The Fisher Queen (24 page)

On the ferry from Vancouver, I had stood transfixed in front of the gift-store bookrack. My colleague who is here with me to mentor and teach the emerging Powell River writers said, “This is where your book will be.” I wanted to see it there so bad it tugged at my guts.

During a drizzly Vancouver winter in 2006, I fled to Arizona to write a historical novel about the northern BC coast and the people who made their living on the sea. That didn't happen. I sat for two days with six months of research strewn about me, completely blocked. In desperation I started writing about my own experiences in that world in the mid-1980s, thinking they would stream me into the novel. The novel never happened, but the stories insisted on themselves and became portholes into the world I lived in as a young woman, deckhanding in the commercial salmon trolling fleet.

The stories shouted and laughed and wept their way out of me as I sat baking in the desert. They dragged me mercilessly through those months at sea. Pulled me down into whirlpools of memory and then threw me back on shore blinking and shivering. To find myself deep in the Southwest desert instead of the Northwest waters. I came home with 30,000 words of life stories that sang like sirens on the rocks.

Now, four years later, I had arrived at the Willingdon Beach Campsite in Powell River. Soon after I settled in, the camp manager's wife came by and asked if I'd like to feed the fish. I followed her upstream, a few feet from my door, to a 20-foot trough, similar to a culvert cut in half lengthwise and covered with metal catwalk lids that she raised to reveal 70,000 humpback salmon fry. I fed them in fanned handfuls from a recycled ice cream bucket, a dry granular stuff that looked like coffee grounds and smelled like dead seal. The quicksilver babies boiled to the surface for supper.

Quietly beside myself, I asked if she knew why I was there. She said no, that my colleagues hadn't said, just that I would be staying for a few days. I told her I had come from Vancouver to teach and edit at the annual Powell River Writers' Conference and work on my book about the salmon-fishing industry. She smiled and shook my hand and welcomed me to town, reminded me that Powell River was a thriving hotbed of the arts.

She said the babies had arrived the night before by Department of Fisheries and Oceans truck. They would be nurtured for about three weeks until they doubled in size, to three inches, before being released into the stream to rush out to sea a hundred feet away to continue their life cycle. The stream water was piped into the nursery trough to imprint the smell of home on the babies. Another 55,000 larger smolts in a submerged sea-water tank at the end of the breakwater in a float dock would be released into the ocean in a few days. As many as Man and Nature allowed would come back to their Mother Stream in 18 months by smelling their way home through hundreds of Pacific miles. Fisheries hoped 40 percent of the babies, about 50,000 fish, would return home to spawn. Much fewer would.

In a simple gesture of nurturance and stewardship, campsite guests pitched in to feed the babies, to do their part to help curb the devastation we have wrought on this planet.

A similar nurturance draws a gathering of wordsmiths to the writing conference. I love them for their courage and tenacity; I know in my bones that I'm on my mark and doing what I love: inspiring people to believe the writing life is real and doable. For 12 years I have supported the literary communities of British Columbia through my involvement with the Federation of BC Writers, first as a regional director on the board, then as president and finally as chief administrator. I have encouraged writers to manifest their passion in literary events and writing programs throughout North America. Coached, edited and consulted with authors and entrepreneurs around the world. Written hundreds of articles and short stories. Everything I ever learned or did, every career I thrashed through, from engineering to counselling to teaching, every thought or feeling or philosophy I ever had, has funnelled into what I do now.

For four years I have shared The Fisher Queen stories, from Haida Gwaii to Arizona, conferences to coffee shops, radio to ranches—even made shortlist for the CBC National Literary Awards in 2010 with the Great Grey Beast story. People crowded into reading rooms, flocked to literary events, asking,
When will these stories be a book?
Their faces lit with the longing to know and touch another tile in the great mosaic of this country and how the Wild West informs who we are.

