My Private Wobegon

stories from home

Summer on the Bristol Bay coast is marked by the smell of salmon. Acrid, biting, unmistakable—it rises up like a ghoul from blood-soaked boat hulls and canneries, the mudflats at low tide. It rides on the cool air and settles into the tiny
Alaskan town like a stubborn stain, intent on remaining well into August, when only the first frost can finally drive it out. Most of the townspeople do not notice the smell, caught up in the rush and ardor of the season as they are. It’s ancillary to their lives, as inconsequential as their own sweat. Only its absence is noted—during the still winter months, the occasional fishermen’s strike, or in an empty room thousands of miles away—like the wary silence after a driving rain squall.

A boy, a fisherman’s son, always notices the smell. To him it has meaning. He breathes it in deep, eyes trained on the dark water. He waits with his mother in the cab of a red pickup truck, the harbor around them as lively as a state fairgrounds: noises, shouts, movement. When his father’s boat rounds the spit and plows into the harbor, the boy kicks muddy feet against the glove compartment and points excitedly. His mother smiles, sits up rigid, tells him to settle down.

The boy watches as his father moors his vessel, loops the lines over the dock cleats, cinches them tight. He watches him cross the decks of other men’s boats, slap them on the back, raise a hand in greeting. His fisherman father swaggers up the gangway, haggard and drop-necked, hip boots turned down pirate-style, navy blue cotton cap cocked to the side. He slings gear into the pickup, kisses his mother through the open window and swings himself fence-hop style into the truck bed. The boy puts his hand up to the back glass of the pick-up, slides open the window. His father makes a goofy face and musses the boy’s hair, then lays his head on the bed liner, as if he no longer has the strength to hold it up. He reaches up absently and pulls his cotton cap down over his eyes. The smell of salmon wafts off him and into the cab as they pull away down the road, towards home. The boy sniffs twice, smiles giddy at his mother.

Father follows mother into the house where she has been cooking all day—bread, soup, casserole, rhubarb crisp. He makes surprised, grateful declarations about the smell of the food that make mother blush. The boy stays outside and peels scales dutifully from his father’s yellow rain pants as if it were a task of great import. When he becomes bored with this, he rifles through his father’s rucksack and finds a battered can of Dr. Pepper, picks the peanut M and M’s and chocolate chips out of a bag of gorp, gnaws on moose jerky strips, gobbles up miniature candy bars. It all tastes faintly of salmon, and is delicious. He wanders inside, where his father snores loudly on the sofa, stands over him and smells salmon on him the way others might smell whiskey. He sits at his father’s feet and draws pictures he hopes to show him when he wakes, but the boy falls asleep, too, and the next morning finds his father has already gone. The boy and his mother are left sitting around the VHF transmitter, waiting for any word. Sometimes, his mother will turn on the AM radio and listen to the trading post or golden oldies, which the boy will hum along to, if he knows the song. When his mother hears the weather or the fishing announcement, she shushes the boy and turns up the volume so loud the dishes in the cabinet rattle. Mostly, though, they just wait. After sitting long hours in silence, the boy’s mother will sigh and stand and look around the room for something to do.

"I make more money in a month of fishing than you do in a year of teaching,” one says. The others laugh, because it’s true."

In the winter months, she is an English teacher at the High School. Her students recline in their desks and ask her why they should learn about Shakespeare.

“I make more money in a month of fishing than you do in a year of teaching,” one says. The others laugh, because it’s true.

“It might not always be this good,” she stammers, though it sounds lame even to her.

She does not want the boy to be a fisherman, and tells him so. She won’t let his father take him out. It’s too dangerous, she reasons. The father shrugs and goes along with this. The boy is too young to be of much help, anyway. Besides that, he is frail, often sickly, and in all his dreaminess, unreliable. His father doesn’t mind that the boy reads books and draws—he likes what this portends—but he does not like that the boy is so easily distracted, and moves through life as if under some blithe, pie-eyed spell, the way one wanders through a carnival boardwalk.

