When Ed came on our boat, his hair was all shaved off– except for a cropped patch on the crown of his head. He had been at loose ends, wandering around the country, and he had ended up with a group of Hari Krishnas. Eventually he decided to do something different with his life and he became another of the countless bits of human flotsam and jetsam that washed up on our Alaskan shores every year. We were amazed enough by our new greenhorn's unusual past, but then he told us he had been on the F/V Skaggit Eagle for its only voyage on the Bering Sea. I felt guilty when he told us this. The skipper had asked me to be their cook and I had turned him down. I had never heard of the Skaggit Eagle, and he had explained to me that it had been named for a river in Washington and it had worked down there until it changed hands. When I asked him if he had ever fished the Bering Sea, he told me no. That was all I needed to hear to know I didn't want to go out on that boat. If the skipper and the boat were going to bust their cherries on the Bering Sea together, the chances of a mishap stood great in the balance of things. I told that skipper about my feelings as kindly as I could and warned him to be careful out there. He was in a different world up here in Alaska, and the Bering was an unforgiving sea with a harsher criteria for survival. The Skaggit Eagle ran aground on the other side of our island because the skipper decided to find shelter from a storm. On the way in he lay down to get some sleep and refused to get up when he was supposed to. There wasn't a single seasoned crew man on the vessel and the green horns sat or stood together in the pilot house and watched the ship run itself aground with the auto pilot. I felt really bad after hearing this story. I knew how to pilot a vessel, and if I had been on board I would have either steered the boat safely into harbor, or turned it around and jogged out the storm until the skipper woke up. Instead, a local salvage company had gone out for the boat after the crew was rescued, and after that it sat in port, looking forlorn. I had walked past it thinking they should call it the Wounded Eagle. It didn't look like it was in any shape to fly across the waves anymore. If I had signed on, the sad ship would have been given a second chance, but with a lazy skipper who liked his sleep, it would have needed more than that up here. I had discovered that all ships sing. They each have their own song and I think it is caused by the sound of their engines resonating through their structures. I had learned to listen for their songs, and there was many a day or night when I had lain myself down for a few hours sleep and I had been lulled into relaxing by their songs. All was well as long as a ship was singing. They only stopped when they came to rest in port, or when something was wrong. I think they all have souls. It is as though they are drums of the sea. When they are made spirits enter them, and it is these which give them life, these sirens of the sea. Life is noisy and it must be heard in whatever way it can. Only that which is dead is silent. I couldn't help but wonder what song the Skaggit Eagle had sung before she was beached, and how it had changed, now that she was a mere piece of salvage awaiting an uncertain fate? Ed turned out to be quite a character. He was quiet and gentle, taking the rough humor of the rest of the crew in his stride. While we were all as fierce and passionate as the waters we worked on, Ed was a doledrum where quiet gathered. But sometimes his placid surface would stir for a joke, or just to laugh. There was humor drifting around under his surface somewhere, as we found out in the most unusual ways. We were having a hard time finding the crab. Everyone was. On the radio the skippers were crying, asking everyone else, "Have you found the crab yet? Where are they? What happened to them?" The crab were like that, they had a way of just disappearing, or maybe they just scattered out so far and wide that it seemed as though there were none or few. Everyone was scratching hard and Ed decided to try and break our luck after I told a story I had heard about a crazy fisherman. The man had been out in a skiff with his buddies and they were having no luck catching any fish. Finally the man decided it was time to do the herring dance and call the fish to his hook. He took a herring from the bait bucket and stood up yelling and whooping. He bit the head from the herring as he precariously danced in place in the boat, scaring his friends. Then he sat down and baited his hook with the headless bait fish and promptly caught a big fish. After that he kept pulling them in, one after another, almost as soon as his hook was wet. Finally the two other men looked at each other for a few seconds, and then they each grabbed a herring and jumped up in imitation of their friend. They all caught their limit that day. I was working in the galley when Little Ed came in. He was our other Ed on the boat. The two