The Fifth Direction

In a place of aggression, gentleness is an act of betrayal.

 
Ona protests, quietly, that she doesn’t believe… in authority, period, because authority makes people cruel. Salome interrupts: The people with authority or the people without?
– Miriam Toews, Women Talking
 

One

All around the table white-haired men have gathered
Spilling their sons’ blood like table wine
– Indigo Girls, “Everything in Its Own Time”

   
The captain’s wife declared to my fellow deck dog that the only reasons people on a boat go off alone is either because they are fucking or plotting against the captain. In a place of aggression, gentleness is an act of betrayal.

At the end of the season, after we were back on sweet, sweet land, the man I’ll call Fryent and I sat at a fisherman bar, smoke thick, talking to each other through the mirror across the bar, jukebox playing, as he relayed to me the way the captain’s wife had confronted him. Apparently, there’s a spectrum, he said, taking a drag; on one end is fucking and on the other end is mutiny. Plume of smoke exhaled. Where do you think we are on the spectrum? he asked me. We laughed, angrily.

The captain’s wife, though, understood more than we gave her credit for. On the boat, when my hands hurt so badly that I cried in my bunk with my face to the boat’s side, my fellow deck dog stood silently beside my bunk and kept his hand on my back. When we sat up on the flying bridge as he smoked a cigarette and admitted for one second that he was overwhelmed, I kept my hand on his warm forearm. In a place predicated on dominance and plunder, we gave to each other non-transactionally—and in that place, that was a betrayal. Mutiny and adultery were the two categories of betrayal the captain’s wife could name, so she put the only name to it that she had.

 
That summer, the tundra caught on fire. The Naknek River at its mouth, where it pours itself into the Bering Sea, is one mile across where it meets the ocean waters of Bristol Bay that gain and lose 30 vertical feet of tide a day—some of the biggest tides in the world—such that the Bering Sea is trying to force water up into the Naknek River. There, at the mouth, it is total collision. The Naknek and the Bering Sea force themselves onto each other so/such that they displace each other, flee from each other, and flee themselves all at once.

Trying to drive a boat over those waters is like, in a romantic relationship, trying to traverse disorganized attachment. No matter how skilled you are at standing on a boat on water, you will fall.

During the commercial salmon season of 2015, Fryent and I worked as deck hands on a driftnetter. If you are going to make it in Bristol Bay, you have to be able to wake at 2 a.m. after one hour of sleep, disentangle thousands of fish from nets with carpal-tunneled hands at the rate of less than three seconds per fish while standing on floors slick with fish blood, in rough seas. Luckily, I grew up commercial fishing with my family in another remote part of Alaska. In my childhood, there were no phones, no roads, no plumbing. I knew how to be tough. Fryent, on the other hand, had grown up in the suburbs of Seattle, and this was his first time on a working boat.

In my late 30s, battered by all the big-machinery violence and sexual violence and absolute control of men that came with fishing for my family, I came up with what seemed to me like a brilliant plan: I would fish for someone else, in a whole other part of Alaska, and thus get to work in the wilderness and make a year’s worth of cash in six weeks, without having to submit to such crushing trauma. So I signed on with a jolly captain who’d been fishing Bristol Bay for over 40 years. He never yelled, he stocked up on good food, and his deckhands weren’t allowed to drink on or off the boat, so it seemed like a great deal.

In my calculus, however, I had not considered global warming. In 2015, the Bering Sea was so warm that the fish were weeks late, so instead of fishing we were sitting in the galley listening to the captain tell stories about a man I’ll call Blendan, who owned the boatyard where the captain stored his boat all winter. I was familiar with Blendan’s winning personality from the signs he posted, like the one over the toilets that said, “The shitters that are on the market today were designed for little old ladies from California with dried up pussies. So, if you shit or piss more than two thimbles full at one sitting, double flush the shitters.”

Early on in my Bristol Bay sojourn, the captain told us this story. One day Blendan was flying his airplane alone down the Bristol Bay coast and he came across a whole herd of walrus on a forlorn beach. He took out his gun and, from the plane, from the air, circling the beach again and again, shot every walrus in the herd.

Blendan flew back to the village of Naknek and called the nearest state troopers 300 miles away in Anchorage, to report that he’d been routinely flying his plane and noticed someone had slaughtered a herd of walrus. The State Troopers had bigger problems—like human murder and rape all over the state—and there was no way they were going to use their very limited resources to fly 300 miles to investigate the anonymous killing of animals, so they thanked Blendan for the call and told him he was welcome to harvest the tusks. Blendan flew back and cut off the walrus heads with a chain saw.

When the captain told this story, it began to occur to me that fishing in Bristol Bay might not actually be the way to escape masculinized violence. It began to occur to me that we might be looking at a systemic problem bigger than my family. I am not sure why this had not occurred to me before my late 30s, except that when you experience violence in an isolated place you cannot escape, you can come to believe in the absoluteness of your aloneness.

Fryent got to the boat late, because at first the captain’s son had been the other deckhand and then the captain’s son had left abruptly and I was not given explanation, which perhaps I should have taken as a red flag, but having grown up instructed to interpret red flags as decorative debris, I carried on. So Fryent came, the captain’s niece’s husband, and I took it upon myself to teach him the ropes.

Rule Number One, I told him, is stay on the boat. He laughed. Ha ha, stay on the boat, nice rule.

Fuck you, I said. Listen to me.

Okay okay I’m listening.

Hey asshole, stay on the fucking boat.

Okay, I’ll stay on the boat.

