Ebb and Flow

TRINIDAD, Calif. —  They will come to the pier tomorrow, on Thanksgiving morning, to ask for the safety of their fishermen. It is known as the blessing of the fleet, a tradition on a day of traditions.

They do not make reference to a specific deity, God or otherwise, but they ask that whatever forces might come to bear protect those soon to enter the waters in pursuit of the Dungeness crab.

It is dangerous work. The federal government considers it among the most deadly occupations, and the winter months are the most treacherous of all off California’s northern coast.

There are days when winds bear down from the north and seem not to care at all about the 311 inhabitants of this village built on a high bluff up the coast from Eureka.

But as they have done for so many years, 20 to 25 boats will leave harbor before dawn on Dec. 1, as the long-awaited crab season begins. This will be a critical season. While prices last year were as high as they have ever been, crabs were scarce, and another slow season could be devastating.

Many have died in pursuit of the Dungeness, and most who come to the pier on Thanksgiving Day can tell you about loved ones claimed by the sea, about the haunting sound of the fog bell that rings 12 times whenever one of theirs is taken.

The people of Trinidad understand tragedy, even more so, perhaps, since Sept. 11. It is a part of their heritage, a history told through tales of timber and sea. They also understand the importance of tradition, and so they will come to the pier, and when they look out on the water and forests, they will see givers, not takers, of life.

Lauren Kirkpatrick, a soft-spoken 41-year-old, lost a brother and two men she once loved. Each year when the air turns cold and Thanksgiving seems lonely, an icy chill runs through her.

And when she describes her family, how everything changed when her brother went down 15 years ago with the Pacific Jewel, and how her daughter’s father also has been taken by the sea, she describes a balloon, once filled with air, now mostly deflated and lifeless.

“I think there are a lot of people in New York who know how I feel,” she says. Still, she will come to the pier hoping she is not pitied. She says she wants to wish the fishermen and their families well. People die, but traditions must live, she says. Otherwise, what remains?

Some traditions in this small town are whimsical: gatherings beneath full moons, an annual parade in the name of a prostitute, the gathering of men to gamble, lie and dine on cougar meat.

But Thanksgiving is about families. Not everyone will come home this Thanksgiving, the result of war and distance, but people in Trinidad say they will celebrate the holiday the way they always have, with humility and hope.

The Years Bring Changes,

Some Unwelcome

There will be an empty place at the Waneks’ Thanksgiving table, as the oldest of their four children, son Joseph Wanek, 20, will not be home. A Marine at Camp Pendleton, he is on call to war.

The Waneks moved here from Santa Clarita in 1997. Like many newcomers, they were drawn by the beauty and chased out by the city. They wanted a slower pace, a quieter life, and they have found both on eight acres of majestic redwoods, where the sound of the surf, like other people’s doings, carries easily throughout the village.

It is a place where many longtime residents have roots in lumbering or fishing and in recent years have felt they were losing grasp of what has always been theirs. Among the new arrivals are artists and retirees, some of whom buy small homes and make them big. Then there are wanderers who fill campgrounds with trailers and motor homes.

Enrollment at the school, kindergarten through eighth grade, is in decline, as housing costs rise and young families find it harder to earn wages that allow them to stay.

Debbie Wanek’s husband, Craig, sells real estate and works nights at the local bingo hall. As much as they love it here, they miss the days when they were close enough to relatives to celebrate holidays together.

They miss Debbie’s father, whose heart gave out four years ago at age 75. He would peel the Thanksgiving potatoes and later sit on the couch with his grandchildren and read them stories. They also miss her 33-year-old brother, killed 15 years ago in a car crash.

Thanksgiving is not the same without them, but Debbie says she will cook the same size turkey she has always cooked and prepare stuffing the same way her mother does, even though her mother won’t make the trip up from North Hollywood this year. She will make her cranberries with brandy, same as always, and she will bring out the good dishes and silver, light the candles, because that is their tradition. The Saunders family will arrive at the pier en masse. Son Steve, 47, and his family will come home from Palo Alto to spend the day with his sister, nieces, nephews and parents, Glenn, 77, and Janis Saunders, 72.

Another son, Larry, a member of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, will not be home this year, as he is back East enrolled in a training program sponsored by the FBI.

Friends will visit throughout the day, and the family will watch home movies and play checkers.

Unless a storm blows in, they will go to the beach, where years ago they slept beneath the stars. In late afternoon, they will track sand into the house, take their places around the table and hold hands. One of the grandchildren will say the blessing before they dig in.

For other holidays, they usually gather somewhere else, but Thanksgiving is a time to come home. “It would be tragic to us if we lost our traditions,” Janis Saunders says. “I’m sure the whole family would feel that way. We’ve done this for generations. It makes everyone feel that they’re coming home.”

And since Sept. 11, such traditions are even more important, she says.

“We need each other more now than ever. Maybe what happened had to happen so we would realize that we have to focus on what’s really important in life, on Earth, for all of us.”

New York and Washington and Pennsylvania and Afghanistan are far from Trinidad in distance and almost every other way. But even here, in this place of water and majestic redwoods, life seems different.

“We can’t do anything about Afghanistan today, but we can do something in our own community, our own home,” Janis Saunders says. “It all starts here, if it’s going to start at all.”

A Boat Handed Down

Through Generations

George Collins is 93 and has spent most of his life on the water. He has crabbed and taken sports fishermen out in pursuit of salmon as captain of a charter boat.

