What's To Be Done!

  What’s to be Done

The wind picked up, the waves got steeper and meaner, and the bow dug deeper into the churning water.

“Hell, why not. I can stay here a little bit longer. I’m not that far off the shore anyway,” the sole passenger of the dilapidated sheet-metal boat thought. “I can even swim to the shore if I have to, for crying out loud,” the thought flashed through his mind.

He pictured his home, a place drowned in shells like a creature of the deep sea, cluttered with driftwood, each unequally sculpted by nature and artistically honed by the capricious waves. And the ocean had given him plenty of food—more than he could ever consume. Yet, there was a limit to what he could do with seafood. How many different ways could he cook fish?

The most troubling fact was that, even with this abundance, he’d managed to remain poor, barely making a modest living selling fish, crab, oysters, and lobster; enough to get by but not nearly enough to afford a larger house or move away. “In this God-forsaken town, everyone is a fisherman; this damn competition keeps the market prices crushed,” he pondered.

The front of the boat got stuck in a trough; the back was pushed up and over by the next surge. The rusting hull rocked like a baby’s cradle, then suddenly turned sideways to the waves.

He thought of his freezer at home, choked with seafood, unable to breathe, and jammed with crab meat and fish in its belly. “When can I ever eat all that frozen fish when the sea offers the fresh ones every day?”

None of the fishermen, like himself, could ever break out of his misery. They needed industrial freezers and a well-structured cooperative to reach other parts of the country. They needed to make more out of their own sweat; otherwise, they were all doomed to suffer just to make the fish processing companies richer.

A big wave hit the side of the boat like a wall. The boat was too small and too light to withstand the blow. The thin metal plates did not have enough weight at the bottom to stay upright. He discerned the danger as he’d been on the open seas all his life, yet he didn't care.

They had no choice but to go with dock prices dictated by corporations, not the men on the boats. The companies were the ones who networked with supermarkets across the country; they were the gatekeepers with the fishermen under their yoke, sweating day in and day out. The mere thought of helplessness struck him as unbearable. 

The wave pushed the top of the boat over, and the vessel rocked viciously with no control.

He was lost in a trance, recollecting their meetings. The men and women of this small coastal community gathered like a weary tide. They sat in worn-out flannel or salt-stained bib overalls, their faces etched with the lines of a thousand storms. The meetings took place in the back room of the local tavern, where the air stank of stale beer and spilled fuel, or in the drafty community hall, where the heater groaned but never managed to fight off the biting cold.

At times, he had proposed moving the meeting to their community church, but the doors always remained closed to their cause.

“We don’t get involved in politics of any kind,” the pastor had told him once in his divine voice.

“What politics? Our meeting is about our livelihood, not politics,” he had responded. “It’s about how to keep our head above the water, pastor.”

He knew exactly what the pastor meant by "politics." The church was a quiet recipient of the big fish companies' charitable donations—blood money meant to buy the complicity of the pulpit. The nationwide corporations were not praised as saviors, and he was ostracized and chastised as a troublemaker. The ones reaping benefits of their hard work were champions of good deeds, while the ones who pulled the wealth from the water were denounced as nuisances.

“The companies give you out of our sweat and blood, Pastor,” he muttered, recalling his words. “But we pay, too. Every one of us pays every week to keep the house of God running,” he told the minister in a large gathering of his fellow fishermen. His words had weighed heavy on the air, thickened with a mélange of seaweed, coffee, and the stench of fish.  

“Our problem is the middleman! If twenty or thirty of us refuse to sell lobster for less than $6.00 a pound, the plant can't just move to the next boat; all we have to do is stick together. It’s that simple. Believe me, it costs them a whole heck of a lot of money to move out of our community and establish a similar business elsewhere. Don’t you see the power of our unity?”

“But they always manage to force us to sell at market price,” one argued.

“They can weather us out. They can punish us by not buying at all. They lose money, but they can afford it, we can’t. This is a gamble we cannot lose,” an old fisherman commented.

