Sport, Fishing

        Last night, my wife and I went to dinner at our daughter's in-law's home.  Salmon was served. The father-in-law related how he had caught this magnificent fish on the Tillamook Bar.   Well, I have some experience salmon fishing myself.  But I am the consummate city boy, and my experiences have been, well, less than inspiring dinner table fodder.  The social event brought to mind this story about fishing with my brother which I wrote some 20 years ago.  . 

                      

                             Sport, Fishing

                                                 by

                                       Dick Morgan

      Last week I received the phone call I had been dreading for weeks, the one in which my older brother Cyril-John invites me to go deep sea fishing, the one in which I finally run out of excuses not to go.  Every time he calls, he is enthusiastic about some hare-brained adventure, for which I am either the source of funds or the source of his deranged amusement.  I suspect that in either case, he has made a hobby out of watching the blood drain from my face.      
      "Howdy-howdy, little brother!" Cyril-John had said.  He's the only person I know who says "Howdy," and he usually says it twice.   "It's C.J.," he said, as though no one would have guessed by then.  "Beautiful day for an adventure!  Should be here."  Cyril-John has always had trouble matching up the subject of a sentence with the proper verbs, so he'd gotten in the habit of leaving one or the other out sometimes.  Saved on phone time, he said.

      Well, I knew he had said, "You should be here," and that was as polite an invitation as I was likely to hear from Cyril-John. I had managed to avoid a Cyril-John adventure for several years now, but this summer he'd bought a sailboat.  Cyril-John knew that I used to like sailing.  I'd even written a modest best-seller about sailing-- Baja Beach Babes, by T.J. Lockhart--that's me.  Well, it wasn't entirely about boats, but there were several inflatable items necessary to the plot.

      "Piece of shit," Cyril-John had said, but I don't think he read more than the back cover.  Still, he'd gotten the idea that I needed boating lessons, and he'd begun calling me every couple of days.  "Let's go fishing!" he'd shout into the phone as soon as I'd pick up the receiver.  But every time I think about going on a boat with Cyril-John, I have these recurring nightmares about capsizing and being pulled under the water entangled in various lines and cables.  Such dreams never go away entirely.

      It would be all right, I told myself.   I wanted to investigate Cyril-John as a  phenomenon, to capture his spirit in a colorful mural of words requiring fresh first-hand experience.  I supposed I owed him that much.  And anyway, I felt sooner or later I would have to go with him so he would quit calling me.  Better now, while I was still without cardiac symptoms.

    "Can't keep callin' yourself a brother if ya don't come," he had said.  And so I relented, and a date was set.  The following Tuesday.

      Now, my hair does a peculiar thing when I am about to violate one of Life's Cardinal Rules, as I call them.  And Rule Number One was don't wager with irreplacable  commodities, such as one's life.  Personal risk makes my hair stand on end all around my cowlick, which has been enlarging like a clear-cut for the past ten years.  As I hung up the phone with Cyril-John, I felt like I was wearing a toilet brush for a hat.  As I hung up the phone with Cyril-John, I felt like I was wearing a toilet brush for a hat.

       Tuesday approached like news from a pathology lab.  I hadn't slept very well, and woke up with my bedsheets wrapped around my neck so tightly my ears were ringing. No, wait, it was the phone. It was Cyril John again.

     "Howdy-howdy, it's C.J.," he said and continued on with no pause at all.  "Beautiful weather.  Drive through Longview to the coast.  Bad west of Murray road.  Highway construction held me up two hours.  Slack tide's at eleven.  Be early; catch the ebb."

      So far, I'd not said a word yet, except for "Hello."  It was good that my wife hadn't answered; sometimes Cyril-John gets to talking and hangs up before he has the right listener. And Cyril-John doesn't translate well; I would have to decipher him even as it was.  Something to the effect of...don't go the short way to the coast; there is highway construction at Murray Road.  Fine.  I would drive around it.  But I didn't even get time to ask if he had extra lifejackets aboard.  This was not likely to be a stress-free day.

      I was late arriving at the dock in Warrenton, having sat in my car staring eye to eye with a pot-bellied construction worker for an hour, exactly 50 miles west of the spot Cyril-John had indicated to avoid.  And which I had conscientiously avoided, happily merging onto the coast freeway far past all the trouble areas, according to what I had understood C.J. to have said.  After 50 years, you'd think I would have learned Life-Rule # 15:  Don't rely on messages from people with poor communication skills.  But I don't pay attention well, according to Cyril John.

      "You're late," C.J. said first thing.  "Came over the mountains, didn't ya, ya weak-brained shit.  Don't listen!"  This greeting did not shock me, as over the years, I have learned that social niceties just aren't a part of C.J.'s speech pattern.

      "And how are you, C.J.?"  I said.       

      "Terrific!  Hard-on of a day! Let's go fishing!"  C.J. grinned affably, just as though he had said 'Good morning' instead of calling me a weak-brained shit.  The day began to  slide downhill.

       "Come aboard, little brother.  We'll get going as soon as I find my vicegrips," Cyril-John grinned at me.  "Now where did that sonovabitch walk off to?" he said, as though it was the tool's fault.  Gradually it dawned on me that C.J. was making up his world moment by moment as he went along.  And as I felt his boat rocking against the dock with gentle jolts and listened to various lines creaking against the stresses in them, I began to understand that the boat was just an extension of Cyril-John, like an Athena leaping from the mind of Zeus full-grown and already dressed in armor.

