Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand

Dad’s fishing boat. We were out with him doing what we could do, which was not much, but it was fishing anyway. Andy was crying in a bunk, and I tried to get to him to comfort him. My dad was running the boat. I reached Andy’s bunk, and Dad told me, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t get away from there.” I could not see why he would not let me go over to Andy. But I did comfort him. After that, Dad kept me on land until I was eight. Out of the blue he told me one morning, “Come on, let’s go fishing.” That was my first working trip. As the bait boy I received one share of the catch, which meant $79 that my mother put in a savings account. I was suddenly rich beyond my imaginings. From then on, I worked for hours each day. If the fishing season was open, Andy and I fished. By the age of ten, I was working each summer with no time off. I did not know anything else. Dad said we were going fishing, and we loved it. We were like puppies. That was how fishing got in our blood. When we cut loose from Dad after we were teenagers, we looked around and we knew of nothing else with the same potential for fast money and such ample joy. Even at that tender age, we beat the older fishermen out on the fisheries. Our fish were bigger than their fish, and we caught more than they caught. That’s what life was about. We competed through and through. Fishing hooked me entirely.
    If we could not fish at sea, as boys, we fished off the Spit. The Kachemak Bay was out our back door. We caught fish, made a fire in the rocks, and baked it. And what remained of our catch we sold to the fish market in Homer for $1 a crab and $5 a salmon. One time with Dad and Mom’s help we built a raft on the beach of scrap and driftwood. The finished craft weighed more than a battle tank. It sank to the bottom at the first launch. Dad felt sorry for us, I guess, because soon after he built us a hydroplane speedboat that looked sleek and dangerous, powered by two 50-horsepower Mercury engines. It was twelve feet long with a eighth-of-an-inch plywood hull. We drove with a recklessness that scared even him. He knew we would kill ourselves if we continued racing it, and he dug a hole with a backhoe and buried the boat. Even we understood why he did it. He told us, “I have given you boys every means at my disposal to kill yourselves, and you have failed.”
    We did not think about luck when we went fishing. We thought of fishing as catching fish. One time, as usual, tourists were throwing lines into the waters off the Spit, frustrated when no fish were biting. Homer promotes itself as “the halibut fishing capital of the world,” and catching nothing does not conform to the ambitions of visitors who mob the Spit in the summers. Several men watched Andy and me throw a net into the water. They seemed to be amused by our boyish naïveté, I suppose. In no time, salmon filled our net. One guy slammed his pole down on the ground in disgust. Another time, we waited at midnight while visitors were combat fishing king salmon off the Spit in what we called “the fishing hole,” a specific pool where the salmon returned each year. The town of Homer had decided to open this fishery at midnight. Watching the fishermen was fun. The men took it too seriously. They threw large sharp hooks into the pool in the hopes of snagging one of the frenzied fish, which would bite at anything that entered the water. They jerked back the lines with such violence that the hooks flew out of the salmons’ mouths and planted themselves in the fishermen. The town fathers panicked over this carnage and from then on, stationed two ambulances at the ready by the pool. We threw a couple hooks, caught as many kings as we wanted, and walked off. The visitors hated us.
    Boats were second nature to us. We learned to operate them starting with rowboats and skiffs and rafts. Older fishermen called us “skiff mice.” We hot-rodded them, sank them, crashed them, and bought and sold them.