“Resistance has a hefty cost,” another griped. “You and I both know, if any of us, any fisherman’s kid, has a costly health issue and has to see a doctor, or his boat needs repair, he will break ranks and sell for $5.00 per pound or even lower, and they know that.”

The prevalent sentiment of helplessness in the community had branded him an agitator, a label given to him by the very people he was fighting for.

Now, the water was churning with a violent energy, creating walls of deep teal and turquoise. He saw the white-capped crests breaking directly against his dented metal hull. Suddenly, a forceful surge, a rogue wave, hit the boat and flipped it in the blink of an eye.

The dark heaps of water, topped with bitter, frothing white foam, zapped his senses like lightning. The chaos dislodged him off the boat and threw him into the sea while the capsized boat floated sideways. He witnessed his boat sinking. His heart throbbed. He was standing on nothing, yet he felt a sudden tug. He realized he was being pulled down by an unknown force into the depth of the abyss. The sinking boat was attached to his ankle by a long rope. He was entangled in the anchor line, going down with his doomed vessel.

He desperately tussled toward the boat and grabbed the line, but the entire weight of the drowning iron pulled him under. He had no tools to cut the long line, no way to cut the umbilical cord bonding him to a dark destiny. Looking out across the vortex of death, he tried to estimate the distance and time to the bedrock, yet he was not powerful enough to stay afloat with the dead weight of the metal boat anchored to his leg. The sky burned red and orange near the horizon, a harbinger of his ensuing inevitable.

The boat was taking him down deeper; he could not breathe anymore. He thought of the life jacket trapped below the deck, but it could not rescue him; the overwhelming weight of the boat overrode any buoyancy of the life jacket. As he struggled with no air left in his chest, his hand touched a large log floating above his head. He grabbed it. The tree trunk rolled as he tried to secure a hold, but finally, he looped his hands around the driftwood and pulled his head barely above the water to breathe. When he surfaced, coughing, the heavy scrap metal was still looped around his ankle, dragging him down.

He swam hard, lungs burning, holding the drifting log as it moved further from the shore. He wrapped his arms around it and fumbled with the rope. Suddenly, the log stopped moving. The boat had anchored him to the bedrock. The more he tried to release himself, the more the sunken iron lodged between the huge rocks below. He was now caught in a state of limbo. His hands were clinging to the log and his leg tied to the boat, stuck between heavy rocks.

Arms stretched wide to steady himself. Legs drawn together around the rope. Beneath him, rocks shimmered through the moving water. Around him, the current pressed and pulled. Above him, the darkening sky. He learned quickly what this position meant. An attempt to untie himself would have meant letting the log drift away, not being sure he could cut the line if he tried. He couldn't afford to lose the log, yet if he stayed tied, he couldn't swim away from his position to the shore. All he could do was maintain his precarious purgatory.

Every wave threatened to tear him from the log; every muscle tightened to counteract destiny. Life and death were intertwined in a bizarre stalemate.

Hours passed. Night fell. Cold seeped into his bones. As he lost consciousness for a moment, his grip slipped, and he drifted. He woke in agony and grabbed the log. Every time a foamy wave slapped him in the face, his shoulders burned; his hands went numb. Excruciating pain radiated through him as he squinted into the darkness. His lips were cracked, and with every gyration, the rope was cutting deeper through his flesh.

The merciless waves kept lashing at him the entire night. The rocks beneath didn't move. The log kept floating away, yet the fisherman’s feeble grip remained steady enough to hold him just above nothingness, a fragile safety that demanded everything in return.

Lifeless and devastated, the man grasped at the tormenting oblivion and bitter cold, never letting go of the driftwood the entire night.

The next time he opened his eyes, the first rays of a new day shimmered on the dark waves and sparkled in his eyes. He was jolted into a new awakening. He felt a trembling shake beneath his feet. He noticed a boat next to the log.  A fellow fisherman underwater, with a knife in hand, was cutting the line to set him free.