Passage to Juneau (eBook)

'Pacific Venturer?' he asked. The late March sun (this was Seattle's first high-pressure, blue-sky day after weeks of low overcast) glittered in the pale stubble on his cheeks. 'That's the boat I'm looking for. Pacific Venturer.' He spoke the name syllable by syllable, and I could see him in first grade -- a large, vacant, uncoordinated child, already far behind the rest of the class. 'You seen that boat, man?' Three, maybe four hundred boats were moored hull to hull at Fishermen's Terminal. They formed a wintry thicket, over fifty acres of water, of masts, spars, trolling poles, whip-antennae, radar scanners, deck-hoists, and davits. Looking at the names around us, I read Vigorous, Tradition, Paragon, Sea Lassie, Peregrine, Resolute, Star of Heaven, Cheryl G., Cheerful, Immigrant (a green cloverleaf blazoned on its wheelhouse), Paramount, Memories. I saw a Pacific Breeze, but no Pacific Venturer. 'What is it -- a purse-seiner?' He took it as a trick question, staring at me as if I were an unfriendly examiner. He had Barbie-doll blue eyes. 'I dunno. Salmon boat.' He consulted the piece of paper in his hand. 'Yup. That's a salmon boat -- I heard.' He stank of the road -- of hitchhiking on interstates, diving in Dumpsters, spending nights in cardboard boxes under highway bridges, gargling with Thunderbird. 'I been here since seven.' It was two in the afternoon. Purposeful men were pushing past us, dressed in the local uniform of hooded smocks and black peaked caps, arms full of gear, impatient with the two rubbernecks in their path. 'You better ask one of these guys.' 'I asked already.' He shambled off -- 'Be seeing you, man' -- up the next finger pier, and I could see his lips moving as he spelled out the words on the sterns of Oceania, Prosperity, Stella Marie, Enterprise, Quandary, lost among these resonant abstractions and women's names. The working men were giving him a wide berth. On his behalf, I kept an eye out for the Venturer, but if it had ever existed at all, it was probably now steaming for Ketchikan and points north. The boats were fitting out, at the last minute, as usual, for their spring migration to the Alaskan fishing grounds. The resinous, linseed-oily smell of varnish and wet paint hung thickly in the still air of the terminal, and there was the continuous happy racket of electric saws and sanders, hammers, drills, and roaring blowtorches. Diesel engines were being hastily disemboweled, their black innards laid out, part by part, on afterdecks, while their bloody-knuckled owners muttered to themselves as they puzzled over camshafts and clearances. Pickup trucks, laden to the gunwales, were drawn up alongside those boats that were now most nearly ready to leave, and wholesale boxes of Dinty Moore stew and Campbell's soup and plastic-wrapped bales of toilet tissue were being swung aboard on hoists. On the broad plaza of the net-mending area, a man and a woman were 'hanging web': threading white, cigar-shaped floats at two-foot intervals along the top of their quarter-mile gill net. The jade-green, gossamer nylon mesh shimmered at their feet like a river. In Seattle, the city of virtual reality, it was always a pleasure to come to this last bastion of old-fashioned work, with its nets, crab pots, paintbrushes, and carpentering, to its outdoor faces, seamed with experience, and to its long-established family air, generation following generation into the same industry. Grandparents, now too shaky on their pins to make the trip, were still important figures at fitting-out time. They drove trucks,...