      From the moment I stepped aboard, I began to feel uneasy.  I dismissed it as a kind of pre-seasickness warm up, but I couldn't help noticing that my toilet brush hat was back.  On the other hand, as I have said, I am a writer.  And the truth was that the harshest realities offered the richest fodder for the writer's page.  So when Cyril-John said, "Cast me off, Thomas James," I did, and jumped aboard as the boat pulled away from everything I could trust.

      Cyril-John banged on the engine cover a few times with his vicegrips and then attached them to the front of the engine.  There should have been some sort of steering arm there, but C.J. didn't seem to mind holding onto his vicegrips instead.  "Too bad we missed the best of the tide," C.J. said, lighting up a cigarette in the wind.  Part of his mustache caught fire from his big silver Zippo, but he slapped it back into little black curls and took a big draw as though this happened all the time.  "Yep.  It'll take us a good two hours to get outside now, even if we don't have engine trouble..." C.J.'s eyes glazed over as he did the calculations; his eyes always did that when he used numbers.

      "Engine trouble?" I said.  The docks were 50 yards behind us now; the banks of the harbor slightly less.  I could still swim ashore; the thought nagged at me.  "What kind of engine trouble?" I said, the docks 60 yards away now.  My clothes would be soaked, and my wallet too, if I swam.

      "Sometimes just dies on me," C.J. shrugged.  "But that's what sails are for, little brother!"  he grinned, a devilish, burnt mustache grin.  I noticed that some of his eyebrow hairs had gone up too.  C.J. liked to work on gas engines with a cigarette in his teeth and so far, he had not factored those two incompatible activities together in all of his 50 years.

      "So you're saying we might have to sail out over the most dangerous bar on the Pacific Coast?"  I said.  I knew that my mouth hung open, slack with disbelief, but didn't care.  I needed some reassurance here.

      "Oh, quit yer grousin',"  C.J. said.  "Always err on the side of prudence,"  he added.

      Somehow that was a bit short of reassuring, since I didn't know where to put the modifier 'always'.  That sentence could have meant 'always prudent', or, on the other  hand, could have meant 'always erred'. And shore was a good quarter-mile away now; I was clearly in violation of several of my Life's Cardinal Rules.  "Please elaborate," I said.

      "What?"  C.J. shot me an annoyed look.

      "I said, please explain to me why I should not be worried about crossing the most dangerous bar in the world on the wrong tide with engine trouble," I shouted, as though he were hard of hearing instead of incredibly dense.

      "Well, first off, it ain't the wrong tide until you're losin' ground.  Second off, the engine's runnin' okay right now.  And third off, we got sails.  But the wind is against us now, so to hell with the sails.  And anyways, it's a beautiful day.  The weather man said it was going to rain, but they don't know shit.  It's going to be a piece o' cake, you'll see.  Not like yesterday."  C.J. slowly shook his head.

      "What happened yesterday?" I asked.

      "Well, I got the tide a bit wrong.  Big fish on, you know.  Fought that sucker for an hour.  Caught him, too. Gave him to the little missy on the yacht Christina.  Boy-howdy, how she gets herself into those jeans...but damn, like to see her do it sometime."

      "What happened?"  I said.

      "Oh, nothing ever happens.  She smiles and blows me a kiss is all..."

      "What...happened...out...here?" I spoke slowly; sometimes I think it helps.

      "Oh.  Hmm."  C.J. cleared his throat, plainly a delaying action so he could remember what he had been talking about.  "Oh, yeah.  Well, I'd only made it to bouy eight, and then I stopped making any headway in the ebb, you know.  So you see those breakers over there off the port side?"  He pointed at the Desdemona Spit--two miles of massive white breakers, and more sunken ships per acre than anywhere else in the entire world.  Anyone with any sense at all knew to stay away from there.

      "Yes," I said.

      "Weelllll, I inched her over close to the breakers, see.  If you sail up close to them, out of the main channel, the rollers will give you a little bitty boost each time you slide down the front o' them.  You can inch along wave by wave and beat the tide," he said, flicking his cigarette stub over the side.

      "Where in the hell did you learn to do that?" I asked, my mouth hanging open again.

      "Right over there, yesterday," he said, lighting up a new cigarette, scorching his mustache, and slapping himself again.

      "Isn't that dangerous?" I asked, mildly astonished that he had remained alive all these years.

      "Not too bad in daylight," he said.  "You got to stay in at least ten feet of water though, 'cause the rollers are almost always a good six feet.  And the boat draws three."  His eyes were beginning to glaze over again.  "But it got dark before I got in.  I could see the white of the  breakers, but I couldn't tell how far away they was.  The moonlight plays tricks on your eyes, you know.  See the problem there."

      "Oh, yes," I nodded, certain that I was conversing with the problem.  I looked away; I needed time to digest this information.  I suspected that I'd be lucky if he did not get me seriously injured.  I looked out over the cabin to the expanse of green water ahead, and the dark bluffs of Cape Disappointment five miles away.  I noticed a fishing boat slightly to our port side was heading our way.  I watched it slowly growing larger but not changing position relative to us at all.  He was straight over our port bow-chalk, and had been for the past couple of minutes.  According to all the books I had ever read on boat-handling, that meant we were on a collision course.

      "Hey, C.J.  You see that fishing boat over there?"  I said with mild but rising concern.  We still had two, maybe three minutes.

