4 - Man overboard - my first encounter with real grief

Some of the things I have experienced were powerful at the time, but their intensity rapidly sank beneath the choppy waters of my life, and remained only as dry somewhat dissociated narratives. Then, long after they happened, as my ability to feel alive in my body has grown in recent years, I have felt these experiences re-emerge in my memory and with them I can feel the things that happened in my body with much more clarity and depth than I could even when they happened.

And I can also feel the way those long-ago experiences had seemingly lain dormant and remained "in the past", but in fact were slowly sprouting roots and subconsciously driving my decisions and directing my path from their invisible hiding places in my body.

Coming across the ring of stones in the Arctic, that I described in my previous post, was one such experience.

This post is about another one of those experiences, from the same phase of my life, in my early 20's and just out of college.

I had graduated with my 4-year degree, and after a summer as a volunteer botanist in Oregon, working for the Bureau of Land Management, having an exciting time exploring the mountains and sea-coast of western Oregon with a bunch of other volunteers, I had no other job lined up. I moved back home to my parents' house and spent 3 months gradually getting more depressed and hopeless than I had ever felt, looking for jobs in my field and finding nothing that fit my qualifications.

Finally I saw an advertisement for the job of "fisheries observer." All that was required was a 4-year degree in anything, and a willingness to go out to sea on a foreign fishing vessel fishing within US waters, to monitor their catches for a couple months.

Well. This sounded completely terrifying. I'd always been terrified when I'd seen movies of vessels in storms at sea. Add to that my social anxiety, and feeling of utter ineptness at navigating communication with my species, even speaking my native language, and the fact that I had never been to a non-English-speaking country, and the reasons to pass on this job opportunity should have far outweighed my desire to find a job.

But given my hopeless depressed state, I found myself, much to the distress of my poor mother, applying for and then accepting a position as fisheries observer. Part of my motivation was to have exciting experiences so that I would feel like I was worthy of the sort of company I had enjoyed the previous summer, when I had been working among young people who had done exciting things like being in Africa for the Peace Corps. I wanted to be admired by those kinds of people, so I stuffed my bags and my terror and flew to Seattle for the 3 weeks of training that was provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The training did nothing to relieve any of the terror, but I was with another group of interesting young people, and we were all excited and trepidatious together. 

But all too soon the training was over, we had been assigned to our vessels, and we were on planes flying to the remote island town of Dutch Harbor on the Aleutians, to board our vessels who would be fishing for pollock in the Bering Sea.

(At this point in the story, perhaps I should explain a little about why the position of "fisheries observer" even existed. In 1982, the UN gave nations with seacoast the right to a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, wherein they could regulate the economic activities that happened in their waters. The US determined that any foreign fishing vessel who wanted a permit to fish in our EEZ had to have an "observer" on board, whose job it was to make sure that the catch being reported by the vessel was accurate, and that the vessel was not retaining species that they were not allowed to fish for. In the case of the Bering Sea pollock fishery, the vessels trawling for pollock were not allowed to keep the salmon, crab, or halibut that they caught, since these were intended to be reserved for US fishing vessels. The observer's job was purely monitoring and reporting catch and compliance with regulations, not enforcement. By the time I became a fisheries observer, the only way foreign vessels could catch pollock in our waters was by engaging in a joint venture with American catcher boats who actually caught the fish, and delivered it to the foreign trawler who took the net with fish on board and processed it in their own on-board processing facilities.)

I had been assigned to a 250-foot Korean trawler named the Yu Yang Ho. I can still feel the dread and barely-suppressed panic I felt the day I boarded. The foreign vessels were not allowed to come into port, so I and several other newly-minted observers got taxied out to our vessels on an American catcher boat, a smaller 50-foot trawler named the Storm Petrel. The ride out to the waiting vessels was about a half hour and I was already feeling queasy and starting to wretch on the Storm Petrel, from the choppy seas.

I don't think I was the first observer on the Storm Petrel to get transferred to a foreign vessel. I think I got to watch a couple others make the tricky transition from the catcher boat to their much larger foreign vessel. This involved having lines thrown between the two vessels, and while both vessels were heaving up and down in various un-matched directions, the larger boat would throw a rope ladder down, and the crew on the catcher boat would hold on to the ladder as the observer had to grab hold of a moving rung and start climbing. (I'm feeling the clutching terror in my gut and throat as I write about this procedure, 36 years later...)

Finally it was my turn. I looked up to the railing of the Yu Yang Ho and saw dozens of strangers with black hair and Asian faces looking over the railing at me in curiosity. The life vest I was wearing was very little comfort as I stood at the edge of the Storm Petrel and waited for an opportune moment to grab onto a rung of the rope ladder.. I think there was lots of encouraging words from the Storm Petrel crew...Once I was on the ladder and climbing, it was a little less terrifying, and I made it successfully onto the deck of the Yu Yang Ho, with much cheering from my new crew members.. 

(Yikes. I'm shaking right now, as I write about it.. some unresolved trauma coming to the surface...)

