Spirit Things

Lara Messersmith-Glavin,Roger Peet

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781602234567
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island."Spirit things" are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual's life.A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska's coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.

1

Spirit Things

An Introduction

I HAVE AN OBJECT that leans on the windowsill in my kitchen. It’s a rusty oval, with a frayed knotted hitch cinched at the top. It looks industrial, weathered, esoteric. It is roughly the size of my hand. If I hold it up, it frames my field of view like a cameo brooch, but with the discarded charm of a junkyard find. For years, I wore it around my neck as a pendant on a length of leather, but now it just graces my sill, having aged from totem to knickknack.

This oval was once a metal ring that held the end of a rope that had been carefully spliced around it by hand. It once served a purpose, holding fast, transmuting the rope into a line to do a very important job on a fishing boat. The metal was exposed to sunlight and salt, grew dusty and corroded along its pores. The circular ring elongated over time, stretching into a narrow egg, describing exactly the tension it had borne and the strength of its material. Its deformation was like a poem of strain and circumstance, its shape a perfect overlap of utility and form. It is not the shape itself that is beautiful to me; it is what the shape tells me about its history, that the story is there inside of it if I know what to look for.

I like things—which is not quite the same as liking stuff. I don’t enjoy shopping or collecting; I don’t accumulate items on purpose. I am drawn to objects with stories inside them: the bowls my great-aunt used to make bread, the pocketknife my father uses to clean his nails, the pencil that inexplicably becomes my favorite despite no apparent difference other than that it’s the one I always choose. When we live with things, imbue them with use and care, when they become extensions of our bodies to work, to create, to touch the world, they take on their own quiet power. I like magical objects and the histories they carry inside of them.

What is the difference between a history and a story? Is a history somehow more fact driven, a story more open to embellishment? The ways histories are used to shape thoughts in favor of one perspective over another suggest otherwise. Communities and cultures have histories, as do relationships or technologies. Lovers have histories. We can talk about the history of Greenland, the history of the cotton gin, the history of salt. I suppose a history is more about a shared experience—How did we get here? it might seek to answer. Why are we in the situation we are in? A story, on the other hand, may be private. A story draws its reality from the ways it plays inside of us, reflecting truth off our inner surfaces, shaping our feelings as well as our facts. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, about what happened to make us so. Our stories are symbols, signposts, examples or warnings of how to be. We are raised on histories and stories both, some clunky and deliberate like the ones we drag from textbooks, while others are furtive and hidden, like seeds planted without our knowing, recognizable only when they bloom.

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I had an unusual upbringing. My parents were commercial fishermen in Alaska, but we lived elsewhere the rest of the year, in southern Indiana until I was in the second grade, and then eastern Oregon until I left for college on the East Coast. This meant I moved back and forth between worlds, leaving every summer for Kodiak and then returning for school every fall. One was the boat world, wet and loud and full of work. It was edged with danger, and its seasonal community offered a kind of tough frontier spirit in lieu of a culture. The other world was landlocked and dry, miles of flat, cornstalked stillness or rolling tan hills roughed with sage. The land world held friends, school, ways of playing. In the boat world, I had only grown-ups. In place of playmates, I had direct contact with the wild: salmon and halibut gasping for breath, skittering crabs, the rich scents of jellyfish and seaweed. There were roaming bears, eagles as common as pigeons, and the ocean, always the ocean, tossing and leaping and murmuring beneath me.

As I was an only child, it was a very solitary way to grow up, even if it wasn’t exactly lonely. It is very difficult to be alone on a fishing boat. It did mean, though, that much of my early years were spent investigating and thinking by myself while my parents were on deck. Even as I grew older, I was the only person my age, which meant that, even in the company of the crew, I was often a community of one.

