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NEVER CRY HALIBUT

WHEN I WAS A KID, I was forced to go fishing in a similar way other youngsters are made to go to church or eat vegetables. There were many types of fish to froth, drag, and otherwise disturb the water after—Dolly Varden, pink, coho, chum, and king salmon, to name a few—but none of them made my imagination run wild like halibut.

“How big can they get?” I’d ask my dad.

“Bigger than me,” he’d say. It was mythical to consider there were fish bigger than my dad swimming in the ocean’s murk.

Most of the halibut we caught were about the size of Ping-Pong paddles, but knowing there was a chance our bait might find its way into the mouth of monster was enough to make me and my brothers plead to stop trolling for cohos and give a halibut hole a try. I couldn’t figure out why Dad often seemed reluctant.

“Halibut! It’s a big one!” I would scream a few moments after my lead weight bounced on the ocean bottom. Not even Reid, my gullible younger brother, bothered to look over. I’d babble as the giant tried to tear the pole from my hands. If it looked like I might lose the rod, Dad would intervene; otherwise, he’d let me battle it out with what often evolved into something bigger than a halibut could possibly grow. He’d stare off wistfully as other boats slowly dragged for cohos and wince when fishermen waved their nets in preparation of bringing a fish aboard. Usually after a few minutes of groaning, moaning, and whining, the hook popped free, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Probably was a whale. Lucky it got off,” I’d say. “Might have killed us if I got it to the surface. And even if it didn’t, we’d have to tow it back to the dock, and that would likely mean being attacked by killer whales, sharks, or a giant squid.”

“You had the bottom!” my older brother, Luke, yelled. I fought back tears, knowing he was jealous because I had more bites and hookups than he did. Somehow he always managed to catch more fish.

Once, after crying halibut, I was doing battle with a monster that felt as big as the bottom. My pole started hammering down. Dad was watching other boats troll, and my two brothers were staring blandly at the slate-gray oceanscape, ignoring me as I tried to figure out why this fish felt so different from all the other halibut I’d hooked and lost.

“Must have the bottom,” I shrugged, trying to free the line. Dad tore the pole from my hands.

“Halibut! It’s a big one!” he said, bracing himself as the fish ran and line spun out. Complete pandemonium ensued; I grabbed a gaff and started waving it, nearly impaling a number of family members as I tried to get into position.

“It’s going to be a while,” he grunted and pushed me out of the way. Fishing teaches kids a lot of things, like how to enjoy nature, how to take pride in bringing home dinner, and most importantly how to curse. Right then and there, the swivel popped, freeing the fish, and the old man gave us a fine lesson on how to talk like a halibut fisherman.

Thinking about it now, I can’t recall my dad ever swearing except for when he lost fish. Well, there was the time my mom attacked a full-grown black bear with a broom because it was trying to take a bag of flour from her mudroom pantry. The horrified bear left the flour on the shelf and dashed into the forest. There ought to be a “Forget the Gun and the Dog, Beware of the Woman with a Broom” sign posted on the door of my folk’s house. Let that be a warning to any burglars considering raiding my mom’s pantry. Though small, she’s a ball of fury and will attack you.

Me, age five, fighting something much bigger and more dangerous than any known fish. (Photo courtesy of Lynnette Dihle)

Through the years, I’ve become pretty good at dressing and acting like a halibut fisherman. My sweatpants and fleece are usually coated with a mixture of crusty salt and slime. I’m not the best, but I’m fairly decent when it comes to swearing, lying, and telling stories. After all, fishing is mostly about fooling other fisherman that you caught more and bigger fish than they did. I work hard but rarely get much done. One might say I’m the ideal fisherman, except that I lack the ability to catch fish, particularly halibut.

As I grew older and was looking for work, I’d put on a wool sweater, wander the docks, and talk, with a hint of an accent, to commercial fishing captains. One would hire me, thinking they were getting a Norwegian secret weapon as a deckhand. Being of Scandinavian descent and not a good fisherman was nearly unheard of. A day or so later, when we’d be far away from port and the price of diesel didn’t warrant a return trip, I would confess to being French, which was a quarter true.

“French! Why, if I would have known!” This would be followed by a long soliloquy cursing baguettes, black turtlenecks, and berets. I would threaten to go on strike, but this only excited my captains further. In time, most began to somewhat affectionately call me Jonah and only shook their heads and grumbled when I made a mistake or the fishing was poor. If they knew I was mostly Scandinavian, my health would have suffered for it.