men couldn't have been more different. Little Ed was a seasoned, middle-aged deck hand and very short with a beard. Ed was tall and young, clean-shaven and new to everything. Little Ed told me to come out and look at what the idiots were doing. When I went to the galley hatch, there was Ed and two of the other deck hands dancing around. They were doing the Hari Krishna jig around the hatch of the holding tank and singing some kind of nonsense about crabs while yelling out the names of strange gods. Their hands imitated the clasping motions of claws and they looked ridiculous jumping around in their yellow rain gear. "Geez!" Little Ed said, "I hope some other boat doesn't pass by while they are doing that, it's embarrassing!" I just laughed as I told him that the dance wouldn't work unless they all bit the heads off of herring while they were doing it. He looked at me speculatively, "Do you think they will do it?" "I don't know, but if they are dancing around like a bunch of fools, they just might." I told him. "Good idea!" He answered, "I want to see this. I think I'll go tell them now." Little Ed trotted back out on deck, and as I turned to go back to work, I heard him yelling something about, "The cook says you have to bite the heads off of herring! Want some bait?" One day a cold snap descended upon the sea and we were being pelted by freezing spray. The air was so cold, as soon as the spray from the sea hit anything it instantly froze. Sheets of ice began to fall from the crews' rain gear as the boat began to ice up. It was time to give up fishing for a while, because the crab froze solid as soon as they poured out onto the sorting table. Their legs snapped off in the deck hands' hands as they tried to sort them. Crab pieces were worthless and it was better to wait until it warmed up to extremely cold, instead of the snap-freeze atmosphere that surrounded us. As the crew was finishing up on deck, the skipper told Ed to go up and check something on the bow. I was up in the pilot house waiting to take the wheel for a while, since we were going to jog until the weather changed. Ed finished what he was doing, but enough ice had built up in the short time he had been up there, that he immediately fell as soon as he wasn't holding on to anything. He landed on his back and started spinning around with his arms and legs flailing about. Every time he tried to turn over on his hands and knees he flipped right back over and went spinning around on his back again. I started laughing when the skipper groaned and asked, "What the hell is he doing out there?" "I don't know," I answered, "but he looks like a Keystone Cop trying to break dance!" Pretty soon the deck boss came up to ask if there was anything else that needed doing before we closed shop for the day? In a few moments he was bent over the console watching Ed along with us. "What is he doing out there?" he asked. The skipper turned to him and told him to never mind. "Just go out and get the idiot. And hang onto something or we'll have two fools rolling around out there. It's really slippery!" The deck boss slipped on the way out the door and nearly fell. With this caution before him, he was careful to hang on to the rail as he slipped and slid up to where our spinmeister was still going at it. The deck boss reached out the full length of his great arms to grasp Ed by the scruff of his rain jacket without letting go of the rail. He pulled him to his feet and threw the unfortunate greenhorn against the rail so that he could steady himself and then escorted him in. "You looked like a turtle out there!" I told a bewildered Ed. "I've never seen a turtle break dance before!" "I couldn't get back up, I just kept sliding around out there!" He replied with a dazed look on his face. I got the impression that the experience had overwhelmed him a bit. "Maybe we should get you a Mutant Ninja Turtle outfit, since you act like one." I suggested. The deck boss grinned at this idea as Ed began speculating on whether he would look good in a mask. The skipper promptly vetoed this idea. It was bad enough that he had Hari Krishna dancing going on around his holding tank hatch without adding costumes to the act. "Well, looks like you've been demoted right out of the gate, Ed." I told him, adding, "You will just have to be an ordinary turtle in a yellow deck suit." The deck boss liked the idea of naming Ed "Turtle." He told us that having two Eds on deck was confusing anyway. "Besides," he told the newly-dubbed Turtle, "You are as slow as one." That was that, the ice had shown us his invisible shell and given us his name. Ed would be Turtle forever more as long as he worked on our boat. It was a first for me. I had never worked with a Hari Krishna Not-Quite-A-Mutant-Ninja Turtle before. May your shell always give you shelter, Turtle, and may you dance joyously wherever you go. But lay off the herring, I was only joking when I suggested that you bite their heads off.
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