      "I been watching him," C.J. said.  "But we're to his starboard side.  Means we got the right-o-way," he said around his cigarette.  He had just finished hooking up a little motorized arm to the vicegrips, and now we were being steered automatically by soft electric whirring sounds, like robots made on TV.

      "We maybe ought to give him a wider berth," I suggested.

      "Naw," C.J. shook his head.  "He oughta give us a wider berth, though."

      "He isn't turning," I said, now more than mildly concerned.  I could see the ropes coiled on the fishing boat's deck.

      "Well, what an asshole," C.J. said, but he never moved off his elbow, which was propped onto the cabin top.  He looked as though he were still involved with a math problem in his head.  "He ought to turn, dammit," C.J. added, motionless, like a cat ready to spring-- should he ever come to a conclusion that springing might be necessary.

      I had had enough speculation about the problem.   Life's Rule #3 was  Assholes always have the right-of-way.  I kicked the control arm off of the vicegrips and turned us hard to port.  We hit the fishing boat's wake not twenty feet behind it.  As I peered over at the cabin of the fishing boat, I could see the wheel turning back and forth by itself.  The cabin was completely empty; she was on automatic pilot.

      "What'd ya do that for?"  C.J. said, astonished that I had actually steered his boat.

      "I have this ambition to grow old," I muttered to myself.

      'Well, it's my boat, and I'm captain,"  C.J. said.  "Don't go touchin' my tiller.  Don't do that no more."

      For the first time, I saw clearly the folly I had gotten myself into.  Shore was a mile away and flanked with nasty breakers which I could hear like an approaching gale.  I tightened my life-jacket and moved my wallet into my  zippered coat-pocket; at least if the authorities found my body, I could be identified.  Again I marveled that C.J. had lived this long.  Either God watches over schizophrenics, or C.J. had some kind of special power to arrange his corner of the universe the way he wanted it.  The power of positive schizophrenia.  Think of it!  Sounded like a damn good book title, should I survive...

      "Oh well, I was going to turn soon anyways." C.J. said.  But now the boat was headed dangerously close to Desdemona Spit, in my opinion.  The bow was rising high into the air as the rollers steepened, and as we slid over the top, the engine raced when the prop came out of the water.  C.J. hooked up the automatic tiller to the vicegrips again and touched a button.  The bow swerved to starboard a little on  the next pitch.  At least there were no white breakers dead ahead anymore.  I settled back and breathed a little easier.  "You worry too goddam much," C.J. said.  He drained his beer can, holding it high in the air and catching the last few drops as they fell at various angles according to the pitch of the boat.  He caught every last one.

            C.J. belched, then sprang to his feet and swung to the cabin-top in one smooth movement.  There, hanging like a gibbon from the backstays, he unzipped his jeans.

Totally unaffected by the corkscrew movements of the deck as though he had some kind of vertical gyroscope in his head, he let fly with a yellow stream.  I could hear him whistling through his teeth the entire time; I wondered if he had seen the large red bouy dead ahead.

      I watched the bouy grow larger each time we crested a swell.  I could hear the bells on the bouy pealing like a civic emergency; we were so close I could see the clappers swinging.  I had no idea that bouys were so huge.  Meanwhile, C.J. was still peeing, and the myterious machine that he had told me 'not to touch no more' was whirring and clicking and merrily guiding us into a virtually certain hull puncture and quick sinking.  When I knew that in three or four more wave-crests we would ram it for certain, C.J. shook himself and zipped up.  He swung down into the cockpit with a single graceful motion; but instead of moving the tiller, he picked up a chart and began to read it, humming to himself.

      "C.J.!"  I screamed, just as the boat slid by the side of the buoy so close that had it been leaning toward us, its top would have fouled in our rigging.

      "Number ten: that's good," C.J. nodded.  "What's the matter with you?"  C.J. said, lighting up another cigarette.  The chart caught fire, but C.J. beat it out against his chest.  I just shook my head.  "You need to relax, Thomas James.  Knew the current would push us clear.  Plenty of room!"

      You could have told me about your calculations," I muttered.  A combination of morning coffee, watching my brother relieve himself, and being nearly killed twice in ten minutes had caused me to become aware of my own bladder in the worst way.  "I need to pee,"  I said.

       "Go ahead," C.J. said.  "Two heads aboard.  Three, if ya count the bucket.  But don't use the bucket.  Bait's in there.  There's a head up forward for the namby-pamby sit-down types, and there's the ocean.  Take your pick."

      Well, I was determined not to be the namby-pamby type, so I swung myself up onto the narrow deck that ran alongside the cabin just opposite where C.J. had stood.  Holding onto the wire backstays for dear life with both hands, I was amazed at how huge and steep the rollers were from this vantage point.  One moment, I would be barely a foot above the trough of a swell, and the next moment I would be soaring 12 feet above it as we passed over its crest.  Not to mention the rolling of the boat, oh, no.  That was an entirely new problem.  If I continued to hold on tight, I would have difficulty reaching my fly to unzip.  Even after solving that problem, every time the boat yawed or pitched, I would be peeing in a different direction.  And if I let go of the wires in order to steady my aim-- well, that wasn't going to happen.  So I wrapped my arms around the two stays and tucked my hands into my belt...

      I had forgotten Life's Cardinal Rule #5, which was Don't piss into the wind, including all of its various corrolaries, such as, If you can't stand up, pee sitting down.  Perhaps I was the namby-pamby type after all.  At any rate, when I was finished, I knew for certain I'd never be able to wear those shoes in public again.  Not to mention the sailboat deck.