In his tight city jeans, he pranced around the boat. He was so overjoyed to be in Alaska— yahoo! The big wide ocean! The tough muscular badass men all around us! And now he was one of them! His overjoyedness scared me because I figured it meant he would die.

I don’t think you’re listening, I said stay on the fucking boat, do you hear me? Do not fall off the fucking boat.

He laughed.

Stop laughing, I said. What’s rule number one? I asked him.

Yeah, yeah, fuck you, I know.

And I said, fuck you, stay on the boat.

 
Meanwhile, all around the Naknek and the Bering Sea, the tundra burned. Sometimes the smoke around us was thick as fog. The tundra caught fire because there had been so little snow that year. As the world is heating up, when lightning struck the tundra it was tinder.

There we were, the season just having started, me realizing that not only would Bristol Bay not be escape from masculinized violence, but it would rather be masculinized violence writ large. Rather than the seven or eight boats I grew up with, it would be 1,300 boats competing for 35 or 45 million pounds of salmon in six weeks. Boats named things like Predator, Whipping Post, Crimson Fury, Shrike. A shrike impales its prey on thorns.

A sea of blood, a sea of men.

We’d drive by these boats and their crew would stand out on deck, following us with their poker faces and steely eyes.

Things were clearly leaning toward the melodramatic, which I did find funny, and I would grin and wave at each boat, playing the jester, but the problem was I knew from experience it wasn’t an act on their part, we weren’t all just playing a game, so my whole self was scared all the time. On the other hand, no court jester thinks it’s a game. Queens behead, kings rape, as every court jester knows, so the clown dances not for denial but for strategy, and to live.

 

A few years before, back in 2011, fishing for my family, one night at the end of a long round of fishing, I had been spinning my skiff in circles so that the gurry water would all slosh to one side so I could bail it. Blue water, forearms muscular with so much work, back muscular, orange raingear, total sure-footedness on the water even spinning in circles. Suddenly I heard my uncle scream my name from another skiff, then immediately felt the two tons of his skiff crashing into mine, a few feet from my head, the collision spiking my neck, radiating my body.

He had crashed his boat into mine—intentionally.

I have thought about this a lot. Why did he crash his boat into mine intentionally? Why did my grandpa drive the tractor forks straight into the warehouse wall, jarring the tractor, puncturing the wall? Why was this the way men related to—well—everything? When my uncle crashed his boat into mine, I looked at his eyes to understand why he did it—did his engine go out? did he miscalculate? had I done something wrong?—and his eyes were outraged. His eyes were outraged, so I said, “Sorry.” I was apologizing, it appeared, for being the recipient of his force, the beneficiary of his violence.

In a landscape—seascape—in which men crash themselves into your body, crash their boats into your boat, what does revolt against such crashing feel like? If the master’s tools cannot be used to dismantle the master’s house, I know the revolt cannot feel like more crashing.

I want to know if it is possible to revolt against abuse and stay in relationship with the abuser. Because, even though some people can leave private domestic violence, many people cannot leave their family or village and they do not want to put the people harming them in prison. And perpetrators are sometimes humans we love very much, often humans with whom we do not want to sever connection. I want to know if there is a way in which no one gets kicked off the boat, no one drowns, and no one gets hurt on the boat.

 

I’m not sure when Fryent started to really get rule number one. Maybe it’s when the captain told us the story of the old-timer he had known, who was once fishing illegally. A dead human body had floated into the old-timer’s net, someone who had not abided rule number one, someone considered “lost at sea.” The old-timer knew if he reported the body he’d be caught for illegal fishing. So he threw the body back. Better to abandon another human to be lost forever than to be caught.

I’m not sure when exactly it was that Fryent got rule number one, but once he got it, he got it. He would tell me, stay on the fucking boat. Thank you, I would say, and mean it.

Once rule number one was firmly established, I moved onto rule number two: keep your heart soft.
 

 
Two

Atherosclerosis, sometimes called “hardening of the arteries,” occurs when fat, cholesterol, and other substances build up in the walls of arteries. These deposits are called plaques. Over time, these plaques can narrow or completely block the arteries. 
  – Medline Plus

 
When the fish finally came, they really came, and so we fished all the time, Fryent and the captain and I. Seven hours of fishing, three hours of sleep, five hours of fishing, two hours of sleep, weeks passed and no bathing, oatmeal at 3 a.m., homemade pizza at 3 p.m., immediate sleep every time we slid into our bunks, coffee every time we slid out of our bunks. Toss the anchor, haul the anchor, tie up at the tender, untie from the tender, relentless, bumpy rhythm, shallow Bristol Bay mud flats and exhaustion.

In their book, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider ask whether patriarchy persists because although so many men and women and non-binary folks say they do not want patriarchy, privately and unconsciously they do want it, because it is feeding sea-deep psychological hungers, starvations even. Gilligan and Snider write, “patriarchy is at once a source of lost connection and a defense against further loss, a source of trauma and a defense against trauma. While this paradox may not make rational sense, it has a psychological logic.”

We fished in rain sluicing off our raingear, wind stirring the water to a chop, we fished in sun so hot it burned into the aluminum of the boat and warmed the Bering Sea to a bathtub so hot that the boat’s refrigeration system could not cool the water in the hold. It’s hard to keep your heart soft in a place like that because you are killing. And killing at high speed. It’s hard to keep your heart soft in a place like that because what your person will naturally do when you are quickly killing many living creatures is it will start fighting itself, one part trying to become a non-feeling being, the other part insisting on staying alive. And this is the whole heart of the problem. Half of you wants to do anything to survive what seems unchangeable. The other half of you knows sacrificing your own aliveness in order to survive is no survival at all. And the two halves are at all-out war. You do not have to be in Bristol Bay to be in this war, though the exaggeratedness of Bristol Bay makes certain things clearer.

