This photo of the Martle, high and dry at low tide in Alaska, hangs on the wall of the Sourdough Bar in Ketchikan.
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Ed Einarson worked as a fisherman his entire life. I don't mean for that to sound like an epitaph. There's no eulogy to be written for Ed Einarson because the old fisher is still alive. Thankfully. This is about his boat, the Martle. The Martle was an old ship but sturdy, built from Washington state timber in a Tacoma shipyard in 1938.
There, that's the epitaph. Stamp it on a headstone and drop it in the sea.
In 1981, Ed was in Newport, Ore., considering buying the Martle. During the war, the dealer told him, she'd fished sardines off the coast of Big Sur, and later she'd gone after rockfish off Oregon. She'd even drug off Vancouver Island before it was closed to the American fleet. Furthermore, the boat was famous—there was a blown-up picture of her, high-centered on a rock at low tide, teetering precariously, and it was hanging on the wall at the Sourdough Bar in Ketchikan, Alaska. Ed knew the Sourdough Bar, as any fisherman would, and he recalled seeing the picture. A righteous place on those walls constituted fame. He looked her over. Ed was shopping for a purse seiner—a boat to catch salmon in Alaska and Washington—while the Martle's deck was rigged for shrimping and crabbing. It would have to be converted. Also, she was shorter than most of the newer boats, barely over 60 feet, and narrower, too—16 feet 6 inches. The wooden hull might have warned him of future problems and costly repairs as well. But whatever his hesitancy, Ed bought the boat for $100,000. A good deal. He drove her north to Squalicum Harbor in Bellingham, where she was an old-school girl docked alongside the modern fishing fleet. Some of the other boats, with their impenetrable steel hulls and cavernous fish holds, were nearly twice the Martle's size. But the Martle wasn't the last boat from the old school, from the days when Bellingham was host to the Pacific American Fishery, the largest salmon cannery in the world. There were other boats still around from those days, and even some from before that. When the fishing seasons began, each boat left Squalicum Harbor as hungry as the next, all of them captains of a dying industry gone to make their living along the western shores of North America.
Through the years of use, Ed learned to trust and understand his boat. She had more years on her than he did. While his crew members came and went, the captain stayed; he discovered the Martle's nuances, the feel of the throttle, the wheel. Oil-slicked tools in hand, he came to know the engine, a pre–World War II Detroit diesel. He learned to steer the boat through rough weather by trial and error, which is the only way. By daylight and darkness, with impossibly tall waves exploding across the bow, he passed storm after storm in the tophouse, his knotty fingers steadfast to the spokes of the wheel, steering toward distant blinking lights. And always they made it through and the water settled and he went out fishing again.
Such is the life of a fishing boat captain.
For 22 years, Ed Einarson owned the Martle, a relationship admittedly longer than any he ever shared with a woman, and then, in the fall of 2003, she rolled over in an unforeseen windstorm and sank. I was there. What gets me most about it is that for all the remote ocean the Martle saw in 65 years, from the sheer cliffs of California, where she set for squid, to the jagged ice floes of Dutch Harbor, where she potted crab, she went down close to home, here in our harmless little Puget Sound, our protected little slip of seawater, so narrow and unthreatening that it dares you to skip a stone across it. And at the place where the Martle sank, you could look half a mile across the water and see houses on the shore. Fucking houses—with people inside, wearing slippers and watching television. The Martle fought against the storm, rolled over with her crew, and disappeared beneath the waves. I wonder now if anyone on shore happened to have been watching the small ship succumbing to unbeatable powers of wind and weather. I wonder now if anyone saw.
Civilization Discontent
I'm not a fisherman, at least I don't claim to be. I'm a deckhand. I work on someone else's boat, the Marshal Tito, doing what is needed, what I'm asked, cleaning this or stacking that, and I do most of the cooking. It's only the captain who could be legitimately called a fisherman. In three seasons' work, I've learned enough to make a guess at where we might catch something, but that's all I've got, a guess. A good captain can read the blank surface of the water for what's underneath. A good captain studies and considers tide books, nautical charts, fathometers, wind direction, rain clouds, radio reports, jumping fish, his lucky shirt, intuition, and countless other things before he orders the net to be set. And a good fisherman always casts his net with the same vigor, sport, and hope of any angler working the bank of a river, no matter how exhausted he and his crew happen to be. Because he loves it. As a crewman, I feel guilty. I sleep a greedy average of four hours a night to the captain's two. The captain wakes early to run up and down the shoreline in the lightless blue predawn, scanning the water for those arcane giveaways that tell him which way the schools are running and where the gathering places are. Then, always in the last seconds before the sun breaks, just about the time I've got a cup of coffee in one hand and a rolled cigarette in the other, the captain gives the signal and the skiff drags the net out. We start our day. A good fisherman knows how to catch fish. I don't.
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