Micah's Full Interview - 6

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We didn’t fish that whole year. It was actually an elective process the fishermen did. We didn’t want to tax the resource too much. So we didn’t fish that year, and my dad had bought into gill-netting and herring-pounding in ’87 and ’88 respectively, so we had those permits and we were capable of doing non-shrimping-related fisheries at the time of the oil spill. But we didn’t in 1989. The next year, we basically went back in and started gill-netting. We gill-netted from the year after the oil spill right on to—we never missed a year until today. So we were back at it. I just remember being a young kid and instead of snapping heads off shrimp I was pitching fish in a hold.  After a while I went—because we tried to patch things together, and we went, “Maybe if they open up shrimping again, maybe we should keep our shrimp gear. Maybe we should keep the houseboat in case it ever opens up again and we can have our life back. Maybe it won’t last 20 years. Maybe in five years we’ll be able to do this fishery again.” And after five years, “No, we should just sell this stuff. It’s getting rusty on dry land. Somebody else should be able to use it, take it down southeast where they still could shrimp.” And then we went, “OK, salmon, that’s what we’ve got to do now.” So we switched to salmon.

I don’t know if scientifically they’ve got a lot of numbers on biomass from back before the spill. I know there’s biologists that were there. But it feels like even today, there’s just—with the exception of sea otters, there are so many now, it feels like there’s less of the birds, the cormorants. There were cormorants everywhere back in the day, and those birds got hit really hard. They don’t tolerate oil. They don’t do good in traumatic situations. So it felt like there was just, like, a lot of birds, not just sea gulls and stuff, which, there are tons of them, just a lot of different of the birds that you kind of—like oyster catchers and little finchie birds that you’d see everywhere. Maybe that was me, maybe that was the lifestyle, maybe I was seeing things. It’s one of those things where if you change the lifestyle, you stop seeing things the same. So I’m not sure.

But I wasn’t really—I don’t think at the time I was like—I wasn’t myself really looking at things that way. I don’t remember because I didn’t formulate my memory in a way where I would now. I keep track of things, there’s a little more of an adult perspective, where you go, “This is this way and this is this way,” and you can kind of understand where the ebb and flow of life is when something like that happens, where the nutrients go. If the oil goes to the bottom, the bottom fish are going to go. The seasonal fish are going to be fine. So those are just really basic things that I didn’t really understand then.

So when I came back, I was like, “Sweet, we’re back!” And the trees were still green, and the water was clear, and I thought, “That wasn’t so bad.” But the birds, it was the birds. The whales were there. It was the birds. That was tough. It wasn’t tough, but that was a change I noticed. It might have been—it was a symbolic change, for sure. It was probably not a very biologically relevant thing, but for me that was kind of what struck me when we were gill-netting. For sure.

I didn’t really know if I wanted to [be a fisherman] or not. I wanted to be a scientist. I kind of have an obsession-style curiosity about things, where I’ll pick it up and I’ll learn everything there is to know about it and I’ll want to be that thing, you know, where you’re growing up, and then I’ll be like, “Eh! I’ll start with paleontology. Oh, love dinosaurs.” And then it’s like, “Well, geology is pretty cool, too.” So it was rocks and rocks and rocks. I still love fossils and rocks. I’m a big rock fan. That’s what I wanted to do. I really wasn’t thinking, like, fishing. I was looking at my dad and going, and I still do, I guess—my dad came up here with no family to help him out, “Hey, do you need an extra couple thousand? Here, just buy my boat,” like I did with my dad. It’s so easy when you have a generational family sitting there, “Just use my gill-net.” “Hey, Grandpa, can I use your boat? Can I borrow your permit for a little while?”

He came up here when he was 18 years old and didn’t know anything about boating. He had a wooden boat that leaked on him and had a crappy engine and he was like, “OK, I’ll buy a boat,” and he went out and figured it out, no friends. It wasn’t like he was in somewhere like Homer where he could just go to a decent mechanic. You could go to Whittier if you had any problems, and then you could hitchhike to Anchorage or down to Homer and bring a part back with you and sit there in Whittier while it’s raining and try to figure out how the water pump goes on to an old Perkins engine or something. That was adventure for him. I did then and I guess I do now always felt like that was his story. And I’m in fishing now because fishing got really good.

School didn’t really pan out for me the way I wanted it to. I really still am just a sponge for knowledge. The classroom thing, I think I’m still a little bit feral, the classroom thing is tough, for me to do that. Otherwise I probably would have been a scientist, and I probably still could do that at any point. But that was kind of my attitude then and now, that I really admired my dad because he took the initiative to do that big step up to Alaska. Now I’m here, and I’m kind of still looking for my step, and I want it to have elements of surprise and ignorance. I don’t want to know how to do everything perfectly. That’s kind of how I feel about fishing. I know how to tie every knot. I know where all the key sets are in the Sound because I’ve been watching guys make these same sets and make money. I’m doing this because the lifestyle’s great. I guess I’m not talking about the lifestyle, because I think the lifestyle’s wonderful. But I’m still looking for my adventure. This is pretty good. We have a pretty good life. We have a really good life, and I’m really happy. But still, fishing isn’t going to be the last thing I do. I’m not going to just do it and my kids—I’m not hoping that my kids and my grandkids do fishing. That’s not it. I want to do something that I have to learn from the very ground up.

Salmon, there’s a lot of salmon fisherman, and I am one now, and they’ll probably hate me when I say it, but it’s a—it’s just different. It’s fast boats, a lot of noise, it’s surface fishing. There’s something about it. It’s just different. It’s awesome, too. It’s definitely awesome, I get a rise out of it. But I was in a spot where everything was real slow. There was nobody out there competing for the shrimp. They’re all down at the bottom of the ocean just waiting for you to find them, and there wasn’t like, “Oh, well, it’s going to be closed in 14 hours and there’s 250 other people trying to get out.” If it’s looking bad, we’d just make some pancakes and sleep in today and go out and pick the shrimp off tomorrow. No big deal. That was kind of cool. That change between having this mellow lifestyle thing to this super-fast, high-powered, turbo-charged lifestyle is something that I—it wasn’t necessarily that after the oil spill, it’s turned into that now, because it’s kind of a cultural change in gill-netting that’s going on. It’s like gill-netting plus NASCAR that’s happening now. Which happens when you inject money into an economy like ours. People don’t know what to do. They’ve got bigger, faster, more stuff.