Russian Surveillance: Somebody's Watching Me

I made a few friends on the Mys Kuznetsova. One of them was the helmsman on the second mate’s watch, a strapping young lad named Dima. Second mate watches were always the best ones on the joint venture. Usually the captain would be asleep or relaxing in his cabin, and since the watches fell in early afternoon or the middle of the evening, chances were always good the ship was loaded up with fish. It was a good time to go up onto the flying bridge and lift weights while catching a view over the wide Pacific, or maybe grab a cup of coffee and practice Russian with the mates. Second mates were uniformly among the mellowest Russians I ever met – officers still with one foot in the camp of the regular sailors, not yet infected with ambitions to become captain.

Dima and I were roughly the same age and we struck up a nice rapport after a while. He was from some small town in the Black Earth region of Russia and entertained me with stories of village life in Soviet Russia – water from the well, chickens in the yard, a milk cow and vegetable garden out somewhere on the lower Volga wastelands. I told him about my life in the States and the long unlikely path that led me out to the Bering Sea. We kept away from politics and spent some free time working out together and bonding in the ship’s banya, or steam bath; afterwards, we would hang out in my cabin, listening to music and enjoying the wee calm hours. Work was tough on me that first expedition and spending time with Dima – making one of my first Russian friends – kept me going.

One day were laying up on drift waiting for a catcher boat to haul up his bag. I took a few minutes to go into the chart room to check on a few things for paperwork and while I was looking around, noticed a piece of paper sticking out of the manual typewriter. I took a nosy glance at it and saw the word, DOHOC written in capital letters across the top. I recognized the word from my Russian classes – donos, meaning denunciation or information – an ugly little Soviet word with bad KGB associations. Donos was something a person wrote when he had suspicions about his neighbor or colleague at work. A donos meant a 3 a.m. knock on the door, beatings and questions administered by shadowy sadists in a dank cellar, deportation, GULAG, death…not a word with which you want any association. I looked closer and saw my name in the text, then picked up the pile of papers next to the typewriter and started reading. The donos was about me. Dima’s name was at the top. He was writing a denunciation about me. I took a furtive few moments to look the pages over. It was mostly harmless stuff – our conversations, which frankly were just not that interesting. Still, it put a chill in me. Here he was, the creep, acting like a friend, all the while reporting on me. I decided not to do anything about it – after all, mentioning it would mean admitting I’d been snooping around in papers on the bridge. I could see scandal and the end of my career at MRCI. I kept my head down, did my work, and tactfully avoided taking Dima up on any more friendly invitations to the banya or the bridge.

Since then, I have wondered often exactly, what kind of file the Russians have on me in their security services. Certainly, it is a good-sized one. I have been in Russia too many times, been involved in too many things, not to have one. I worked for two years at the US Embassy in Moscow, which in itself was enough for the KGB to put a tail on me. Then I spent two years living on Kamchatka, the only American for thousands of kilometers. I have had Russians and Americans both ask me if I worked in the CIA or FBI – the answer is no, I have not, never have, never will. It is not in my DNA. The nature of work brought me into some deep research, though, and I like to think that, since I spent so much time living outside of major cities, I have learned more about Russian context than most. Finally, the shipping business touches on any number of strategic nerves in post-Soviet life – economy, foreign trade, market penetration, not to mention violence, corruption and social policy – all taken in unadulterated raw shots absent the niceties of art and politics, raw business, with real people staking real money interests, and quite candid in expressing themselves.

Most Americans will never see their FSB file, but I got lucky a few times, and saw mine. The first time was when I was on a two-year writing Fellowship with Institute of Current World Affairs. The Fellowship sent me to the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, a hardscrabble fishing city jammed along a harbor on the North Pacific Ocean. My research topic was officially Privatization in the Russian Far East Fishing Industry, but the real subject of study was How Will Pete Christiansen Manage to Survive? This was back in 1992-1994. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski suffered horribly back then from the severe economic and social dislocations provoked by the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russians there were the poorest people I ever saw – their salaries were ravaged by inflation, the city experienced electricity brownouts and blackouts because the regional government ran out of money to pay for fuel, and the shops were devoid of all but the most basic of foodstuffs. My consolation was that the Fellowship paid me in dollars, enough to keep me as well fed as the local economy allowed, with some left over for some fun every few weeks.

There were no ATMs in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski back in those days. I kept my money hidden in the bookcase in my apartment. I figured the local security people had an eye on me and I was careful not to get involved with in the black market or any business whatsoever, except for some freelance teaching and translating jobs. When I needed to change my precious dollars into rubles, I would go to the Sberbank downtown, or the closer currency exchange booth at the Gorispolkom, or City Hall. This worked fine until one day, a huge blizzard hit Kamchatka. A Kamchatka blizzard, or purga, is like no other snowstorm in the world; masses of moist, tropical air from southeast Asia trundle up past Japan and China before running full-on into a wall of Siberian cold air. A purga lasts for days and can easily drop five feet of snow before bouncing out into the north Pacific. Gale force winds lash the land and force even the indomitable Russians indoors. When the storm finally blew itself out enough for the buses to start running again, I hurried down to my office to finish a research paper. I ran out of rubles during the purga and during a break, decided to go to the bank to change some money.

The streets were choked with snow and stranded cars buried up to their doors. Snowdrifts made the streets impassable. I lurched my way down towards Sberbank but decided it would be too much of an effort to go there – it might be closed anyway. I was near the currency exchange booth and it was closed. I stood there contemplating my dilemma when I noticed a young man in a parka standing next to the booth. You want to change money? He asked. He was illegal but I didn’t see much of alternative, and I needed to buy food. We ducked behind the corner and I exchanged forty dollars for the ruble equivalent, and that was that.

I was back at my office and just settling into work when three men walked into my office. What nationality are you? One asked. Why, I’m Japanese, I said brightly. Don’t joke with us, said another. We’re from the Militia. He pulled out a badge. Did you just change money on the street? I saw no reason to lie – I figured, if they were asking me, they knew already and there was no point in making things any worse. Collect your things, said an officer, and come with us.

They took me to the Militia Station and I found myself caught up in the slow wheels of post-Soviet justice. A sergeant took over my case – he sat and asked me pointed questions about the dreaded exchange of currency. Did I know the man with whom I changed money? No, I’d seen him on the street before but stayed away from him because he was obviously a black marketer. How much money did I exchange? Forty dollars. Blah blah blah. Finally, the sergeant wrote up a Protocol and I signed it. I figured, well, forty bucks, how bad can it be.

The next week I found myself summoned to the Station again, answering the same questions, in the same order. The sergeant seemed friendly enough – he mentioned to me that he had gone to Chicago on a police exchange, and showed me pictures from his trip. This being Russia, and me being a foreigner, he went out of his way to be polite, offering me tea and cookies along with his impressions of the Windy City. We talked, I kept to my story and I was released.

