Gil

It was pretty hard to get Gil to swear, but I did manage it.

I didn’t mean to, of course, just like I didn’t mean to run into that other boat, and no one wants to be trapped on a vessel with a skipper who’s mad at them, but, all intentions aside, we had this bad day.

The weather was nice, though. That’s why I was on wheel watch, and Gil felt safe enough to hit the bunk for some shut-eye. It was the first week of the first trip of the season, and he was a seasoned enough skipper to know that it’s a good idea to take naps whenever you get the chance, and wasn’t it great to have two deckhands again since his three sons now had boats of their own.

The weather was nice, and I was finally over my seasickness. This was my second season, but it still only counts as one because, the season before, when I was twelve, I had heaved my guts out for four straight days, and was shaking, and my teeth felt gross and fuzzy, and they hurt, and I thought they were going to fall out, so I was dropped off, dejected but relieved, at the end of the dock in front of our house, and Gil shook his head and said we’d try again next year, and left. We didn’t even tie up.

I really wanted to be out there. Salmon trolling was good money, even for a green deckhand, and I was going to buy a dirt bike at the end of the season so I could ride with my older brothers and their friends. Gil wanted me out there as well. He’d seen how hard I could work on a firewood day, and he thought I’d make a good deckhand, and he’d know, and he was right.

He grew up in Victoria, across the golf course from my Mom, and was probably sweet on her because my Mom was sweet, but when they all went to bible school to find husbands and wives, she married my dad, and they all moved to the westest coast to live well and raise healthy families. Like all of us, they did their best. And their friendships lasted many lifetimes, and even to this day, though so many things have changed.

There were a few houses that we often went to for pot-lucks, and New Years and the like, and they were all in Tofino. I remember unlatching the heavy door and being greeted by a gruff jovial giant of a man named Bob, and his wife, Edna, who was possibly the sweetest woman ever to exist; they both used to talk to me with full attention. Jim and Ruth’s house had the extraordinary carvings of Nelson Dunkin, and Harold read books like me and talked to little me about reading even though he was in high-school. And Gil and Hilda’s place, that was my favourite. Their driveway was good enough to sled on whenever is snowed and we’d have to park at the bottom, and inside, there were animal heads and guns on the walls, and a metal lathe-like my grandpa’s-, a woodstove AND a fireplace, and a pool table. It was the only pool table that I ever played on because the ones at the bowling alley were expensive, and huge, and rough-looking people were drinking beers and filling the ashtrays around them in the smokey gloom. But I always thought that it looked fun to play, and I liked the sound of the balls cracking together.

So I learned to play pool at Gil and Hilda’s, was allowed to play pool there, was taught to play pool there, I should say, and have. It was tough to reach some shots as I was so small when I began, but by the time my balls dropped I was able to sink a few. It’s funny, looking back, to grow up, to slowly get better at trying not to die before your luck runs out, or your time.

I learned that working with someone is not the same as going to their house for christmas dinner and seeing them at church. I learned that high stakes, heavy responsibilities, and mastery of a craft or trade have requirements from a man that aren’t always likable, or pleasant. I learned that I was immensely sensitive to disappointment. I also learned that being sworn at and fired by your temporarily enraged skipper when you are a good eight hour run from port is a very, very unsettling feeling. Some of this took me a few decades to absorb, but it’s good to look back, sometimes, and see what you’re made of.

The Reva J was a clean, green, 42 foot double-ender with a Gardener engine(which Gil was very proud of), and skookum aluminum poles. The other boat was a 36 foot wooden troller with one of those wheel-houses that was JUST a wheel-house with the step-down galley forward, and wooden poles. Like toothpicks. I didn’t even feel it when we sheared his pole off with our pole, but whenever you hit something with a troller it makes a lot of jangling on account of all the bells and rigging. But I swear, I hadn’t even heard the sound before Gil had made it up out of the bunk, through the hatch, into neutral, then reverse, and gunned the Gardener to stop us so that we didn’t, I don’t know, tear the other guy’s entire tree down. He was mad, too. And yelling. Once he had control of the boat, he let me have it. “You’re supposed to be watching, you stupid ass!” Sorry didn’t seem like a worth-while thing to say at this point, so I just stayed mute. I was sitting in the captain’s bench, and he was at the wheel, so I was kinda penned in between him and the wall, and it got worse when he squeezed in to open the port side window to holler at the other skipper about how his green deckhand didn’t do his job, so I just scrunched over to the cabin wall and looked at my lap, and the big mass of tangled leaders laying on it, still tangled.