At the end of the fishing season, the father hauls the boat into the yard to save money on dry-dock fees. Mother doesn’t like the way it looms over to the house, but doesn’t say anything. The boy likes the boat in the yard, because it means his father is home for good until next season. His father never stops working, though, and busily gets things ready for the long winter, and the next fishing season. He crawls down into the hold and scrubs it clean with bleach and water; mixes sand in with paint primer and refinishes the deck; sits at the living room table with his glasses roosting on the bridge of his nose and writes generous checks to his crewmembers.

“Do you think they call them ‘sockeye’ salmon because they look like a sock?” the boy asks, bouncing on an orange buoy while his father strips his tattered nets.

“Pick up these bits of twine,” his father instructs, and points his knife at the ground.

The twine is pressed into the dirt in neat little patterns, like curlicue fossils. It’s satisfying to pull them up, but after awhile, the boy forgets what he’s doing and wanders inside and lays down in his room to draw his father’s boat. When he finishes, he places the picture carefully on his father’s pillow. He is sure his father will like the drawing, and that evening in bed, fights to stay awake, waiting for him to find it. Days pass and the father does not say anything about the picture, simply strips nets at his bench, stopping only to sigh heavily and wipe the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. When he finally does speak to the boy, it’s only to remind him that he didn’t finish the job he started in the yard. The boy slips his tiny feet into his father’s bloodstained, scale-speckled Romeos and flops around the yard, glumly gleaning bits of twine, putting them in his coat pocket for some later use.

“Sometimes,” his father shakes his head.

When the commercial season ends, the family puts up fish for the winter. They stretch their net out on Kanakanak beach and at high tide watch the water boil as the fish strike, watch the white corks bob and pop and eventually sink below the muddy water. They drag in the loaded net and pitch the fish, bucking and shivering, into the pickup bed. Some are nearly as long as the boy is, and too heavy for him to lift; his father takes those.

They drive their load home and work in the late evening sun, the gnats and mosquitoes swirling around their faces. Father splits and guts the fish in that careful, fastidious way of his, never hinting that he’d probably rather lay on a bed of nails than touch another salmon after clawing them out of drift nets for unending hours over the last two months. Mother wraps the fish in butcher paper, tapes them tightly and passes them to the boy, who writes “Hi-Ho Silver ‘85” and draws cartoon fish that wear glasses and hats and smile and talk.

His father chuckles at this cleverness, but quickly gets back to cleaning fish. The boy draws other cartoons that aren’t as funny, and finally his father tells him to cut it out; he’s holding up the line.

During the winter, they eat salmon often. Mother rises hours before the boy, goes into the bitterly cold garage, retrieves a mummified salmon from the deep freeze and sets it in the sink to thaw before making breakfast and getting dressed for work. The boy doesn’t take much notice, only wrinkles his nose at the smell.

His mother is a wonderful cook. She makes lavish salmon dishes that other people in town don’t understand or care for that much. She tones it down when company comes, but for the family she expresses herself with croquettes and soufflés and sashimi and pickled roe and lox spread so smooth and delicious it makes the father’s eyes water. She stands hours picking bones out of the leftovers to make salmon salad. She spreads it on thick slices of homemade bread and places the sandwich in the boy’s lunch sack, which he trades for bologna or pressed turkey on white.

Other times he calls and says fishing is dead, and explains to his son why with all the sad finality of an elegy. Neither one of them really knows for sure, but it’s something to talk about.

The boy longs for hamburgers. Meatloaf. Pork roast. Fried chicken. Other families eat these things, he reasons to himself. He comes home to the smell of salmon.

“Again?” he asks.

“There’s people would pay $50 for a gourmet meal like that,” his father says.

“We had salmon last night,” the boy whines.

“Eat it,” his father commands. “Those fish are going to put you through college.”

At the university, the boy—young man, now—learns, among other things, the Latin name for salmon: oncorhynchus. He whispers it in quiet moments alone, as if it were a one-word poem. It bounces around his palette like a rubber ball: “ON-core-ING-cuss.” He sits in hot, crowded rooms thousands of miles from his bayside village, and scribbles notes about things that have little to do with where he is from or what he’s learned about life so far.

