I’m not sure about this whole newsletter thing, but apparently it’s not going to write itself. I’m currently working on a long-form article about the troll fishery, in addition to getting my boat ready for the summer season, and working a full-time job to keep the lights on, and a couple other side projects. So the writing here will likely be sporadic and quite possibly all over the place, but for now I’m planning to put down some stories about how I drifted north, fell in love with Alaska, and essentially walked into a shotgun wedding with the ‘frontier’ lifestyle. I also have some overdue book reviews on the way.
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Four years after I left the Marines, I landed on the docks in Sitka, Alaska. I had an orange backcountry pack full of clothing and books and a vague idea of finding a job that would allow me to stay in the ‘last frontier’ for the rest of the summer.
It turns out that just showing up in a fishing town without a drug addiction is a pretty solid start toward finding a deckhand job, and I quickly got hired on a salmon troller despite having never caught a fish. Over the course of three years, trolling for two summers and working other jobs ‘down south’ to save money, I slowly nurtured a half-crazy plan to remake myself as a solo fisherman off the rugged coast of Southeast Alaska.
I worked in construction in Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, and briefly managed a coffee shop in New York. I fished with three different captains during the summers, asked a lot of questions, and took voracious notes on how to tie fishing gear, how to change the oil on the main and the gen-set, what depths to fish, where to drag the hooks, and how the tides, temperature, and other factors might affect the chance of landing more salmon. I was a dry sponge for both practical knowledge and the lore of this cloud-robed land in the short north.
I read Wayne Short’s books about homesteading in Southeast Alaska, pored over stories behind the names on the chart, and drank in the dramatic views to be had in every direction, whenever the marine layer cleared. Fire-orange sunsets, clammy 4 a.m. mornings, rain-soaked forests, lazily diving humpback whales. I started checking fishing vessel classifieds online, fantasizing about outfitting and running my own small boat like a hiker shepherding a small flame in camp after a long day.
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The truth is, eight years in the military had been great for me in a lot of ways, but it had also burned me out. I was disgruntled and angry at the bureaucratic nonsense of military life, but I also felt a deep loss that was hard to define. Initially, I missed the camaraderie of deployments and shared adversity, but accepted it as a necessary cost of my own freedom.
But it was more than lost unit cohesion and moving away from close friends. Being a marine had filled my life with a sense of purpose and meaning, or more accurately it had intoxicated my ego with a strong cocktail of direction, danger, and undeserved elitism. I’ve always been unsure of myself by nature, and I had filled the void inside with a lot of testosterone and myth. I was also heartbroken, and eager to hide my own failures and faults from myself and anyone else.
So I chased off my existential hangover with half-baked adventure. I studied Spanish in Colombia, learned to sail in Australia, and spent a month bouncing between treks and hostels in Patagonia, hoping to run into destiny.
I didn't really know where I was headed, but I figured worst case scenario, I might spend all my deployment money but have a good story to tell. Funny how those kinds of vague intentions have a way of bearing fruit.
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So eventually I got a job killing fish. It was hard work, and there wasn't much downtime, but I was determined to prove myself worthy and make something of the experience. (Surely I would be able to finally write something about being a commercial fisherman in Alaska.) I was also aware that my financial runway was shortening and I had learned the hard way, several times, that I am not built to work for a boss in an organization.
Becoming a fisherman at 37 seemed like a long shot, but if I pulled it off it was a chance to literally captain my own ship, own a boat that would (theoretically) pay for itself, and live in small-town Alaska. The only screens in sight, apart from my phone, were a chart plotter and a black-and-white radar display. And anyway, I have a thing for long shots. They provide that familiar allure of the crucible—redemption through suffering. They mask the quiet desperation within.
I started a spreadsheet to run the numbers and figure out if I could afford this desperate gamble, but spreadsheets are tedious and what’s the point of being a fisherman if you have to use an excel file to figure out if you can hack it? So I ditched the spreadsheet, packed my belongings for the trip north, and poured my life into a thirty-two foot fiberglass hole in the water. I had visions of making a hundred-grand in the summer, and then living frugally so I could fix up the boat and scratch out a living as a writer in the off-season.
Really it was more of a pipe-dream. Another myth, with just enough truth inside to hook me.
More, more, more!
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