When my beloved friend Aeyn got leukemia, his sister gave him her bone marrow to save his life. But his body fought the transplant, his skin and then internal organs literally hardening, in a disease called graft-versus-host. It was graft-versus host that killed him, not leukemia. His body that was hosting the grafted-in marrow was fighting that marrow, and the marrow was fighting its host. In life-threatening conditions, sometimes what we will do to save our own lives will kill us.

Somatically—in my soma, my flesh—I knew this is what we were up against, so obsessively I whispered to Fryent, keep your heart soft, keep your heart soft, as if we were under siege and I just had to get us through till the war was over.

You might be thinking—but no one was making you fish in Bristol Bay. That is technically true, but family and love and harm made me into a sleeper agent, so that when the code word was whispered I followed the orders of my earliest training.

 

In whispering keep your heart soft I was trying to find a portal to a home deeper than home, a home before the time when my whole family was taken hostage by riotous violence, female complicity, child sacrifice, everyone pretending what was happening wasn’t happening.

 
Fryent and I developed our own rhythm synced with the boat’s greater rhythm: at the end of every shift, however long or short, we would climb up to the flying bridge, he’d smoke a cigarette, and we would ask each other, for real, how are you doing? And we would answer. Hold hands, almost like children, touch forearms, lean head on shoulder, look at the ocean. Then climb back down to the cabin, slide into our bunks. Then wake, one of us make coffee for the other and for the captain, and fish. This: again and again and again.

After a while, the boat ran out of bottled water, so we only drank Kool-Aid because the potable water in the boat’s hold was so green with algae that it was only potable in a technical sense. We’d stir bright blue Kool-Aid packs into mugs of water for each other, tell each other drink, grimmace and drink, then back out to the deck, to the fish.

From a young age, female-socialized children and male-socialized children are treated in such a way that they come to believe that ruptures in connection, intimacy, and relationship are inevitable and irreparable. “Thus we came to see how patriarchy persists in part by forcing a loss of relationship and then rendering the loss irreparable,” write Snider and Gilligan. They write, “By nature, we are relational beings, born with a voice… and with the desire to engage responsively with others… (But) if the capacity to repair [relationships] is itself under siege, if the move to repair ruptures in relationship is rendered futile or shamed, the loss of connection becomes seemingly irreparable.”

Something in me insisted—and insists now still—that the loss is repairable.

Keep your heart soft I would say when the captain lumbered up the ladder to the flying bridge to bring us around to the buoy on the far end of the drift net. Sun radiating off the aluminum deck and the baby blue ocean in every direction, Fryent would lasso the buoy and we’d feed it through the hydraulic roller and then the fish would roll in, each one tangled in the net, and I would say I know it’s easy to block off that they are living, that they suffer, that each one is unique, but keep your heart soft.

I was bossy, evangelical. I thought I was talking to Fryent, generously offering him wisdom grown, barely, in hard rocky soil. In hindsight I see I was teaching myself to unlearn hard heartedness towards living creatures I had been trained since birth to interpret as non-sentient, fungible, whose thrashing deaths by suffocation were not to be cared about. Also in hindsight I see that I was talking myself out of fishing—because the dissonance that comes when you are both killing creatures by the thousands and continually saying out loud “the suffering of this creature matters” and “keep your heart soft” is not a dissonance you will be able to maintain indefinitely. You either have to revert to disassociation, or you have to stop.

I don’t know if Fryent kept his heart soft toward the fish, but he kept his heart soft toward me. Maybe he thought that’s what I was talking about. Maybe in part I was.

 

In Edward Tronick’s “still face” experiments of the 1970s, Tronick had mothers play with their babies, being as fully responsive to the babies as they usually were—and then he instructed the mother to make her face still, to become unresponsive. Each mother’s baby would instantly register the loss of connection, and move to re-engage their mom, repeating gestures and sounds that had previously elicited her response. When the mom kept remaining still-faced, the baby started screeching. After two minutes, Tronick instructed the mothers to re-engage, and the mom and baby found each other again, repairing the ruptured relationship.

Gilligan and Snider write, “In this brief two-minute window, we can recognize how trust in relationships hinges on the discovery that ruptures can be repaired.”

So what happens when the rupture persists? Female-socialized children are conditioned to know-believe that if they aren’t only and endlessly sweet and obedient, if they say what they actually know and feel, they will be treated as shameful, even despicable; all of their relationships will be irreparably ruptured. Male-socialized children are conditioned to know-believe that if they are vulnerable and tender, all of their relationships will be irreparably ruptured. According to Gilligan and Snider, at the first signs of this conditioning, children intensely protest. But because the adults around them are also so thoroughly conditioned, protest doesn’t repair the relationship, so then despair sets in. When despair persists and the relationship still isn’t repaired, disconnection/disassociation sets in, long-term.

Female-socialized people come to not-know their own feelings, to not-hear their own thoughts, not-feel their own bodies, to act against their own safety and wellbeing and the safety and well-being of their children. Male-socialized people come to not-know their own feelings, to not-hear their own softness, to not-know their craving for vulnerability and intimacy, to project intolerable weakness onto anyone below them in the hierarchy and then to punish that weakness.

 

A hard heart will kill you. When your arteries or blood vessels or heart chambers harden—from high cholesterol, lack of exercise, smoking, stress—you’ll eventually have a stroke or heart attack or sudden coronary death. Literally, the heart inside your chest must be kept soft to live.