      After I settled back into my cockpit seat, I found C.J. looking at me and shaking his head.  He grabbed the bait bucket and sloshed its contents, bait and all, along the deck where I had stood.  The yellow puddles there turned clear as all the dead herrings swept by toward the bow.  As the bow rose forward on the next crest and all the herring swept back along the deck to the stern, Cyril-John caught them in his bucket again-- every last one.  As he sat down, he said, "Better use the head below, next time."

      "Well, it's rough out here!" I said apologetically.

      "'Course it's rough. We're on the bar in a riptide," C.J. said.

      "You might have told me that earlier," I muttered.

      "Well even a damn fool knows where the bar is," C.J. snorted.  "Got to keep your eyes open out here.  See that line of foam there?"

      "Yes, I see it," I said.

      "What does it tell you?"  C.J. spoke like a teacher who was upset with a particularly doufous pupil.

      "It tells me that my life is totally out of control, and that I'm probably going to die," I said.

      "Tells you the damn tide's changing and the water's confused.  Bound to be rough right there," C.J. said.  "Personally, I'd 'a waited."

      "But you didn't wait!" I shouted.

      "I was done by the time we passed bouy ten," he said.

      "Almost rammed it," I said loudly.

      "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,"  C.J. said, a favorite saying of his I'd heard all too often over the years.  "Don't count in ramming," he added.  "Anyways we're over the bar now.  Let's hoist the sails."

      Cyril-John leapt to the cabin top, more gibbon-like than anything I remembered at the zoo, and untied the straps that held the mainsail to the boom.  A cascade of canvas suddenly covered my head.  I felt the boat tip as C.J. moved about, but I couldn't see him.  I looked in vain for the edge of the sail; I'd forgotten how huge sails could be.

      "When I turn into the wind, haul up on the main halyard," C.J. shouted.

      I heard a flapping just as I found the edge of the sail.  Directly in front of me were four lines, all different sizes, and all unmarked.

      "Haul away!" C.J. yelled.

      I couldn't see where the lines went because of the 200 square feet of sail on my head, but I reasoned that the line farthest inboard would most likely be the main halyard, so

I pulled on it several times until it jammed tight.

      "Not the goddam jibsheet, for Christ's sake!" C.J. shouted.  ""Don't ya know the difference between a main halyard and a goddam jibsheet, ya weak-brained shit?  That one there!"  I knew that C.J. was pointing, but I still couldn't see him.  I threw the sail off my head and quickly examined the lines from the mast downward.  The halyard made a sharp turn at mid cabin-top and led directly to the jibsheet winch.  All the other lines criss-crossed as well. 

      "Your main halyard is going to the jib winch," I said.

      "'Course it is.  Works better that way," C.J. said.  "Now haul it up, Thomas James."

      "I hauled away until the mainsail was taut, and C.J. steered us just off the wind.  The mainsail billowed out full and beautiful.  But because the main halyard still led to the jib winch, I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.  So I kept holding it in my hand.

      "Well, don't just sit there like a tree stump; tie it off," C.J. said.

      "To where?"

      "Anywhere!" C.J. said with disgust, as though our failure to communicate was entirely my fault.  Maybe it was.  "Oh, Christ, do I have to do everything?"  He snatched the line from my hand and tied it to the compass gimbols the same way John Wayne used to tie up his horse in the movies:  wrap, wrap, saunter away.

      I reflected on how in those movies, the horse was always trained not to wander away, not really being tied and all.  But while the halyard might come untied and the mainsail might collapse onto my head at any second, somehow it didn't.  I also reflected that as long as it didn't, the compass was totally hog-tied and dysfunctional.  I vauguely wondered what Cyril-John did when he needed to read it; I prayed that it wouldn't get foggy.

      "Let's go fishing!"  C.J. said.  He grabbed a thick  salmon pole, disentangled the line and double hooks, and placed a herring on them so fast that I didn't quite see how it was done.  He flicked the herring over the side, jerked his line out half a dozen times, checked the star-drag, and propped the butt of his pole between the engine and the transom-- all while I was still trying to adjust my psyche to picking up a little, slimy, dead fish with my bare fingers.

      I picked out what to me looked like a handsome herring, which was to say that it was all in one piece more or less, and not stained yellow anywhere, and managed to hold it in in my fingers without grimacing.  Real fishermen do not grimace at their bait.  As I was trying to figure out where to put in the first hook, C.J. held up a tinfoil package with plastic wrap on the top.  He ripped off a hunk of pastry with the same hand he had used to bait his hook and offered it to me.

      "Bear-claw?" he said.

      I looked at his fingers, which were flecked with herring brain and small, shiny scales.  "No, thanks.  Maybe later," I said.  I held the hooks and the herring in opposite hands and moved them up and down in alternating motions.  I had no idea what to do next.

      "Here, lemme show ya the way I do it," C.J. said.  Thankfully, I handed him the herring.  He took it into his fingers directly below the pastry lump he had offered me.  "First hook goes here," he said, shoving the point through the herring's jaw so that it came out the top of its head covered with yellow-white brain goo.  Then he paused to take a gigantic bite of his bear-claw, holding the dangling fish less than an inch from his mouth and nose.  "Yum, yum, gimme some," he said.  Then  he showed me how to put the second hook in the tail, although I didn't understand a word he said around the lump of pastry in his mouth.  "Olla-da ben-ina tayo," He mumbled as he pointed with his scale-flecked bear-claw at the hook, which followed the bend in the herrings slime-smeared tail.  C.J. tossed my baited hook into the water, stuffed the rest of the bear-claw in his mouth and then licked his fingers.  I had to look away.  