He tries to bring the two disparate worlds together. He fishes for trout in a stocked stream a few miles to the north, easily landing languid, scrawny brookies that lay in his creel like wet rags. He visits a Chinook hatchery and argues with the docent about the differences between pen-raised fish and wild stock. He enrolls in a fisheries biology course and listens attentively to lectures on riparian habitat loss and mercurial mine tailings and dam diversions and genetic bottle-necking and the spawning process down to the minutiae.

“The fertilized eggs are nourished by the parents’ decaying bodies,” the professor says, his voice booming across the lecture hall. The young man writes this down.

“Ewww,” a girl seated next to him says.

The boy tells his father things he’s learned about salmon over the telephone, but the father sounds disappointed, as if the boy had explained a particularly good magic trick to him, or given away the ending of a book.

In all the years his father fishes, the boy never once hears him protest to the smell, so strong it taints his coffee, or the scales that stick to his face and hands, tangle in his hair. Nor does the boy hear him complain of his back, his tendonitis, the raw cuts and blisters.

The boy’s father fishes when the waters are open, and stops fishing when the waters are closed. He stays inside the regulatory markers, and never motors over anyone’s net or strong arms another vessel out of good grounds. He names his first boat after his wife and his second boat after his mother, while other men paint “Salmon Killer” or “Cash Flow” across their sterns.

He hangs up his nets and waits during the strikes, and he hangs up his nets for good when he realizes he hasn’t spent a summer with his family in over ten years. The young man won’t understand or appreciate any of this later, when he can no longer lean close towards his father’s whiskered face and smell salmon on him like a sweet musk. His father has long since stopped fishing.

“Isn’t what it used to be,” he says.

Sometimes, he will call and tell his son he thinks it might come back, and talks at length about them buying a boat and permit together.

“I wonder if we could track down the Orena Pearl,” he muses.“I’ll bet that fellow would sell it back to me.”

Other times he calls and says fishing is dead, and explains to his son why with all the sad finality of an elegy. Neither one of them really knows for sure, but it’s something to talk about.

“It wouldn’t take much to get back in now,” the father says. His son secretly wishes they could, but knows his father is getting too old, though perhaps he doesn’t realize this yet.

The boy is a grown man now, and does not live in the small fishing town anymore. He left for all the reasons people leave small hometowns, and is often sad and heartsick that these reasons will keep him from ever living there again. He instead pays rent on a small room in a big city, where he does not know his neighbors and hardly ever eats salmon and, at times, feels very alone. Some nights, the salmon visit him; they drift and skitter through his dreams. They stare at him with their cold golden eyes, gills aflutter and tails fanning in the murky dark. The man cannot tell if they are mocking, or challenging, or inviting. He wants to know; he wants to reach out and run his fingers along their smooth backs, feel the flex and stretch of their muscle.

“Oncorhynchus,” he whispers.

Walking through a grocery store, the man sometimes takes a detour from the neat, circus-colored aisles, and casually wanders by the seafood case, the way someone else might stroll past the deli counter to get a better look at a pretty girl, or pass by the bakery for the scent of fresh bread.

He looks over the fish laid out on the ice chips. If they have any Alaskan salmon, he’ll stop and admire the meat, bright orange with gossamer striations.

“Is it fresh?” he’ll ask the smocked man behind the counter, skeptically. The smocked man invariably nods. “I’ll take it,” he says.

The smocked man wraps the fish up tightly in butcher paper and passes it over. The fisherman’s son smiles to feel the weight and heft of the salmon in his hand. He brings it to his face, breathes it in deep through his nose, smiles. It’s as close as he can come to giving thanks.

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Drew Cherry
Drew Cherry was born and raised in Dillingham, Alaska.

He has won numerous awards for his fiction and poetry, and is a regular contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle and Forest Magazine, among other publications.

Mr. Cherry lives in Portland, Oregon, and is currently at work on a novel.