 
Before Fryent came on the boat, before the boat even got hauled out of its winter dry dock in Blendan’s boat yard, the captain had to suddenly leave Naknek for four days to accompany his wife to her father’s funeral. So for four days I lived on the boat alone, on land, surrounded by the kind of men who fish in Bristol Bay. This scared me, but of course I have been around those kind of men all my life so I knew better than to act afraid.

Some of the men were better than others, I guess, and one night one of those men, a man I’ll call Ed, a history professor during the off-season, invited me to dinner on his boat along with his deckhand: a 25-year-old, heavily-tattooed man I’ll call Sam. As soon as we settled in with our microwaved dinners in their galley, I dove in with an actual question that had been puzzling me. I was too lonely for small talk, and something about cleaning algae from the outside of the captain’s boat all day with a toothbrush had scoured my mind.

“You know something that confuses me,” I said to Ed and Sam, “is that even though there are almost no women here in the boatyard, the men are constantly showing off. Guys’ve got their shirts off even when it’s cold, they’re strutting, they’re doing pushups in plain sight in this way that’s so obviously just showing off. But like, there are no women. And something tells me they’re not gay, or not unclosetedly gay, so what is going on?”

Ed took an oracular tone. “They don’t do that shit for women. Even when women are around, it’s not for women. It’s never for women. Men are always doing it for each other.” I looked at him a long minute. I considered my whole life. “Even when women are around, and a guy scores chicks or whatever, that’s only to prove something to the other guys. Women are never the point.”

I looked at him through squinted eyes. I thought about my aunts, grandma, mom. Then Sam told a story.

“Last summer, one night when we weren’t fishing, all the boats were docked up in the Naknek River and the captains got an idea to have their deckhands race to the top of the muddy bank, you know the one up the river that’s like 50 or 100 feet high.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know the bank you mean.”

“They forced their deckhands to race up it. The captains all put down money, hundreds of dollars each, so that if the deckhands lost the captains lost something real. And you know how muddy that bank is? You just slide right down it. You can’t run up it, can’t even claw your way up. The captains were screaming at the deckhands, no mercy, and the guys were puking, trying so hard but sliding down.”

“Fuuuuck,” I said, hands cupping the tin mug Ed had given me, full of coffee at whatever hour. 

“There’s something wrong with those captains. I don’t know what that is,” Sam trailed off, not quite here with us in the present.

Ed maybe said something at that point, but all I could see was Sam’s memory, white-haired captains pitching $50 bills in a heap beside a campfire, mouths open in screams worthy of cubist paintings, the salty river, the never-darkening Alaska sky, and I knew that rage, the way the captains would’ve been screaming in a way that scared the deckhands, actually scared them, and I knew the deckhands’ fear. What Sam was describing, it wasn’t a fierce-but-friendly competition. It was… what was it? What is it?

I didn’t know then, but now I’d say, it was grief, rotted.

Recent research shows that sometimes the hardening plaque along the walls of arteries and heart chambers—that plaque can turn to bone. A heart made of bone is no longer a heart. Odd that being “soft” is the one thing that in Bristol Bay you absolutely must not be, considering that a hardened brain or heart will actually kill you.

Maybe not odd at all though. Maybe the captains are the living dead, and the deckhands the living dead in the making.

I once saw a therapist who said that violence comes of the inability to tolerate powerlessness. Or, as Martha Nussbaum writes in Anger and Forgiveness, “anger becomes an alluring substitute for grieving, promising agency and control when one’s real situation does not offer control.” Maybe violence is the inability to grieve harms experienced while one was powerless. All around the table white-haired men have gathered, spilling their sons’ blood like table wine. And they are spilling their sons’ blood in a war they know deep in their hearts is perpetual. Or maybe they don’t know it deep in their hearts because those hearts are bone.

Gilligan and Snider: “So as long as those below are able to communicate their feelings and those on top are able to feel empathy we are inevitably pulled toward repairing the ruptures that all forms of hierarchy create…. To enforce the sacrifice of relationship necessary for establishing and maintaining hierarchies of power and status, it is necessary to render protest ineffective and to subvert the capacity to repair.”

What I learned as a young girl was that to be in close relationship—first with family, then with boyfriends, I had to sweetly obey, hide pain, silence protest. If I didn’t, it’s not so much that I would be harmed—though that, too—but it’s that people I loved, including the harmer, would be harmed.

Trauma gets passed on and passed on and passed on. What is not transformed is transmitted. You think to yourself that you will never perpetuate on another what was perpetuated on you, but you will unless you actively practice something else instead, unless you scuba dive into your own soul and befriend those deep sea creatures—monstrous in their loneliness—who have never seen light.
 

 
Three

We are wasting time, pleads Greta, by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us, she says. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.
   – Miriam Toews, Women Talking

 
Then the captain’s wife came to work on the boat. At first it was nice. She was my friend, and it was luxury to have another female in that place. We caught up on friends back in Sitka, she told me stories from way back when she used to live in Naknek 30 years ago before her sons were born.

And then within a few days, some dynamic shifted, and something that mattered snapped. Her eyes looked distant even when her mouth smiled. She said mmhm instead of asking me further questions. I knew in my heart of hearts that she believed Fryent and I were up to no good. He was married to the captain’s niece, and he and I had made a gentled intimacy. We made each other oatmeal, gently. We put our hands on each other’s backs as we passed in the galley, gently. I knew that the captain’s wife was suspicious, and I pretended that I had no idea she was suspicious. I pretended that I did not know, and I turned from her in my heart.