The week after, I was summoned to the Station yet again. I decided to ask the sergeant point-blank – what ever was their interest in me? For forty dollars, they sure had a lot of questions. Couldn’t I just pay the fine and get it over with? It wasn’t so simple, explained the sergeant. Illegal hard currency trading was a serious offence, carrying with it not just a fine but also a prison sentence. Wait a second, I told the sergeant. If this is such a serious offence, then why aren’t your officers down at the Market arresting the people in the booths who openly advertise that they buy and sell dollars? What about the nightly television advertisements from currency traders, with telephone numbers shown right on the screen? Do you investigate them?

The sergeant mumbled something about the law and militia resources but I could tell he was embarrassed, and I pressed on – surely, I said, those traders have more than forty dollars on them. Why are you worried about me? Don’t you have bigger crooks to catch?

He looked at me sadly and lit a cigarette. It’s not so simple, he said. We filmed you trading currency with that guy. We were running an operation against him; he’s one of the biggest illegal hard-currency traders in the city. You are evidence. Well, what do we do about it? I asked.

There was nothing to be done. It was November. I had three months left on my Fellowship by then, and when my visa expired, I was supposed to go home. Now that was complicated by the arrest. The sergeant called me down to the Station every few weeks to give me a progress report, but nothing seemed to change. By then I began to notice my file on his desk; a thick papka, the Russian type of file, made of cheap gray cardboard and tied together in the front by a ribbon type of thing. After every session, the sergeant would duly write up another Protocol, and I would duly sign it. We got to be somewhat friendly – I enjoyed his sense of humor, and he liked the novelty of talking to a foreigner. One day he let me know that a deal was in the works – I would give them some testimony in return for immunity. When this would happen, he did not know. Until then, I was restricted to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski and could not leave the country.

The case dragged on until March, just a few days before my visa expired. I was at home with a miserable case of the flu when a team of officers from the Federal Anti-Organized Crime unit showed up to question me. The Governor of the Kamchatka Region, Mr. Biryukov, would pardon my crime against the Russian State in return for my opinion regarding criminal activities among the bosses of Kamchatka’s leading fishing enterprises. Which ones were stealing money and sending it overseas? All of them, I answered. Where were they going when they went overseas? Seattle, Los Vegas, how should I know. It was inane – I had no idea whatsoever what the bosses were doing while they were in America. I didn’t go with their delegations and even if I did, they certainly wouldn’t give me details of their thievery. Finally, another Protocol was written and signed duly; I had my immunity, and left Russia a few days later.

My case wasn’t over, though. Far from it. About seven or eight months later, I was working in Vostochny Port, Russia, a container terminal on the Sea of Japan about 160 kilometers east of Vladivostok. One day the local Militia called me in for a get-acquainted session. This was a good thing because I was one of four foreigners in town and it is always good to know your friendly local policeman. The Militia office was a dingy room with four desks, a couch, peeling walls and a television blaring Brazilian soap operas. The officers briefed me on the criminal situation in town; the port company town had four active criminal gangs, and it was best to avoid them. Be careful with your car, always lock your apartment, and look out on the streets if you are walking home at night – especially if you’ve been drinking. Usual commonsense advice.

Then the officer took a file out of his desk, a familiar looking papka made of cheap gray cardboard. You’ve been arrested before for illegal trading in hard currency, said the officer. Yeah, forty dollars, it says so right there, I said. That’s right, said the officer, giving me a hard look. We’ve got our eye on you. I rolled my eyes. Tell me you’ve always changed money at the bank, I said. Anyway, I was pardoned.

Oddly enough, I never ran into that particular file again, but I’m pretty sure it is somewhere in a stack, waiting to come out and pounce on me like a spider at the least infraction. I wonder how big and swollen the spider is with useless information; Dima’s donos, my comings and goings, records of conversations, bits and pieces of the press – all about a foreigner with really nothing but good wishes for Russia and its people.

Melee in Dutch Harbor

I progressed well in my career as an at-sea company representative with Marine Resources. Company officers, impressed with my performance during my first season in the Bering Sea fishery, offered me a plum position on the hake fleet operating off of the coast of California. The reps had a saying – hake is cake. Hake disperse to feed during the evening and so the fishing quit after sundown. This made it easy to set up a sweet little work routine: Get up at six, get the first fish on board by about nine, take another delivery at eleven, another at about two, and then two more around seven or eight at night. The rest of the time was spent on the radio, crunching numbers and listening to music, sunbathing on the flying bridge, and doing factory coefficients. It was indeed a lovely place to work after the round-the-clock, insomniac routines of Alaska.

Nevertheless, the hake fishery only worked during the summer months, and so I wound up spending the fall and spring up in the Bering Sea. After half-dozen or so expeditions, I managed to work my way up into one of my typical do-it-all positions, handling not just a main job but also some difficult or out-of-the ordinary tasks inevitably arising when Russians and Americans work together.

The job this time was to handle a produce delivery to the fleet. The basic plan was simple: A transport ship, the Yellowfin, would come up to Dutch Harbor bringing a load of meat, vegetables, fruit, and dairy products for the Russian boats, since they could not be re-supplied from Russia. Three factory ships – the Pavlik Morozov, Pyatdecyat Let Sovetskoi Vlasti (Fifty Years of Soviet Power) and the Akademik Buratino – would come into the Dutch Harbor bay, where each would load on food for three other boats, which would keep working out in the fishing grounds. My job was to coordinate the delivery schedules, work with the mates of each factory ship to make sure everybody got the right quantities of food and handle anything else that might come along during provisioning.

I was excited to do the job – it was always a treat to go into Dutch Harbor from the fleet since it was an opportunity to eat some real food and grab a beer or three. In addition, I would be working with my good friend Mark, a bespectacled, red-haired, rail-thin Seattleite with excellent Russian whose jolly mien concealed a sharp, orderly mind. Mark was the company rep in Dutch Harbor that year and did a great job of taking care of us; he somehow managed to come aboard the Soviet ship I was on, the Morozov, with a hot pizza and six-pack of beer within minutes of our dropping anchor.

Mark brought good food and bad news. Apparently, the Soviet fleet commander made a small accounting error in his order. We were to offload quantities that seemed normal for an operation of our size – a few tons of meat, a few tons of carrots and beets, a few tons of apples, a few tons of yogurt, cheese, sour cream and butter…and fifty tons of cabbage. The fleet commander ostensibly put together the produce order when he was drunk, and wrote fifty instead of five tons on the requisition forms. When questioned about the number, confirmed it – twice. So MRCI went ahead and dutifully ordered the cabbage and had it delivered to the Yellowfin in Seattle. By the time the fleet commander got off his bender and realized his mistake, it was too late to send the order back. And so our first challenge was to find space on the Morozov, Vlasti and Buratino for ten times the quantity of cabbage they were expecting. Each factory ship would have to take on over 600 50-pound cases of cabbage.

The next morning the Yellowfin showed up; I met the captain, a big bear of man with huge forearms, and went over the scope of work with him, the Morozov captain, and the first, second and third mates, who would work the operation while the captain went into town for shopping. The Yellowfin captain was on a tight schedule and wanted to be done with the offload and out of Dutch Harbor within 36 hours, 48 hours tops. With that in mind, we worked at ‘marrying’ the ship’s cranes (joining them together to work off a single control point). I went down into the hold of the Morozov to take on produce, counting cases with the Russian tallyman and comparing our piece counts to get it right.

