“The Gift” was written for an anthology called Alaska Women Write, a collection of non-fiction essays by Alaskan women. Mine is about growing up on a boat on which my mother was deckhand in the Gulf of Alaska.

Written by request of Deb Wahrer, who put together the anthology. And, I still don’t know how, finagled me into editing it.

Excerpt from “The Gift”

When the salmon hit Cook Inlet, the fishing boats hit it with them, and the Celtic was not far behind. We went wherever the fishing boats had nets in the water. We would offload groceries and fresh water and parts and fuel, and load fish. The skipper sat in the galley writing fish tickets. My mother stood on the catwalk outside the wheelhouse, five silver counters on each hand. One hand kept count of the fish loaded from the boat to starboard, the other from the boat to port. There was one counter for each kind of fish: kings, reds, silvers, humpies and dogs. I never learned the difference between reds and silvers. The humpies I knew because they were little, three pounds, and the dogs because they were big, eight to ten. The kings were biggest, thirty pounds and up. Mom knew them all, on sight, from thirty feet. I can still see her there, looking down from the catwalk, forearms resting on the railing, fingers moving swiftly and accurately on their many counters. She was as dark as I was fair, with brown hair, brown eyes and an olive skin that tanned easily in the constant glare of an Arctic summer sun. She would look up and see me staring, and her teeth would flash white in a quick smile. You okay, honey? she’d ask. I’m okay, Mom, I’d say. You catching all those strays? Every one, Mom.

Mom would take the deckboards off the hold and brace them to form a slide between the gunnel and the opening of the hold. The fishermen pewed their fish up over the side of the Celtic and, theoretically, the fish would hit the slide and slip right into the hold. In practice, about one in five of the salmon slid to the deck, where I stood with my own pew, ready to snag strays. A pew in my nine-year old hands with a couple of reds on the other end formed a pretty effective counterweight. One day I got cocky and pewed up three salmon. I staggered over to the hold, confident that Mom’s admiring eyes were upon me, and tilted the pew. The salmon didn’t slide off the single prong like they were supposed to, I didn’t let go of the wooden handle like I should have and all of us ended up in the hold together. There were already a lot of salmon in the hold so I landed soft. They fished me out when they stopped laughing. I can laugh about it, too. Now.

I didn’t eat salmon again until I was thirty-five.