When coffee was everything.

Post your adventures, anecdotes, amusing, funny, or scary stories here.
Post Reply
yak2you2
Site Supporter
Site Supporter
Posts: 556
Joined: Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:00 am
Location: Yakutat, Ak.

When coffee was everything.

Post by yak2you2 »

From the time I was able to walk, I spent the summers of my youth Commercial fishing with my grandparents. Thinking back on it, I realize now that these seemingly endless summers would ultimately set the course for a lifetime spent involved in Alaska's commercial fishing industry, but they did so much more for me than that.
Monti Bay in Yakutat, Alaska narrows down at the end to a small cove where stands an old cannery that has bought fish consistently for more than 100 years. Nearby is a small sandy beach, that some of the earliest memories of my life spring from. On this beach would be long rows of flipped over wooden dorys that were owned by the cannery and least to the local gillnetters for the summer salmon gillnet fishery. They weren't much to look at, about 16 feet in length, they were made of plywood, 2x4'sa for ribs, and two planks for seats. A lot of them had a set of roller horns that went all the way acrossed the stern to guide the gillnet as it was set out by the fisherman rowing the little dory as it had been done a century before hand. Some, for those who were lucky enough in the early 70's to be able to afford it, had a notch for where a beastly little 10 hp. outboard motor could be mounted. This would allow the lucky fisherman who owned it to feel like he was traveling at the speed of light compared to those who were rowing.
Every spring, my grandfather and I would go down to the beach where he would pick out the little numbered dory he wished to lease for the year, and would start the tedious process of fixing up the little boat to make it ready for the summer fishery. He would pull old nails and refasten it. Sand down rough spots to try to avoid the web from catching on them, and apply copious amounts of pitch and paint to keep it from leaking as much as possible. This, by the way, was a near physical impossibility and the little boats had to be bailed fairly often when they were in the water, which allowed for my first official title as a fisherman, I was the head bailer. The old man made me a tiny little wooden box with a handle and I would amble around the boat and scoop water out of the little spaces in between the ribs. The job paid a dollar and a half a week, which at a time when the cannery store charged 5 cents for a candy bar, and 5 cents for a comic book, made me feel like a millionaire.
I remember asking him a thousand questions a day while he would be refurbishing our little boat,about everything imaginable until he would grow tired of the distraction, and send me off to go play. I would busy myself trying to jump from the bottom of one over turned skiff to another without touching the ground, or stand my ground against impossibly vast numbers of marauding pirates with a piece of driftwood used as an imaginary sword. or simply lay on the beach and stare at the clouds and try to spot imaginary faces. Eventually these long blissful spring days would give way to summer and the seasonal return of the salmon runs.
We would start gillnetting for sockeyes and kings in early June just a few miles away from the old cannery. Not many folks would wander to far as we fished 75 fathom nets, and they were a lot to haul in so small of a boat. They didn't take very much weather either so no one fished out in the open ocean like we do now. I will always remember the intense excitement that would over take me not long after waking up on our first morning. We could legally set the net at six a.m. but we would usually go to out at about 4 a.hm. just to be at the spot we wanted to fish before anyone else. Catching fish didn't mean anything to me in money terms, it was all just measured in pure excitement, and adrenaline. Unless it was terribly slow, we would stay on the net all day, and wait for fish to hit, then work our way along the corkline and pick them out. When I was seven, my grandfather brought along a small ribbon and each day he would make me start pulling from one end towards the other. When I got tired and could go no further, he would tie the ribbon around the corkline. If I could make it passed that spot the next day,he would give me a quarter.By the end of that summer I could make it the whole way down the net by myself if the current wasn't to bad, though I don't recall how many quarters it cost the old man, it was a pretty savvy way of making a good little crewman for himself. Our little boat would hold about 800 pounds of fish if the weather was calm, and I remember we would fill it up quite often over the course of the summer. My favorite though was always the kings. We fished sockeye gear because it was the predominant species and the web was usually far to small to gill a big king salmon. They would get tangled up by just the bulb of their noses and could be lost very easily if the fisherman didn't make the right moves. My grandfather's usual trick for getting them aboard was to try to get them in the bag of the net with the lead and corkline over the bow, but this didn't always work because sometimes the fish had hit going against the current. He had figured out through trial and error that if you didn't get to close to the big fish they wouldn't spook right away, so he would reach way out as far as he could reach, and conk the thing over the head before it had a chance to freak out and tear it's self free of the web. One morning we had a large, lively one hanging outside of the bag. The old man attempted to reach out and club him, but at the last minute the fished moved and he missed. He took another swing at him but by now the fish was angry and was thrashing violently. In desperation he took another swing and this time he connected with a resounding WHACK! that layed the big fish instantly still, but, in so doing he had knocked the brute loose from the web and it was now drifting silently back and downward in desperation he made a lunge with the hook of the gaff and stuck the fish in the head, but in so doing he had reached out to far and lost his balance over the rail and fell head first right overboard leaving nothing to show of himself but his hat. My grandmother screamed and was panic stricken, but when the old man surfaced he was laughing. Grandma and I were feverishly working to haul him into the boat, but he shucked us away saying" don't worry about me just get the damn fish in, which we did. Only then did he haul himself up over the rail and climbed in, he wasn't going to let his one and only trip overboard be in vain. The fish weighed in at 57 pounds later that day, but it was worth a lot more than that in bragging rights.
