Rhymes with 'humpy'

THERE ARE FISHERS, there are poets, and then there is Geno. Among the 150 poets and aficionados gathered at last month's Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Wesley "Geno" Leech is spoken of like a playground legend: You shoulda seen the moves he put on last year. "Sure, you could just come on Saturday if you want," festival organizer Jon Broderick tells me a few days before the show. "But then you'd miss Geno."

Just before 8 on a miserable rain-soaked Friday night, Geno takes the stage at the Wet Dog Cafe, a tavern as upscale as they come in this soggy fishing town on the southern bank of the Columbia. Geno's a crewman on the Salvage Chief, the salvage tug that helped pry the Exxon Valdez off Bligh Reef, and he looks like he walked out of an Old Spice ad: neatly trimmed black hair and beard, chiseled features, and a deep mumbly voice. "My goal for this year's gathering was to write a poem about the Salvage Chief," he says, and adds a jab about the New Carissa, which, at the time, was still beached in Coos Bay. "Hell," he says, if Chief were on the job, "that wreck wouldn't be on there now, it'd be off!" Wild cheers.

"Well 6-ton salvage anchors/Adorn her fo'c'sle head . . . " Geno charges into a recitation of the Chief's storied history, her back-breaking equipment, and the herculean labor of her crew. "Even coffee time's hard work," he says. "Hell, the cups weigh 50 pounds." He recites this and four other poems from memory, eyes shut tight and fists punching the line breaks. His body sways with the rhythm of the poem, something I've seen only James Fenton carry off as well. The effect is something like Eddie Vedder at a poetry slam. The crowd calls for more. "Bring it home, baby!" "Gee-no! Gee-no!" For the second year running, Wesley "Geno" Leech is the fisher king.

GIVEN A CHOICE between listening to cowboy poetry and taking a hot poker in the eye, I'll thank you kindly for the poker. But a family friend had raved about last year's event—the first ever—so I drove to Astoria and subjected myself to three days of rhymed references to scuppers, draggers, bow pickers, Helly Hansen raingear, and Norwegian green paint. And it was splendid.

What the fishers have over the cowboys, I think, is less tolerance for romantic bullshit, and a language so rich it'd make an academic poet weep. Most of the writers at the conference steered wide of Hemingwayesque portraits of the seafaring life, preferring to poke fun at greenhorns and drunks, set tall tales to rhyme (Robert Service seemed to be the weekend's patron saint), or wrap the fishing-life vernacular into free verse. The tone was captured by Erin Firnstad of Port Townsend, whose love poem began, "Wiping red jellyfish from your eyebrow . . . "

A weekend sampler: Retired salmon troller Harrison "Smitty" Smith went the Paul Bunyan route with his "Ballad of Rubber Hooks Devine." John "Captain Caviar" Roe, America's only Native American river pilot (and the only man in a suit I saw all weekend), read some of the work he's posted on his poetry Web site. Holly Hughes, a former Alaska gillnetter, read a piece about the guilt she suffered after killing 50 king salmon. Katherine Johnson of Fairbanks, Alaska, exhibited the gathering's biggest set of cojones by successfully airing a work of performance art before the boozy crowd.

Why do fisher poets write and gather? "When you're fishing, you're either working real hard or you've got a lot of time on your hands," says Hughes, who now teaches poetry at Edmonds Community College. "They've got the great subjects," adds Alaska Fisherman's Journal editor John van Amerongen. "Love, separation, death, and dismemberment—all that great stuff, it's right there."

The writers are also aware that they may be documenting the final years of the millennium-old occupation of independent fisher. In the Columbia Basin the fish are going extinct and in Alaska, where salmon still thrive, they're being snatched up by factory trawlers—enormous floating canneries that boast crews of 100 and more. "We risk being in the waning days of commercial fishing as a way to make a living," says Jon Broderick, the Cannon Beach, Oregon, fisherman who created the festival last year mainly as an excuse to see some old friends. "We're seeing and doing stuff that a lot of people don't do anymore. And even when it's cold and you're wet, tired, hungry, and scared, you get the sense that you're doing something good, something worth doing." Perhaps the most telling participant of the weekend was Jens Lund, a folklorist for the Washington State Humanities Commission, whose video camera underscored the sense of a culture passing away.