        I took my pole, pulled out the line the same number of times I had seen C.J. do it, and leaned back against the gunwale; I was fishing, actually deep-sea fishing in the wide Pacific.  The sun came out from behind puffy little clouds, and the boat rocked gently in long, low swells.  I reflected that we had not capsized and turned my attention to more mundane concerns.  Like how my fishing reel worked.

      "Fish on!"  C.J. shouted.  I yanked back hard on my pole, but of course it wasn't my line the fish was on.  Cyril-John's pole jerked like a dousing rod above the mother-lode as he began to reel in.  "Feels itty-bitty," he said around his cigarette as he braced one foot against the transom to keep from being pulled overboard.

       "Feels like a' itty-bitty bottom fish," C.J. said as though listening to something.  His pole jerked two, three  more times.  "Sea bass," he added.  C.J. reeled in and lifted it aboard; damned if it wasn't a sea bass, too.  How did he do that?  I'd heard stories about idiot-savants who played Mozart on the piano...

      The sea bass lay in the bottom of the cockpit like a not quite dead yet road casualty, its eyes bulging out at me accusingly and its mouth gasping in a humongous "O".  C.J.'s line disappeared down the fish's throat.

      "Damn," C.J. said.  "Swallowed ma bait."  He stepped down on the side of the fish and gave his line a couple of hard yanks.  A slimy, unrecognizable pink lump ejected from deep within the fish's gut.  C.J. examined it for a moment, adjusted the hooks, and threw it back into the water.  "Bait's still good," he said.  Then he tossed the squashed and bloody sea bass into the cooler, on top of our drinks.  "Wanna beer?" he said affably.

      I was not thirsty.   "No thanks.  Maybe later," I said.

      "More for me," C.J. shrugged as he reached beneath the bloody bass and pulled out a dripping bottle.  He pressed the edge of the cap against the motor mount  and slammed down with his fist;. he was drinking before the bottle cap hit  the deck and finished the entire bottle in one long guzzle.  Several loud belches followed.  "Ahh.  Damn fine day," he grinned, a wet circle all the way around his mouth shining in the sun.

      I had to admit that at the moment, things weren't too bad.  Despite a rising bank of clouds on the western horizon, the sun was out; I was still dry, uninjured, and not fibrillating.  It definitely could be worse.  For instance, I could catch a big fish of some kind, and then be obliged to clean it. The only fish I had ever actually cleaned was a six-inch trout when I was twelve, and I had gagged then.  Faced with the prospect of cleaning a fish 50 times as big... And then there was the obligation of cooking and eating it.  I had long ago decided that the only fish that I remotely cared for came frozen in little squares and covered with bread crumbs.  My only hope was that I wouldn't actually catch anything, which was ludicrous, considering all the trouble I had gone to in order to be fishing at that very moment.

      "Heeere, fishy-fishy," C.J. began to chant in a sing-song voice.  I gave him a puzzled look.  "Helps if you talk to them nice," he confided, and then gave an extremely loud belch.  "'Scuse me," he said remorsefully.

      "Why,  Cyril-John, I've never heard you apologize to me before," I said.

      "Wasn't talkin' to you.  Was talkin' to the fish.  Won't bite if you're rude,"  he said.  "Heeere fishy-fishy-fishy," he sang again.  C.J. checked his line, fiddled with the reel a bit, and then banged it on the top of the outboard motor.  "Jams up once in awhile," he said.

      I looked at his banged up pole and then at my shiny new one.  "Why didn't you use the pole I'm using?   Seems nicer," I said, somewhat perturbed that I had unconsciously  omitted the subject of my last sentence.

      "'Cause this is my lucky pole."  C.J. spat his cigarette stub a good thiry feet out over the stern.  Caught a sixty pound Chinook with this pole.  Caught a two-hundred pound halibut on twenty pound test line with this pole.  Took me two days.  Caught a white shark once on this pole.  Itty-bitty one, though, only about twelve feet.  Even caught that pole with this pole.

      "You what?" I said.

      "Caught that pole on a hoochie squid and flasher with twenty-pound test.  Boy-howdy, did it give me a fight, too," C.J. said.  He lit up a cigarette and burnt off about half of it in the process.

      "Okay, I'll bite; tell me the story," I sighed.

      "Weellll, it was on the Columbia slough up near Coon Island.  I was trollin' by a little boat with a family in it.  Could tell they was first timers right off-- new boat, shiny new poles-- the dad had a tie on, for Christ's sake.  Anyways, the boy-- must 'a been thirteen or so-- was holdin' his pole real loose in one hand, so I yelled over to him, 'Hey, btter hold onto that pole, kid!'  He just gave me the finger.  Sure enough, about two minutes later, the kid got a strike that yanked that pole clean out of his hand. Look just like he threw a spear.  Bloop, and it went into the water so fast, didn't even make a splash.   Kid just sat there with his hand up in the air and his mouth wide open.  They was laughin' at him all up and down the river.  Weellll, I got an idea to troll upstream o' them for awhile just in case, and sure enough, I got a humongous strike.  I played him in and he turned out to weigh 57 pounds.  Had a line comin' out of his mouth, and when I pulled it in, that pole was on the other end.  I gave them the fish, but I kept the pole.  They could always get another pole, but they'd never get another fish like that one.  No big deal to me; I've caught bigger on my lucky pole."  C.J. took a big drag; a long, glowing cigarette ash that I had been watching all through his story dropped down inside his open-front shirt, but he didn't seem to notice.  He checked the ash length after his drag, saw that it didn't need flicking, and put it back between his teeth, smiling as though he had a big secret instead of a two-inch live ash down his front.

