Salmon Tides

It’s two a.m. on a July night and I’m in an aluminum skiff on a river that feeds into Bristol Bay, in southwest Alaska. Around me is the brief moment of night’s darkness; the river is shadow, its banks are darker shadows still. The sky is tumultuous, clouded shadow, the eastern horizon a stripe of blood-red, a harbinger of dawn. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Is that a real thing?

The boat pitches as Mickey, my coworker, struggles to keep the bow straight in the twenty-mile-per-hour wind gusts that slap us like a hand. We’re wearing foulies, heavy rubberized rain gear, to keep out the splashes and driving rain. Then it’s time—Mickey positions the bow just so and grabs the cork line of the net, I grab the lead line, and we pull together, heaving against the force of the river as beautiful, writhing sockeye salmon pop over the gunnels one by one.

We count the fish as they pile around our feet, still stuck