He long ago handed the business over to his son, T.J., now 64, and still known to some in town as “The Kid.” Last year, T.J.’s son, Clay, 24, became captain of their Shenandoah.

T.J. spent 50 years on the water, and last year was the first time he didn’t go out. He says he doesn’t miss it, as fishing was never his dream. It was his father’s dream, he says, and now it is his son’s.

When he thinks about the sea, his hands turn cold. His shoulders tighten. One cannot trust the sea. “Paying attention,” he says, “is more important than thinking when you’re out there.”

He is doing now what he has always wanted to do, paint pictures. Think. The winter sea and sky is often gray, and now he basks in colors. He always suspected he was an artist, he says, and now he has a chance to find out.

His father is the oldest fisherman in Trinidad. George Collins started fishing in 1947 to provide his restaurant with fresh fish. At various times, he has served as mayor, fire chief and dock commissioner, but captain is the role he cherished most.

When he talks about home, he is referring not to his small house but to the sea, even though he has had his share of close calls when the ocean heaved without mercy, and he cursed and prayed in the same breath.

He thinks about those who have been claimed by the sea as he sits at his kitchen table with a grilled cheese sandwich and coffee with milk. A tray in front of him contains nine bottles of various pills. He points to his right. There was the young fellow next door, he says.

Then he points to the left, toward Memorial Lighthouse, where the names of those lost at sea are written in stone. Another guy with two sons drowned out there, he says. And there were others.

Behind his home, hidden behind crab pots and ropes and buoys, is his gear shed, another Trinidad tradition.

Once or twice a month, men of the town would gather here to play “cowboy poker,” to tell their lies and play nine ball. It was a place where members had their own padlocks and storage lockers to safeguard their booze, but once when T.J. was down on his luck, and it was too cold to fish, he admits that a buddy showed him how to remove the hinges, so he could sneak a lick.

Meals of bear and rattlesnake and cougar stewed in a big pot by the bar. The decor of the shed is unchanged. Pencil sketches of the old-timers drawn by a former Disney cartoonist hang on the wall. There are Christmas lights lacing the ceiling, old photos, pictures of bare-breasted women and, of course, poker-playing dogs. There is no clock.

When George Collins was a young man, the poker games would go well into the night, but as the old-timers grew older, they would shut down at 11 p.m., then 10, then 9. Now, it’s the young ones who are starting to come.

Bob Hallmark, 72, is one of the original members of the fraternity, the only one who still fishes full time. His father built the dock in the mid-1940s, and it stayed in the family until a couple years ago, when he sold it to the local rancheria.

He was known as “Whitewater Bob,” for his willingness to enter turbulent seas. Over the years, he gave many fishermen their first jobs. He is assisted now by son David, whom he describes as a fisherman of rare talent, perhaps the fastest on the coast at pulling up crab pots, sometimes 400 times a day.

Soon, the Hallmarks will set out to sea with the others. If the water is calm, that would be fine, he says, but if the wind kicks up and spray flies, that would be even better, for that is when he feels most alive.

“God can do some things with that water,” he says, “but it gets in your blood, and you enjoy it. Frankly, a lot of the fellows could make more money doing other things, but it’s exciting pulling up the crab pots, like a little boy at Easter, looking for that bonanza.”

Traditions Old, New and

Decidedly Different

There are other traditions in Trinidad, like the annual parade to honor Cockeyed Florence, a legendary prostitute said to have been buried over the cemetery fence, apart from the honorable dead. To the song of bagpipes, 50 or 60 townspeople parade each year to the cemetery, where local historian Ned Simmons reads his “Lament of Cockeyed Florence” and residents lay flowers upon her grave.

Then there are the Loonies, who gather each full moon on Trinidad Head. They hike out with spirited banter and bottles of champagne to sing “Happy Birthday” to the rising moon.

Other legends and traditions date back further, to a time before Trinidad even existed. Axel Lindgren III, 51, can trace his American Indian heritage back six generations to the Yurok settlement of Tsurai.

There is a place on a nearby beach where generations of his family have fished with nets. Each family had a designated area to fish, and this was his. They would bring their fish in and lay them upon a rock, and if there were too many for the rock, they would lay seaweed upon the sand where the fish could be dried by the sun.

Lindgren’s great-grandmother was the last medicine woman in the village of Tsurai. Each day before his father went to school, she would awaken early to find ingredients for medicine to rub upon him to keep him safe.

Before he died a couple years ago, Lindgren’s father participated in the blessing of the fleet. Now his son continues the tradition with a yellow feather and sage.

Since the first blessing in 1995, says founder Marge O’Brien, none of the town’s fishermen has been lost to the sea.

There have been close calls, like the time a boat was hammered by a monstrous wave and rolled twice. The vessel lost its cab but not its three fishermen. “I think that’s a miracle,” she says.

It is not only the sea that seems dangerous now, she says. The entire world seems unsafe.

“You don’t know how long you’re going to be here,” she says. “I think the feeling at the blessing this year is that we should show more gratitude for whatever we are given, even if it’s not a lot.”

Among those heading out to sea will be O’Brien’s husband, Jim Gullett. Tragedies of the past, on land and sea, will not stop him or the others from setting out in early morning, doing what they have always done.

“That’s what Trinidad’s all about,” says O’Brien. “It’s who we are. This is one of the few ocean-side towns that hasn’t become a resort, an artsy kind of place. It’s the crab fishing that makes us unique.”

But first there is the matter of Thanksgiving, Gullett says, a time for tradition. “To me, it’s a day of peace and family,” he says, “a day to feel safe.”