For years, up until the moment I sat to write these words, I have been angry with the captain’s wife, for her assumptions, her belief that my sexuality was her business. Now that I am sitting here, writing about softening my heart, it occurs to me to wonder for the first time: why didn’t I cut the captain’s wife some slack? She was short on warmth toward me, but her father had just died. She was decidedly unhelpful sometimes on deck when we were delivering fish, but she had never fished before and she was doing her best. My memory is that she was an asshole to me, making assumptions about my sexuality and character, but when I sit still and focus on finding the places I might be unconsciously lying to myself, I realize I was such an asshole to her. She flew 700 miles from Sitka to Naknek, to support her husband who was having a rough summer, and because he wanted to support her in her grief over her father—and I was her dear friend, whom she had counted on back in Sitka, whom she had every right to expect would be supportive and generous and extend grace toward her not-knowing how to do things on the boat—and here on the boat, where she had zero privacy with her husband, where we were all truly stuck with each other, I cared more about the insularity of my kinship with Fryent, the closedness of our two-person circle.

If I go very still and quiet, and focus, I regret.

What felt so at risk? When she knelt on the deck and tried to pry up the lid on a hold and pried it the wrong way, when she tied the driftnetter to the tender but too loosely and with the wrong knot, why did I re-do it for her with abrupt movements and without making eye contact? Why did I stop smiling at her, stop asking her in a gentle voice for her thoughts?

 

It was the way Aeyn’s own body turned against him when a cure was offered that killed him, not leukemia. I’d learned disgust at female weakness, learned it in my body, my body that is female. In a system in which the set-up is that there are two genders only, and you do not get to choose which you are, and one is strong/dominant and the other is weak/dominated, it is very hard to prevent the visceral disgust that rises in the presence of the dominated—since that is what you have been trained, always, to feel. It is hard as a woman to prevent yourself from turning on other women, and on yourself.

 

This essay started as an attempt to answer the questions: Is it possible to shift an abusive relationship or community dynamic while staying in relationship? Is it possible to evict no one and still change? And specifically, what is going on with gendered, sexualized violence: why do male-bodied humans harm female-bodied humans at such astronomical rates all over the world and particularly in Alaska; why do older women ignore the violence against younger women and silence their protests; why do mothers and fathers harm their sons by punishing the softness out of them; why do so many people in so many communities protect sexual perpetrators and blame sexual victims?

What I have meant to be asking is: is there a way for me to re-enter my family without bringing myself further harm?

But so far I have been writing about a gentle relationship with a deckhand in a non-gentle place, so what does that have to do with the questions I set out to untangle?

 
The captain’s wife and the captain and Fryent and I rose at 3 a.m. to fish and there were almost no fish. We cranked up the anchor, jostled in choppy seas, splattered each other’s faces with blood as we broke each salmon’s gills to bleed her, winched down the anchor, toppled into bed each time Fish & Game closed the waters. The tension on the boat between the four of us was as viscous as water and as hard to see through.

Fishermen all around us were quitting. There just seemed to be no fish.

One day the captain said: I’m done too. Today is the day I end. Not just with this season but with my 40 years of fishing in Bristol Bay. His son quitting, the too-hot ocean, his wife’s grief and ill-at-ease-ness on a boat—something—it made him give up. In silence, he drove the boat up the Naknek River, and Blendan yanked the boat with his huge tractor sluicing salty water back up into the boatyard.

Suddenly, we were on land. I climbed down the boat, looked around furtively to make sure no one was watching, and I knelt and kissed the ground. I took my first shower in three weeks. Then Fryent and I flew from Naknek to Anchorage, Anchorage to Juneau, Juneau to Sitka. The captain and his wife flew back too, and eventually we were all back in Sitka.

But no. Let me tell the truth. All the time before the captain abruptly quit I asked myself each day if I wanted to have sex with Fryent, if actually I was in love with him. We were in some kind of perpetual tango on that boat, oriented to each other completely, one couldn’t sigh without the other noticing.

One day I knelt down to clean a fish hold and Fryent said, while you’re down there…, the joke being so common among working class men that he was just using its shorthand, the joke being wanna give me a blow job since you’re already kneeling. Like everything in Bristol Bay, it is low-hanging fruit for gendered analysis, and something about its obviousness made me feel embarrassed for the men in Bristol Bay: deckhands doing push-ups to impress each other, captains guffawing over the VHFs and naming their boats Predator and Crimson Fury. I felt protective of the men the way you’re protective of children performing on a stage, so proud of their performance, unaware of their own fragility, guarded by all the adult applause.

 

I kept getting angry that day Fryent said While you’re down there; my eyes kept sliding off the deck, slithering down boat sides and into stupid Bristol Bay’s shallow muddy sea, feeling wronged by the captain’s wife’s silences and sideways glances, like my bones were loosening, a kind of unhinging in my own coves and angles. When Fryent saw it happening, saw my body going rigid then slack, saw my eyes wandering off on their own, he said in a pleading voice I hadn’t heard him use before, don’t leave me. All the many bargains I have made, so no man has to feel my abandoning.

 

In the present, I am queer. In the present, 2020, I have most recently been partnered with a female-bodied, gender-non-conforming person. Finally being able to acknowledge I am queer, I am reinterpreting my whole life. After all, ever since I was about ten years old, I had a reputation for being “boy crazy.” So now I ask myself, all those years when everyone around me called me “boy crazy,” what was I up to? What were they up to?