Things went well enough on board the Morozov and we made good time. Fortunately, the ship had plenty of room in the hold and could take most of the cabbage below deck. Meanwhile the Vlasti and Buratino came into Dutch Harbor. If going into Dutch Harbor for a few days was an eagerly anticipated treat for an American company rep, it was like a visit to Candyland and Disneyland all mixed together for the Soviet sailors. Back in the 1980s, most Soviet citizens had about as much chance of going to America as they did of going to the Moon. The Soviet government did not let its citizens travel, and even if it did, nobody would give them visas, and even if they got visas, they had no way of getting their hands on foreign money since their salaries were paid in non-convertible rubles. Except at MRCI, where they earned the princely sum of $6 per day on top of their rubles. Because of this, the Soviet sailors I knew spent years maneuvering themselves onto the fishing boats and paid substantial bribes to secure a spot on the crew. A call into an American port like Dutch Harbor made it all worthwhile – they could buy blue jeans, music tapes, perfumes, VCRs and tape decks, and re-sell them at home for a fortune.

As soon as the Vlasti and Buratino dropped anchor and went through US Customs and Immigration, their crews made a beeline for Dutch Harbor and the cornucopia of the Unisea general store, taking off in groups of 20 or so sailors across the bay in their hot dog-like shlyupki, or covered red lifeboats. I labored away in the hold for hour after hour, powered by coffee and anticipation of a nice dinner in town. After about ten hours, we finished loading the Morozov, the tallyman and I happily coming up with the same piece counts, and closed the offload on a positive note. I got into town on the Morozov’s lifeboat and enjoyed a nice dinner with Mark and the reps from the Vlasti and Buratino.

The next morning found me bright and early on the Vlasti, embroiled in an argument between her captain and the captain of the Morozov, who, according to the Vlasti captain, should have loaded more cabbage on board since she had more hold space. The Vlasti captain had almost no room in his holds; he hadn’t offloaded his fish in a while and would have to find space on and around the decks for all the cabbage. The Yellowfin captain started to get impatient – every minute spent arguing was one minute less working, and he didn’t need it. Finally, the captains calmed down and the offload commenced. This time it went much slower – the Yellowfin could only drop cases of cabbage onto the Vlasti’s foredeck, and sailors scrambled around trying to find places to stow it. Boxes of cabbage went everywhere; into the crew dressing room on the trawl deck, up onto the flying bridge, into crew quarters, down into the fishmeal plant. The work went on and on – after ten hours, the Yellowfin offloaded only about half of what it should have. I called Mark, who had gone into town to help out with the crew visits to town, and asked him to come out and lend a hand with the tally counts.

He showed up and was working down in the hold near the ship’s refrigerator when the first disaster struck. The Yellowfin was lowering a pallet loaded with yogurt when it caught on the edge of a hatch and tipped over, sending hundreds of individual serving size containers plummeting twenty feet to their explosive doom. Work screeched to a halt as Mark and the second mate laboriously pawed through a mess of yogurt, salvaging and carefully counting unexploded containers. At last, the second mate emerged from the hold, his coat splashed with strawberry, blueberry and boysenberry yogurt; Five hundred and thirty seven, he announced dolefully. Somehow, Mark came up with a different figure, and the two spent another hour carefully going over their numbers until everything added up right.

Then more hours were wasted on a crew change, which took longer than anybody thought because there had been some disturbance between the crews of the Vlasti and the Buratino on the bus Mark hired to drive them around Dutch Harbor. The bus driver refused to take the sailors any further and kicked them off the bus out on some gravel road near the fuel dock and the sailors, laden with purchases from the Unisea, were slow getting back to the shlyupki for their ride back out to the factory ship. The Yellowfin captain fumed while the Vlasti crew fiddled around on deck. Hundreds of cases of cabbage remained to offload when the third mate came up and announced that the crew would break for dinner.

The Yellowfin captain went ballistic. He grabbed wildly at the crane controls and swung a load of cabbage over the Vlasti’s bridge, a bristling forest of antennae, radio and radar equipment. You tell those SOBs to get back to work right now, he bellowed at me. I’m going to start putting these loads down on their heads if they don’t! Watch me! Soviet sailors scrambled for cover as the cabbage spun around above them. A case flew off the pallet and sailed into the bay with a huge splash. The Vlasti captain ran out to see what was going on and, hands plastered to his face, stared at us, his mouth a wide O.

Get the crew! Get the cabbage! No dinner! No dinner! No dinner! I yelled into the loud hailer. Stress reduced my Russian to mere phrases. Now! Move! Just do it! Do something! Do it NOW! CABBAGE! NOW! CABBAGE! NOW!

That woke them up. Crew boiled out of the doors like ants and swarmed around the deck, carting off case after case of cabbage. It no longer mattered where they put it. They stacked boxes along the gangways, out on the trawl deck, and eventually, just started dragging them off onto the foredeck. The frenzy went on and miraculously, after a little more than an hour, the Yellowfin captain ordered a halt. I can take the Buratino tomorrow morning, he said. You tell those SOBs to be ready because once I get started, I ain’t stopping. You tell them, he said, and walked off the bridge.

The next morning the skies were leaden and the air still; sure signs that a williwaw, a big Bering blow, was on its way in. The Yellowfin captain confirmed this at the weather fax on his bridge. Now we really had to hustle the Buratino crew to work fast; if the seas came up, we would have to untie the ships and wait until the weather came down before resuming the offload. Fortunately, both the boat and the crew were up for the job – as fast as the Yellowfin dropped a load into the Buratino hold, it was carted off by gangs of sailors. We got a welcome bit of bonus news from headquarters. Nobody cared about tallying up the rest of the cabbage and so my job was over. I signed off on the final offload documents with the Buratino tallyman and the Yellowfin captain, and headed off into town on the next schlyupka for an afternoon and evening of fun with Mark.

I got to shore just as Mark was getting ready to go out to the Vlasti on another schlyupka. Apparently, one of the sailors who had gotten into a fight with the Buratino crew on the bus the day before was having trouble. We found the Vlasti sailor sitting in his cabin with his hands clutched between his legs. There was a rotten stink in the air and the ship’s doctor fretted around us. He got kicked in the groin yesterday, the doctor explained. When he got back here, he sat on a box of frozen fish for a few hours and drank to relieve the pain. I think he’s getting gangrene. We quickly hustled the sailor off the boat and into the Dutch Harbor hospital, where an American doctor confirmed the diagnosis. Mark ran out to arrange for a medical evacuation. I was left with nothing to do and decided to wander around Dutch Harbor for a while. I came across a group of Soviet sailors huddled up out of the wind among stacks of crab pots and did a shot of vodka with them. The weather was starting to get nasty – a wind kicked up and snow started to blow across the bay. I could just make out the Yellowfin now underway, heading out into the Bering Sea in the growing blizzard.