We had encountered a mutual misunderstanding. I was a kid, and didn’t understand anything, and he didn’t understand that, if you give me two things to do, and I like one of them, I’m just going to do that one thing, and I love untangling shit. I’m like a vampire, give me a knot, or better yet, a giant tangled mass, and I can’t leave it be. I love to solve, I love to follow a line back, pull, and have more, so when Gil said, “The course is set, wake me up if the numbers go above this, or below this, and while you’re just sitting there, see if you can untangle that mess of leaders so we don’t have to retie them all.”, I put my head down until we hit the only boat in the area.

Later, but not much later, after he fired, then unfired me, and all the scenarios in my head that included me swimming to death had faded away, Gil apologized. He didn’t say he was sorry, but he said, amongst the exhortations about paying attention so nobody dies out here, that he shouldn’t have given me something else to do while I was on wheel watch. I did apologize, and agreed that tying a few hundred knots sounded like a great idea, and got to work. The other deckhand was in the stern the entire time, which is what more experienced deckhands do, but he didn’t see the boat either. Gil made supper, and we kept fishing. As he was so fond of saying, You gotta put the time in.

Every time we’d pull the stabies, then raise the poles that season, we’d have to fight to get the pole on the port side to fit into the cross-tree on account of it being bent. Not another word was said about it aside from when Gil told me that the other guy had his pole fixed, and was out fishing again without missing too much time. I wasn’t relieved; I was too young to understand the value of anything, of how challenging it is to make a living, and how devastating a setback can be. I know that Gil worked very hard to get that guy out fishing again, because that’s the kind of guy he was, and because he DID understand.

He was an avid hunter, fisherman, and outdoorsman, he could build, and weld, and fix stuff. Wife, sons, house on the hill, and salty and tough as an old gumboot even without swearing, well, not ACTUALLY swearing, but those godly guys had a funny workaround when it came to cussing. Anyway, the old billy goat was a man’s man, I guess, though I think that’s a stupid term for just one of the many types of competent person, but now you probably know what I mean if you didn’t before. But that’s not all he was. Of course it wasn’t.

Life on a troller with 3 guys is endless movement, and short action proximity, so it was really weird one day to enter the wheel-house and see Gil standing stock still, and obviously very far away from the Reva J and our pull count. He glanced at me, then turned his ear back toward the speaker in the ceiling, listening to the song that had captured him. I can not, for the life of me, remember what that song was, but it was probably Dolly, or Reba. He had tears in his eyes, and he wasn’t ashamed of them, not at all.

I saw that man again, many years later, standing by the death bed of his friend of so so many years, my Mother, while she could still speak, and he spoke to her of inconsequential things, because that’s what friends do when the problems are too big to be solved. That’s what friends are for, to face death with a smile with. But his smile was hard for him to maintain, and his keen eyes gleamed with all they were trying to hold back, and his hands, lean, worn, and hard, were trying to hold each other in comfort, like gnarled old tree roots, yet trembling like spring willow.

There are so many layers to people. There is so much value under our masks, but there is also so much value IN our masks, in our problems, in our pain, in our mistakes. Our masks are what we managed to build with what we had, and besides, if we never fuck anything up, there’s nothing to forgive, and we all need the practice. It’s like laughing at things that are stupid. It’s a good exercise; it’s so good that you start looking around for more dumb stuff to laugh at, and soon, laughing is easy, and comes without thought.

I was hurt when Gil swore at me, and I was devastated that he was disappointed in me. None of that was healthy on its own, but nothing ever is. I fished with Gil on the Reva J for five seasons, then I fished with his son for two more, and I bought several dirt bikes, and rode the shit out of them until I broke my bones, and it was glorious, and it all could have never happened.

Gil passed away this past year, and my Dad lost one of his very best friends. When this happens I get to thinking about why it hurts, or feels so heavy, why it abides. I think it’s because I learned from him, and from others, and now that he’s gone, I have a responsibility, a duty, to remember, and to share, all that I could not have learned if I had kept only my thin skin, and saw only masks.

One way or another, you’ve gotta put the time in