hundred pounds, but I felt none of the satisfaction and awe I had as a kid when I reeled in a ten-pounder. Sitting on the kill-box, with the gulls shrieking behind the Njord, I remembered being six years old and clutching a rod. My dad had just given me the all-clear, so I opened the reel and listened to the sound of the line spooling out as the lead weight zinged the bait down into the ocean’s depths. The weight hit the bottom, and I felt connected to an invisible and mysterious world. A few moments later, at the slightest disturbance, I could no longer contain my excitement and yelled “Halibut!” Now, decades later, I stared out onto the broad expanse of ocean and felt a bit nostalgic. A halibut flopped in its death throes. I tossed a clump of kidney into the screeching flock of birds and went back to work.
FISHEMATICS
I REMEMBER when I began to realize the danger of combining math with fishing, something Today’s Journal of Fishermen’s Accounting calls “fishematics.” I’d just exited a floatplane at the Elfin Cove dock and shaken hands with Joe Craig, with whom I’d signed on as a deckhand for the summer.
“If you tell anyone our catch numbers, I’ll put you on shore to fend for yourself,” he warned half-jokingly as we climbed aboard the Njord. I was bad with numbers—which, not long after, I learned made me much more likely to become an expert in fishematics. I’d taken the same math class every year in high school and never passed. My poor teacher had burst into tears several times when trying to convey complicated mathematical formulas like counting to me. I’d grunt, hit my desk with a stone, grab a spawned-out salmon I’d found on my way to school, and offer it to her try to make her feel better.
Naturally, with my dim wits and Joe’s good humor, we became great friends. He didn’t even get annoyed when he’d ask how many salmon we’d gotten after a pass and I could only shrug if the count exceeded ten. He’d always laugh when he asked me to measure a halibut and I spread my hands apart however long in estimation. Sometimes, he’d let me out on the shores of Yakobi and Chichagof Islands to run around and play with the local brown bears. I was in heaven. Finally I’d entered a world where math was viewed for what it was: a crime against humanity.
A haul of coho salmon waiting to be gutted, gilled, and slushed aboard a power troller in Cross Sound.
Fishematics were a different beast altogether, though. I couldn’t remain under Joe’s protection forever. After the season, back in Juneau, I began mixing with certain fishermen who loved talking fishematics. At first I felt like I was listening to a foreign language, but soon I mastered the different theorems, postulates, axioms, and equations. I was overcome with the bubbly feeling of belonging, but I soon became plagued by philosophical questions. If a fisherman doesn’t catch any fish and no one’s around to see it, did he really not catch any fish? What is the meaning of fishing? Why are there fish rather than no fish? Do fish shape our nature more than fishing does? What is fishing? What is fish? I tried to use fishematics to solve these problems, but the deeper I delved, the more questions arose. It got so bad that I was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.
On street corners, in alleyways, and in bars, I frequently found myself locked in fishematical debates over the size and quantity of fish, many of which I’d never even caught.
“I don’t like to talk about myself or the fish I’ve caught,” I’d said, squaring off against a crusty old-timer who looked like he’d been fishing for at least eight decades. “But thirty-seven years ago, in Frederick Sound, I caught a 164-pound king.”
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