ABOUT A WEEK AFTER I got home from Iowa with my box of sparrows, I was drifting around in a canoe off San Juan Island, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Seattle. I was out in front of a house where two of my buddies from college, Mark and Pooder, live, trying to catch a lingcod—a long slender fish known for its firm, white, sweet-tasting flesh. Escoffier used Atlantic cod for all sorts of dishes, and I was betting on a Pacific lingcod being just about the same thing. I wasn’t having any luck and started thinking about trying a different spot. That’s when the killer whales showed up.
All of a sudden, I heard a gargled blast of water and air, like someone clearing a snorkel after surfacing from a dive. But this noise was more like someone clearing a snorkel through a loudspeaker. I whipped my head around and saw an impossibly large mound of what looked like black and white rubber rolling out of the waves and disappearing again. The rubber mound was so close, I could have hit it with a bow and arrow. I thought, Oh my God, a whale’s going to kill me.
I started frantically reeling up my bait. The killer whale rose again, blowing a blast of mist maybe twelve feet in the air. As its back cleared the water, its long dorsal fin quivered in the air like a car’s radio antenna when you bend it back and let it go. The fin was almost as tall as me. As it disappeared underwater again, three other whales rose out of the waves behind it. The lead whale would miss my canoe, but I wasn’t so sure about the other three.
My first impulse, before fleeing, was to look up toward the lighthouse on Lime Kiln Point. Mark and Pooder live in the lighthouse keepers’ quarters. I wanted to make sure they weren’t watching, because they’d be embarrassed as hell if they saw how afraid I was. They’ve both worked as sea-kayaking guides in the waters around San Juan Island, and they love to talk about the gentle, harmless nature of killer whales. Except Mark and Pooder don’t call them killer whales. They use the more politically correct and socially acceptable term orca, which is actually a generic Latin word for whale that probably stems from the Greek word for vessel. Mark and Pooder defend their use of the word by saying that there has never been a documented killer whale attack against a human and that the whales suffer from bad PR because of their name. The thing is, killer whales didn’t get their name for attacking humans. The name is actually a corruption of an older title: whale killer. Orcas, or whatever you want to call them, are the only cetacean known to eat other warm-blooded mammals. As I sat in the canoe, I couldn’t help but think that, from beneath, my canoe probably looked a little bit like a baby whale. So I decided to get the hell out of there.
I paddled toward shore and pulled into a deep cove beneath the lighthouse. I felt safer in there, so I lowered my lingcod bait—a dead herring—back down to the bottom. The next time I looked up from my fishing rod to check on the location of the killer whales, I realized that one of them was now closer to shore than I was. The whale was practically scratching its sides on the rocks to the north of my canoe. It blew from its blowhole and smacked its tail on the water’s surface. I reeled my line back up, paddled over to a little indent in the cliff beneath the lighthouse, and dragged the canoe onto the rocky shores of San Juan Island.
Hundreds of tourists come to San Juan Island every summer with hopes of having the sort of up-close experience with a killer whale that I’d just fled, but I had not come for whales. I had come for cod, a fish that Escoffier prepared any number of ways, including broiled, boiled, grilled, fried, and salted. Also, I was there to redeem myself. Years before, my buddy Drost and I had come to San Juan Island because we’d wanted to take his little brown rowboat to a small, outlying island and live off the land like Robinson Crusoe for a long weekend. Our adventure was bookended by bad luck. A bee stung my right eyelid when the trip began, and another bee stung my left ankle when the trip ended. In between these stingings, a procession of disasters played out, uninterrupted. We never caught a thing, not even a clam.
When Drost and I left the island, we vowed to never return. But once I decided to get a lingcod for my Escoffier feast, I developed a General MacArthur–like desire to return to the island and vindicate myself in the very waters where I had once been shamed. For my expedition companions on my return trip, I selected Diana and a New Yorker friend of hers named Becca, whom Diana had met in Israel years before. Becca is very exotic-looking. Her ancestors are from Eastern Europe, but she looks almost Egyptian. She has eyebrows similar to those of hieroglyphic figures on Egyptian tombs, but she doesn’t pluck them to look that way. She’s a lot of fun to hang out with, always up for seeing new places and meeting new people. She flew into Seattle, and Diana and I made the long drive over from Montana to pick her up.
