Salmon Life

“Let me off on that rock over there.” I point to a cove with a shelf of rock jutting out. While I am balancing on my private rock struggling to undo all my layers, Duncan and DeWitt pull out the candy bars and pop. “What do you want, Leslie? A Hershey’s or a Uno?” Duncan asks, after picking me back up. He’s sitting on the seat in the stern with a root beer beside him. “Hershey’s of course,” I say as I reach for it. “Ugh! How can you eat those things? They’re just chocolate covered Crisco.” I roll my eyes as he takes an exaggerated bite. On shore, I would never consider eating a candy bar or drinking a pop, but it’s different out on the water. When I can see for a hundred miles, when more than half a mile of net filled with kelp, grass and fish who have swum thousands of miles waits for our hands only, when the work subsumes even time itself, how is a candy bar significant in an economy like this? I unwrap my Hershey’s and pop my Coke.

DeWitt sits, his head down, munching his bar. He appears to be studying the salmon. He looks up at me and says, straight into my eyes, “Those are beautiful fish, aren’t they?” He picks one up with both hands, holding its silver body out lengthwise in front of him, and with the wonder of a boy, he shakes his head. “Beautiful fish.”

It looks like this pick will be over soon. I realize that I am saying the word “pick.” That four-letter word seems to fill in for nearly everything done on the nets, and it is my word now, too. There are two picks a day, meaning we leave shore and go out on the water to the nets two separate times, for four to seven hours each time, depending on how many fish there are. We come ashore for lunch and a rest in between. In this case it is a noun, as in, “How was the pick?” or, “This pick shouldn’t take too long.”  But “pick” is a verb as well: we go out and pick the nets, referring to picking the fish out of them. The men also say, as we approach a net, “Okay, pick up here,” meaning the person in the bow is to lean over into the water and lift up the approaching net from the the corkline and bring it into the skiff.

It becomes a noun again when we talk about the people who do this. They are fishermen, but more specifically, fish-pickers, as in, “Are you going to be a fish-picker, too, Leslie?” just as one of the neighboring fisherman asked when he first met me in Larsen Bay.   The terms conjured up discordant images in my new-from-New Hampshire mind, where “picking” meant an excursion into the garden or orchard or field to pluck apples, blueberries, beans or corn from their green growing stems. There, it meant fruit or vegetables heavy in the hand, warm with sun. Here, in this country, the same word meant a fish hanging from our hand, cold as death from the cold sea.

We are on the way to the tender now, like farmers to market with the produce we have picked. I smile as I sit on the stern seat next to DeWitt as Duncan, running the outboard, stands over us. I look up and we wink at one another, proud of ourselves for this skiff full of fish, both of us happy that we are working together. After these hours in the skiff, the boots, life jacket, all the gear that seemed to remove me from myself when I started already feels natural, just outer layers of my own skin.