I wandered back up to Mark’s place and he showed up after a few hours. We were both worn out from the offload and wanted nothing more than to have a few drinks and catch some sleep, when the radio crackled on. A schlyupka was calling the Buratino. The williwaw had whipped up a chaos of big frothy waves in the bay, and visibility was nil because of the snow, now driven into horizontal sheets by high winds. The schlyupka was stuck, banging away at the piles on the dock, with forty sailors inside.

Mark rallied us down to the docks in his pickup truck. I looked into the schlyupka hatch. The scene was desperate, indeed; the sailors, stuffed to capacity onto the benches, each one holding multiple bags of loot from the shopping spree at the Unisea, sat barely visible in a cloud of second hand smoke. Every few seconds the schlyupka would rise, creak, and slam against the wood pilings with a WHAM! Outside the wind howled. We struggled back to the pickup truck and Mark began to make calls.

First, he called the Buratino and told them the schlyupka had no chance of leaving the dock that night. It was way too dangerous. Next, he began patiently to call everybody he knew in town; would they happen to have a place to put 40 Soviet sailors for the night? The local high school gym could do it, but the bus company hung up on him when he asked if they would be able to transport the sailors – too many bad memories from the day before. Mark called vessel agents, the sheriff’s office, everybody he could think of, and came up lemons on each one. Finally, the Unisea agent called back. We could put the Soviet sailors up for the night in their waiting room, provided we kept the place clean and had them out before nine the next morning.

Fortunately, the Unisea agent’s office was a short walk from the dock, and we soon had the sailors waddling penguin-like through the storm to the safety of the waiting room. We took them upstairs to the ‘accommodations’ – a barren hall with a few chairs and tables scattered around and a burnt-orange carpet. I went out and rustled up some bread, meat, and soft drinks for an improvised dinner while the sailors settled in for a long night on the floor.

Misery set in immediately. Forty sailors by any other name would smell not as sweet – and the mixed aromas of unshaven, poorly washed fishermen mingled with fishy smells wafting forth from filthy cloth coats into a dank fog. Somebody belched; the Russians dread drafty rooms, and insisted that we turn the heat up as high as possible. Most of them ignored our request not to drink or smoke in the room – instead, clouds of smoke billowed out of little groups, and when we went up to ask them to take it outside, please, we got blank looks and ‘who me?’ faces. One crowd, red-faced and merry from vodka, broke out into a ragged version of Moscow Evenings.

Noise escalated into a din. I felt like a prison ward, walking around, trying to stop the smoking and drinking and noisemaking. Mark argued gamely with some of the sailors but it was obvious there was no preventing the fun – these guys were in America, they were letting loose, and we came off like a bunch of spoilsports. The room was just short of an uproar when suddenly, and all at once, everybody seemed to run out of steam – like toddlers running out of steam in the middle of some fun, the sailors began to lie down and curl up in their clothes. By midnight, all but the most hardcore were fast asleep. Mark and I began to exact our revenge.

The conversation inevitably turned to comparisons of life in the United States, and we had one particular guy in our sights, a staggering drunk with a wandering eye and bad attitude. We convinced him that it was impossible to fly directly into Dutch Harbor; that it was a secret economic zone, accessible only by flying though multiple airports and passing through many checkpoints. Travel to Canada? Sure, that was possible. It was no problem getting into Canada. The problem was getting out again. The Canadians had a perverse exit visa that put any entrance visa to shame. American roads? Don’t let the movies fool you. Sure, you can drive as fast as you want, provided you can get past the donkey cart traffic jams. See that restaurant over there? Mark is the boss –he can eat there anytime he wants, but not me, no sir. I have to go with him or not at all.

By dawn we were punchy, red-eyed and beyond exhaustion. The weather settled down enough for us to get the sailors to their schlyupka and out to the Buratino. It was a relief to see the hot dog shape receding out into the bay trailing a stream of black smoke from the engine. The Unisea agents weren’t too unhappy with the way we’d left their waiting room, either – it stank to high heaven, of course, and we had to buy them some air freshener, but at least they didn’t notice the burn marks in the rug (burnt orange is great like that). But when I went to clean the bathroom in the morning, I did take a moment to regret the tall tales I’d told the night before. This was back before toilet paper was readily available in the Soviet Union, and people used torn up newspaper for their personal hygiene. Rather than clog up a factory ship’s drainage system, sailors tossed the used newspaper bits into a trash can next to the loo. Seeing an American throne for the first time, none of the sailors thought it operated any differently, and all forty of them thoughtfully tossed all of their used paper onto the floor.

Out of all the experiences I've had working with Russians, this one stuck with me the most over time. I learned a cardinal lesson: The higher you go, the bigger the mess you make. And since nothing ever goes as planned when working with Russians, it's best to be ready to clean up a few messes along the way.

Living with the Wolves

One of the big attractions for me about working in Russia is the intensity. I feel like I kick into another gear when I am over there. It begins with the language. Russian uses six cases to indicate notions of position and action but there are really twelve since the plurals are different for each case. There are four types of nouns, masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, each with their own morphology through the cases. Then you’ve got your basic past, present, future constructions, each of which changes with the plural, yielding a further six constructions. Probably I’m getting the math wrong here, and a good linguist will hasten to correct me for overlooking something, but my rough estimate is that there are about two hundred and eighty-eight possible constructions, before you even get involved with the exceptions.

Figuring all of this out – and the process really is never-ending – pushes me into all kinds of wild mental gymnastics. I have to admit I get a rush from the extreme amount of energy I exert to nail down a good translation from Russian to English, or back again. Working with the Russian language is totally fun for me, but it can also be extremely exhausting (although less so as I became more and more practiced). When I worked as a company rep on a joint commercial fishing venture for Marine Resources, living and working on a Soviet factory trawler for months at a time, there was no respite from Russian. It wasn’t just the language for work; it was the language for fun, for eating, for making friends, arguing, explaining, asserting and apologizing. There was no way my college Russian was up to the task of covering everything but I was pleased that my grammar and basic vocabulary skills capably took me up the learning curve.

Virtually all of the company reps mastered a good version of meatball Russian while out on the fleet; it was either that, or go home quick, but that didn’t happen to many of us. We developed rather quickly an ability to communicate that exceeded our native abilities by an order of magnitude. Because of my MRCI experience, I liken my Russian language skills to a vezdekhod, the eight-wheel drive troop carrier used by the Soviet, and later Russian, military. It may not be pretty, and you won’t have a luxury ride, but you will get from point A to point B over even the toughest terrain.

This is part of the reason why I think years in Russia are lived like dog years – the intensity crams the equivalent of seven years of experience into each year. The other reason I think of Russian years as dog years is that the demands never stop when you are working over there. Virtually every job I’ve ever handled over in Russia – fisherman, guide, researcher, transportation manager – had its own zamarochki I nuanci (puzzlements and nuances) – things that just made no sense taken from the perspective of a westerner, but that made perfect sense in the Russian context. Like the practice of closing all the doors but one leading in and out of grocery store or shopping mall, even though there are two or 3 other doors that could be open to let people in an out without running into each other. It’s just something they do and you can’t imagine Russia without it.