I had a little hand line that the old man had rigged up for me, which amounted to being a ball of twine rapped around the middle of a foot long stick, that I would amuse myself with from the back of the boat, when fishing was slow. My usual catches were limited to shallow water fish, small cod, bullheads,and flounders. I remember one hot day in July, the water was dead still not a breath of wind was stirring and the ocean look like a giant mirror. The gillnetting was terribly slow, and even the jigging had gone flat as I hadn't had a bite in hours.The heat of the day seemed to have put everything in the whole ocean down for a long nap and it was threating to do the same to me. I was hanging over the rail making faces at myself in the water to amuse myself, when I felt a firm and resounding tug on my handline. I sat up and held my line in front of myself almost in disbelief, and then it hit again, only this time line just started to wiz out through my fingers at an alarming rate. I stood up on the little wooden handles on either side of my ball of string in an attempt to break the course of whatever was reeling my line out, but I didn't weigh enough, and line kept peeling out anyway. Now I knew I had something. I screamed for grandpa to come and help me, as I knew for sure I was about to loose my fish and my little handline. The oldman came back sort of chuckling, and he said something smart like" bout time you finally caught something big enough to eat". He though maybe I was over dramatizing my catch as I had done on many other occassions. Not this time. When the old man took hold of my little jigging rig he knew we were in for a fight. He finally managed to stop the flow of line but for near an hour he could not budge whatever was on the other end toward the surface, as the thin hanging twine offered almost nothing to grip to the hand. Eventually he came up with an idea. He rapped the line around his gaff hook handle and slowly pulled up on it. when he slid the handle back down the line, I would take up the slack on my little handle roll. This went on for about another hour, before we got our first look at my prize. Slowly, up from the depths, rose the biggest fish I had ever seen in my entire life of 8 years, it looked to me to be the very bottom itself, and it scared me. This fish looked like it could eat a small boy like me! It was of course a Halibut, and a big one by anyone's standards, the old man estimated that it weighed somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds, but for a small boy with a handline it was Moby Dick himself. Grandfather eventually dispatched the thing and hauled it in. There was other little dock rats like myself that spent all of their spare time terrorizing the local flounder population under the local boat harbor, and I will never forget the deep feeling of pride that came from flopping the world's biggest flounder out on the dock for them all to see. I was in heaven.
Once the sockeye season came to a close, it would be time for the old man and I to go trolling for a while. He had an old wooden 38 foot ex-seiner that had been converted into a fish and game boat called the Shearwater that he bought on an auction. I couldn't tell you what year it was, but I can tell you that he worked on it more than we ever fished on it. It was an interesting vessel for a small boy to grow up on, with lots of small little places to explore and let the imagination run wild. Trolling was a whole different world then from what it is now. what the old man had for electronics was a CB radio, and a flasher. Now, if you never had opportunity to experience a flasher, be thankful. In my mind, the round little dial that the light spun round and round on until it made a supposed flash at the current depth, should have been made to look like a dart board, because your odds were about the same. I got yelled at for that piece of equipment more than I have for any other thing in my entire life. For the first few years, This was my job, keep the boat straight, and watch the flasher. Half the time it would be showing about 3 or 4 flashes at the same time, and I never had any idea which one was which. The other thing that would get me yelled at a lot wasn't my fault either the way I remember it. The old boat had the oddest set up for shifting and throttle. There was 2 steel pipes that ran up through the dash, and kept on going through the ceiling to the flying bridge station. They had a handle welded on to each of them and one was for shifting, the other, for throttle. These were the stiffest controls I ever experienced in all my life. You would give it nudge, then another, and nothing, then one more, and the old jimmy was going balls to the wall, and the same went for slowing it down. For some reason grease didn't seem to help. We did catch plenty of Cohos with it though. It seemed like a time of plenty, when you didn't even have to have good electronics or gear. Just throw over some crusty old spoons, and crank until you were tired for the day. Eventually I got promoted to head cranker, but what's funny, for all the reamings I took for bouncing bottom, or going to fast or slow, I noticed that the old man didn't fair any better than I did at it, only I didn't get to say anything about it. He sold that boat when I about 13, and I never heard of it again. We trolled for a few more years together out of a skiff but by then he was getting a little old for being out there all day in the skiff.
We would go back to gillnetting in the fall and catch the cohos up inside the river about 10 miles from town where we had a little cabin. I looked forward to this time of year the most, for a number of reasons. First, the nets were only 20 fathoms long, which were like a toy net compared to the 75 fathom nets of summer. Second, we fished mostly at night in those days, which allowed me to hunt ducks and geese on a regular basis during the daylight hours. It was a young boys' paradise. It was during these times that I most remember people coming by to visit.
Many times I've heard Yakutat referred to as a sleepy little native fishing village which it was, and still is a pretty accurate description of it. Fisherman had to hustle in those days to make a living, same as today, and in a lot of ways more so, but in times of leisure, everything was different. Back then there was no television, no computers, no video games, or ipods, and the telephones were rarely used. In the evenings, when all the fish had been sold and my family was home relaxing, it was a totally different lifestyle from the one we know today. We spent much more time talking and reading. In these quiet times, a person had a much greater opportunity to absorb the details of life. Some nights the old man and I would spend an hour or two carefully assembling a model sailing ship. It would usually take us a year to complete one down to the finest detail, but by the time it was completed, I could tell you what the function was of every little piece of equipment that there is on a sailing ship, though I've never sailed before. Other nights I would simply curl up in front of our fireplace with my dog and let the peace and serenity that fire seems to bring to all people, lull me to sleep. Even reading was subtly different. No one read any quick little magazines or short stories, it was usually a big thick novel that would take people literally months to read a little at a time. No one, was ever in a hurry to do much of anything, and for living that way I remember most people seemed to attain a certain graceful, patient nature about themselves.