      We fished for two hours without another bite.  In that time, C.J. polished off the entire package of Bearclaws, two tuna sandwiches, a box of crackers, two bags of potato chips, and a case of Bud's Best Beer.  I had had an apple which I had carefully washed once in the ocean, once under a canteen, and wiped to a bright sheen with my handkerchief.  I ate it slowly while I watched the cloudbank in the west looming larger and darker.  When the afternoon sun began to dip behind the top of it, a cool breeze rose.

      Finally, C.J. said, "Well, shit," and started to reel in.  "Looks like we're skunked today, little brother.  Sometimes the fish just don't listen, even when ya talk pretty to 'em.  Don't take it personal, is the thing.  Anyways the wind is pickin' up.  Time to head in."  I was  overjoyed to hear those words, until he added, "We got to go pick up my crab trap first, though."

      "What do you mean we?" I said distrustfully.

      "I mean you and me, unless you want to go swimmin'.  Lighten up. Piece of cake, you'll see. Should be lots of crabs in it, too.  Didn't have time to pick it up last night, what with it gettin' dark and all.  Doesn't fresh crab for supper sound damned fine?"

      "Fine," I muttered as I reeled in.  I hated shellfish even worse than salmon, and had never gotten any all the way swallowed in my whole life.  "Damn fine," I said, trying to sound as adventurous as C.J. and taking special care not to have my upper lip curl up under my nose.  Real fishermen do not curl up their lips at their catch.

      By the time we had motored in from the fishing grounds to the crabbing area in  shallow water near the South Jetty, the sky was totally overcast.  The breeze had picked up, and little flecks of white began to show on the rising chop.  We circled around the area a couple of times until C.J. pointed over the side.

      "There she is!" he shouted, and jerked the vicegrips to one side.  The bow of the sailboat swung sharply just as a chop-tipped swell hit the side.  Suddenly the deck I had been standing on was almost vertical; I fell against the gunwale at the same time it came up to meet me.  Every bit of wind was knocked from my body, and I sank into a fetal position gasping for air.

      "Come about," C.J. said.

      "Can I have a little more warning next time?" I coughed.

      "Got to stay on your toes," C.J. shrugged.

      "Not even an apology?" I hinted.

      "For what?"  C.J. looked genuinely puzzled.  "There ain't any 'oops' in sailin'.  Only 'there-nows'.  C.J. reached over the side and plucked an old Clorox bottle from the water.  "There now," he said, and started hauling in the line attached to it.  "When I get the trap up, you hold it into the side of the boat.  Watch your fingers, though.."

      Suddenly a large wire-mesh cage emerged from the water; a moving mass of red crabs made clacking sounds as they crawled over one another inside the cage.  I held the cage steady on the gunwale as C.J. reached in and picked one of the smaller crabs up by its back.  While he was doing this, the largest crab I had ever seen in my life crawled over all the others and made a lunge for my fingers.  A split-second after I moved my hand away, a pincer the size of the Jaws-of-Life snapped shut around the wire mesh where my fingers had been.  I could see the little eyes on the ends of his feelers turn and focus on my other hand; a second later, his other pincer snapped shut where that one would have been, had I not moved it.  I continued to play 'hot potato' with my angry new pal while C.J. emptied the trap.

      "Too small.  Too small.  Female," he repeated as he threw several back into the ocean.  Finally, he came to my  hand hunter, the Godzilla of crabs.  "Nice one," he said.  He reached in to extract it, but the crab was big enough to span the entire cage and had dug in with all of its various appendages.  C.J. pulled and prodded, but as soon as he got one appendage free, the huge crab found another foothold with its others.  "Ol' Big Red here's a stubborn one, ain't he?" C.J. grinned.  "But he's still got crab meat for brains.  Just got to distract him."  C.J. reached behind himself with his free hand and grabbed the first two tools he found from the top of his open tool box-- a pair of pliers and a hunting knife.  He reached into the cage with them and waved them around until Big Red closed his pincers on them.  Then, as the huge crab was unable to use his pincers, C.J. pried his other six legs loose.  C.J. pulled Big Red from the cage and dropped him into the bait bucket. 

      While C.J. cleaned out the last of the small crabs from the cage, I kept my eye on old Big Red, who was entirely too big to fit into the bait bucket.  It was only a matter of seconds before Big Red, still carrying the piers and hunting knife in his pincers, was able to tip over the bucket and was now loose on the cockpit deck.  He stood there, moving up and down on his six hind legs, and I could see his long, protruding eye-feelers turning toward me.  I thought he had been huge inside the cage, but there on the cockpit floor, spanning from bulkhead to bulkhead, he was one humongous sea creature.  Then he began to slowly advance on me, waving his pliers and hunting knife in the air.

      C.J. continued to secure the crabtrap to the deck and coil the lines, oblivious to the sea monster loose in his cockpit.  Another few click-clacks of his various appendages, and the crab from hell would be close enough to knife me, or do who knew what with his pliers.  I was out of there; I climbed up onto the cabin-top as Big Red began to scale the cockpit seat.  "Cyril-John!" I screamed.

