Fisherman’s Daughter

When you grow up in a fishing village, you’ll inevitably come to both love and fear the ocean.

Our family was young. My dad was putting in long, rough hours managing salmon farms off the coast, like most of the men in the village did. He would bring back stories of finding a stowaway baby seal tangled in the nets on his boat, or the ongoing battle to keep clever hawks from destroying the fish pens. His hands were padded with callouses and the lingering stain of engine grease.

The day that he brought me out for my first fishing trip on his new boat, The Sea Dream, I felt a surge of wild, pure happiness as we sliced through crests of waves, shore disappearing behind us as we sailed into an endless stretch of water. The wind whipped my hair into a tangled, salt-sprayed mess. I didn’t care. I wanted to sail into the canvas of sea and sky before us forever.

Later on that night in bed, I wrapped my ponytail around my fist and tried to catch the last fading whiffs of the sea air as I drifted to sleep. The ocean was infinite and beautiful.

But the ocean was also infinite and terrifying.

Everyone in the village knew someone who had drowned while working out on the water. The sound of sirens wailing down through Main Street in the direction of the wharf always made my heart stop. You could feel the entire village collectively hold its breath while we waited for word of mouth to ripple out from the docks; who had we lost this time?

Once, my mother and I were running errands at the village’s tiny grocery store when the checkout clerk mentioned that she had heard there was an accident on one of the fishing boats that morning- possibly a drowning. A young blond man in his twenties. Like my father. I watched the blood drain out of my mother’s face, the panicked blankness as she robotically took my hand and led me out of the store. She didn’t speak the entire drive home. My child’s mind tried to comprehend that my father could be dead. He came home safe and sound that day, but I was haunted by the expression on my mother’s face in those moments of agonizing uncertainty. It wouldn’t be the last time.

When the weather was too rough for my dad’s crew to risk trying to make it back to shore, they would stay overnight in a shack that was built on one of the larger sea farms. I worried that the shack would be struck by lightning or swallowed by greedy waves, biding their time until the darkest part of the night when no help would be able to reach them in time. The ocean was infinite. Anything could happen.

Those nights, my mother and I would talk to my father using an old HAM radio. We had an ongoing bedtime story that we told back and forth for months, a silly tale of the adventures of a mischievous butterfly. I would draw out my portion of the story, trying to keep it going as long as I could before we would have to say our goodnights. In those moments I knew the ocean was still infinite, but I felt like the yellowed curly cord of the radio mic and the promise of an unfinished story would tether him safely to shore, to home. To us.