Bering Sea. I am Andy Hillstrand, and this is the other half of my existence that I do not share with crabs or my brother Johnathan.

Usually, I leave these “housekeeping” chores for the afternoons, but after Russell’s call, I could not sit in the house a minute longer.

I have reason to be worried even if it turns out that Johnathan is only late getting in. Our friend, the president of our Bering Sea Crab Co-op, Chris Heuker, drowned two weeks ago in Bristol Bay, and nobody knows for certain what happened. He was fishing alone, like Johnathan is today. Chris also had a small boat, like Johnathan’s
Fishing Fever.
He was a lifelong fisherman, smart, and skilled. He could have had a heart attack. He could have been running the boat from the aft fishing station, again the same as Johnathan on
Fishing Fever,
with throttles and a wheel on the transom only inches from the water with nothing to hold on to. A rogue might have thrown Chris off balance.

Maybe he fell overboard and his boat continued on. Alone in the cold water without a survival suit, drowning was inevitable. He had nobody to rescue him; he could not call for help. Johnathan and I felt saddened by the loss of Chris. We felt terrible for his family. He was the father of teenage boys. He was a great guy and a dedicated, professional co-op manager, and because he was also a fisherman since he was a teenager, fishing was in his blood. Whatever caused his death I am willing to bet he died doing what he loved to do.

After I hung up the phone with Russell, I told Sabrina, “It’s about Johnathan.”

“What now?” she asked in a tired, been-there-before tone.

I told her.

“What can you do?” she asked.

“Worry,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

She has told me, time and again, “Andy, I would never want to be clinging to a cliff beside Johnathan and have you decide which of us to save. I know who it would be. I’m okay with it not being me.” She would usually pause here. “This is not a criticism. It is a fact. And you can’t deny it.”

I don’t. I love Sabrina; I love Johnathan. Just because she does not get into the same perilous scrapes as Johnathan doesn’t mean I love her less. In her hypothetical situation, I could not say whom I would save. It is not fair to ask. Sabrina wasn’t really asking. She knows. She has had to become a realist. I am a fisherman, an optimist who lives on heapings of denial. We inhabit different planets where philosophies are concerned. She is a fisherman’s wife and she has saved my life by making me examine mine. She slowly and painfully came around to understand that when a woman marries a fisherman she shares her man with the sea and with a boat, and barring death and childbirth, he is not coming home until the fishing is done. Actually, forget childbirth. One time, Sabrina nearly died from toxic shock syndrome and I could not get home. She did not expect me to. Like in the military, generals do not stop the war when soldiers’ wives are delivering their babies. Maybe a woman strikes a bad bargain when she marries someone like me. The divorce rate of fishermen is high because some women do not understand the men they married. They think they can change them and tame them. They will get them to leave the sea. Right there they have started out wrong. Sabrina knew she would never take me off the sea.

I pat Rio’s withers and grab a fistful of his mane, then jump onto his bare back. Together we leave the stall for the paddock. I lean over and open the gate and we head in the direction of the pond, shining in the moonlight. The night is summer-still and hot. Frogs croak in the end of the pond that water lilies have overgrown. There is something so stable about this place, this farm life. I have not regretted moving here for a single moment.

After Dad died Sabrina and I made the move. The timing was no coincidence. Sabrina liked my dad, maybe even loved him, but she saw his faults clearly. She did not like how he treated me. When my brothers and I bought the boat from him, she thought we paid him more than another buyer would have paid. People in Homer believed we had our lives handed to us on a silver platter; in truth, we worked harder than anyone else for our dad, who never helped us. He trained us to survive in the water and taught us to work hard, never to complain, and never quit, but he was a slave driver. Over time, Sabrina grew resentful of him and his ways. He scared her with his drinking. She grew to hate the drunken Christmas arguments and him kicking his sons out of the house. Our children were afraid of him. He said he loved me only three times in his life. In spite of this, I could not leave him. I loved him no matter what.

We bought the farm four years ago. Hobby Horse Acres, as we call it, is about as far from an ocean as anyone can be in the continental United States. We have twelve acres and a pond surrounded by woods, stalls for the horses, riding arenas both indoors and out, and trails. I am proud of the indoor arena, which we built this year; we want the horse-riding business to operate come rain or shine, winter and summer. I should explain, we—Sabrina and I—enjoy the work and wouldn’t have it any other way, but Hobby Horse Acres is a struggling business that we plan to make a success through hard work and persistence. From my own perspective, the farm keeps me humble and honest and gives me a different view of life from the sea and commercial fishing. Living and working this far away from the dangers of the sea offers me balance. I should thank horseshit for saving my sanity if not my life.

We found horses the way most people find things—by happenstance. If someone had told me twenty years ago that I would be living on a farm in Indiana raising horses and teaching kids how to ride, I would have laughed. But that was before our daughter Cassie turned eight. We were living in Homer at the time; she told us she wanted a horse for her birthday. All eight-year-old girls want a horse. I wished she had wanted a skiff or for me to take her fishing. And like good parents, we bought her a horse that she named Champ.

That first year after Champ was installed, I was fishing all summer and Sabrina was driving Cassie and her horse to 4H meetings and barrel-racing competitions. Two years went by, and I began to take off the summers to give Sabrina a rest and go to the events with Cassie. I was interested for her as a father. But horses failed to seize my interest, until one day I met a natural horseman, a so-called Whisperer, who asked me if I would like to really get to know horses.
Really?
I had no idea what he meant. He showed me what horses are as creatures, and about them being the ultimate flight animal. Once I understood how a horse thinks I could understand his universe; I approached horses differently, as if we were suddenly equals. I respected him and he understood me. I think that some people deal with horses as if they are machines to be put in gear and driven at different speeds and with maneuvers, like they were motorcycles.

