Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

July 10, 2008

Photo (by Seth Kantner): Andrew Greene tying bait in a crab pot

It’s midnight, windy, spitting rain. Far across gray ocean, bands of sun reach orange fingers under the clouds. Andrew Greene’s boat leaps, plunging and pounding into a quartering chop and sideways swell. We grip the console, shouting seasick stories to each other and joking about the cost of crabs with this seven-dollar-per-gallon gasoline.

“Your picture better not show me puking.”

“Don’t worry. I can’t use a photo of a green Eskimo.”

This king crab fishing started with sunburns. The day before the Fourth of July celebrations, we motored thirty miles across the sound and set Andrew’s pots in mirror-smooth water. Cumulus clouds were rising in the blue sky, icebergs all around the boat, fierce sun off the ice and sea cooking our faces and shoulders.

That day, the first thing we did was search for my two crab pots. My wife and daughter and I had set them while camping, a couple days previous. But they were gone, taken by ice that had moved in—even though the water temperature was 50 degrees. The ice wasn’t a surprise in July, but the water had seemed so warm, and with recent newspapers telling that the North Pole might melt loose this summer, I’d foolishly taken a chance.

Andrew had made brand new pots, five-feet square. He had new teal-blue ropes rigged in an untried and covert fashion; his gear would be without buoys for ice to snag or other crabbers to spot.

He found a larger opening between icebergs. We strung the three pots out in a line a mile offshore. The last rope disappeared into the depths. “Okay, right next to that big ice pan,” I joked. The ice was moving out on a brisk current; seals surfaced near the boat, seabirds called and all around us massive melting chunks boomed and thundered into the glassy ocean.

Weather moved in after the fourth. Andrew went back to work for the week.

Southerly winds and high water eroded away the last grasses of our backyard. I set a short net for bait—caught three salmon and a tote of huge sheefish. Filleting a salmon for dinner, I thought about how rich this land and ocean are, and wondered as I have before about the ridiculous nutritional inequality of catching hundreds of pounds of fine-eating fish for bait—and burning drums of gas—in hopes of catching a few crabs.

The old Inupiaq Eskimos that I knew when I was a kid didn’t mention crabs. Likely there were even fewer king crab this far north at that time, and traditionally people here had little time or reason to fool with such a marginal food supply. My family certainly would not have.

Tonight, Andrew pulled up a rusted broken axe with his anchor. Gunning the motor, he steered north. Fifteen miles out, the first thing we ran into was a bloated floating dead walrus. Shot, possibly by ivory hunters, and lost. We idled up to it. An oil slick stretched away into the windy distance. The stink was powerful enough you could feel it with your face. We assumed the head would be cut off, but it wasn’t, and down in the water we saw the white of tusks.

We joked about rolling the animal over, to check if the bottom was fresh enough to eat. “That’s the best eating,” he said, “If they’ve only sunk for a couple days. It ages it.”

This one had the loose-flopping floating movements of a walrus long past that point. Andrew held the head up with a gaff. The tusks were small, both broken off—one from natural causes, the other from gunshot. I bent over the gunwale and cut as fast as I could at the putrid whiskered face. Andrew made gagging sounds and kept turning away into the wind. It took some chopping with the hunk of rust that used to be an axe. The chopping caused spattering—black ooze and splashing oily water.

We got the face bone free and traveled on, but of course that kind of stink comes along with you. The wind was rising. By the time we idled in circles for a while, the rocking boat and us staring down trying to figure out our GPS, by the time we finally found and hooked a line and pulled in the three pots and pulled out starfish and crabs—by that time Andrew told me he wasn’t feeling his best.

A squall enveloped us and rain pelted down. I lashed a last few sheefish in next to leaking mesh bags of old bait. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t the first one seasick. What a great trip! I remembered my camera. “Wait a minute, Andrew.” I clambered over pots and lines and crabs loose on the floor. By the time I found it in my soggy daypack, the boat was pitching sideways, my subject wasn’t photogenic at all, and my stomach had started that reeling feeling.