HOLLY HUGHES fished in Alaska from 1979 - 1987, gillnetting for salmon for four years on the Merry Maid, then running tenders for the herring and salmon season for four seasons with her former husband Dave Hartwig. They were lucky to fish with Jon and Doreen on the Beverly Sue, Guy and Anne on the Restless, and Barney on the Vega—and she still counts those seasons with the “double-ender fleet” among the best times of her life.
She continues to go back to Alaska each summer—this summer will be her 32nd season—and is currently working on the Gravina, a beautiful wood boat that worked for the Forest Service for many years in SE and which is owned by Mark Lundsten, a former halibut fisherman. She teaches writing and co-directs the Sustainability Initiative at Edmonds Community College and divides her time between Indianola and Chimacum, Washington.
She continues to go back to Alaska each summer—this summer will be her 32nd season—and is currently working on the Gravina, a beautiful wood boat that worked for the Forest Service for many years in SE and which is owned by Mark Lundsten, a former halibut fisherman. She teaches writing and co-directs the Sustainability Initiative at Edmonds Community College and divides her time between Indianola and Chimacum, Washington.
AUDIO
WRITINGS
Ablution
From the trolling cockpit
I watch you rise
like a prayer to the surface
pull you from the sea
slide the hook from your jaw
your silver body in my hands
gasping in the shock of air.
I lay the bowing arc of you
on the plywood table
to be cleaned.
The cannery says I must bleed
you while you're still alive.
I slice an artery
your blood pools
thick and red on deck
slit your long white belly
pull out your luminous organs
heavy with herring
stroke your scales --
ask forgiveness --
sluice your belly with sea water
until your bones glisten
white and startled
against pink flesh and
the water runs red
but your body knows
still what to do
how to move
in the bright water.
Down I lay you on the wet deck
empty and shining
and the wing of your tail
strokes the wood
as you swim away
into air
a silver river
of memory
longing
for the sea.
-----------------------
September Letter from Rocky Pass
Marine radio calls for gusts up to 50,
rain thrums on the wheelhouse roof,
and wind shrills in the rigging
as another fall squall rolls through.
On the back deck, five crabs scuttle
in a blue bucket, scratches startling,
until I realize what makes them, think
how good they’ll taste for dinner.
Yesterday I found a Steller's Jay:
breast picked clean, only tail feathers intact.
one creature dead, another about to be eaten,
the line crossed in a wingbeat.
Two days ago we ran aground,
had to wait for the rising tide to float us.
We could see the channel from where we were
but that didn’t much matter.
I can’t put that jay out of my mind. When Steller
saw him, he knew they'd reached Bolshaya Zemlya
His servant shot the bird to bring home and
Steller drew the jay in all its blue-black beauty.
How young Steller was, how difficult the voyage:
Bering sick, crew weak from scurvy.
Still he wrote in his log the voyage was a success
though that winter, most of the men died.
In a few hours this storm, too, will pass.
We will eat crab for dinner,
crack and pick each red claw clean
and forget to think enough about it.
-----------------------
Working on Deck, Ten Years Later
Coil the line down against the sun
the old timers said,
clockwise on deck,
and ten years later
my arms still breaststroke
the familiar movement
loop upon loop
rolling the line a quarter turn
so it won’t kink,
feeling the resistance
give way in my hands,
stiff fibers yielding:
the line knows how to lay
if you let it.
Now all the old loops come back
and my hands swim
down the line by heart
and the line remembers
all its lives,
the past carried firm
in its fibers,
how they intertwine
coil upon coil
circling emptiness
to make way for the next.