It was rare that we stopped fishing to socialize or explore, but it did happen on occasion, when the season would close temporarily, and all the gear work and repairs were taken care of. Once, we anchored up off Spruce Island and took a skiff to the beach, where we were met by an old friend, a Native boatbuilder named Ed Opheim. He took us to his workshop, a graying barn at the edge of the woods where the earth met the sand, and he gave us a tour of his handiwork while he and my father swapped fishing stories. Stepping inside was like entering a museum of magical things. Myriad mysterious tools cluttered his workbenches, old metal in different shapes bound with handles of wood and cloth and plastic, different edges for prying, for peeling, for coaxing, for gouging, for pounding. Curls of wood were scattered like confetti, mounds of sawdust gathered in drifts against every upright surface, as if there had been a tiny, festive storm. The space was rich with the golden scent of raw lumber, the heady lurk of epoxies and fiberglass. In the center of the shop sat a beautiful hull, a wooden craft in the process of coming into being. Its lines were still blurred, not yet settled into their final shapes, but it was already so suffused with its boatness that it practically trembled, anticipating the water beneath it. I ran my hand along its side like I was calming a large animal, feeling the grain of the wood in its skin. Ed smiled, interrupting his reminiscence to acknowledge me and my attention to his boat.

“You need to write the stories, Lara Lee,” he said. He was talking about fishing, not about the boat itself, but I was only eleven years old and all of these things were one thing for me. “You’re the youngest person who remembers the way it used to be.”

At the time, I felt both intimidated and thrilled at this thought, and I accepted the charge solemnly. I have carried it with me since, even though I don’t know how it used to be for others, or what the it really was. I know the way it was for me—which is probably quite unlike the experiences of other deckhands, or of boatbuilders, or of the Native communities. Mine is the perspective of a child, a teen, an adult looking back and tracing the impacts of that time on my life and identity. Now, when people ask me about Alaska and what it was like fishing—especially in the heyday of the 1980s—I think what they’re hoping for are salty sea stories, filled with outlaw characters and colorful language. Some have watched shows like The Deadliest Catch and are riveted by the vicarious thrill of danger, the potential for disaster. The human connection and the characters, the relationships, the drama—those are the histories, I suppose. For those, people should listen to my parents share their memories, the parade of specifics and timeless quotes that come from a lifetime spent fishing. They have those pieces of history. Mine are something different.

Stories are what build our sense of meaning in the world; they’re what reveal the magic and change inside all things. In the shifting, seasonal culture of the fleet, there were few storytellers who offered me these meanings. There were elders, and I listened to them gratefully and hung on their tales of giant halibut coming over the side, of being knocked overboard by a crab pot and living to tell the tale, of pulling in nets by hand. As I began to call forth stories of my own, however, I found that what I wanted to talk about were objects. I don’t recall the name of a particular boat or remember the politics of a sudden closure, but I remember with stark clarity the way the windows would crust with salt from the spray that leapt up the sides of the boat as we traveled. I don’t know why we fished in one place rather than another—I was a child on deck, following orders, not making decisions—but I can tell you exactly how the twine was wrapped around the handle of the white knife we used to hack the kelp from the net.

How do we tell our own stories when no framework has been given for deeper meanings? How do we create a cosmology of our own? In the absence of storytellers, wise women, or a culture of collectivity, I had things and feelings, my senses, and an overwhelming contact with the ocean, a living symbol of the messiness, the terror, the creativity and beauty of the divine. Each object in this book has taught me something about the world: how to occupy it, how to behave in it, what to expect from others, people and non-people. Each object has its own kind of magic. I decided to let these things be my storytellers: the nets, the knots, the gloves. I sat down and asked each of them, “What did you teach me?” Whether history or story, this is what they said.

2

Net

I.

AS A CHILD, I marveled at the heaps of seines that lined the docks on pallets, like the necklaces of a giantess piled along the boardwalk. The black web was strung through with playful colors, edged with frayed splices and thick lines of turquoise and yellow and pink, beaded with rounded floats in brown and algaed white. I loved the smell of them, the sour salt and fish reek, the tar and cork. Dried jellyfish hardened to gooey jewels in the mesh. I loved clambering on the piles, the dense way they absorbed my punches and jumps, their warm heft when left in the sun, like patient animals. It was clear to me then, as now—nets are a form of magic.

For one thing, they move between worlds. The net is a creation from land that serves no purpose there. Its only function is to extend the grasp of drylanders: once submerged, it becomes a ghost of the fisherman’s will haunting a domain where the fisherman cannot dwell. It allows water to pass through it as if the net were not even there. It is meant to deceive, and then to trap. Its purpose is to visit, to take, and then to return to land with other things that do not belong there, things from the underwater world.