Then the hours are brutal. At sea, I rarely got more than four hours of sleep a day, and sometimes wound up going for a full day or more without a chance to catch any real rest. My record for going without sleep was seventy-two hours; a rep from another ship had to go home unexpectedly, so I wound up managing two boats at once. After a while, I broke through into a kind of zone where I felt like I could go forever. I hustled to fill both ships up with fish so that their factories were almost jammed, then got a five hours of blessed sleep before working another twenty-four hours shift. Even working in an office, when I finally managed to get office work in Russia, wasn’t always better. The time differences between the USA and Russia got me into the office early or kept me late for conference calls, and then there were always RFPs or proposals to finish, or some task that would keep me into the office late.

Paradoxically, none of this intense work ever really exhausted me to the point where I felt I just couldn’t take it anymore. It would get stressful but the combination of using Russian constantly, long hours and dealing with the various Russian nuances, usually got me up for the work. The best part of any day was always feeling like I had managed to get something done that looked impossible when I first looked at it; or bringing staff along with me on the journey, and helping get their perspectives and solutions applied to the problem at hand. The long hours and days were necessary to make the work go, and getting things accomplished between cultures is richly satisfying. Maybe I should say better that years lived in Russia are canine years – and any westerner who has been through the experience knows, part of the fun comes from running with the pack. As the Russians put it, po volchi zhit, po volchi vyit; Live like the wolves, howl like the wolves.

Some Lessons from the Mys Kuznetsova

I showed up for my first expedition with Marine Resources on the Mys Kuznetsova woefully unprepared. Looking back on it, there was really no way to prepare any of the company reps for the work. We got the basics in a training video and went through some practice drills on dry land, but nothing can prepare a landlubber for industrial, round-the –clockwork the ocean. Like so many things in life, you just have to go out and start doing it to find out if you are any good at it.

I had a couple of strikes against me already when I climbed up the ladder onto the deck of the Mys Kuznetsova for the first time. I had put myself through college and was the only guy in my degree program who had not been to Russia. I studied hard but never had little experience actually hearing Russians speak their native language. Since this was back in 1986, and the Cold War was still very much alive, I thought part of my job as a rep would be ‘citizen diplomat’ – somehow I was going to make relations between the American catcher boat captains and the Soviet factory ship captains improve, thereby contributing to the lessening of tensions between our countries (or some such baloney). In a word, I had what Russians so eloquently describe as ‘kasha v golove’ – a head stuffed with kasha, or a mush-head. It took me a week or two to realize that I was on a boat in the middle of the Bering Sea, far away from Misters Reagan and Gorbachev, and that the only thing expected of me was to do my job.

With these two factors working against me, it was no wonder I fell onto my face with such a resounding splat. My grand debut on the Golden Venture turned into a grand debacle on the Mys Kuznetsova. The turning point for me came when I faced the prospect of being sent home for my lack of competence. I realized I had to screw my courage to the sticking place or it was go back to Vermont and spend the rest of my life working in some restaurant. The key was mastering the language and the processes at the job; Anatoly Ivanovich did me a huge favor, in retrospect, by demanding that I master the technical terms and procedures. We were dealing with hundreds of tons of metal in constant motion on rough seas, and the price of a mistake could easily be somebody’s life. One time we were taking a delivery of fish and an inattentive mate on the catcher boat forgot to release the bag. When the catcher boat turned away to let us winch the bag onto the factory boat, the two vessels were still connected by the steel cable. The twanged out of the water, buoys popping off everywhere, and cable torqued wildly across the trawl deck, sending the crew diving for cover. Fortunately, our crane operator hit the quick release immediately and got enough slack into the line to keep it from snapping. People got hurt out in the Bering Sea all the time, and the best way to prevent an accident was precision, attention to detail and constant vigilance.

Later in my career, I learned that the lesson applied everywhere I worked in Russia. Russians are frighteningly intelligent and give professional respect only when they see mastery at work. As a foreigner, I was under the microscope and if I couldn’t perform, they wanted somebody who could. It was a simple lesson but easy to forget. You earn the esteem of your colleagues by your performance.

The ‘citizen diplomat’ thing is a little harder to explain twenty years after the fact, but for those who remember, the nineteen-eighties was an extremely tense time between the United States and the Soviet Union. Many of us feared that a nuclear confrontation was likely and this gave birth to a number of ‘No Nukes’ movements. If only we could get to know one another, the logic went, we would realize that Americans and Russians are only people, and we could work together to prevent the ultimate catastrophe. It was naïve but I like to think that the marches and demonstrations helped to change the political atmosphere (actually I know they did in the Soviet Union but that is a different topic).

The upshot of this is that I arrived on the Mys Kuznetsova looking for a dialog that simply didn’t exist. Nobody out there cared much about politics – they were a bunch of fishermen trying to make a buck. In fact, the joint venture operated somewhat under the radar; it was a rarity and did not need to be politicized. The American reps were cautioned against engaging in any political discussion of any kind, ever, with the Soviet sailors. It was an offence egregious enough to get sent home for. Without the warm and fuzzy cushion of good international intentions to soften our interactions, the American reps and Soviet sailors were left, inevitably, with fishing. That is what we did, and since industrial fishing can be tense and situations difficult, conflicts are sometimes unavoidable. I was shocked the first few times I got screamed at, and retreated into a deferential political posture, trying to understand the deeper meaning behind it. Then it hit me: All they want is for me to convey the right information at the right time. The Bering Sea is a notoriously foggy place and a big part of the rep job was standing on the bridge, translating positions and headings, and playing find the catcher boat. The captains and mates needed to have complete confidence in my abilities – again, the price of a mistake could be people hurt or even killed.

One last thing. It took me a while to appreciate the intense hierarchy existing on a Soviet factory ship; the captain had the first, middle and last words in all affairs great and small. Everything that happened on board his ship was his business, and in the case of Anatoly Ivanovich, he spent his entire life and career getting command of the Mys Kuznetsova. During my first few weeks, I did not appreciate this simple reality, and allowed myself to criticize him; which only undercut my own credibility. It was a stupid greenhorn posture to adopt. Our moment of truth came when the Raven was getting fuel from the Mys Kuznetsova and he came out to ask the Raven’s captain to untie without getting the promised bunker. By this point, I was far enough along to understand that he was worried about keeping more than one hundred sailors busy, but at the same time, he probably didn’t like to break his word to the Raven. He was between a rock and a hard place. When we had our confrontation later by the map room, though, he saw that I would stand up for what I thought was right, and by not leaving the Mys Kuznetsova, I proved that I was ready to handle any pressure he put on me. Fortunately, I had the intuitive sense by then not to inflate the confrontation or even mention it further, which meant that in a general sense I did not challenge his authority. Our argument turned into a useful departure point for developing a better working relationship. This lesson served me in good stead throughout my career in Russia; it is important to establish yourself but not at the other person’s expense.