“You look like a bobblehead. You have to be Norwegian!” one skipper said excitedly after he shook my hand and welcomed me aboard his boat. We were crabbing that summer, and I quickly became adept at birding, telling the captain how to stack pots, and making watercolor paintings of him cursing against beautiful backdrops of mountains and ocean. When he asked for a hand, I would tell him I had an acute shellfish allergy.

“Yeah, sorry, I can’t touch crab, but I’m almost done writing a poem about how hard crabbing is. Just give me a sec, and I’ll read it to you. By the way, can you make me another cup of coffee? Don’t forget the cream and sugar this time. And make sure it’s organic.”

On a rare day off, I borrowed a skiff and dropped a hook into the shallows near the mouth of a spawning salmon stream. Almost instantly a nice halibut bit, and my pole started hammering. Somehow, after slitting its jugular with a dull pocketknife and letting it bleed out for a few minutes, I managed to get the fifty-pound fish aboard with a broken salmon gaff. It was the biggest halibut I’d seen alive. Now that I was an expert, I started offering advice to anyone who’d listen on how to catch halibut.

“They’re in the shallows. Everyone’s fishing too deep,” I told some seasoned fishermen at the bar in Hoonah.

“In the seventies, I hauled a fish to the surface in Frederick Sound that must have weighed 1,500 pounds, and it just spat the hook,” an old man said. He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe what he’d seen.

“When I was a kid, I hooked several that were about that size, maybe even bigger, but they all got away,” I said, one-upping him.

I got a job longlining for halibut in Cross Sound with Joe and Sandy Craig on the Njord the following spring. The halibut I’d caught the previous summer had tripled in weight and multiplied in quantity. On our first day of pulling sets, I was eager to show off my knowledge and skills.

“Halibut!” I cried in the early gray morning as we bobbed in rough seas. Excited, we all grabbed our gaffs and waited as Joe hauled up the longline with hydraulics.

“Gray cod,” he said.

“Halibut!” I cried a few minutes later.

“Rougheye,” Joe corrected.

“Halibut!”

“Err…starfish,” Sandy said and gave Joe a worried look. When the first halibut came to the surface, I frantically whisked the water with my gaff until you could barely see the fish in all the foam. Joe gaffed it in the head, yanked it over the stern, then dispatched it with a perfectly aimed blow from a lead pipe. I had no money, and they didn’t want to pay for a floatplane to take me back to Juneau, so they were stuck with me.

Despite my ineptitude and the fishery’s often stressful nature, I learned to love wrestling with halibut and wallowing in their blood and slime. The Fairweather mountains beckoned white through the slate-gray world, but I only had eyes for the ocean. When I thought I saw a halibut coming up on the line, I swallowed my urge to cry out and grunted instead. I popped off wolf eels, seven-foot sleeper sharks, skates, and all sorts of strange benthic creatures from hooks. I learned to decipher species of fish as they rose from the murk with a quick glance. I gently freed octopuses, only to have them wrap their tentacles around me in what seemed like a refusal to return to the ocean.

“Stop hugging that octopus,” Joe said, laughing as I tried to convince the creature to let go. When we motored back to their home in Elfin Cove with our day’s catch, Sandy and I baited hooks and watched sea birds following schools of bait fish and whales sound. Listening to the ocean, the chug of the diesel engine chug, and Sandy telling stories from her decades of commercial fishing and exploring northern Southeast Alaska, it was a rare afternoon it didn’t feel good to be alive.

Toward summer’s end, realizing the richness of the experiences they were facilitating for me, I felt I ought to be paying them. Perhaps out of philanthropy, they took me on for the next several seasons until they retired from halibut wrangling.

After that first summer, I never looked at halibut with naiveté and wonder again. I enjoyed longlining but no longer found it that exciting. I pulled flopping monsters over the stern then dispatched, bled, and stashed them before going back to work without another thought.

One afternoon, as we were motoring back to the dock, I was slicing bait and tossing guts to an entourage of sea gulls. Glancing at the boatload of dead halibut, I realized I hadn’t cried halibut in years. Several of them weighed well over a hundred, even two hundred pounds, but I felt none of the satisfaction and awe I had as a kid when I reeled in a ten-pounder. Sitting on the kill-box, with the gulls shrieking behind the Njord, I remembered being six years old and clutching a rod. My dad had just given me the all-clear, so I opened the reel and listened to the sound of the line spooling out as the lead weight zinged the bait down into the ocean’s depths. The weight hit the bottom, and I felt connected to an invisible and mysterious world. A few moments later, at the slightest disturbance, I could no longer contain my excitement and yelled “Halibut!” Now, decades later, I stared out onto the broad expanse of ocean and felt a bit nostalgic. A halibut flopped in its death throes. I tossed a clump of kidney into the screeching flock of birds and went back to work.