The next morning, we got up bright and early and drove north toward Anacortes, the departure point for car ferries heading out to San Juan Island. Once our ferry pulled away from the dock, we got out of our car and walked up to the deck. Rain was coming down in a slow, steady shower. We stood on the deck in our raincoats, drinking coffee.
There are between 172 and 700 islands in the San Juan Archipelago, depending on how you define an island—some of them could also be called rocks. These islands and/or rocks are the tops of old mountains, gouged and scraped by passing glaciers over the millennia. As the ferry traveled through the archipelago, Becca and Diana commented on the beautiful shapes we saw rising out of the water, the curvaceous cliffs and deeply scratched rocks and thick growths of cedar.
The ferry ride took seventy minutes. We landed at Friday Harbor, which is like the capital of San Juan Island. It was the spring season, so the streets were fairly empty of tourists. We looked around a bit, and I bought my fishing license and some fishing tackle. I made some inquiries around town about renting a skiff for fishing, but the boat rental places weren’t yet open for summer. I hadn’t anticipated this particular setback. How could an island’s boat rental shops be closed? It seemed as though my efforts to catch a lingcod were going to be thwarted from the beginning. We got into our car and drove off toward Lime Kiln Point.
Lime Kiln Point got its name from some old lime quarries that operated on the island for sixty-odd years before finally petering out in 1920. The kilns on the point were used to fire the limestone into usable lime, a component of cement. The Coast Guard built the lighthouse in 1919 and also constructed two large, colonial-style houses for the lighthouse keepers to live in. But once electricity came to the island in 1960, resident lighthouse keepers weren’t so important. The Coast Guard eventually handed the land over to the state of Washington, which turned it into Lime Kiln Point State Park in 1984. Fourteen years later, my buddies Mark and Pooder stumbled into two of the choicest jobs on earth, and one of the greatest houses.
At night Mark and Pooder can lie in bed and hear passing gray whales clear their blowholes into the ocean air. They can look up from flipping a burger on the porch and see pods of feeding porpoises. Needless to say, Mark and Pooder don’t have much trouble getting women. But they’re insulted when I suggest a correlation between their prowess and their living situation. I guess I can’t prove the correlation, but I do know that if Mark and Pooder lived in a cornfield in Iowa, I sure as hell wouldn’t have brought along Diana and her friend.
Mark and Pooder’s digs came complete with access to an old aluminum canoe, but for a fellow looking for a solid boat to tame the treacherous saltwater surrounding San Juan Island, it was a less than ideal choice. Mark and Pooder made it pretty damn clear that I shouldn’t risk taking the canoe onto the ocean.
We walked out onto their porch and stared at Haro Strait, which flowed past their house. Miles away, across the strait, we could see Canada’s Vancouver Island. Drift logs and uprooted kelp whisked past in the current as the strait flooded with an incoming tide. The shoreline was pockmarked with coves and bays, some no bigger than your average supermarket, and these inlets were separated by points of land, or peninsulas, jutting into the sea. The swift current in the strait formed swirling eddies inside the coves. A small buoy anchored in the cove below the lighthouse was pitched over at a sharp angle in the current of an eddy.
“That water is forty-eight degrees. You know how fast you’d die if you flipped over in that water?” asked Mark.
“How fast?” I asked.
“Fast.”
Mark has spent years guiding in the San Juan Islands, taking tourists out in sea kayaks to camp on remote beaches. He has a calm, measured demeanor and wears a ponytail that gives him an outdoorsy yet academic look, which lends his warnings greater credibility.
Pooder tried to warn me away too, but he had to admit that he’d taken the canoe out fishing a few times himself.
“It’s a matter of timing,” said Pooder. He put his hands into the pockets of his greasy work pants. “You’ve got to watch the tides, and be careful. Water levels can rise twelve feet here on a high tide. A big tide like that creates a lot of current. What I’m saying is, if you’re not careful, you’ll get pulled way the hell out.” He shrugged. “It’s your call, man. I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”
In the morning, just as it was getting light, I took a look at the water out in front of Mark and Pooder’s house. The small buoy floating in the cove was standing upright; the tide was slack. I woke up Becca and Diana. The three of us were sleeping on child-sized mattresses butted up together in a guest room. Becca opted to keep on sleeping, but Diana got dressed and came outside with me. The air was cool and wet. We lowered the canoe off the rocks and climbed in.
