Shoveling Ice on the Norrona

Shoveling Ice on the Norrona

         
     Sam and Jon were Norwegian bachelor brothers who lived in Seattle and fished Alaskan waters for halibut. In 1971 the mercury scare ruined their market, so most of the halibut boats came south for albacore. I was hanging around the dock at the Bumblebee cannery looking for unloading jobs both times when the Norrona pulled in to the mouth of the Columbia and ran upstream the few miles to Astoria to tie up and sell her fish. They hired me both times.
     Jon was maybe 55. Sam, the skipper, was older. Jon and I worked in the hold; Sam stood on deck and signaled the crane operator on the dock when to raise and lower the big rectangular steel bucket through the Norrona's open hatch.
     The second trip had been a short one, and the fishing had been poor so we had only about four tons of fish to get out but a lot of unused ice that had to be shoveled into the unloading bucket, lifted out of the hold by the dock hoist, and dumped over the side. A man who worked for the cannery operated the hoist; Sam tilted the bucket to dump the fish into a larger cannery container extended over the Norrona's deck on the
flat steel arms of a waiting forklift.
     Now, the inside of a fish hold is its own kind of place. It would not, for example, be a good place for a department store (too small), a library (too dark), or a geriatric ward (too hard to climb in and out of). But a fish hold is an ideal place for preserving fish from the time they are caught until the boat  leaves the fishing grounds, runs to the nearest cannery port or  receiving station, and ties up at the dock. And it is accessible to the people who need to get into it.

     That large, squat wooden box you see on the deck of a fishing boat is not a box; it has no bottom. It's the hatch coaming. Its cover is the hatch cover, which is the only way in and out of the hold (unless the ocean, or a piece of its bottom, or another boat, makes a new opening in the hull). A post, grooved on all four sides, extends down from each corner of the hatch to the bottom of the hold. The area of the hold bounded by those four posts is called the slaughterhouse. The rest of the hold is subdivided into bins by inserting the ends of the "bin boards" into the grooves in the vertical posts, and stacking the boards up on edge until they almost reach the underside of the deck. This partitioning of the hold provides smaller, more manageable spaces for iceing down the fish as they are caught, but the more important reason for it is to prevent the load from shifting in heavy weather. A few tons of fish and ice, thrown suddenly from one side of the boat to the other, can easily capsize her.
           
     The slaughterhouse is usually the only subspace in the hold shaped like a rectangular prism; the other spaces are truncated by those planks which form the shape of the hull as it comes in from the side and down to the keel. The obtuse angle formed by the juncture of the two sides of the hull with the keel is filled with concrete for ballast; then a shaft alley is laid on top of the concrete. The shaft alley houses the long steel shaft which transmits power from the engine, which is forward of the fishhold, to the propeller  which we call the screw  at the stern.                                      
The removable planking over the shaft alley furnishes a level working space a couple of feet wide which runs the length of the hold; it lifts out for cleaning and for shaft repairs.
     The slaughterhouse is also the only place in the boat where a man can stand up straight, unless the boat has an exceptionally deep draft. From the slaughterhouse you bend over to walk either forward or aft; one or two steps to either side puts you up against the bulkhead as it angles down toward the keel.

     The heavy wooden deck beams are bare overhead; on the sides the ribs are covered with interior planking. The outboard ends of the bin boards are all_
angle cut-  each one at a slightly different angle than those above and below it  so that their ends roughly follow the curvature of the hull.
     All this wood is dark: dark from years of being continually wet, of being stained with fish blood, and from being struck by no light but that furnished by the two bare bulbs which burn when someone is working in the hold, and the occasional shaft of sunlight which tumbles through the hatch when the cover is off for unloading.
     All this dark wood is punctuated at frequent but not perfectly regular intervals by perfect circles a half inch in diameter. They look like dowels. But boats are not put together with dowels. Boats are put together with speciallycoated nails or screws, like this: a halfinch diameter hole is bored partway into each plank at two points within the area of its intersection with a rib. A nail or screw is driven into each hole through the plank and into the rib, then the hole is plugged. A plug is different from a dowel  though the circles with which they punctuate the planking of a boat look just like the circles formed by dowelends in some handcrafted furniture  in that dowels are cut so that the grain in them runs longitudinally and they furnish strength in fastening; the plugs used in boatbuilding are cut so that tahe grain runs crosswise. This gives no strength, but that is not the purpose of a plug. The strength is furnished by the nail or screw; the purpose of the plug is to prevent water from seeping into the hole and being trapped there to corrode the fastener and rot the wood, which it would do if a dowel were used, since water travels much faster with the grain than across it.
     All this wood is scarred; the ribs, struts, planks, and bin boards show the blows of gaffs, ice shovels, and the four-
foot-long, steel pipe-handled devil'stail forks used for breaking hard ice. Finally, every edge of every piece of wood (even the edges of the scars, except for the newest ones) has been rounded by the patient abrasive action of forty-odd years of slightly shifting tons of crushed ice.
     Now wood all beveled, plugged, dark, scarred, rounded, glistening wet and dripping in the light of two bare bulbs.