None of this means that the remainder of my career went entirely smoothly, or that I discovered some sort of magic key to working in the intense cross-cultural environment that always ensues when Americans work together perfectly with Russians. But it did instill in me an awareness that my chosen path would lead me through some very difficult waters, and that when I hit those waters, my assumptions should be the first thing to jettison overboard.

First Days On the Mys Kuznetsova

His name was Anatoly Ivanovich Kudrashov and he was the meanest son of a bitch in the fleet. I worked eleven expeditions with Marine Resources, and met countless captains, most of whom disappeared into the mists of distant memory soon after I stopped working with them. But Kudrashov stuck with me over the year – our two short months together on the Mys Kuznetsova in the Bering Sea became one of my touchstones for the pitfalls and rewards of working with Russians.

Anatoly Ivanovich was the short pot-bellied captain of the Mys Kuznetsova, a firm believer in the stern Soviet discipline of the ship’s hierarchy over which he exercised ill-tempered command. He had yellow vulpine eyes. His nickname among the sailors of the fleet was Golos – the Voice, for the main weapon in his arsenal, a cannon firing great booming salvos of Russian invective at the hapless souls who dared disrupt the ship’s routines. I saw him once on the ship’s bridge, convulsing in a paroxysm of rage over an infraction on the trawl deck, rip the loud hailer out of the wall, smash it to bits, and fling open the back window to bellow instructions to the scurrying trawl crew.

Anatoly Ivanovich brooked no foolishness. He hated me, a clueless greenhorn rep, right away. I got everything wrong. The essence of the rep job was carefully coordinating and choreographing the movements of the American catcher boat and the Soviet factory ship. The catcher boat caught fish in huge nets holding 20 tons or more of yellowfin sole; once the catcher boat hauled the bag of sole to the surface, the factory ship would come alongside at dead slow speed, and let out a steel cable. The Americans would catch the cable with a grappling hook, pull it onboard the catcher, shackle the bag of fish to the cable, release it, and turn to port. The factory ship would then winch the full bag of fish aboard up the stern ramp. Once the bag was on board, the factory ship would return an empty bag to the catcher boat, the catcher would rig his gear back up and the process would begin all over.

The key ‘success factors’ were keeping the factory ship close to its catcher boats (more than one catcher boat usually worked for one ship), mastering the process and language of the bag transfer, and not letting the ship factory run out of fish. In my puked-out seasick and disoriented state, I badly botched every attempt to make the process run smoothly. I found out, to my utter dismay, that there was a huge distance between being able to say, I think Pushkin is one of the greatest poets in the history of world literature. His body of work is immortal! – and, the Golden Venture is hauling his trawl at latitude 59 08’ and longitude 163 39’, wants us on a heading of 283, and by the way, make sure to check the goose shackles on the left top bridle of the bag and have the mates sew in some extra trawl mat while they’re at it.

The Mys Kuznetsova mates appeared to be speaking some version of Slavic Chinese; they swore every second word, and instead of the clean briskly articulated Russian from the University of Vermont language lab, they spoke in ellipses or barked out short phrases; they stuttered, mumbled, spoke at breathtaking speeds, and rolled their eyes in irritation when I asked them to repeat something. Sleep deprivation crushed my intellect; the fishery worked around the clock, requiring my constant presence at the radio to interpret between the boats, and spent all the time in my cabin filling out delivery receipts for the American fishermen. But if there were almost no chances to sleep, opportunities to botch things up abounded. Anatoly Ivanovich stood on the bridge next to me during every delivery, glaring at my misinterpreted words and halting, fumbling massacred Russian, steaming at mistakes in navigation that sent our floating factory veering off in the wrong direction at the wrong time.

The low point came when the rep who was training me, a cool calm Seattle blonde named Maryanne, leveled her gray eyes at me and said, I really don’t think you’re cut out for this, Peter. If you don’t get better soon, I’m sending you home. I re-doubled my efforts, studied the rep manual like it was the Bible, pushed myself to get on top of the language, and somehow won her faith over in the next week. Kudrashov was vocally opposed to leaving me alone on his ship and let all of the other captains know it during radio hours. I persevered – and after another week or two, it looked like I was out of the woods. Almost, but not quite.

To keep things running smoothly in the fleet, each catcher boat was assigned to a factory ship for the duration of the fishery. This got the catcher boat and factory ship crews used to working with each other and made for good relations between the captains, who were in general egotistical bastards demanding their own way in all matters great and small. When the fishing was hot and the factory ship full of fish, everybody was happy, but as soon as the fish went away and the nets came up empty, captains got antsy and temperamental.

That spring, the catcher boat assigned to the Mys Kuznetsova was the Raven, a jet-black dragger out of Astoria with fierce red eyes painted on either side of its sharp ebony bow. The Raven fished hard and hot, pulling up twenty and thirty ton bags of fish like clockwork. Her captain, cheerful and affable Robert, kept his schedule in perfect synchronization with the needs of the Mys Kuznetsova’s factory. He kept Kudrashov happy with his obliging manner – need a bag in two hours? Two hours later, we took delivery. He thought a day or two ahead, and if the fishing got bad in one spot, he would always put some extra tonnage onto the deck before running to hunt for a better place.

Then one day he asked the Mys Kuznetsova to re-fuel the Raven at sea. This was standard practice – the Soviet marine diesel was lower quality than American was but cheaper and had the advantage of being right there in the Bering Sea, instead of a day’s run away in Dutch Harbor. Kudrashov wanted to fill up the Mys Kuznetsova in anticipation of an off-load onto a transport ship, and asked Robert to keep fishing. Robert obliged, with a firm promise to fill his tanks to the brim when took the fuel; empty tanks were beginning to affect his catcher boat’s stability, and he risked swamping or even capsizing in a good blow.

Kudrashov put him off and put him off, until finally, Robert laid down the law – you fill me up to capacity tonight, or I’ll have to go into Dutch Harbor. The Raven put almost 50 tons of yellowfin sole onto the Mys Kuznetsova that evening, enough to hold the factory for about 12 hours. After the last delivery, Robert brought the Raven alongside the Mys Kuznetsova, tied up and started to take on fuel. The crew of the Raven invited me down for dinner and I spent a great evening getting to know Robert and his men over a beer or two.

The trouble started sometime after midnight – the second mate came out from his watch and, yelling down between the boats, told me that Kudrashov wanted to give the Raven 12 tons of fuel instead of the 18 tons agreed upon earlier. The factory was running out of fish and they wanted to keep working for the offload. I told Robert the news but he would have none of it; he wanted what had been agreed on. I passed this news along to the second mate, who duly passed it along to Kudrashov, who then appeared in person to appeal to Robert. We spent the better part of an hour in heated discussion but Robert held his ground against all appeals. He needed his fuel, they had an agreement, and that was that.

Finally, sometime around dawn I came up the Jacob’s ladder back onto the Mys Kuznetsova and walked onto the bridge to get the Raven untied and catch up on work. I noticed the mates avoiding when suddenly Kudrashov walked out of the map room. All reps are the same, he hissed. All Americans are the same. You’re all a bunch of deceitful liars! I blew up in return, You made a promise! Keep your word! And as the Russians say, vot i pogovorili – boy, we really talked. I stalked off the bridge and banged the door behind me.