My grandfather had grown up on a farm in Michigan in the midst of the great depression, and was the second oldest of ten brothers and sisters. There wasn't a lot of money or food available so he had dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and joined the navy. He had been in for about two years and just recently had been stationed on a supply and technical ship called the Argonne in Pearl Harbor, it was December, 1941. He had seen some bad things come of alcohol in his early life, and it was for this reason that he rarely drank. This being an oddity in the navy, had usually landed him the detail of running small lighters back and forth from ship to shore ferrying sailors to the beach for liberty, even though his general duty had been as an engineman. He was just finishing up a graveyard shift of this detail and was running his last boat load of groggy sailors back to their various ships when the first of the Japanese attack planes showed up, they were torpedo bombers. Grandfather told me that before this event he had been just another shy, quiet, country kid, whom had never seen a dead man, or seen a gun shot at anyone in anger. Everyone of course knew that there was a savage war tearing the European continent apart, but the Hawaiian islands on the other side of the planet, seemed to him to far away for any of it to almost matter. Neither him, nor anyone else ever expected what happened next, and he said that in an instant, it changed all of them forever. For his part, his experiences in the war made him an intensely peaceful man later in life, that abhorred violence.
During our quiet times, my grandfather would often tell me a very detailed account of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, along with all of his other experiences during the war, and everything else about his life, stories and details that I doubt people of today would ever have the time to sit doubt and tell, and all of which I treasure very deeply.
He told me that because of the shallow depth of the harbor, the torpedo bombers had to fly very low off of the water before releasing their torpedoes. He remembered that as a group of three of them flew by about fifty yards away he could see the pilot and the rear gunner of the nearest one smiling. Not realizing what was taking place, some of the drunken sailors in the boat were inclined to stand up and wave, but grandfather said that they all knew what a torpedo was, and when they dropped them, they knew right away that something was very wrong. Before they had much time to contemplate it, one of the rear gunners of the torpedo planes opened up on their boat with his machinegun with a passing burst that had hit one of the sailors in the chest killing him instantly, and had sent everyone else diving for cover. As grandfather stood up he said the most tremendous blast he had ever experienced in his life rose up out of a nearby battleship which had just been torpedoed by the planes that had flown by. The entire ship, which had just come out of dry dock the day before, rose up out of the water and he said you could see the massive propellers, and all the fresh red paint on the bottom of her hull before she settle back into the water and immediately began to lurch over to her wounded side. When the concussion of the blast hit them, it blew a few of the men right out of the boat, knocked all of their hats off, and deafened everyone. He spent the rest of the attack picking up horribly burned and wounded survivors from the water, and even those who were not wounded were covered in oil so thick it made it nearly impossible to pull them into the boat.
It always amazed me the vivid detail with which he could recall his memories of the war, but I don't suppose they were the kind of memories that anyone could ever forget.
My grandmother grew up in Wisconsin the daughter of a very wealthy lumbermill owner. Her mother had passed away when she was very young, and she remembered having servants and nannies to watch over her,and her brother and sister, as her father was away a lot. She said that he lost everything during the depression, and he wound up taking to drink, and left her to care for her two younger siblings. As was the patriotic nature of the time, she had told a young man who was going off to join the navy to give her name and address to some of the sailors he would meet so that she could write to them and hopefully make them a little less home sick. He gave the address to one of his shipmates, my grandfather. They corresponded for about a year, as best as they could, in the middle of a world at war. The old man finally had some leave to go home in late 1942. He was taking a train from San Francisco back to his home town of Battle Creek,Michigan, when he decided to take a detour and visit my grandmother in Milwaukee. They were married by the weekend they would later recount, and would not see each other for another whole year. This was the way that their marriage of 60 years began.
They were intensely friendly people who loved to talk and trade stories with others, and often would have visitors come over for coffee, and a chat. Grandmother prided herself in being a good cook and would get down right insulted if visitors wouldn't eat to near unconsiousness. When we were fishing she would share an equal hand in the work. She was stout, and very strong, thinking nothing of hauling up the leadline by hand, or picking the fish from the nets for long hours, But when it came to homemaking she was at her very best. She would rise up early in the morning before anyone and put on the coffee, and make breakfast. One of her favorite sayings was" eat to live, live to eat", and she always made sure that no one who fished with ,or even near, us ever went hungry. It was the coffee that I remember sticking out the most though. Every morning I would wake up to the smell of freshly brewing coffee, day after day, until it left an imprint in me that the day just doesn't didn't start without the smell of coffee. She had a giant thermos that she would fill up and bring along with us in our little skiff that never, ever missed a single trip that I can remember. It was only on stormy, rainy days though that I was allowed to drink it, and I was generally told that the reason for this was that it would stunt my growth, of course I know now that it simply had the effect of making me ask to many questions that was the real reason. Nothing ever did taste so good I have to admit, as a hot cup of coffee on a cold day.
Still, there seemed to be more to coffee than I could make out in my youth. I remember watching fellow fisherman taking spray in the face, driving against chop for miles with a ten horse motor just to come to our little cabin, or come over and tie along side our skiff and have coffee with my grandparents. I could never figure out why then, I remember thinking," why wouldn't you just make your own coffee, and avoid the hassle?" What I didn't understand about coffee in those days is, it was much more than just a drink, it was a social call. To offer someone coffee was like extending your hand for a shake. It was a reason ,or excuse if you like, for people to get together and visit and entertain one another with stories of old. Sometimes, they would spend the whole day just sitting and talking. Coffee was everything. People of this era knew more about taking time to share in each others lives than anyone does from the internet age we live in now-a-days, I feel something very important has been lost with the increased speed with which we're living our lives. After all, life is terribly short as it is, why on earth people want to speed up the pace is beyond me.
groundhog
Member
Posts: 25
Joined: Thu May 08, 2008 8:10 pm

