But sometimes a whiff transports me. Sometimes, when I get lost down here, so far to the south, in the city of Seattle, my sorry nose reminds me who I am.
1. Paraffin, Diesel Exhaust, And Salmon Blood
In the net lofts along the ship canal they tar their seine twine with paraffin to protect against salt water. Out on the salmon grounds, they tar the seine with the black exhalations of the main's piston strokes and with brush strokes of blood from broken gills. Salmonid blood and combusted diesil both stink and the meshes never come clean. Down on the dock at Ballard Oil, between seasons, near the shack where the old Norwegian skippers lounge like priests by the coffee urn, this medley of twine, diesel, and blood comes over me and suddenly I am a boy in Alaska, back in the fjords. I can hear the main engines yammer deep in the belly of fleet as they rev up for the opening gun at 6 AM. Purse seiners dot the shoreline. Merle Enloe on the Icy Queen lurks over by Dog Point, urgent to hook off, her white hull vague in the grey. Karl Kerr on the Baranof Queen, Terry McDonald on the Miss Helen, Sonny Enloe (Merle's boy) on the Claudia H, and some asshole from Seattle on the Nordic Pride joust for a big school as it mills towards Tree Point, each boat bluffing for the best position at the stroke of 6 when the moment comes to make the mains roar and suffer. Fumes from their stacks drift across the water. It's raining, hard, still pretty murky. Humpies and dogs are jumping their skittery jumps along the skin of the water. I'm shivering, either from excitement or from rain scumbling across my slicker. Plenty of boats in the fjord, but I feel alone with God. I am grateful.
2. Salt
When I was a child and fished hard by myself, I stared for hours at the charts of the waters around my home, Cape Edgcumbe, Olga Strait, Naquasina Sound. I memorized fathoms. I loved the thick, fine paper, flecked with scales from bait herring, stained by coffee and lube-oil. Where the chart was bereft of soundings I filled the blank spot with cohos. I would look at the contour of Katlian Bay and in my mind's nose I smelled the fish I hungered for. They savored of salt. These days salt takes me when I pull up a navigation chart on the computer. Don't ask me what salt smells like, I don't really know. But I feel sad when it comes upon me.
3. Coffee
When I grind my coffee in the morning the pungent bean evokes . . . more coffee: A child wandering among coffee and conversation in that hour after church, the murmurring plangent to the arc of Dad's sermon. Coffee and salmon stew and bullshit around the galley table on the Northern Fury, Tony Petrovitch's boat, my first time alone among men, and old Tony sucks a lung-full of cigarette deep into himself the better to ride my ass about which highschool cunt back in Sitka was my favorite fuck and maybe he should give her a try. Graduate school, thin coffee and thick formulae slammed down the hatch till dawn while I fought with parameter estimation the night before qualifying exams and flourescent tubes fizzed gray over my student office. That sweet first hour after waking, coffee and Communion, drinking it in with Vicki, watching our infant Fisher nurse at her breast, his perfectly shaped head, his steady, soft proclamations of gluttony uttered on the breath between sucks.
4. Grey
In November, when Seattle busses hiss through the overcast, I swear I can smell the color grey. Also gray, with an "a", which smells like paper clips or rifle barrels. But my color, grey, smells like wind heavy with the Pacific, tastes like a wall of mist, a curtain sweeping softly across the salt chuck to shroud the steep shoulders of the fjords. It is the iron and must of rain water plopping out of spruce needles in big, fat drops, plunking among bear bread, moss, and skunk cabbage. Grey is the coppery tang of not knowing which way to point the skiff when snow catches you far from home. And grey is always the fragrance of the ore that smelts itself into silver and chimes downstream, a ribbon of light through the forest, and smolted salmon ride it, the little swimmers borne out to take the smell of salt deep into their blood.
5. Bacon
These days the boats we charter tend to be run by Norwegian-Americans, meaning that they lust after high cholestorol foods. Breakfast is relentlessly bacon and eggs. Grease sizzles its way into every cranny of the galley, the mess, and the living quarters, its fumes penetrating the layers of stale farts in stuffy staterooms, last night's cigarette smoke, and this morning's first frantic puffs. Bacon tickles my nose and I jump right up to grind some coffee. I flip the skipper shit while he's still sleepy and dim-witted. In a few minutes I will roust my crew of biologists. For now, I sip my coffee, eager for the dawn, when we will send the trawl down into the dark. A lighter grey rides into the sky like a tide. I head aft to bless my net and take a piss. Standing by the scupper, braced against the hydraulic line coiler, I watch the green shining in the face of each wave. I breathe into my body the same chill wind that yesterday kissed away the dying gasped by ruptured cod and broken soles. My shipmates are elbow tight around me twenty-four hours a day but I feel alone with God. I am grateful.