     There's the place; now the work:
     The four tons of fish were only about a quarter of what the boat could carry: they were all iced in the after bins and the bins on either side of the slaughterhouse.
     Jon got the fish out of the ice and threw them toward me; I grabbed them by the tails, two at a time, and threw them into the bucket. Jon never stopped moving, and he never wasted a move: a sweep of his oilskinarmored left arm would clear the ice off a layer of fish, then his right hand would be swinging the gaff  thock! he'd bury it each time in the firm flesh just behind the top of the head, then flick his wrist, and the twelvepound, twofootlong, shiny silverbullet albacore would come leaping out of the bins at me, faster than I could grab them by the tails and flip them into the bucket. But I was keeping ahead of the crane operator, so after awhile we had a pile of fish already free of the ice and waiting in the slaughterhouse for the bucket to come back down, and we would kneel down on the ice for a minute or move over and stand up in the slaughterhouse to straighten our backs  that is, after we saw the bucket disappear from above the hatch opening. If one of those buckets, loaded or not, slipped loose from its rigging (as occasionally happened), it would crush whatever part of whatever careless fisherman it landed on.
     The four tons of fish were out of the boat in about an hour; then we started on the ice. The ice which had been used for the fish was colored a mottled red by the tuna blood: a ton and a half of raspberry snocone. It was already out of the bins and shoveled easily; a few bucketfuls took care of it.
     "What about the ice you didn't use, Jon? We take it out, or not?"
     "Ja, vee take it out. It's old, an' hard, an' vee ain't going out for a few days. Vee take it all out, an' clean up the hold good."
     The Norrona had holding coils, a partial refrigeration system the purpose of which is to reduce the hold temperature so that the ice melts less quickly. When the ice first comes aboard, it is flaky and easy to shovel, but when it stays in the bins for a week or more without being moved, it tends to melt and partially refreeze. We had several tons of this hard ice to move out of the hold.
     Shoveling ice is the hardest work on one of these boats, except for pulling big, fast-biting fish aboard on the hand lines in heavy weather. It all has to be done bending over because there is no headroom; you swing the scoop shovel once to get it full and once to empty it into the bucket, and both swings are done from a crouch.
     Jon moved ice like he moved fish. He expended a tremendous amount of energy without wasting or even slightly misdirecting so much as a footpound of it. His combination of strength, speed, and skill kept chunks and shovelfulls of ice cascading into the bucket as if propelled from a chute by a large volume of compressed air. But despite the speed with which he worked, there was nothing frantic or even hurried about his movements. You pull in at a port after two weeks at sea, you got work to do before you go ashore and rest, so you might as well get it done. Jon was getting it done as he had been getting it done for nearly fifty years.
     The first time I had worked with Jon, the eighteenyearold high school football jock who was working in the hold with us, and who had been unloading fish for a few summers, got tired and slowed considerably towards the end of the job. By the time we'd finished he was pretty nearly exhausted; Jon hadn't slowed a bit.
     That time, and this time as well, I had reached inside and disconnected my fatigue switch, and gathered all the strength I had to stay with Jon, because of my respect for him and because I wanted to be a fisherman.

     The second time, I was more fit and had more experience.
     The ice flew. We were two men in oilskins attacking a pile of ice, and this is how we looked and felt:
     Our oilskins were wet inside and out: inside from sweat, and outside from the moisture dripping on us and from ice melting against us. Our oilskins shone darkly through the water running down them somewhat like the dark wood of the fishhold shone through the water covering it. And our faces and hands, piecherry red from the combination of sunburn, exertion, and the temperature contrast between our bodies and the ice, shone redly through their own mixed covering of sweat and melted ice.
     The fishhold of the Norrona was a place where dark carved wood and human flesh glistened through flowing sheets of water.
      Concerning the motion there, two things: first, every swing of shovel, ice fork, or mattock by either of us had all the weight of that man's body and most of the strength of his back and shoulders behind it. This is because, not knowing whether a particular swing of the tool will bite deep or not, we swing it hard enough to make sure. If we don't, many of the strokes will simply be thrown back at us, and a few of those is more enervating than maintaining an unmitigated attack on the pile. Here, as in many kinds of effort, the best way to save strength is to spend it well.
     The second thing to say about the motion is to describe the rhythm, and its effects on the workers and the work. With, say, each of us in separate bins on opposite sides of the bucket and both using scoop shovels, our periodicities will be about the same, and a time will pass when shovelfulls of ice will fly into the bucket in a regular cadence from alternating sides. If one man changes tools, the other will keep the beat until the one who is changing tools picks it up again. After awhile, the rhythm of the work becomes primary, and it is like a vehicle that carries you along with it, such that men who are actually very tired can keep a pace of work which otherwise they would not be able to maintain. The rhythm will become so strong that when one of us goes to change tools, he will swing through the change, dropping a shovel and picking up an ice fork in one motion which takes just the space of one beat, then catch the second beat with the new tool.
     When we work like this, the rhythm becomes an ecstatic dance. The level of ice in the big rectangular steel bucket rises as if seen in timelapse photography. We fret about the time it takes to be raised and dumped; the interruption breaks our rhythm. So while the bucket is out of the hold we jump into the bins with mattocks and ice forks and hack out the frozen corners so we'll be ready with a load when the bucket gets back.
     We got the ice out, got all the bin boards up on deck, scrubbed the hold until it was empty, clean, and still glistening darkly, ready for the next trip. Then we scrubbed the bin boards and stacked them neatly on the after part of the deck, and pumped the bilge. It was evening and the tide was going out when we took off our oilskins and sat down on the rail. The Columbia, hurrying with the tide toward its mouth and the Pacific and the orange-streaked sky beyond, tried to pull the Norrona with her. The bow line groaned in protest where it was clovehitched around one of the dock's pilings. Gulls flew low over us and settled on the river at our stern to quarrel over the last bits of fin and gill tissue we'd washed overboard as we hosed down the deck.
     Sam brought us over two cans of cold beer and we popped them and drank long. "Well, young fella," Jon said as he lowered his beer and belched, "you done all right."