Even now, when I meet a man who is kind, I often immediately and without distance assume I want to have sex with him, and then I realize I do not have to have sex with him, and then my whole body is overtaken with euphoria.

This makes me question the cluster of behaviors and impulses we umbrella under “desire.”

Only think of the place where the Naknek River and the Bering Sea meet: the Naknek rushes, pushes, downward and outward, into the Bering Sea; when the Bering Sea’s tide is ebbing they flow out together; when the Sea’s tide is flooding they rush directly into each other, and depending on how you think about it they crash or intermingle or collide or dance.

So too with queerness. The river of my life force pushed one way, and the ocean of here-is-what-you-must-do-to-belong-be-loved-be-alive pushed the other way; my body was the roiling place where the Naknek and Bering Sea meet.

As a female-bodied, female-socialized person growing up in Alaska, my worth was hung up on being tough and desirable and pure—a hard trinity to pull off simultaneously. Sex outside of marriage, in my proudly fundamentalist Christian family, was the worst thing you could do. Dying would have been less frowned upon than fucking, or being fucked, or being raped, but we will come to that.
 

 
Four

What I’ve learned from a soldier
Every man is a son to a daughter
And we only remember
When we see the blood
   – Jacob Banks, “Slow Up”

 
The summer of 2011—four years before Bristol Bay—I chose to have sex, without being married to him, with a man who worked for my family, a man I fished alongside. My family did not react to this well. This is an understatement.

 

Sometimes that summer, on the island where I had grown up with my family (far from Bristol Bay) and was now fishing as an adult, I would take my hands and sweep them over the tops of the desk and coffee table and table and bedstand and counters, and everything on the surfaces would fall onto the floor and scatter or break. I would gently turn over the chairs, turn the table upside down, like I was enacting a slow motion sinking ship, like I was a hypnotized creature obeying a command to drown. Then I would panic-reach for the body of my lover like he was the one thing that would keep me from falling off the proverbial boat.

Why did I choose to have sex with him? Was it because his body reminded me of a female body? Was it because sex creates life and I was trying to stay alive? Why did I choose to continue to have sex with him even though my family punished me so severely that my body had psychogenetic seizures for years afterwards in response? Did my uncle crash his boat into mine, that summer, because I was having sex with this man?

My aunts and uncles and father and step-mother treated me as if in having sex outside of marriage, as a 34-year-old, I had contracted the black plague.

Of course if someone actually contracts the black plague you cannot be near them without protective gear. They are dangerous. My family treated me as if I were dangerous. After they realized he and I were sleeping together, they drew up a legal contract forbidding me to have sex with anyone, or flirt with anyone, or have anyone in my room, and told me they would fire me without pay, and force me to leave the place I had always known as home, and fire my lover, if I would not sign the contract. They spied on me with telescopes and by sneaking around. They told me they were going to command the other deckhands to sign a piece of paper agreeing to spy on me, and that if the other deckhands refused to spy on me they told me they were going to fire the other deckhands. They did not actually make the other deckhands sign this paper but they told me they were going to, so I kept waiting for it to happen, fearing the people around me. They told their children, my cousins whom I loved, to stay away from me.

Because all of this happened on an island in the wilderness whose sole inhabitants were my family and their workers, the deckhands, because the only phone on the island was inside my father’s house, because everyone around me was a conservative Christian aside from the man I was having sex with, I had to sort through what was happening by myself—or, in conversation with my lover, but he was stumped by the whole thing.

My family’s idea, I think, was that if they shunned and punished me, I would acquiesce. Maybe other people would have acquiesced, I’m not sure. I pretended to acquiesce, which is to say that I signed the contract and told them I would not have sex—and then he and I took to each other’s bodies like creatures in a forest fire huddled on the one unburned place. Or maybe just I took to his body that way.

For so long in my life, my family created the forest fire and then punished me when I did the one thing I could think to do to stay alive and kind-of-okay: huddle with the deckhands, who were not perfect and some of them weren’t even good, but they were not King Lear-mad like the men in my family were mad, inexplicably retaliatory, and you rarely even knew what they were retaliating for. The deckhands weren’t like that. I loved listening to their funny stories and laughing and laughing. I loved working near them in quiet. I almost never huddled with naked skin, but sometimes I did, and sometimes when I was a child they took off my clothes when I did not want that. And so then my family punished me for that. When I was 18, I married one of the deckhands, then divorced him 10 years later, the divorce further evidence to my family that I was contaminated.

You would think that somewhere along the way I would have quit my family. But there is this thing about humans and belonging.

In 1989 and 1991 and 1993 and 2000 and 2007 and 2011, huddling with the deckhands was as close as I could come to things being okay. But meanwhile the fire around us burned down kindness and relationship and the possibility of repairing rupture. And, unlike the deckhands, I was of that place; I wasn’t an outsider proving to myself I could be a badass in Alaska. It was like huddling on a boat while the tundra burns and the ocean heats up. Okay, you are alive for now, but clearly this isn’t a sustainable situation. Is it possible to quell the tundra fire, cool the ocean, welcome the fish instead of kill so many of them, stop huddling and walk through fire to its source and undo the source? Is this a thing that can be done? Can it be done while the fire burns?

When, at the end of the summer of 2015, the captain’s wife said to me, I am upset with you because I think you hooked up with Fryent on the boat, without her realizing it she was stepping through a spacetime portal into my past. And when I refused to respond directly and said, instead, Why you are policing my sexuality? Why do you assume connection or gentleness equates to transgression? I was responding not really to her, but to a whole life, a whole world. If she had looked deep in my eyes she’d have seen the orange-red of windows reflecting fire.

