Jetty Fishery

If you’re lucky, this is how you’ll first see Jetty Fishery: on a cool, damp, winter afternoon with a man you like—a man who knows where he’s going. 

You go the day he wakes you with pancakes made from scratch, a meal you eat wrapped in the quilt his mother made for him, denim interspersed with plaids and stripes cut from the clothes he wore as a child. 

You first see the fishery off to your right between Highway 101 and the steely, saline sea. The small sign is all capital letters and easily missed. Patchy grass smelling of the tide pokes between weathered picnic tables before petering out to gravel that’s littered with rusty buckets and yellow tarps. There’s a T-shaped dock tied up with bobbing silver boats. Next to it, a steaming vat of boiling water and a tank with three big Dungeness crabs moving across its floor in slow motion. You haven’t had crab since you were little. The man you’re with asks for two, laughs when you turn away as they’re put in to cook.

Clouds lift as the crabs boil, revealing blue hillsides in the distance as you walk to the tiny store and then over worn linoleum to a cooler in the back. You lift the cold silver handle that opens a heavy glass door, reach for one of the small, flowered Dixie cups with chunks of butter still half-wrapped in thin paper. There are lemons, too, bright yellow, softening in spots. 

The man you’re with rinses a serrated knife he finds in a small sink next to the cooler. He slices a lemon right on the Formica countertop, squeezes some juice into the wax-coated Dixie cup, then puts the concoction into the microwave—one minute—until it’s steaming hot. 

You read the small blue type on the fishing regulations as you wait for the crabs to finish, then watch the old man who runs the joint as he cracks them in half and cleans out the guts. He hands them to you piled in a shiny silver bowl, along with half a dozen oysters resting raw on the insides of their barnacled shells. 

You drip hot sauce and squeeze lemon on slippery oyster flesh, eating them in one bite between chunks of crab extracted by cracking the shells with your teeth. You take turns dipping soft, sweet crab meat into the Dixie cup with your fingers, feeding the biggest pieces to each other. The dampness of the picnic table slowly seeps through your jeans. A little butter and crab juice soak into the thick cuffs of the sweatshirt the man you’re with took off and gave to you so you’d be warm. The seagulls know their screeching will be rewarded, that it won’t be long before you’ll toss what’s left of the crabs back into the stormy sea and they’ll feast on the scraps of meat you’re too full to want. 

You wash your hands at the sink inside, then tell the flannel-shirted woman at the cash register what you ate, so she’ll know what to charge you. It’s next to nothing. 

You get back into the car. Time slows as you drive past the Tillamook cows and the red-and-white lighthouse, its upper half angled glass. You pull over and get out as the sun begins to set at Cape Meares, the sky turning shades of bunny-ear pink. Tall, rounded rocks stand sentry, half-submerged in the ocean. The moon glows in the east. 

Driving back, it’s dark and peaceful. You listen to the closest thing he’s got to country music, twangy, banjo-laden bluegrass; it’s playing because he knows you like it. 

It feels like childhood, and children to come, and home.