Pooder doubted that I would catch a lingcod in the cove. Lingcod tend to hang out in superdeep water, he said, but I wasn’t willing to go way out and risk getting caught in a current. With a heavy weight on my line, I lowered a ten-inch-long herring down to the bottom. The water was several hundred feet deep. I’m used to fishing in lakes and rivers, where the water’s maybe ten or twenty feet deep. In such shallow water, I think that the fish and I are in close proximity, the primary difference being that the fish are underwater and I’m above water. But now that I was fishing in water one hundred yards deep, the fish seemed so far down that I couldn’t picture my actions having any effect on them. It seemed impossible to hook into something that deep. I was more than surprised when I felt one sock my bait.
At this point in our relationship, Diana had developed a very slight interest in fishing but had by no means decided to become a full-on fisherman. I could never assume that she wanted to fish; instead, I would offer fishing to her the way you might offer a drink to a visitor at your home. After the fish took my bait, I held the rod toward her. “You wanna take it?” She thought about it for a moment, then took the rod and started cranking on the reel.
“It just feels like a weight,” she said. “I can’t feel it swimming around at all.” She stopped reeling. Faintly, the rod bounced. There was a fish down there, somewhere. She reeled some more. After about five minutes, she reeled up a rockfish. I didn’t know it was a rockfish, but I looked it up in a guidebook that I’d brought along. The fish was reddish, about as long as a big shoe, with a fat, toothy head. It had needles on its dorsal fin that you could probably sew clothes with and weighed maybe three pounds. We got the fish up in the boat and into the cooler. I rebaited the line and lowered it back down. Within minutes, I pulled up a small greenling. A greenling is similar to a lingcod in name, though not appearance. Still, I felt like we were getting close to catching what we were after. I lowered a fresh piece of bait down to the bottom, but then noticed that the buoy was cocked on its side and water was flowing around it the way a river passes a rock. The tide was on the move. Quickly, we paddled for shore. We carried our fish back up to the house and cleaned them, then climbed back into our little beds.
Later in the morning, after we’d eaten breakfast and Mark and Pooder had gone off to work, I made a few local phone calls to inquire about clam-digging spots. As long as we were on the island, I thought I might get lucky and collect some other good ingredients in addition to the cod. According to Pooder, though, suitable clam-digging beaches on San Juan Island were scarce, because there simply weren’t many beaches to begin with. Most of the island’s shoreline consisted of tall, vertical cliffs.
I called a sporting goods store in the town of Friday Harbor, but the clerk was being tight-lipped; he apparently didn’t want to give shellfish-collecting information to some clueless tourist by phone. I attempted to dial another sporting goods store but screwed up the number and, through a weird twist of fate, got hold of a chef at a restaurant in Friday Harbor instead. When I started asking about shellfish, he thought I was inquiring about that night’s menu. Once I apologized for calling the wrong number, I asked the chef my question anyway, just for the hell of it. He said that the only clam-digging spot he knew on the island was near a place called British Camp.
I looked through the Washington Department of Fish and Game’s shellfish regulations. Rather than listing the beaches where a person could go clam digging, the book listed the beaches where a person couldn’t. The beach at British Camp was on the no-no list, but the listing stated that the closure extended only to the dinghy dock. I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but we decided to go there and take a look.
One of San Juan Island’s nicest features is that every road eventually leads to every place, or at least seems to. No matter where you’re going—to get some ice cream, to dig clams, to shoot pool at a bar—you can just start driving and you’ll eventually get there. To find British Camp, Diana, Becca, and I took a left or a right turn out of Mark and Pooder’s driveway—it didn’t really matter—and after ten minutes we saw the sign for British Camp Park.
The parking lot was surrounded by a forest of cedars and firs interspersed with madrona trees. The trees had glossy, leathery leaves and reddish bark that seemed to be peeling away in places, as if they were diseased, which they definitely were not. The branches of the madronas spread out in broad, strong, beautiful arcs; I’ve never seen a tree more suitable for a tree fort than a big madrona.