In hindsight, I see she was trying to be forthright and even vulnerable—saying plainly she was upset with me because she thought I was sleeping with her niece’s husband and she didn’t want to not be my friend but where do we go from here. She was making an assumption, yes, but she maybe felt betrayed by the way I’d emotionally abandoned her on the boat. But I couldn’t hear any of that, which I guess is how generational trauma gets passed down: the past is roaring so loudly, so hotly, that you cannot hear the present no matter how articulately or sweetly or painfully it cries.

It’s only now, in 2020, as I am writing this, that the roar has quieted enough to hear.

I took her as more fire coming for me, so although I did not say it directly I said in so many words Fuck you. How dare you. Who the fuck do you think you are? Eventually I did tell her Fryent and I hadn’t slept together or kissed or anything like that, and she did not believe me. She said, But what about that time you put your hand on his chest when we were all getting into our bunks? And I looked at her with flat eyes and said What about it?

I was saying to Fryent, I will not abandon you to the fire, but the captain’s wife did not know there was a fire. Fryent himself probably didn’t know it either, come to think of it.

 
Trauma will eat your brain for lunch. It’ll make soup of your bones. When Fryent and I weren’t angrily discussing the captain’s wife’s accusations, when I was alone, I was considering killing myself. I was living in several time periods at once and in most of those time periods I was unsafe.

 

If there is any single thing I wish I had done differently in my life, I wish I had not pretended to acquiesce in 2011, when I was sleeping with the deckhand and my family tried to force me to be “pure.” I wish I hadn’t flown under the radar, but stood right in front of the radar and said here I am. I wish I had marched into the 3-hour meeting where my father and his two brothers discussed my sexual history and my sexual present and ruled on my fate, while my aunt served them lunch. I wish I’d stood sure on my two feet, looked my father and uncles in their eyes and said:

The way you are treating me is not love. It is harm. This place—this wilderness, these buildings, these boats—they are my home, as they are your home. They are not more your home than they are mine. And in this place, my home, with my body—

But—it is not as much my home as it is theirs. It feels that way to me because I was born into that place, into my grandparents’ garden and workshop and tiny home, into the crib my grandpa and mom built from driftwood, into the black sand beaches that I cherished as much as kin, and the starfish and untamable ocean. It felt like mine because I loved it.

But the men in my family hold the legal claim. The women—the wives—do not have ownership. The children—and even though in 2011 I was 34 years old, I was still considered one of the children—we do not have legal claim to that land or to the fishing permits or the equipment to fish or even to the food in the kitchens. The men have made sure of that. When I fish for them, I exchange my body’s labor for room and board and, when you calculate out the hours, less than minimum wage. When they die, it will be passed on to my cousins and brother and me, but until then we do not have any share. And of course you can have legal claim to something that was stolen; in western culture you can have legal title to something you perpetually harm. None of which amounts to, or even resembles, true belonging.

Do we belong here in any way? Aren’t we, with our white skin and our inheritance of overtaking the land that was unmarred for millennia before “explorers” came, overtaking the people who have belonged here for millennia—aren’t we always interlopers, and worse, no matter our legal claim, no matter our intention or posture?

Although I did not consciously realize it at the time, it was not lack of courage that prevented me from standing my ground in 2011. It’s that I did not and do not possess ground to stand on. And even if I had possessed the ground, that would not have been the stance from which to right relationship.

 
Five

The music whispers you in urgency
Hold fast to that languageless connection
A thread of known that was unknown and unseen seen
Dangling from inside the fifth direction
   – Indigo Girls, “Everything in its Own Time”

 
A woman I’ll call Ruth invited me to spend the night at her house in the village an hour’s boat ride from our island. Ruth’s mother was Alutiiq, and Ruth had grown up in her mother’s village, then lived in the broader world, and then returned to the village. I was 15 years old, and every night an adult deckhand undressed me, pawed at me, made me jerk him off. All summer I was ground into and then spit out—with the at-least-partial knowledge and total non-response of my aunts and uncles and grandparents. Ruth had built her wooden house right on the beach and, all my growing-up years, every time we came to the village we stopped in to say hello on our walk up the graywacke and slate beach to the shed of a post office just up the dirt road. The two or three times a summer I got to come to the village, we always stopped at Ruth’s. The men came every week for the mail, but for me coming to the village was a special treat.

I don’t know how she knew to invite me to spend the night. She had never invited me before, and she did not invite me again. Maybe one of my aunts or uncles, or one of my grandparents, knowing how that it was against the family code to intervene directly but wanting to help, had whispered something to her.

I rode the tender to the village, then walked in my hip boots and orange rain gear from the cannery to Ruth’s house, my body muscled from so much labor, face and arms sunburned, hair bleached. Salmon ran by the hundreds of thousands in the inlet beside the village, so thick you really felt you could walk on them to cross the tide-rushing bay. Bears lazily lumbered into the village to snatch salmon from the stream running under the rickety bridge and the dust-matted roads. I felt the thrill of a half day away from the island, of travel somewhere beyond our family’s realm.

Ruth, with her long, dark hair tied back in a red kerchief, opened the weathered door. Hi, hi. Excuse the mess. I made bread. Do you like homemade bread? And there’s smoked salmon, I realize you must have salmon all the time, but would you like some anyway? And a cheeseball, I made a cheeseball, does that sound good? This was decades ago. I don’t know if this is exactly what she said, or exactly what we ate, but I do know this is exactly how it all landed in me.