      C.J. turned from completing his business.  "Here now," he grinned.  "Rude to chase the guests with knives.  Bad crab," he added.  He stepped on the crab's back, squashing it to the seat.  Then he twisted the pliers like a corkscrew until the whole arm, pincer and all, broke off with a crack.  He did the same with the knife, stuffed the pincerless crab into the bait bucket, and put the cooler on top of it as I climbed down off the cabin-top.  I didn't look at him.  "Got to be firm with your catch," he said, looking away from me, out to sea at the darkening clouds.  "Weather coming up.  Better head in," he added.  He hit the starter button on the motor, but nothing happened.  "Damn," he said.

      "Is that a good damn or a bad damn?" I asked, eager to change the subject away from Big Red.

      "If it was good, I'd 'a said 'hot damn'" C.J. muttered as he fiddled with various levers on the front of the engine.  He pulled the starter cord a dozen times without so much as a chug from the motor. 

      "I take it this is a cold damn," I said.

      "Naw, it ain't no damn at all," he said.  "It's just  time to go sailin'  Stand by the main halyard, and get it right this time, shit-fer-brains!" he said, but he grinned at me as he swiped the two pincer arms aside on his way up to the cabin-top.

      We got it right enough that C.J. used no more profanity than usual, and soon we were sailing around the tip of the jetty so close that I could see the sea anenomes blooming like flowers on the rocks below us. 

      "Aren't we awfully close to the rocks?"  I asked.

      "What, did we hit?"  C.J. asked.

      I almost said the word "almost", but I stopped myself, not wanting to hear about horseshoes and hand grenades again.  "Not yet," I said.

      C.J. snorted.  "Quit your worryin,'" he said.  "You're gonna hurt yourself thinkin' like that."  He frowned as he looked at me.  Clearly I was not a bit less worried for all his careful watching over me.  "Oh all right.  If it'll make you fell any better, we'll sail right up the middle of the damned channel."  He pushed the tiller hard to one side and the bow swung away from the rocks so suddenly that I hit my head on the gunwale again.  But when you're with Cyril-John, pain is a given.  I was sort of getting used to it; I think all my nerve endings must begin to pull back away from the surface of my body the second I meet with him.  At any rate it didn't hurt as much as last time.  "Come about," C.J. said.

      We turned abeam of the wind as we entered the mouth of the river and sailed right down the center of the channel between the buoys, which C.J. pointed out one by one.  The wind was steepening the waves into a white-capped frenzy, but on our heading, the bow of the boat deflected most of the spray as we surged forward.  Powerful gusts began to play the taut sail lines like harp strings, and the boat heeled over far enough that I had to brace my feet against the opposite seat in order not to fall out of my own.

      "It's getting pretty windy," I yelled, trying to sound calm and adventurous.

      "Yup, right fresh out," C.J. said.

      " I meant to say, really really windy," I said as I stood on the opposite wall.  "Shouldn't we reduce our sails?"

      "Naw, shit," C.J. said around his cigarette stub. "I've had this boat in lots worse than this.  Had this boat in a fifty knot wind once.  Full sails up, too.  She's a good boat."

      "What the hell were you thinking with full sails up in a fifty knot wind?" I said, vaguely aware that my toilet-brush hat was coming back.

      "Weellll, it was up just south o' Cape Flattery... makin' way towards Neah Bay just ahead of a sou'wester.  Makin' damn good time, too, leavin' a rooster-tail in the wake like we was.  I'll admit I was gettin' sort of concerned.  I was thinkin' I wanted to get in before it got any worse."  C.J. spat out his cigarette stub; it hit the taut sail like a bullet and exploded into tiny firy sparks.   "Why hell's bells-- I've had this boat clear over with its mast in the water..."

      "On purpose?" I asked.

      "Course on purpose!  How else ya going to find out if water's going to get inside the cabin?"  C.J. said.  "Ya got to know if the damn boat is safe, don't ya?"

      "So let me get this straight.  You capsized this boat to see if it was safe?" I said, my mouth hanging open.

      "The only way," C.J. shrugged.  "Do that with all my boats."

      I began to shake my head involuntarily, but I stopped as soon as I became aware I was doing it.  I didn't want C.J. to think that I thought he was crazy, even if I thought he was.  I clung to the merest shred of hope; we were in the middle of the channel, far out away from any dangerous rocks or breakers, and almost inside the bar.  Soon the water would smooth out and the wind abate somewhat as it passed by the spit of land we were approaching.  I began to breathe easier.  We were almost home safe, sound, and dry.  I found myself starting to smile with relative optimism.  That's when the first raindrop hit the bald spot in the middle of my toilet-brush hat.

      The dark clouds seemed to split apart like an overloaded hammock.  A torrent fell so rapidly that in a matter of minutes I was soaked to the skin in the sideways rain.

      "I thought you said it wouldn't rain," I shouted, starting to shiver a bit.

      "Never said that," C.J. shouted back.

      "Did," I answered, vaguely aware that I had left off the subject of the sentence again.  I was beginning to sound like him.

      "Naw," C.J. spat.  "Said that weathermen don't know shit.  They're bound to be right once in awhile by accident though."  He shrugged and squinted hard over the cabin top.

      "What are you looking at?" I said.