This in-betweenness gives nets a certain power. In folktales, when fishermen cast their nets into the ocean, they often pull up wonders in place of their catch: talking fish, strange babies for barren mothers, enormous pearls, loaves of bread. It is as if the very act of straining the water is an incantation or spell—the uncertainty of the sea itself a thing of stories. As sorcerers must ask for help from untrustworthy spirits, when we fish for our own gain, we do so by crossing that watery barrier, and invite risk and visitation of the unknown.

Superstitions abound to counter those risks. Some are simply rituals to summon prosperity or show gratitude to whatever gods or giants may control the realm—like kissing the first salmon caught in a season and throwing it back overboard. Others are wards against misfortune, many of which are so old or have traveled so far from their origins that their true purpose is lost. Bananas are forbidden on boats, for instance, as are suitcases, women, and whistling. Never leave port on a Friday or change a vessel’s name. These sound arbitrary, mere folk charms from quainter pasts, but many are still obeyed without question. It is difficult to know which gods may be listening or watching in any given waters, so most mariners simply prefer not to take the chance.

II.

For the old Norse, the giant Ægir was responsible for the benevolence of the sea, the bounty they drew from it and the beauty that formed the horizons of their world. His daughters were the Nine Waves, each named after an aspect of the ocean’s surface. They were lovely and nymph-like, dancing on the surface of the ocean, laughing and tossing at the edges of the Vikings’ ships. In the eddas, thirteenth-century manuscripts that captured much of Norse mythology, the sea giant and his daughters personified the Nordic wonder and familiarity with the water, their love of its facets and changeability. But the mother of the Nine Waves, Rán—it was she who brought the storms.

Rán, the Cold Queen, embodied the dark indifference of the ocean, the bitter violence that pitched ships about on open water and tore them apart against the rocks of the coasts. It was she who waited for raiders and fishermen alike, holding a net of her own, tossing it from the deep and dragging men overboard, calmly pulling the drowned men downward into her bed. It was this net that the men feared, more than the crashing seas or weather. Ægir was unpredictable and powerful, but Rán was a ravager, greedy and beautiful, filling the halls of Ægirheim with her collection of dead souls. A raider who died at sea would not end up in Valhalla with his friends from battle but would feast and couple with Rán until she tired of him, at which point she would cast him to Helheim, the Land of the truly Dead. Rán’s underwater appetites were known to be fickle and unquenchable, rivaled only by her craving for wealth. For this reason, Vikings often went to sea with gold coins in their pockets, tokens to offer her, either tossed overboard as a bribe for safe passage or as a means of bargaining for mercy, seeking to please her for as long as they could, should she tangle them in her nets and draw them down.

Translations of Rán’s name differ, but many suggest that it means the “Robber,” as she took from mariners and raiders and coastal folk alike. In Alaska we drew our wealth from the sea as well. Instead of pulling men down, we pulled salmon upward, drowning them in the air. They flopped and kicked as men do below, desperate gills flailing to draw breath. The sound of their thick bodies striking the deck was like wet applause. Gradually, their movements subsided into occasional, spasmodic claps until at last they lay still, shifting in flat unison with the rock of the boat. Thousands of them would pile motionless in the fish hold. Over time, the rhythmic movement of the swell would settle them all tail-down, their faces frozen upward in open-mouth gasps, their eyes dead ohs of horror. Their death became our gold. I sometimes imagined them whispering to me, offering supernatural trades for their lives: Three wishes—if you’ll only throw me back.

III.

On a seining boat, the net is heart of the operation. The main boat holds one end in a curved shape while a small skiff runs to the beach with the other, and together, they hold the net like a wall in the water, blocking the way for salmon trying to return home to their streams. The fish are pulled by the necessity to spawn and then die—when they encounter a barrier on their way, they will instinctually seek deeper water, heading seaward as if to navigate a rock or cape, but once there, they find the net hooks back around them, and they become confused. The fish swim in circles until the two ends of the net are brought together and the bottom is pursed up, catching them in a bag that is eventually pulled on board. As deckhands, our job was to stack the net carefully—the cork line that makes it float piled on one side of the deck, the leads that make it sink on the other, and the vast curtains of dark web in between.

A seine is a miracle of mathematics, sequences of squares that compress and balloon and create lines and curves out of straight edges and angles. My father, a tall, white-bearded man who could easily pass for a minor sea giant, taught me just how to hold it as he mended the holes that rocks or gear had torn into it. I held the net at the corners of the squares, creating tension as he tugged with t...