Electric energy crackles any time creative minds and diligent focus come together. This little-engine-that-could of a conference is no exception. The air in the room where I teach my master class hums with the high hearts and hard work of going pro in the writing world. At noon, a motley crew of presenters and organizers and attendees thankfully piles into cars for the windy drive through Powell River's business district, past the devolving pulp mill and to the town limits, where we will lunch and absorb the expanse of lake and tree and sky to fuel us through the indoor hours. Coasties can't be away from the wilding world for long before things start coming undone inside us.

We are randomly arranged at four long tables set end to end along the windows: locals on one side, facing in, guests on the other, facing out. It's hard to be completely present when the wind and water are tugging me to come join them. It's hard to pay attention when my eyes follow the weavings of the eagles, when my nose catches the edge of the sea. The quiet woman across the table is watching me; the chatty woman next to her repeats something.

“I am so glad we came to your class this morning, I had a feeling it would be really good and you were great. My friend didn't even want to come, but I dragged her here. I just had a feeling we really needed to be here and I'm so glad we came. It was so interesting. I kept telling her—oh, I'm Joan and this is Anne, by the way; you remember us, right?—I kept telling her something really great might happen and maybe she'd get inspired to write.”

“I don't write, at least not up to now,” the quiet one says with a faint smile.

“I'm so glad you came,” I say, and something about her makes me really mean it.

“Someone told us you used to be a deckhand on a salmon boat and you are writing about it. That's amazing. Anne used to work in the salmon-fishing industry too, right, Anne?”

“That's amazing, Anne, it's a pretty small sisterhood,” I say, encouraging her to reveal more. The faint smile reaches her distant grey eyes and she simply agrees.

It starts out normal enough: we learn I worked on a salmon troller, she worked in a fish camp; I was a full-on deckhand and cabin slave, she was a bookkeeper and first-aid attendant; I fished with my boyfriend, she worked for BC Packers.

“In Bull Harbour? Oh my God, we fished out of there all the time!” My words rush and tumble. “In the 1980s? That's when I was there. Did you work with Dave and his wife? The guy that died in the ice auger? And you were the first-aid attendant?”

When she says yes and that she remembers our boat and fixes me with those searchlight eyes, a high wind rushes through me. It's hard to hear her, but I see her lips say, “I thought it was you.”

“My God, you are in my book. Oh my God, I know who you are.” My heart races and it's hard to breathe, a dark green mountain wave rushes toward me—I just have to hang on to the wheel and keep the bow pointing into it. The world telescopes down to this electric conduit that connects us and sends us spinning 25 years back in time. I watch myself slowly lift my arms and extend my hands to her across the table, palms down. I feel a trickling on my face and don't know why my eyes are blurry.

I hear myself say in a bright voice untouched by 25 years of full-calamity living: “It's me, the little girl with the broken hands.” Some small part of me knows how surreal this seems to those near us, but I can only keep the bow pointing into the wave and pushing forward. She says she knows. I ask her if she remembers what she did for me. She does. I watch a silver track slide down her pale cheeks.

Her friend is weeping. “When I said I dragged her here because I knew something was going to happen here, I meant it. She has breast cancer, just diagnosed before we came here. I told her that maybe if something inspired her to write, even in a journal, it would help her.”

I turn to those eyes that had noticed the festering wounds I had tried to hide, those hands that had tended mine, that mouth that had comforted me through the terrible pain. Those arms that had held and rocked me in that tiny plank-board room that smelled of disinfectant and fish guts as I sobbed my fear and loneliness.

“You saved my life 25 years ago and maybe we're here for me to return the favour. Maybe something today will help shift what is happening inside your body.” I slowly come back into mine and the room around me. Everything has gone very still and quiet except for the faint gasps and sniffs.

They say that we barely spoke above a whisper, that a casual observer enjoying the view from across the room would hardly have noticed. But those at our table said they were changed forever, each to their own need, by what they had witnessed. Exchanged serendipity for coincidence, perhaps even considered the possibility of a grander plan.

Every time Anne and I passed each other in the bustle of the conference activities, I asked, “Did that really happen?”