We don’t eat salmon that often and I always like it, I told her, and she cut me off a thick hunk of soft whole-wheat bread. I must have smelled of days’ worth of salmon slime and old sweat, but of course she didn’t say anything and maybe didn’t even notice. Like me, her body was lean and muscular and of the earth and of this particular place on earth. Our bones strong from eating salmon bones baked in the oven, our muscles rich with the minerals of the rainwater and streams and lakes, our hearts both softened by the clean air of that place and hardened by the people of that place.

Sit, sit, you must be tired, so many days fishing, she said, and cleared a chair of seed catalogues and Sears catalogues and books. I’m okay, I said, my body tough and toughened, saturated with exhaustion, endlessly resilient. My body knew the price of being that robust. But my mind only knew the urgency of never being weak.

Would you like hot chocolate? she said, knowing the language of food, how many things in that place cannot be said directly. My chest loosened a bit, for the first time in such a long time. She made the hot chocolate with milk instead of water, poured herself a coffee, settled in again.

So how are things on the island? she asked. I knew I wasn’t supposed to tell her how many fish we were catching, or how the humans were treating each other. I knew it was against every code.

They’re good! They’re good. It’s just this one crew member, he, I mean, you know he comes to my room at night. And with Mom not here this year, I live in the warehouse now cuz it’s kind of cold in Dad’s house. Anyway, fishing’s been okay this year. Grandpa and Grandma are good too.

She nodded and drank her coffee. It was evening, and outside there was plenty of light because this was Alaska in summer. She looked out the window. A seiner passed by, and we watched it pass. Time slow enough to watch a boat pass the full length of a window at five knots was as normal to me as sunburned skin or hot dogs. She looked back at me.

Do you like to dance? she asked.

I don’t really know how, but I think so, I told her. What was happening, I wondered. She reached beside her to the stack of tapes on a hand-made bookshelf. Do you like U2? Michael Jackson or Billy Joel?

I think I like Billy Joel, I said. I don’t really know U2 or Michael Jackson.

Let’s try some U2, she said. Let’s just try it. Everything was squeezed in me. Being in our bodies in the way of dancing—being in our bodies—nothing seemed more counter to how I spent my days. She put the tape in, clicked play.

So she woke up
Woke up from where she was
Lying still
Said I gotta do something
About where we’re going

Ruth uncoiled her lanky body from the chair, stretched her thin, blue-jeaned legs. She reached her arms above her head and slowly turned to the music. I watched her for a moment and she smiled and danced. As a young queer person who had no conscious idea I was queer, I was curious about her body, and I also needed her to be safe for me, to not try to get anything from me.

I didn’t know what was happening, and something in my center knew it was a kind of mutiny against the way my family worked, a mutiny different than what was being done to my body by the hands of a man. This mutiny, I wanted. When I had watched her long enough, I put my hot chocolate on the window sill, and started dancing.

You gotta cry without weeping
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice

We danced on. She sang along, and I tried to sing along, and she did not laugh at me or even smirk. She took my hands and we danced around and around, and although we were dancing and it seems like there must have been joy and even silliness, all I remember is that it was like we were dancing for our lives.

The land and the water and the salmon are trying to tell us something—we can’t hear it but our bodies are both receiving the message from this place and also trying to talk to each other. Up to my knees in fish all day—or my ankles, on a slow day—the intimacy of picking fish in single-layer cotton clothes, their blood and bodies’ juices coating my hands and arms all day long and much of the night, and I could not hear anything, but sometimes with my body I could feel, just barely, but still.

Under a black belly of cloud in the rain
In through a doorway she brings me
White gold and pearls stolen from the sea
She is raging, she is raging
And the storm blows up in her eyes…
 

 
If I’d been able to see Ruth more often, what would have been possible. If I had had seven such women around me, what we could have unmade, what we could have wholly made new.

I have tried in my life to accomplish alone what is probably not possible to accomplish alone, but there were not other possibilities. Or rather, I have tried in my life to enlist male deckhands in my revolutions, but they were too young themselves, too embedded in what they had learned men were to be, too afraid—but even if they’d had the inclination, the logistics of change in such a wilderness place under men with absolute authority are formidable.

In hindsight, I see that not only did every woman around me have Stockholm Syndrome, every person around me had Stockholm Syndrome. The men, the women, and anyone queer enough among us to be something other than man or woman; perpetrator and victim among us and all those who are both—we aren’t ontologically different from each other, though what has been trained into us and modeled for us tells us differently. We all craved relationship with each other and with the world that sustained our life, and we had learned in one part of us that protest would be ineffective, that relationships between us were impossible to repair. I see now I was far from the only one who needed rescuing from the hierarchy and dominance, that hollows out not just children, but everyone. It kidnaps us from ourselves and from each other and then we have nowhere left to turn.

Dancing—dancing is what revolt against crashing feels like. Dancing together. Bodily improvisation. Listening to that in you that is connected to it all, and then putting yourself forth. Listening closely to the bodies of the earth and air and spirit and water, salmon and bears, past people and present people—and together making the dance by which you are also made.

We spun, arms like jellyfish in slow water. Kinetically, I felt my body pushing toward something that wanted to be but could not yet be lived. Our feet touching the floor were an incantation. Our hips shaking were a lament. Our swaying shoulders a conjuring. We bent our bodies like tilling and harvest and planting all at once. We arched our backs like we ourselves were the soil. Save us from this place, take us from these men, save these men, repair us all, mend the world, let us be the mend in the world and no longer the tear, let us unconceal the sorrow that we all are, so that sorrow can finally portal into genesis. We danced and danced and danced. Our bodies a sacrament, a hope, a plea, an insurrection.