Next to the parking lot was a map delineating the routes of various footpaths. The map didn’t mention a dinghy dock or a clam-digging spot. From the parking lot, we walked downhill on a trail and came to an open grassy meadow the size of a couple of football fields. The meadow ended at a small harbor, which looked as placid as a backyard pond. There was an old white building with a U.S. Park Service sign out front. Although the sign said that the visitor center was not yet open for the summer season, I saw that the door was ajar. Inside, a gray-haired woman in a green fleece jacket was vacuuming the curtains.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re not open.”
I told her that I was wondering about the dinghy dock that separated the open clam-digging beach from the prohibited clam-digging beach. She didn’t know what I was talking about. “This is my first summer as a volunteer,” she said. “The only dock I know of is that one.” She pulled aside the curtain she was vacuuming and pointed out the window to a small wooden structure floating in the bay. “That must be it,” I said.
We walked through the grass to the dinghy dock. Diana guilt-tripped me into relinquishing my rubber boots to Becca, so I walked barefoot into the water on the other side of the dock. The water was cold, and I winced as crushed shells and sharp rocks cut into my feet. After a few unpleasant steps, I looked down and saw a mussel the size and shape of a Brazil nut clinging to a rock. This was the first mussel I’d ever seen that wasn’t for sale. Surely I’d come across countless mussels on docks and pylons before, but I’d never mentally registered their presence until that moment, because I’d never been looking to eat one before. When I plucked it from the rock, it made a slight tearing noise, like a weed being pulled out of the dirt. The noise came from the severing of the mussel’s connective threads, or byssus, which held it to the rock.
I consulted the regulations and found a description of the blue mussel, a circumpolar species that occupies both of the U.S. coasts and the shores of Western Europe. My shellfish license allowed me ten pounds of these things a day—much more than I would need to prepare several of Escoffier’s mussel dishes. I looked around and plucked another mussel from a different rock. We hadn’t toted anything along to put our shellfish in, so I set the mussels on the beach and walked all the way back to the car. I got an empty two-liter pop bottle out of the trunk and used my multitool to cut off the top, then ran back to the dinghy dock to collect my catch. Diana and Becca were wading around in the water, looking for more mussels.
We owed our access to this nice shellfish beach to a long-dead person named Lyman Cutlar. Cutlar had killed a pig on San Juan Island back in 1859 because it kept getting into his potato patch. Cutlar was an American, but the pig was British, owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The 1846 Oregon Treaty had established a border between the U.S. and Canadian mainland at the forty-ninth parallel, but the agreement was vague when it came to the cluster of islands between Canada’s Vancouver Island and the territory of Washington. Both American and British citizens lived on San Juan Island, tolerating each other’s presence until Cutlar happened to avenge the destruction of his potato patch. The British came to arrest Cutlar, but the Americans refused the British claim of jurisdiction. Each country backed up its argument with a battleship. The British garrisoned a small army at what would become our clam-digging spot, while the Americans set up camp at the other end of the island. The confrontation became known as the War of the Pig, even though no shots were ever fired. The standoff lasted until 1872. It was resolved when an impartial mediator, Kaiser Wilhelm I, the king of Prussia and emperor of Germany, sided with the Americans. The British left, and the Americans eventually turned the vacated British camp into a national park.
To my mind, Kaiser Wilhelm I was responsible for another important event. During the Franco-Prussian War, he led the army that held Auguste Escoffier as a POW. Years after that experience, Escoffier cooked for the kaiser’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, on the maiden voyage of a luxury liner that was crossing the Atlantic. Wilhelm II was nervous that Escoffier might take revenge on him, but Escoffier assured the kaiser that he “wasn’t on board to poison him.” Later Wilhelm II helped lead Germany into World War I, where Escoffier lost a son. After his son’s death, it is rumored that Escoffier expressed regret about not having killed the kaiser when he had the chance. Whatever the kaiser’s sins against Escoffier, were it not for Wilhelm I, I wouldn’t have had a beach on which to collect the necessary mussels for Escoffier’s recipes.
