mama, mama, I'm coming home

This morning we put the net in the hatch, chained the skiff to the back deck, and stowed our gear. After a hard season of scratch fishing and weather comparable to what you typically encounter further north on the Aleutian chain, we'll cross Dixon Entrance tomorrow on our way south to Bellingham.

It's time. Since my last post I've had the satisfaction of feeling that after two years of this routine I finally have a sense of what it means to be a deckhand on a commercial seiner. The shared camaraderie with captain and crew is something I will miss, along with the thrill of catching fish, the satisfaction of hard physical work, and the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. But I won't miss the hard drinking, the brawls, the miserable weather, the close quarters, and above all, the sense of remoteness from a larger world of diverse people, places, and ideas.

In retrospect my memory of what I've left behind grows fonder, and my heart tends to yearn for what it is I don't have. I think this is a human tendency that's fairly common, and I will almost surely slip back into romantic visions of everything this time was (and wasn't) as I'm holed up in a pub at Oxford writing my master thesis. But after two times around my hope is that I've seen with a little more clarity the life of a fisherman and that my decision not to choose it for myself is an informed one. Though even greater adventures await, each time away brings me closer to knowing where it is I will ultimately land, like an oscillating pendulum that slowly loses energy as it tends towards a central point.

I now have a couple weeks divided between time with friends, family, and pre-Oxford prep before I fly to DC on the 27 of September, and from there to the UK on the 1 of October. Pray for safe travels back through the Inside Passage: if the weather stays as bad as it's been we may be in for some rough riding.

Aaron