Re: When coffee was everything.

Post by groundhog »

Wonderful story Yak2you2.

Keep 'em coming.
yak2you2
Site Supporter
Site Supporter
Posts: 556
Joined: Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:00 am
Location: Yakutat, Ak.

Re: When coffee was everything.

Post by yak2you2 »

I'm glad you liked it. I do plan on writing some more, just takes time to gather it up in the right order. I hope that breaking the ice on the STORIES category will entice others into sharing some stories, i'm looking forward to reading others experiences.
Salty
Site Supporter
Site Supporter
Posts: 2399
Joined: Thu Feb 14, 2008 1:46 pm

Re: When coffee was everything.

Post by Salty »

Great story, yak. My father was in Hawaii in the Navy toward the end of the war. He courted my mother through the mail.
yak2you2
Site Supporter
Site Supporter
Posts: 556
Joined: Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:00 am
Location: Yakutat, Ak.

Re: When coffee was everything.

Post by yak2you2 »

It must have been one of the most amazing times of all history to be in your prime, through the 40's and 50's. I can't hear enough of what it was like for them. My grandma is 84 now, but still sharp as a tack and able to remember all the old stories, I wish I could sit all day and listen to them as it was when I was a kid, but sadly the world is just moving to fast for me now for that to happen as often as I would like.
As a fisherman, I don't think a day goes by when I don't contemplate what it was like to fish back then without all the toys we have now-a-days, that's why I liked your mom's book so much, kind of takes you there.
Post Reply