Fortunately, because we were involved in joint venture fishing, I was not the only American on board the Yu Yang Ho. There was also an American "joint venture representative" who was responsible for making sure communication flowed between the catcher boats and the crew of the foreign boat. The JV rep was on the bridge for every catch delivered, to ensure a smooth exchange of nets - the full net was hooked and hauled on board and the previously emptied net was returned to the catcher boat.

I was, however, the only woman on this boat. The crew consisted of 75 Korean men. I had never been in a foreign country before. A couple things made this whole situation manageable, barely. The first is that every person on board had been instructed to behave honorably, because I was on the sister ship of a vessel that had had sexual harassment charges made against it by their female observer just the previous fishing season, which, at this juncture, the fishing company who owned my boat wanted to avoid at all costs. The second was that all of the officers and a few of the crew spoke at least a wee bit of English. One of the officers was always assigned to help me with my sampling of the catch.

The first mate, known by the Korean crew as "Cho-sa," which was short for "chief officer," was the person who spoke the best English on the ship. In addition to speaking pretty good English, he had a warm and comforting charm, a wonderful sense of humor, and a smile that lit up the room.  I always liked the parts of the day when the Cho-sa was on the bridge, or in the dining room for meals. I got along OK with the JV rep on board, but it was the Cho-sa, whose name was Mr. Cheong, who really helped me feel at home and not so lonely and uncomfortable with all the new strangeness I was surrounded by. The weird food, the un-ending motion of the ship, the sticky fish slime and scales that covered the rain gear I worked in, the smells of fresh and rotted fish, the strange language, the feeling of being trapped on this small chunk of steel on this vast wilderness of rolling water without being able to get off and go for a walk... Mr. Cheong felt like a kind and jolly older brother who wanted me to feel at home there.

For the first week after I boarded, it was too rough to fish, and I spent most of that week being seasick and also actually sick with some intestinal bug. I finally recovered, just as the seas were calming and we were able to actually get to fishing. I gradually got accustomed to the food, the smells, my job, the rhythm of the boat, and the beauty of the sea.

After about 3 weeks of fishing, our holds were filled with frozen pollock fillets, and we had to offload product in order to keep fishing. This involved tying up in the middle of the Bering Sea to a cargo vessel and transferring nets filled with cases of fish from our hold to the hold of the cargo ship. The two ships were about the same size and were secured to each other by large ropes, with big black inflated rubber blimp-shaped cushions between the two ships. This took several days, and while this was happening, I had no work to do.

One evening during the offloading, I was startled out of my room by lots of shouting on deck. I went out the side door in the direction of the shouting, and was horrified to discover that there was a man down in the dark water between the two vessels. I was further horrified to learn that the man in the dark cold water was Mr. Cheong.

I'm not going to describe all the horrifying details of that evening. The short version is that the crew was unable to get Mr. Cheong out of the water until after he had succumbed to the cold water and drowned.

For the first few hours after he arrived back on the ship, I was stunned, numb, disbelieving that one hour he could be alive and smiling and laughing, and the next he could be just... not here anymore..

I don't think I slept much that night, but I remember trying to argue with God, to bargain, furious that this was allowed to happen. How is it that a person can be so vibrant one moment, and then simply be gone forever.."It was just a couple stupid mistakes and lack of training, God! can we PLEASE have a chance to go back and do things differently?!!" It felt so impossibly unfair for our actions in a brief moment to have such irreversible permanent consequences...

I went to meals and all the men were stoic and silent. Mr. Cheong's place at the table was kept empty. No one else sat in his seat for the rest of the voyage.

By the second night I was beginning to feel my insides unbearably heavy, and I went outside in the dark, and stood in front of the wall of the cabins, which was a couple levels below where the bridge was, and found myself wailing. Wailing. Wailing into the dark universe. I had never done it before but it felt like the most natural and necessary thing to do, like my body would be very uncomfortable if I didn't wail.

It wasn't but a minute later that one of the officers came from around the side and told me that I had to stop. I was not supposed to make so much noise. I was stunned. I tried to explain that "my body has to do this."  He just said "no, we don't do that."

So out of respect for my hosts, I stopped, and followed him back inside. I had great respect for the Korean culture, and wondered whether it really was somehow bad to do the wailing I had been doing.

This was a question that I had not even had the need to ask before, because I had never felt compelled to wail like that before. And it would be many years before I would feel the urge again. I don't remember precisely when I finally did feel the urge again. But it also took many years before I would find the answer to my question of whether it was bad.

The answer I found, that corroborated my own instincts that wailing is a natural and required part of grief, turned out to come from indigenous teachers, Martin Prechtel and Malidoma Some. It turned out to be another reason why being indigenous felt like a more beautiful and sane and grounded way to live. I have a lot more to write about grief, which will have to wait til other posts.

I had never forgotten Mr Cheong and his untimely death, but I had forgotten the part about the wailing, until quite recently. It felt like a time-capsule that opened and the question that had been planted and forgotten about, had returned to finally find its resolution.