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.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
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.
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.
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