      "Just tryin' to spot the next bouy.  See anything?"

      I looked up ahead and could only see a little ways in the downpour.  A damn fine situation this was.  I was cold, wet, hungry, and lost.  I looked astern to see if I could get a bearing on the last two bouys we had passed. I could still see them, but I also saw a  curious object between them.  It was vee shaped and looked like a pair of wings.  The vee was too near the water to be a cloud and too large to be a bird, though it did appear to be moving toward us.  For the life of me, I couldn't make out what it was.

      "C.J., what do you suppose that thing behind us is?" I said, pointing at the object.

      C.J. looked over his shoulder, and his mouth fell open.  "Shee-it!" he said,  and swung the tiller to one side so quickly I hit my head again. 

      I looked back at the low-flying white vee, definitely getting larger, and then saw the dark shape above it looming toward us.  The vee was the bow wake of the largest ship I had ever seen, and it was headed up the channel straight for  us.  It was so huge that it looked as though it might scrape the bouys on either side, and it completely eclipsed our view of Cape Disappointment.

      Meanwhile, C.J. had turned the boat so sharply that we faced directly into the wind.  The sails began to flap franticly as we coasted to a stop.  That was when I heard the ship's horn begin to blast several times.

      "What does five horn blasts mean in ship language?" I asked.

      "Collision alarm," C.J. said as he fought with the tiller.  "Go up on the bow and see if you can get some wind in the jib!"

      This time I did what I was told as quick as I could manage it, and soon we fell off the wind enough to slowly gain headway.  But as I looked over the cabin toward the stern, all I could see was the massive ship's bow bearing down on us.  I could no longer see any of the superstructure; all I could see was an anchor the size of a Cadillac and the words Toyota Maru behind it in white letters ten feet tall.

      The Toyota Maru would be on top of us in another minute, maybe less.  As I gaped at the huge ship, I saw C.J. standing alongside the tiller, calmly holding onto an aluminum boat-pole as though it were a harpoon.  I supposed he thought that if we didn't steer clear of the ship soon enough, he would simply reach out with his trusty pole and fend her off, simple as that.

      I had no Life Rule prefabricated for this situation.  I was soaking wet, hungry, freezing, and about to be run over by a ten-million pound Toyota.  I had far less faith in Cyril-John and his aluminum boat-pole than I needed.  I knew that ship's captains were supposed to go down with their ships, but I was pretty sure it was a Life Rule that smart people tried not to.

      Just before I was certain the Toyota maru would crush us into little fiberglass trinkets and unrecognizable meatballs, I took a flying leap off the bow.  The icy water squeezed the breath out of my body like weight on a punctured tire.  Luckily, I had been wearing my life-jacket all day, and by the time I need to inhale in the worst way, I broke the surface.  As I was gasping for air, I was vaguely aware of Cyril-John's boat surfing down the Toyota Maru's bow wave and hearing him yell "Yee-Haww!"  Then I choked on a faceful of foam and seaweed as the bow wave rolled over my head.  I tried my best swimming stroke, which was very difficult fully clothed, life-jacketed, and confused as to which way was up.  Suddenly, my arm became tangled in a rope or line of some kind.  I threw it away from me, but it coiled back around me like a snake.  I flailed my arms and swam away from it, but the line found me even more quickly, and wrapped around my neck.  By the time I freed myself, I was completely exhausted. But then I felt the line laying heavily across my shoulder yet again.  This was my absolute worst nightmare.  I was going to be pulled under, hopelessly entangled in heavy ropes, and I was going to  drown.  I began screaming, but the noise that came out of my mouth, awash with sea water, sounded a lot like gargling...

      "Grab onto the damn life-line, Thomas James!"  C.J. yelled from the stern of his boat.  I could see him holding a rope as he leaned out over the water.  "Knew the bow wave'd probably throw us clear.  Don't know why ya had to go and do a damn fool thing like that!"  he shook his head.  "You're not just weak-brained.  Worse than that," he said.  "Swear, I think your brain's trying to kill you!"

      I don't remember how I got out of the water; somehow, Cyril-John got it done.  He wrapped me in a sail cover, made me drink lukewarm coffee from his thermos, and managed to steer the boat into the harbor as well, all the while singing What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor at the top of his voice around a bent cigarette stub.  How he kept it lit in the sideways rain is still a mystery to me, as are a lot of things about Cyril-John.

      Whether or not he was right by accident like the weathermen he cursed, just phenomenally lucky, or had a sixth sense about things like other dumb animals had, I could never figure out.  But when my feet touched the solid boards of the dock, I experienced a most profound epiphany, realizing for the first time all day that I would live longer than ten minutes.  I clasped my hands together, looked toward the darkened sky and whispered "Thank you!"

      "You're welcome," C.J. said  just as though I had been talking to him. He finished tying off the stern line and straightened up, streching his back as he walked up to me.  "Sorry we got skunked," he said.  "'Cept for your damn foolishness, don't know what you'll have to write about."  He shrugged.

      You'd be surprised," I said.

      "Say, why don't ya come out next week?  Well have us another boating lesson.  Maybe catch us a big Chinook.  What d'ya say, Thomas James?"  He grinned affably, just as though this had been a normal trip for him.  The thing was, with Cyril-John, you just never knew.  Maybe it was.

      "Not on your fucking life," I said.  I cringed, and made a mental note to train myself not to swear by the time I got home.  But I shook C.J.'s hand before I stumbled up the ramp towards my car.