And she would say, “Yes, little sister, it did, every bit of it. It's time to tell the story.”

I will forever be deeply connected to how the land and sea talk to us. I will always know when something is coming. I'll look up and scan the skies and sniff the wind, on a wild mountaintop or a frenetic cityscape, and murmur that it's shifted to slack, get ready for it. Those who know me will pay attention.

The Wild West has gone to its condos and fish farms, yet still nature insists on being heard. I am older, plumper, shrewder and a little road weary, but my gypsy soul still leaps and flings its irreverent laugh all about the place.

I went to sea and met my Sisiutl. Faced my horror, faced my fear and answered the call that drew me through my journey home to the Mother Stream that is me.

Humans have always harvested the land and seas to feed themselves and the world. Now we must feed seven billion of us. In 40 years, there will be many more to feed, and we must increase our food production by twice as much. Fishers are among the last hunter-gatherers in the world and fish are among the last wild food. And the greatest of those fish on Canada's west coast is the mighty salmon.

For millennia, five species of wild salmon have been inextricably woven into the tapestry of life in the Pacific Northwest. One of the rare fishes that lives in both fresh and salt water, salmon's rich, dense and delicious flesh, loaded with life-sustaining nutrients and oils, is prized by both animals and humans. For the fish, the oils allow them to survive migration for thousands of miles and the final powerful push to reach their inland spawning grounds, fighting their way against the current, often through predators, rapids and shallows.

During their life cycle, wild salmon carry nutrients from river to sea and back again—as living food and then as fertilizer after they spawn, die and decompose. Salmon have provided humans with not only an integral food but also a foundation for Pacific Northwest culture, and for 5,000 years have been a cornerstone of wealth and commerce. Only in the last 200 years has that ancient balance been disturbed and rocked to its core as competition for this dwindling resource becomes more and more fierce.

The First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest were the first commercial trollers on the BC coast, fishing in small dugouts and using baited hooks with hand-pulled lines. While they braved the wild coastal weather and waters, inland tribes braved the powerful currents of the Fraser, Thompson and Stikine Rivers, trapping and harvesting the returning adult salmon in complex weirs owned by clan families. Fish were dressed and dried to sustain villages throughout the winter. Especially for inland peoples, poor runs meant starvation.

In May 1670, King Charles II of England signed the charter for his nephew Prince Rupert that created the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and changed the fate of the BC salmon fisheries and Canadian resource allocation forever. The company was granted unrestricted dominion over “the sole Trade and Commerce of those seas . . . with Fishing of all sorts of Fish, Whales, Sturgeon and all other Royal Fishes in the Seas, Bays, Inlets, and Rivers within the Premises.”

When Alexander Mackenzie explored the Fraser River in 1793, he was stunned by the enormous numbers of salmon moving upstream and filled his canoes daily to sustain his crew. By 1808, Simon Fraser had begun the first trade in salmon with local First Nations on the lower Fraser River, noting the phenomenal harvest by “means of barriers” and the people's relative wealth.

Those ancient traditions would change dramatically in 1827 with the building of Fort Langley, the HBC trading post, 30 miles upstream from the mouth of the Fraser River on BC's southwest coast. As the first commercial salmon fishery grew exponentially, Native men provided tens of thousands of fish annually while Native women cleaned, salt-cured and packed the catch in barrels for shipping to Hawaii, then on to Asia and South America to an exploding salt-fish market.

The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858 saw an estimated 30,000 prospectors pass through Victoria to pan the river, and clashes with Native communities soon followed. Over 2,000 Babine peoples arrived at their ancestral river fishing grounds north of Yale to find an environmental catastrophe: clear-cutting, stream diversion, destroyed gravel spawning beds. The ensuing conflict left fish camps destroyed and 31 Native villagers, including chiefs, dead. Eventually an uneasy deal was struck, and by 1906 the Department of Indian Affairs reached an agreement with the Babines that in return for dismantling their weirs and in lieu of land claims, they would be given nets for food fishing and trade.