Chapter One
At Sea
I used to think Mary was easier to recognize at sea. She was near at hand there. She and the playmates pinned to the bulkheads were usually the only other women on board when I worked as an offshore fisheries observer on the Canadian west coast. On the joint-venture hake fishery in the deep waters off Vancouver Island, the Russian trawl fishermen kept her below decks in their shared cabins and tea corners, in colour magazine clippings of sixteenth-century Orthodox icons, pictures with softened edges in which the grave, gold-haloed head was fingered thin. On board Polish fishing ships, the Byzantine Black Madonna of Czestochowa, as painted by Saint Luke himself on a plank from Mary's cedar wood kitchen table, kept watch in the captain's cabin and the crew's mess. On one ship, she also hung over my bunk, guarding my well-being at the captain's insistence after the hawser line snapped when the fishermen and I were on the stern. Under her jewelled crown, the Madonna of Czestochowa's sword-scarred right cheek and straight-edged, sombre face seemed not unlike the look of the trawl bosun or the winch man or even me, some nights, when we hauled in the rain and dark.
In my low Anglican childhood, the most memorable Mary appeared onstage in the blue-gowned co-star role usually played by blond girls in the nativity scene. Christmas allowed a pregnant Protestant Mary to be important, but only briefly. Thirty years later, at sea, where Mary seemed to come to my attention more than she ever had on land, my interest in her stirred. The ocean and the offshore vessels carried her closer to me. She came nearest of all on Lana Janine, a Canadian black cod boat fishing the twelve-hundred-fathom grounds at the western edge of Canada's sea limit. Lana, formerly Mary Lou, first rigged for tuna in the Gulf of Mexico more than forty years before — 36.58 metres; 255.41 gross tons; stem: raked; stern: fantail; build: caravel — and I were the same age. Neither of us had ever stopped working for long, though Lana lay underwater some while at an upcoast dock after her Bering Sea halibut voyages. Like Stan Rogers's hard-aground Mary Ellen Carter, the boat who had saved her crew through so many Atlantic gales, Lana Janine was raised. Changing my name to Mary Ellen Carter occurs to me sometimes, here on land. The need for a rise-again daydream never surfaced offshore, even when I was the only woman among ninety-man crews on Polish stern trawling ships — some Russian vessels carried a few women — and on Canadian draggers. In storms blowing vessel crews' fury with Canadian fishing regulations, or gusts of my own sometime loneliness, or sixty-knot winds across the deep-water grounds, the ocean and the possibility of Mary must have held me up more than I knew.
Left on board by the long-ago Mexican crew, the Virgin Mary lived in a locker on Lana Janine's top deck. The door by the wheelhouse ladder was inset with a blue glass cross. In the locker, beyond the potato sacks, past the cases of root beer and Coke, stood an altar. On the altar, a hardwood arch. Under the arch, Mary of the Black Cod Grounds on the Bowie Seamount thirty-two hours running time west-northwest of Nahwitti Bar.
Mary and the captain, the cook, the engineer, the deckhands, and I climbed forever up one side of Lana Janine's slanted decks, then braced ourselves for the steep-angled descent down the opposite edge of the roll. The boat's heavy main mast had been taken to make more deckroom for black cod traps, so she rolled on a following sea, and when she was headed into swells. She rolled wallowing in the waves' trough and riding high in the spray. Lana Janine rolled when her main engines were running and when they were shut down for a few hours after midnight, so we could drift, asleep on the Pacific. She rolled on both rising and falling seas, and on no sea at all, on calm water. Only one of the men spoke against her for this. "Roll, then, you bloody whore," he would say. Roll your guts out. But she could not help herself. Even the latches on all her port and starboard doors were loosened from the strain of leaning.