Mussels and clams are both bivalves, meaning they have two shells. Despite that similarity, the two shellfish have different habits. Mussels live out in the open, directly exposed to the water. I could walk around and pluck them quite freely. Clams, on the other hand, use an appendage called a foot to dig themselves down into the mud, which makes them nearly impossible to find. As I surveyed the beach, I knew I could be looking at thousands of clams. Or none at all.
The three of us poked around on the beach while we waited for the tide to go out. As it did, it exposed fresh mud, and I noticed that spurts of water were shooting out of small orifices in the mud, like blasts from a squirt gun. Some of the orifices were as big around as a finger, while others were as narrow as toothpicks. I jabbed my index finger into one of the larger holes. About an inch beneath the mud’s surface, my fingertip met a slimy and very alive object that retreated from my touch. I shoved my finger in farther and caught up with the slimy object. It retreated deeper still into its lair. The object I’d touched was obviously a clam’s siphon, which it uses to get oxygen and food. The hole left in the mud by the siphon led down to the clam in the same way that an electrical cord leads to an appliance.
I started digging down with one hand, following the siphon’s hole until I was up to my elbow in muddy water and holding the top of a clam’s shell, which was a handful in and of itself. I invited Becca to follow my hand down to the clam, to see what it felt like. She took hold of the clam and tugged and tugged, but it wouldn’t come up. She got her other hand in there and really started working at it.
As the clam began coming loose, you could hear faint gurgling noises as water filled the vacant pocket. Becca hoisted up a ball of mud, then rinsed it off. The horse clam was the size of her hand, minus her fingers. In response to getting yanked out of its hole, the creature had drawn its foot and its siphon into its shell and clamped shut like a vacuum-sealed jar.
The success of our clam extraction inspired Diana to start digging at another hole in the mud. Becca resumed digging too. At that moment I was probably the only guy in the world digging shellfish, which are not kosher, with two Jewish girls.
Diana’s relationship with shellfish up to this point had been somewhat mercurial. Until her third year of college, Diana had counted shellfish among her list of top ten favorite foods. She had no problem slithering back a few raw oysters, and she’d happily munch on buffet-style peel-and-eat shrimp. Then she went to live in Israel for five months, and she gave up eating shellfish altogether.
Jewish dietary law, called kashrut, includes many prohibitions. In addition to a ban on eating clams and mussels and fish that do not have fins and scales, such as sharks and eels, there are many other no-nos. No eating certain bugs; no eating animals that do not chew their cud and have a cloven hoof; no eating blood; no eating carrion. The former prohibition is the likely source for the word treyf, a Yiddish word that refers to all prohibited foods. Treyf means “torn,” probably in reference to animals that have been killed or mortally wounded by beasts of prey. Kosher slaughterers, or shochets, consider all animals that have suffered a wound to be treyf, even if the animal has been healed. They take the prohibition so seriously that they inspect the lungs of slaughtered animals for signs of diseases, past or present. If an animal has a lesion on its lung, it is treyf. The lungs should be unblemished and smooth. The Yiddish word for “smooth” is glatt. Nowadays, glatt refers to a very strict interpretation of kashrut.
Traveling all over Israel, Diana saw shellfish on a menu only once. She was in the northern city of Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. She ordered and ate the shrimp, then felt guilty, so she decided to stop eating shellfish. By the time she moved back to the United States, she had lost her craving for seafood altogether. As long as she wasn’t eating her favorite form of meat, she decided not to eat any meat at all, treyf or otherwise.
Ostensibly, Diana was just digging clams for the hell of it. She had no intention of eating them. I felt sad for her, bent over and breaking her fingernails all to pieces for something she didn’t even want. I admired her open-mindedness and fortitude, though I felt a little manipulative because I was always getting her into these situations with hopes that I could turn her into an enthusiastic meat eater.
Escoffier himself was not above manipulating his friends. He went to great lengths to change the cautious eating habits of his clientele, especially of his female clientele. He and Ritz were annoyed that the refined Victorian women thought it imprudent to be seen dining in public establishments, and the partners overhauled their dining rooms to appeal to the tastes of upper-crust women. Using Ritz’s wife as a model, they tinkered with lighting and lampshades to find the most flattering combinations for the “delicate complexions” of ladies. They designed entrances that did not draw overt attention to guests and offered discreet corner seating. They decorated with a feminine touch, with lots of flowers.