The next morning on the fleet it was a ‘scandal’; I dared yell at the Voice. The lead rep for the fleet, Beth, asked to speak with me on the side after our morning radio reporting and I figured, this is the last straw. Instead of getting the axe, though, she offered to move me to another ship if things were too hot for me on the Mys Kuznetsova. But I guess I’ve got a bit of a stubborn streak in me and I refused to give Anatoly Ivanovich the satisfaction. He and I settled into a hostile glaring truce but my work was now up to his standards, so he couldn’t criticize me on that count.

About this time, the factory manager, Gennady, asked me down to his cabin for an evening of drinking and conversation. We were almost full and there was time to relax for a change; I came by after my evening shift and watched in amazement as Gennady pulled out a cornucopia of vodka bottles, kolbasa, black bread, onions and marinated mushrooms and pickles from his secret store. I’d never drunk with a Russian before, Gennady had never drunk with an American, and we made a determined effort to strengthen relations between our countries before our bout ended about dawn. I ended the evening by getting lost on the way back to my cabin, finally finding my door by some function of my reptilian hindbrain, and collapsing in a giggling heap on my bed.

The third watch woke me up about an hour later, just as I was beginning to sleep, with the words; The Coast Guard is calling us. Having the Coast Guard near the fleet put the fear of God and the US government into everybody – rumor had it they hated the Russians, and subjected them to all sorts of heinous punishments for the most minor of infractions.

None of this mattered to me right then, of course. When I got to the bridge, I was half-drunk, half-hung-over, and feeling mean for missing out on a deserved rest. This is the Coast Guard cutter Vigilant calling the Mys Kuznetsova, said the radio. Kuznetsova, Vigilant, go ahead, I said. Ah ya, Mys Kuznetsova, we are thinking of boarding your vessel for inspection during the day. Please advise the captain to be prepared. Oh for crying out loud, that’s all I need, I spat into the radio without thinking, adding an ill-chosen profanity. The US Coast Guard reminds you that the use of profanity on federal airwaves is an offence punishable by up to $20 thousand dollars fine and 20 years in prison, came back the Vigilant.

Doom. Of course, there was no question of sleep. The mates circled around the bridge, peppering me with questions about the inspection, chain-smoking and following the movements of the Vigilant with binoculars. Anatoly Ivanovich came to the bridge and began barking orders. I sat there, my head growing bigger by the moment, drinking tea and trying to gather my wits about me. The hours dragged by. Finally, sometime after lunch, the Vigilant announced that it would be boarding us shortly. An hour or so later, an orange Zodiac boat buzzed up to the Mys Kuznetsova and sent a six or seven sailors and officers clambering up the ship’s rope ladder. Half of them peeled off to look around the ship under escort of the first mate, and half of them went to the captain’s quarters to inspect the ship’s logs.

For me it was a descent into the maelstrom. The Coast Guard demanded detailed explanations of every figure in the catch registers, cross-referencing them against each other and asking pointed questions. My head throbbed and I broke into a profuse sweat under the intense scrutiny. My Russian had improved and after a few hours, it appeared that Anatoly Ivanovich had dodged a bullet, when the officers inspecting the ship arrived in his room. The catch numbers did not add up with the Coast Guard estimates; according to their calculations, there should be far more fish than recorded. The conversation boiled down to a heated discussion of the hold volume, which, according to Anatoly Ivanovich, held less than an open space because it had a series of columns in it. I somehow managed to convey this information to the extremely skeptical Coast Guard officer in charge, who took a few minutes to confer with his colleagues. He came back and said they’d reviewed their calculations and it seemed that Anatoly Ivanovich was right. A fine was avoided, smiles all around, and the officers graciously accepted a cup of tea and some Russian cookies before departing for the Zodiac.

I stood there on the deck, saying good-bye to the Coast Guard and thinking of nothing but sleep and forgetfulness, when an officer came up and clapped me on the back. That was a pretty good one this morning, he said. We don’t usually hear something like that. Sure gave us a good laugh! Ha ha ha. It was all over for me, I thought, as I watched the Zodiac go away into the Bering fog. At last, bed. Then I felt another hand – it was Anatoly Ivanovich, thanking me with a squeeze to the shoulder. After so much stress, we need to go to the banya, he said. Come on and join us.

The banya is one of the Holy of Holies in Russian bonding. I didn’t know it then but an invitation to the banya is a sign of ultimate trust and goodwill. I’d been to the banya on the Mys Kuznetsova every few days and it was one of the more impressive ones in the fleet. The sweat room itself, or parilka, had room for about ten or twelve guys and was lined with smooth sanded larch. The steam came directly from the main engine and was pumped through a grid of rocks to simulate the effect of pouring water onto hot rocks, like on a shore banya. After sweating in live steam for a few minutes, banya guests were invited to step out into the shower room and hose themselves down with water pumped in directly from the Bering Sea. The first time I tried this experience my heart almost stopped. The contrast between the intense heat of the steam and icy seawater flushed my entire being with a flood of endorphins. It was among the most amazing banya experiences I’ve ever had.

Needless to say, after a nice long session with Anatoly Ivanovich and Gennady, we all retired to the captain’s cabin for a round or three of vodka and a midnight feast of treats that magically appeared from the ship’s galley. I can’t say I never called down the wrath of the Voice on myself again during the remaining month but from then on, I was part of the crew, always the best result for any aspiring sailor.

At Sea With Marine Resources Company, Intl.

My first experience working with Russians happened back in 1986. I was a newly minted graduate from the University of Vermont Department of German and Russian, and trying to find my way after college in the working world. Career choices for Americans with Russian language degrees were limited in those days to jobs in the CIA, FBI or academia, none of which appealed to my adventurous and wandering spirit. It was a letdown to find my prospects so circumscribed but these were the final years of the Cold War; only a few years before, President Ronald Reagan had joked into an open microphone that the Soviet Union was cancelled, and that “the bombing begins in five minutes.” So maybe we were all lucky to make it even that far.

In any case, I found myself working in a pasta restaurant in downtown Burlington, Vermont, pretty much doing the same thing I did before college except I was now stuck with thousands of dollars in student loans. Then one day out of the blue, a friend of mine called from Seattle, where she was working at an outdoors outfitter. One of her customers worked for a Soviet-American fishing company up in Alaska and she thought this might be an opportunity for me. I called the phone number she gave me the next day and got through to an outfit called Marine Resources Company, International. They interviewed me by phone, apparently liked what they heard and invited me out to Seattle for training.

Marine Resources Company, International, or MRCI, fished for yellowfin sole up in the Bering Sea. Some smart fishermen out of Astoria, Oregon, figured that they could get more use out of their boats if they used them up in Alaska on under-utilized fish species, but they lacked any way to process the fish at sea, while distance and weather made taking the catch into shore-based plants impossible. They needed sea-going fish processing capability and found it in, of all places, the Soviet Union.

