The Queen of Pacific Tides

Photo by Nicholas Harris

Ten years ago today my father went overboard in a stern trawler fifty miles offshore, and I’m headed down to the breakers for an omen. It’s early morning, and the clouds are cutting strips of the Pacific clean silver when I slip down the bluffs to the beach. It’s a steep path, lined with ferns and trillium that bloom purple and white. The shore is dotted with the last of the night smelters hauling their loads into rust-checkered pickups. The waves are out with the tide, leaving traces of foam on the shore like a comb over wet hair. The Eureka Fish Company lurks on the horizon, jutting out on barnacled pilings into the Pacific like an old ship on stilts, the aluminum roof reflecting patches of early light. Here, the stink and rot of the cannery fades into tufts of sea spray. I can see our fleet of purse seiners, trollers and old-time squid jiggers in the docks, idle and giant. From this distance, most people would mistake the cannery for the flotsam of development hanging over the ocean, an eyesore of industry, but to me it’s more than just fish scales and mung. It’s got a berth that holds vats of cod and the pulse of Eureka in its floors. Made of dusty redwood planks that creak in the tides, it’s home: our airless, two-bedroom apartment saddles the scaling room. It’s where Mama keeps the books and where, above a shipment of herring and sea bass, I was born.

I shoot down the beach and scan the tidal pools for bodies, then the Watson cove. Nothing. Just the lonely bleat of the foghorn and the crack and sizzle of wave break. On my way back to Smitty’s truck, I find a collection of used condoms, the graying polyps of a seaweed mane and a few sheepish teenagers, shivering and guilty from a night spent on the beach. They’re bleary-eyed and haphazardly alive but hold no interest for me. Every six months in Eureka, a fisherman overdoses, goes overboard or disappears for the dry land of the redwoods. Bodies come and go with the regularity of the tides, and occasionally, if it’s a good and stubborn current, they’ll even wash up on shore.

My first find was Smitty’s brother Otto at high tide in a small cove north of the cannery. He was half mangled, with crab legs for eyelashes and pellucid skin. He looked relieved and terrified, which fueled the rumor that it was a planned death. When I found Otto all eaten and raw like that, I stuck a marble in my mouth. It was the only thing that made me feel like I wasn’t dreaming, or dead myself. Since Otto, there have been others: two missing bodies from a yacht wreck, one teenager who disappeared somewhere off the Aleutians and an airline attendant recovered from the crash of a transatlantic flight. The scientists say it’s something in the offshore Alaskan crests, and the locals say it’s a sign of reckoning, but what no one understands is the quiet relief that settles on me when I find someone. The air of mystery that surrounds death is abated, at least a little, and I can’t help but think I’ve formed a connection to the family, that I’ve somehow settled their grief and made the impossible leap of closure for them manageable. Nevertheless, people think it’s strange. I’ve heard the gossip, suffered the vetting looks of shiny mothers at bake sales and kids in the schoolyard. Smitty calls it my “curious sense of duty,” but I feel an obligation to the dead. I can’t help but think about the day my father’s body may have washed up, only to be dragged back out with the flotsam of the tides. If only there had been someone brave enough to look, I might have more than just an idea to...