And Escoffier tampered with their food. One of his lifelong clients was the leading French actress of his day, Sarah Bernhardt. Like many upper-class women, Bernhardt considered garlic taboo because it creates bad breath. On her birthdays, Escoffier would go to Bernhardt’s hotel room and make her a simple meal of scrambled eggs. Some of Escoffier’s biographers suggest that Escoffier also pleased Bernhardt in ways beyond the culinary, though Escoffier was married to the same woman for most of his life and maintained the appearance of fidelity. Either way, Bernhardt declared Escoffier’s eggs to be the best in the world. He was using garlic, of course, but lied and said that the eggs got their taste from a special silver pan.
Another trick of his was to name dishes after fashionable women. Supposedly this was meant to pay homage, but it had an effect not unlike hiring a pop star to pose wearing a certain brand of shoes. He named Melba toast and peach Melba after the Australian singer Nellie Melba. For Sarah Bernhardt, he created soufflé Sarah Bernhardt. For the Prince of Wales’s wife, he made peach Alexandra. He made a rice pudding for Napoleon III’s wife, Eugenie.
Rather than slipping a clam into Diana’s tofu, or changing the lighting in my apartment, or naming a variation of an elk burger after her, I thought that exposure to fresh air and natural environments and outdoor labor would bring her around to being an omnivore. She certainly enjoyed the outdoors; after all, she was out in the water digging for clams with a smile on her face. It seemed like the logical next step was for her to eat one. Watching her dig, I thought of that old saying about how you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. But, I thought, if you lead the horse to water a hundred times, and all the other horses are drinking, at some point it’s bound to get curious. Escoffier may not have practiced this particular approach with the women in his life, but he certainly would have understood my motivations.
Scratching deep into the mud after horse clams, we kept turning up much smaller specimens with textured, more solid shells. These were butter and manila clams, which must be an inch and a half in diameter to be of legal size. Most of the clams we found were big enough to keep. We carefully returned those that weren’t to the mud.
The daily limit for clams was forty per person, no more than seven of which could be horse clams. It didn’t take long to fill the two-liter container, at which point I started filling up my little backpack. Once the pack was filled, we decided that we had all we would need. And my hands had taken as much abuse as they could. We all had shell fragments jabbed under our nails, which were bruised, and myriad little wounds on our fingers that looked and felt like paper cuts.
That night I prepped the clams and mussels for a trip back to Montana. Pooder took a few handfuls of the mussels and prepared one of Escoffier’s recipes as an appetizer, cooking them with onion, parsley, white wine, butter, and ground pepper, then thickening the cooking liquid over high heat and adding a shot of lemon.
“Oh my God, Diana, you’d love these,” Becca said.
Diana was drinking a beer and playing darts with Mark, but I could tell she was dying of curiosity. She came in for a closer look at the mussels and regarded them with interest. She asked if they were cooked all the way through. They were. She opened a shell with her fingernail, which still showed the black grit and scratches from our expedition. She popped down a mussel, then had another. Then she ate a couple more. I didn’t want to make her feel self-conscious about her conversion, so I tried to act laid-back and indifferent. Escoffier was helping me out.
The day after our clam-digging expedition, I went out beneath the lighthouse again and tried to catch a lingcod. That was the day I got run off by the killer whales. When I came up to the house, I could tell Pooder was starting to pity me. He knew I’d keep fishing until I either drowned or got what I was after. To save me from myself, he took a look at his tide charts and told me that the following evening would be a good time to give it another try. And he’d come along with me.
“We can ride the incoming tide northward a few miles,” he said. “That’s a good spot. It’s deep. We’ll fish through the slack tide, then ride back south on the outgoing tide. We’ll get one.”
In the early afternoon, we lowered the canoe off the rocks. The current was moving fast, creating a back eddy inside the cove. Once we paddled outside the cove, the current picked us up and we started hauling ass toward the north. Pooder set his line and started jigging.
