It’s just after midnight and if you’d driven by my house a few moments ago, you’d have seen me in my pajamas, blood up to my elbows, chasing a salmon head around the grass in the dark. Even as I sit and type, scales are still attached to my forearms and two bandaids stop the flow of blood where I punctured my finger tips with vertebrae.
Such is the life…of the mother of an Alaskan fishermen.
Billy started his day at 4 a.m. and just walked in, twenty hours later, proudly displaying six giant Sockeye Salmon he’d brought for his mommy. He showered, helped me double bag the fillets, and went to bed so he can be up again in five hours to do it all again.
And so the boy…becomes a man.
This afternoon, as the wind howled at my house and I tried not to think about my boy far out on the ocean being tossed about in ten foot waves, I realized that what he was doing was not the work of a child. At sixteen…and last year when he did the same job at fifteen….he is working hours, working in conditions, working at a job that many men will not, neigh, can not do.
And he does so with vigor.
Billy works on a drift boat in the Cook Inlet, off the shores of Ninilchik, Alaska. The season is short, just six weeks or less and the captain works his boat as if he’s making his living for the entire year…because he is. They’ll sleep in September, they figure, and they hit the waves hard.
And the boy comes home tired, and bloody, and amped in the middle of the night, unable to think of anything but work, tossing fish in his sleep. Then rises the next day to do it all again.
The boats that harbor in Ninilchik are reliant on the tide, as the water is only deep enough within two hours of the high tide. If the miss the tide…or the tide comes in the middle of the night, they will sleep on the boat and catch the entrance when they can.
This afternoon, after worrying over the wind, I drove down to the harbor to watch the boats arrive. When the first of the vessels came in sideways, half swamped, and bailing water…I was a little nervous. Waves crashed the rocky shore as I watched boat, after boat, come in to dock, rocking from side to side as they went. I knew Billy was okay…he has a good captain…but still.
A mom worries.
When they finally appeared on the horizon and I watched them rock and creak closer to shore, I realized that there was nothing I could do to steady his boat…to stabilize his life. I found myself wondering how much longer I’ll be able to see that tiny boy he was when he walked into my home seven years ago. Forever, I decided. Forever.
A boy is still a boy, after all, to his mother. Even if he is slowly…without my permission…stepping over into the shoes of a man.
