Aksel went to see Einar Karlsson, the man who’d made his wooden leg. Einar was the owner of Karlsson Boats, a designer and builder of good reputation in a market where all the buyers were boat savvy and could probably build the boats themselves if they wanted to invest in the tools. Einar and Aksel settled on a classic double-ended design, allowing the boat to slip between waves from either direction when tied to a long net. Einar had a source for Port Orford cedar, a subspecies of western cedar with remarkable boatbuilding qualities. The boat would be a carvel-built hull of Port Orford cedar planks placed on ribs of white oak. The deck, too, would be Port Orford cedar. Aksel insisted on choosing every plank and timber and came to the boatyard morning and evening. Einar liked him, so he tolerated Aksel’s being pickier than he’d allow most customers to be. But also the boatbuilding business was as bad as the lumber and every other business, and Einar had already decided that with sales and production down, he would take his time. For decades, fishermen talked about having a “Karlsson depression boat” like violinists talking about having a Stradivarius.
He named her the Aino. She had a four-cylinder Ford tractor motor that Aksel found in Rainier through a classified ad. On the day she was launched, Aino smashed a bottle of bootleg wine across the bow and she slid into the Columbia River stern first, Aksel at the wheel.
He brought the Aino around, the engine almost idling, and the boat’s namesake scrambled down the ladder from the wharf and into the empty net room, the open bow where the huge gill net would be folded. Aksel helped Aino negotiate the narrow ledge between the little cabin and the gunwales, and she somewhat awkwardly managed to get her feet in the stern. Aksel headed the Aino toward her home in Alderbrook, careful not to run her too hard until he was sure everything worked. He motioned for Aino to take the wheel. She stood on a box he had pushed beneath it. She could barely see forward above the top of the cabin, but she felt a wild excitement as the wharves and houses of Astoria streamed by the Aino‘s starboard side. The Aino, she thought, named after her. She felt absurdly happy.
Aksel was absurdly happy, too. He’d hung his new gill net weeks earlier, carefully measuring the distance he tied the net to the cork line, aware that how the net hung in the water would largely determine how many fish it would catch. He’d chosen a larger-meshed net to start, knowing if Einar built the boat in time, he would catch at least the last half of the August Chinook run—and this is what he was doing. He’d often forget himself as he saw the big fish slam into the net, sinking the cork line with a sudden pop. He’d be halfway through a sandwich, hear a fish hit, and be on his feet, sandwich thrown into the water. He’d run to the side of the boat, forgetting his wooden leg, and have to be helped to his feet by Aino. Then he’d be back in the stern, spinning the wheel, turning the boat, racing to one end of the long net or the other, filled with the sheer joy of fishing again—and with such a boat. Aino had never seen him so animated and it delighted her.
As the Aino settled in, so did Aksel. By September he behaved much like all the other fishermen on the river, except in one way: Aksel uncannily found fish. Aino would watch him dip a hand into the river and taste the water. He’d watch the way the treetops moved and the direction of the swells, see signs of a hidden current that she couldn’t see even after he’d pointed it out. He’d poke the Aino into eddies, let her drift, then suddenly gun the engine, heading for a spot he could see as if it were marked by flashing buoys. Whenever the Aino idled proudly beneath the boxes hanging on davits at the cannery weighing stations, she was always full of fish, big fish, and they were paid for by the pound.
By October, the Chinook run had abated, but there were still some late Chinook, steelhead, silversides, and even sturgeon to be caught. The two of them had moved into a routine, sleeping on the Aino, one of them always on watch during drifts. After they came in to deliver the catch when the boat could hold no more, Aino would return to the house, make sure everything was in order, shop for food, bake rieska, make more viili for the next outing, prepare sandwiches, have a quick visit with Kyllikki, and haul everything down to the boat. Aksel spent almost all his time on boat and net maintenance.
Aksel’s enthusiasm never waned. Aino’s did wane.
They fished when the tide was right, which meant if the tide was right at two in the morning, they fished at two in the morning. The smell of engine oil and gasoline permeated the cabin and made her nauseated. She’d initially solved the problem by sleeping at the fore of the net room on a little pallet she’d arranged, but as fall moved closer to winter, the rains came, driving her inside the cabin. There, she could sleep only fitfully.
Worse, with the deteriorating weather, the river grew rough. She got seasick. Eventually, the seasickness lessened, but it never went away. She also didn’t like hanging her rear end over the gunwales to pee and she really hated to poop that way, especially with other boats in sight—which was almost always, except at night. She tried peeing into a pot in the cabin, enduring the fumes, but after two accidents, when the Aino went up and came crashing down on a sudden swell and she missed and spilled what was already there, she went back to the gunwales. Aksel said nothing to all of this, for which she was grateful. If he had said something, made one tiny joke, the crew would have mutinied and tossed the captain overboard.
In January, Aksel took the Aino upstream, where the river flowed between numerous islands, cutting the wind and swell and making it more likely for anyone thrown overboard to reach shore. Aino wasn’t sure he’d done it for her, but she was grateful. However, Aksel brought the Aino back closer to the bar in March, and the heaving swells made Aino ill, on top of being miserably wet and cold. Sisu and love got her through.
* * *
The spring Chinook run was good. The canning factories were busy. The price of salmon, however, was low and falling as the catch increased. At the start of the August run, all the canneries on both sides of the river lowered their prices from five cents a pound to three cents a pound. The prices were controlled by an organization called the Northwest Packers Association that consisted of all the canning companies on the river. One of its board members was John Reder. He’d sold his logging business some years earlier and moved his family to Portland. There he had invested his money, diversifying into different industries and serving on various boards of directors.
Fishermen of lesser skill than Aksel, although no less hardworking, found it increasingly difficult to make payments on their loans. The Fishermen’s Protective Union, organized years earlier primarily to help the families of drowned fishermen, launched numerous complaints about price fixing. Almost every lawyer in town represented a cannery, so the union could find no one to take the case. The lawyers who would didn’t know anything about antitrust laws.
The fishermen grew desperate. In the fall of 1931, the Fishermen’s Protective Union called for a strike.