“Try to feel the bottom with the weight,” he said. “Lift it up, set it down, lift it up, set it down. Adjust your bait as we roll over the depth changes, so it doesn’t drag along the bottom.”
The canoe shot past the small cove, and we skirted beneath a sheer cliff. We passed a couple of harbor seals on a rock. A flock of guillemots was feeding along the edge of a kelp bed. When the birds came up from a dive, they’d flick their heads with a gentle twitch to get the water off.
“I caught an octopus out here,” Pooder said. “Accidentally. It wrapped itself almost completely around the canoe when I brought it up. Just grabbed on to the canoe. I could see arms over each side. It was, like, six feet long. Easily. It was changing into these crazy colors. And its mouth was full of scallops. It let all the scallops go when I pulled the hook out, then it dove straight down. All those scallops it dropped drifted back down behind it. It was crazy.”
As Pooder and I drifted along, we caught small rockfish and greenling. We kept a couple but threw most of them back. We were after lingcod and tried to keep our eyes on the prize. We lost hooks and weights and loads of bait on the rocks. The lighthouse became a distant speck, way up the shore. The wind had switched and the waves were picking up considerably. They were getting so big and choppy that now and then they’d slap water over the gunwale. The current was way too strong to paddle against. I started to get nervous, and I kept anxiously checking our progress against the shore.
“If we had to, we could ride this current down about four miles and pull the boat out there,” said Pooder. “There’s a break in the cliffs with a little beach there. We’d have to walk back to the house. But I’m also worried that the current would change before we got to the beach, and then we’d be even more fucked.”
We were discussing our options when Pooder’s rod got slammed by a nice fish. We were zipping along at a good clip. We forgot about our predicament as the fish rose and dived, rose and dived. Pooder didn’t try to force it; he just took his time. Once the fish was tired out, we lifted it into the boat with a net. It was a lingcod. I was so excited that I wanted to stand up and jump around; the only thing keeping me in my seat was the thought of rolling the canoe over and losing our fish. The lingcod was a mottled orange color. Because we couldn’t get up and celebrate, we sat there and admired the fish. We were perfectly happy, and there really wasn’t much to say. Finally Pooder broke the silence. “They’ve got big heads, don’t they?”
He was right. The fish’s head was grossly disproportionate to its body; it looked like it could turn around and swallow itself. Where we were fishing, a lingcod has to be between twenty-six and forty-four inches long to be a legal keeper. Ours fit comfortably, at twenty-nine inches.
When a big wave slapped the boat, I was abruptly reminded of how scared I had been before the fish hit. The waves clearly were not letting up, and the wind was gathering strength. “Maybe we should get up against the cliffs,” I said. “The friction there might slow the current down.” We pulled in, but we could get only so close without getting smacked into the rock wall by a wave. The incoming waves bounced off the cliff at an angle. The ricocheted waves would hit other incoming waves and make a slapping noise and shoot sheets of water into the air. A thick foam was building up against the rocks.
Despite the confusion of waves, the current was slightly diminished near the cliff. We found that we could make some up-current progress by paddling our asses off. We took a few waves over the bow, but not enough to swamp the boat. We struggled around a point of land and caught an eddy inside a small cove. The eddy carried us a quarter mile back toward the lighthouse.
At the south end of the cove, we had to break out of the eddy and struggle against the current to round another peninsula before riding another eddy through yet another cove. We did this two more times. It took an hour, but we were making progress. After resting in a cove, we got all set to enter the current again. We pulled out.
But there was no current. The tide was slackening, just like Pooder had said it would. It had grown dark. We could see the beam from the lighthouse. Pooder and I paddled along, easily now, careful to keep the waves at a manageable angle to the canoe. When we got to the lighthouse, we had to do a kamikaze-style landing on the rocks. When a big wave washed in, we rode it in and slammed the bow of the canoe into a break in the rocks. I hopped out; Pooder and the canoe slid back out on the receding wave. He spun the boat around and rode the next wave in, backward. I grabbed the canoe as Pooder hopped onto the rock. We gathered up our gear and walked to the house. I burst through the door, hoisting the fish. Mark gave us a round of applause. We were alive, and we had a lingcod.