The horse as a unique creature began to intrigue me, and the more I learned about them, the more I was drawn into their world. It was quite different from the one I was used to as a crab fisherman. I enjoyed the new space, which expanded exponentially as I learned and observed. I enjoyed my new friends, the horses. They helped me gain a new perspective on just about everything, including the people I loved and those I would deal with as business associates and friends.

Back then, when this was all new to me, after two weeks of groundwork with the Whisperer’s techniques, I won a prize barrel racing at a rodeo. In 1998, I won the Alaska reserve state championship, and for two years running I was state champion. I realized that horses are thousand-pound animals that I did not have to fight. Once you ride a horse and everything is working, it is a beautiful experience and as close to flying, on the ground, as you will ever get. Horses became important in my life. I stopped competitive barrel racing when I reached the understanding that the competition was all about me and not about the horse. The more I learned about them, the more I needed this knowledge. I was learning to be a better person through horsemanship. If I can read body language in a horse without talking to it—by the set of his jaw, his ears, how his eyes blink, where his tail is at—I can look at people’s faces and know what they are signaling with their eyes and mouth. I realized that I could help other horse owners with their horses. Now, I look forward to teaching about horses with the same enthusiasm that I once looked forward to fishing.

And yet…and yet—isn’t there always an “and yet”? In spite of my contentment here, I look forward to Alaska; fishing will never leave my blood, just as it will always be a central part of me. As much as I love the horses and this farm, I feel fully liberated and even wild only when I am on the boat at sea. Nothing will change that. Like tides in my veins, the tug of the land competes with the draw of the sea, and I exist somewhere between.

As much as I love them, horses do not pay for groceries; crabs do.

T
he aesthetic of fishing never reached me at the same depth as it did Johnathan, who has moments when he even demonstrates a poet’s soul when he talks about fish and fishing. He appreciates the beauty of simple things, like the glory of a sockeye’s coloring. My daughter Chelsey, who is twenty-six years old, educated and smart, and a new mother of a boy, my grandson Dylan, inherited some of this sensibility.

The spirit of the sea touched her directly a few years ago. At the time—she was just twenty-one, on the night before her grandfather’s death. She swears that the
Time Bandit—
yes, the boat my father designed and loved—knew he was going to leave this life. She had taken over the watch on the
Time Bandit,
which was tendering salmon in Bristol Bay. Our brother David was in command. Alone that night in the wheelhouse, Chelsey was doing all that she could to stay alert. An electronic plotter identified the presence of other boats within a radius of forty-eight miles, and David had told her to wake him if a boat appeared within two miles. Suddenly, a boat did appear on the screen identified as the F/V
Guardian.
On the plotter, Chelsey estimated its distance as three miles. It was pitch black out and the boat was on autopilot. Chelsey was daydreaming of an upcoming trip to Europe.

In reality the
Guardian
was less than two miles away and closing fast.

Chelsey squinted in binoculars through the dark, when distances are most deceiving. Through the glare of the sodium lights on the deck she thought the
Guardian
looked still closer but she was not sure. She did not know how to read the navigational screen. “It just didn’t seem right,” she told me later. “But it didn’t seem like an emergency, either.”

She went downstairs to wake up a crewman named Chance, who had just gone to bed. She asked him to take a look. Chance saw the
Guardian
was right in front of
Time Bandit.
Chelsey pulled back on the throttles. She slipped the engines in neutral, instead of reverse. And
Time Bandit
moved forward with inertia bringing the two boats together “like two magnets in the sea.” Chance threw the
Time Bandit
in reverse too late. The boats collided, “like the Titanic in a small way.” Chelsey was looking at the
Guardian
through binoculars even as the two boats screeched in contact.
Time Bandit
’s bow was crushed to the tune of $60,000 in damage. Chelsey prayed to be taken away from her guilt. Eight hours went by in agonizing radio silence before I called her on SatPhone. I was crying; this was the only time she had heard me cry. She supposed it was about the boat accident. Then I told her that her grandfather was dead. Of course, until that moment, she had no idea that timing was an amazing coincidence.

The next morning, Chelsey climbed onto the platform behind
Time Bandit
’s wheelhouse and sobbed. She felt to blame. She had let down the man whose heart was in
Time Bandit
more than anyone’s. Suddenly out of that gloom, whales swam in a line on the surface beside the boat and snorted through their blowholes. The whales, she believed, were signaling to her that it was OK. She said to the wind, “Grandpa, thank you, thank you.” It was the most profound experience of her young life.

After that, she talked to me about her feelings for the sea. She surprised me when she said, “When I am out there and vulnerable, I am more spiritual than I ever am. The ocean is so powerful and real. If Mother Nature gets mad, I am at her mercy.” And what about crabbers like me, her father? “Fishermen live with the notion they can be erased at any moment; they are forced into a camaraderie of survival. On a boat, they know that they have to work together to survive. Alone, they will die. Crabbing is the extreme version of fishing. Crab fishermen are dashing just for what they do. They know that they lay their lives on the line every time they get on a boat, but they can be reassured that their crew will rush to their rescue. This forms a brotherhood. Other men respect them for what they will do. They defer to them in some instinctual way. They envy this brotherhood for its exclusivity. It is very primal, this overcoming of obstacles again and again. It runs in a fisherman’s blood. He lives and breathes to do that. More than anything, it is a way of life.”