The USSR had a fleet of dozens of deep-water factory trawlers, commissioned in the 1960s to catch fish in seas around the globe. Unfortunately the Soviets built the fleet based on their biologists’ mistaken presumption that the oceans had unlimited fish resources; and after a few years, the Soviet fleets all but wiped out a series of important fisheries (including the George’s Bank off Newfoundland). Fishing nations banded together at the United Nations and passed the Law of the Sea, introducing the concept of a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone.

It just so happened that the Bering Sea was one of the last unexploited areas in the 200-mile EEZ belonging to the United States, and it just so happened that a large proportion of the mothballed Soviet fleet sat in the Russian Far East ports of Vladivostok, Nakhodka, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii. The Oregon fishermen, led by the estimable Mr. Jim Talbot, negotiated and concluded a joint fishing venture with the Soviets.

All of these unlikely and fortunate coincidences led me away from a life of restaurant scullery and introduced me to a life of working as an intermediary between Russians and Americans. To make the venture work, MRCI hired eager recent college graduates with Russian language skills at $54 per day to start; not bad for 1986, especially considering that an average expedition lasted two months or so and that all of the money earned at sea couldn’t be touched until the expedition’s end. Three thousand dollars pure profit for a few short months sounded pretty good to me, too. The job, of course, sounded like pure heaven – live and work as the only American on the Soviet factory trawler, coordinate movements between the trawler and the American draggers, act as the interpreter between the Soviet and American boats and be present during all fish deliveries.

And so it was that I found myself one cold midnight in May standing on the front deck of the MV Golden Venture as she plowed away from Dutch Harbor. A full moon lit the scene – enormous, snow-shrouded mountains encircling the bay on all sides – and lit a road ahead of us out to the Bounding Main. I had spent the evening waiting for the call to come to the Golden Venture at a Mexican restaurant, eating burritos and nachos and flan and washing them down with shots of tequila, chased by margaritas. Then the MRCI Dutch Harbor rep drove us out to a Polish boat and we went aboard to continue the party. By midnight, I was pretty well lit up myself and fairly glowing from within as I stood at the bow of the Golden Venture, breathing in vast lungfuls of brisk Aleutian air and watching the mountains slide majestically by.

I slept that night in a bunk in the dragger’s bow and woke up to the novel sensation of feeling my feet rise up above my head, scrunching my head and shoulders down into the pillow, before they sank down again to a level far below my head, enough to reverse the scrunching process from my head to my feet and knees. I got up, brushed my teeth in the tiny bathroom and went upstairs to the bridge to say good morning to the captain. He was friendly enough, talking around a cigarette stuck in the side of his mouth and blowing smoke in my face while asking if I’d spent a pleasant night – we were still a good days’ run from the fleet up to the north, no worries. We spent a long time talking and looking at the overcast sea, which was filled with long, hefty rollers of grey water curling into occasional spume tops. The Golden Venture climbed and rocked over some of them, hitting every fourth of fifth head on, so that satisfying splats of raw sea hit the windshield. How’re you feeling, inquired the captain. Lots of new reps get seasick. Me, I never felt better, I said. This is great.

He offered me coffee from down in the galley, and it sounded pretty good – I didn’t have a hangover but the cobwebs definitely needed some cleaning out and the mental furniture set back in place after the drama of leaving the safety of shore on my own golden venture the night before. I marveled at the coffee maker, the glass carafe set ingeniously on gimbals hanging below the cupboards so that it swayed back and forth with the motion of the boat. I poured myself a stiff cup of black – no cream and sugar for me, thanks, I’m at sea – and took a few big swigs. Yessir, that coffee maker was a marvel, all right. The coffee in it sloshed back and forth, back and forth, in perfect counterpoint to the rocking of the Golden Venture. Fried food smells in the galley mixed in with a strong smell of marine diesel; the door to the back deck banged open, and one of the deckhands came in, big old Ballard boy, hey, howyadoin, hear you didn’t get seasick yet, that’s great. I looked down into my mug, saw the coffee swirling around, and suddenly made for the toilet, just barely making it.

I spent the next three days stuffed into the skanky bed in the bow, stricken by the eternal, endless dumb motion of the Golden Venture in the Bering Sea into a never-ending cycle of semi-conscious lolling among old sleeping bags and filthy rags, punctuated every few hours by panicked runs to the back deck, where I retched and convulsed in helpless animal agony. At last, the deckhands persuaded me that the best way to cure seasickness was to just get over it, man, like eat a good meal instead of leaving your stomach empty all the time, which is what the problem is. They ushered me into the galley, all friendly and solicitous, sat me down in the seat of honor, and set a platter in front of me: Double cheeseburger with onions, tomatoes and lettuce and a mountain of steaming fries. On the side, a cup of New England clam chowder and a tall frosty chocolate milkshake. Go on, man, best thing for ya. Good, ain’t it? Hey, Scott, change that movie, willya, let’s look at something to get the appetite up. Chuck Norris shootouts popped out of the VCR and the screen jumped around for a second as the new movie tracked in. I fought my way through bites of burger, munched fries, and slurped chocolate, as the television began to moan. Hard core images bombarded me from inches away, an avalanche of flesh tumbling on and on in grunting sweating abandon. The deckhands all lit cigarettes and blew smoke at me while I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed and chewed and then bolted suddenly, pushing my way frantically to the familiar door and onto the back deck where I cut loose, all of it, to a chorus of hoots from the galley. Hey man, that was pretty good. You lasted a lot longer than most. Sure you don’t want to finish that? Ha ha ha.

The next day, mercifully, the weather came down enough for me to transfer to the Soviet factory processor where I would spend the next few months, the Mys Kuznetsova. The Golden Venture laid up a few hundred yards away from the Kuznetsova, three hundred feet at the beam, agleam with white paint and streaked with rust at the scuppers, and flying a glorious scarlet and gold hammer-and-sickle. The Kuznetsova lowered a covered lifeboat, the classic Russian schlyupka, red like a hot dog with a little turret on the back for a mate to stand in and steer. It motored smoothly across the low heaving seas and pulled up alongside, bumping and grinding the Golden Venture’s gunwales. A hatch flew open in the middle of the hot dog and a sailor in a striped pullover stood out of it and made impatient come on motions with muscular arms. We tossed in a few hundred pounds of chains, some boxes of supplies, a bag or two, then my backpack. At last, it was my turn – the jump between the boats had to be timed perfectly, a missed step or slip could put my legs right in the middle of tons of bumping scraping metal. I counted three, stepped up on the gunwale and dove headfirst into the hatch, landing in an ignominious heap right in the middle of the schlyupka in a puddle of sloshing water and diesel fuel. Strong hands picked me up and put me onto a bench; I looked around in wild surmise at a small crowd of about eight Soviet sailors and noticed, as the hatch banged shut, that they were all smoking. The airless chamber exaggerated the sea’s humping sway and I noticed the engine had quit. My college Russian completely and utterly abandoned me – all I could think of to say was, I read the works of Pushkin every day. A sailor banged on the engine with a hammer. I put my head down between my knees and heaved again, and again. Somebody laughed and handed me a bucket. It was my first day on the job in Russia.