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When I first met Crazy Jeanie I had just come in off a boat. It is customary to make the rounds of the bars even if you don't drink just to see who is in town and hear the news: who got rich, who went broke, who died, what boats don't pay their crews, you know, fishing stuff. Jeanie came up to me and introduced herself. It was St. Valentine's Day and she had bought a case of heart-shaped lipsticks in assorted colors to give to every woman she met. She offered me one and to be polite I took it and thanked her. She wanted to buy me a drink but I only drank soda and the Elbow Room doesn't charge for pop, only for liquor. So it was easy to explain away why that wasn't necessary. I was kind of glad too, I had no idea who the woman was and couldn't help but wonder if she were a lesbian trolling for dates. As time went by and I got to know Jeanie I realized she was an inordinately kind woman with very bad taste in men and a desperate need for friendship. I both liked her and pitied her, always wishing the best for her. The Dutch Harbor/Unalaska community is small and you run into the same people all the time. I would usually bump into Jeanie whenever she was in town. She was actually from Kodiak, if someone who fishes can be from anywhere. One day I met her in front of the Unisea Inn after she had just got off the F/V Fierce Contender. I had worked on the boat in my early days of fishing and it was a big boat. The skipper who ran the boat at that time was a hardcore sea-raper and I didn't like the way he fished. He didn't give the crew time to send the under-sized crab back into the water. Instead they were left to pile up on the deck and die. One night when I was working on the Contender there was a freezing spray. It was so cold that when the spray from the waves hit anything it instantly turned to ice. I watched from the galley doorway as the guys worked. I was waiting for something to bake because I was making some snacks for when they got a break. I could see the sheets of ice falling from their rain gear and I could also see that the crab were starting to freeze to death in the air. Something had to be done. A lot of those crab would be legal-sized the following year, and the joker who ran the boat was letting them die! How could he do this? Even though I was just a cook on the boat and the skipper didn't allow women on deck I went out in the rain gear I always carried with me and began filling tote after tote with crabs. The outer layers of a mound that was taller than me and at least ten feet across were all dead. When I grabbed at them their legs snapped off like icecicles. The under layers were still alive and if I got them into the water they would survive. So I took the tote and dragged it to what is known as the shit chute. It is a gutter that runs along the beam across the ship and water always runs through it circulating out from an open hatch in the crab tank on the steel deck under the wooden planking. It all runs out a scupper or hole in the side of the ship along the base of the gunwhale, or waist high wall which supports the rail. It took a while to get all the crab off deck. When I was through a deck hand named Harold came over and thanked me. He hated leaving the crab to die like that and was glad I had done something about it. I ended up doing this several times on that trip. The weather was very cold and sometimes the guys had to stop fishing because the crab would freeze as soon as they came out of the water, breaking apart even as the guys tried to shovel them out of the pots. Even our greedy "Captain Bligh" could see there was no profit in dead crab. So they would leave the string of pots in the water until the cold snap passed and wait for it to warm up from absolutely freezing to merely very cold. Jeanie was a party girl with a wild and crazy sense of humor. She started telling me about her last trip on the F/V Fierce Contender. As usual it had been cold out there. Most boats will stop fishing when the seas get to 15 feet. But because the Contender was so huge, it kept working in 20 foot seas. One such stormy night Jeanie could see the guys were getting the heck beat out of them on deck. The weather was miserable and so was the crew as they doggedly worked their way through a storm. Jeanie decided to do something nice for the guys to help cheer them up. She got dressed in a little see-through pink teddy and her fancy red cowboy boots with the little white stars on their fronts. She went charging out into the cold, running around the guys on deck and shimmying her skinny body as goosebumps the size of her tits began to well up on her skin. Still it was funny and the guys had a good laugh and whistled and hooted for a minute as they waited for the next pot to come up. And then it was time to get back to work and they instantly forgot about Jeanie. Jeanie was freezing to death after only being out on the deck for the minute or two it took to haul a pot from the bottom and she headed back to the galley. Her little red boots were designed for mud and dirt and dance floors, not the slippery planks of a fishing boat. No one saw Jeanie slip and slide into the shit chute. The rush of water going through there quickly pushed her through the scupper and the only thing that saved her from being lost at sea was the fact that she had reached up trying to grab at something and when she hit the gunwhale she bent her arms so that her elbows caught her. The shit chute was huge enough to allow a man twice Jeanie's size to be washed overboard. Now the freezing woman who was being pushed overboard by icy cold rushing water hung on for dear life and began screaming for help as she kicked at the air and tried to get herself back on the boat. No one could hear Jeanie over the hydraulic equipment and the crashing waves. A howling wind carried her voice away and for all the good it did for her to yell, she might as well have remained silent. It was a terrible tale, I suppose. But I had seen Jeanie's fancy red boots when she first bought them. In my mind I could see her skinny bare legs thrashing out over the icy water and wished I could have been on a boat passing by when it happened. It must have looked hilarious! I could see myself looking through a pair of binoculars, or anyone in the pilot house doing so while wondering exactly what was going on? "Hey!" the question would come over the radio to the Fierce Contender, "Where'd you get those legs? Who is that hanging out your scupper anyway?" I started laughing at the thought and told Jeanie, "Girl, you are too much! I am glad you are here to tell the tale, but you got to admit, you must have looked ridiculous!" Jeanie laughed too, making kicking motions with her fingers and yelling for help in mock terror. She continued with her story, telling how she was finally able to get herself up and out of the water. She trudged back to the galley, exhausted and nearly frozen. Her boots were squishing with water and she couldn't feel her feet any more. One of the guys saw her as she passed by and wanted to know what she was doing still out on deck? "Don't, t, t, talk t, to me!" Jeanie stuttered. Her jaws were nearly frozen and didn't work so well. Her teeth were chattering like castanets. "I will t, t, tell you lat, t, ter!" And she went into the galley to change and warm up.
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