How many of us know about the valley of the shadow of death? I expect many of us have taken that path at one time or another. It may have been when you were experiencing the death of a loved one and death seemed to be a huge shadow that was overwhelming, unmanageable and suffocating. It may have been in a battlefield experience when there was doubt form moment to moment about whether or not you might live for the next minute, day or week.
That valley of shadow comes to all of us in one way or another, sometimes symbolically but sometimes in a very real way. Did we feel the presence of our Lord in that time? Did we reach out and take His hand? Or did we lean on our own understanding and just gut our way through the experience? What does it mean to fear no evil? When we are facing death, either of a loved one or for ourselves, can we do as David did, put our trust in the Creator of the Universe and continue to walk with confidence or do we tense up, square back our shoulders and muddle through with fear and trepidation?
Let me tell you about a stroll through the valley I experienced. In the mid eighties I found myself between earning opportunities (read out of work) for a period of time. A fellow I had known for quite some time offered me a chance to go to Alaska and fish for crab for a summer. I have experience and schooling in oceanography and had made several trips to Alaska including a summer stint as a storekeeper for a salmon cannery. Just an aside, that cannery is located just a couple of miles up the Nushagak River from where Todd Palin’s grandmother had her setnet on the Nushagak. So I was not a complete greenhorn when it came to working on the ocean in an Alaskan setting.
I flew into Dutch Harbor. This should have been a clue to what I was getting in to. The Reeves Alaska 737 that ferried me from Anchorage to Dutch Harbor was pretty much a Detroit city bus with wings. The blue paintjob seemed to have been touched up many times with a brush, the seats were worn and old, the flight attendants sort of matched that description, the engines showed signs of past ( and perhaps present) oil problems and firing them up produced a cloud of blue smoke that would make any teenager proud at a hot rod drifting competition.
The flight out was uncomfortable but that was offset by the turbulence. The scenery was spectacular. It was a rare maritime Alaskan day with a bright blue sky and unlimited visibility. When we neared the Aleutian chain the pilots dropped down to a very few thousand feet above the ocean surface. What a view of God’s handiwork! The islands were a green so intense and fresh that would have sworn we were entering Eden. The blue green ocean wore a lacework of whitecaps to make a fabric fit for any Hollywood queen on Oscar night. I could see schools of fish and seals chasing them, unaware they were being watched from above. It was entrancing.
Then we came to the Dutch Harbor landing site. Notice I didn’t say airport. The landing strip at Dutch Harbor is a strip of land between the steep mountain hillside and the deep ocean. It’s narrow. And it’s gravel. Picture a fully loaded paintbrush blue Boeing 737 at around 125 miles an hour, yawing back and forth to get oriented to a straight path on a gravel strip, everyone aboard clutching the seat arm rests, each other, their back packs, their beer (yes alcohol was served to anyone who could pay for it, perhaps even the pilots, I’m not sure) and wondering why this trip seemed such a good idea in Anchorage.
The wheels touch down and a spray of gravel erupts onto the undercarriage. It sounds as if the plane is being ripped apart by prehistoric beasts. After approximately two years of speed reduction in the gravel (probably more like a minute) the plane comes to a stop, slowly turns and taxis to an asphalt pad where the passengers are dumped. The engines are stopped and the ensuing quiet is deafening. The co-pilot steps out of the cock pit, crosses himself and calls out to a flight attendant in his best imitation of a calm voice, “hey Sue, I win the bet. You didn’t think we’d make it one more time!”
I could tell you tales of Dutch Harbor, the people who make a living there, the kinds of vessels that pass through it’s waters but that would be another book. Suffice it to say, I found my vessel, the Alaska Beauty, my home for the next twelve weeks and my friend. I boarded, stowed my gear, was assigned my duty stations and we set sail for the Bering Sea.
Life aboard a 100 foot fishing vessel is fodder for another book. Many of you have watched the TV series “Deadliest Catch”. That series is not an exaggeration. That’s pretty much what life is like aboard a crabber. Some of the boats on that series are the same boats that were fishing when I was there twenty years ago. The summer I was there seven people were lost including a hand from a sister ship that was with us out near the International Date Line. One vessel larger than ours went down in a bit of rough weather. The captain was drunk and simply passed out at a critical maneuver, broached the ship and it caught a huge wave, capsized and never came up. Six people aboard.
So, was that my walk through the valley? No, so far my trip was a walk in the park. In late July we were near the International Date line, three days from any land. The Pribilof Islands were the closest land and there is not a lot on the Pribilof Islands except solitude, birds and walrus. It’s a place to restore one's soul.
We were working several strings of crab pots, having some success,
but not near enough in the hold to head back to Dutch to sell the catch. I was
working the hydraulics to bring the pots aboard when the captain stepped out
on the gangway behind the cabin and hollered at us. Captains on crabbers never
talk to the crew, they yell at them. “We’ve got big weather heading
at us in about six hours so we need haul the pots and batten down”. Yes,
captains do tell the crew to batten down, it’s not just in pirate stories.
So we hauled the pots. These pots are about four feet wide by eight feet long
and two and a half feet deep. They are made of iron rebar and covered with heavy
netting. Each one carries two buoys and several hundred feet of line. They are
stacked on end for as much room as we could cover on the deck then they are
stacked horizontally for at least two and often three layers on top of that.
A hundred foot vessel can carry around 100 to 110 pots. Each pot is tied to
each pot that touches it and heavy chains with chain binders are used to lash
the whole rig to the boat itself. Theoretically the mass of pots is one solid
unit and will not move. That’s theoretically.
We had all the pots hauled emptied of crab and lashed down when the storm hit us. The engines had been checked to make sure there was no apparent problem that could cause us any trouble. We had three engines; two giant Cummins diesels of several hundred horsepower each and a generator. To go into that engine room was to hear the dying shrieks of prehistoric monsters being ripped apart. The sound would make ones bones vibrate. Even with hearing protection it was daunting.
There were five us on the Beauty and we gathered in the wheelhouse to watch the storm rage around us. Finally the captain said “We don’t have enough power to fight this thing so we’ll just stay with the wind and see where she takes us. We’ll need a watch every four hours. Just, your first watch starts right now. The rest of you go below and get some rest.”
With that statement I was left alone in the wheel house, in charge of a 100 foot crabbing vessel, in a Bering Sea storm and holding the lives of five people in my hands, one of them being me. The wheel house sole (for real people the sole is the ceiling of the main cabin) is about twenty feet above calm water. I don’t know how that figure was ever determined since there is no calm water in the Bering Sea. We would typically fish when the sea was lashing us with twenty foot seas. This storm was big enough that while I was sitting in the captain’s chair I would see giant seas rolling towards us. The Beauty would take them head on and green water would break over the top of the wheel house. The Beauty would be completely engulfed in sea so cold that to enter that water would be much the same as diving into acid. She would shudder and roll but the wave would roll past and she would come up on the surface with the engines still thumping contentedly and we would get ready for the next onslaught.
I caught a midnight watch several hours later (we ran with
the storm for three days). I could barely see the winch for anchor on the foredeck.
Looking out the rear glass I could see that tower of pots trailing behind us
as if they were on some other vessel. The deck was constantly awash so it appeared
there was no connection between the wheel house and the stack of pots. But there
was and I could tell because as the sea rolled the Beauty with each passing
wave, that entire tower of pots would lean farther and farther until I knew
we where going to breach. But, just as the tipping point seemed to be reached,
the Beauty would groan, stop tipping and slowly right herself and then start
that slow but majestic sway to the other tipping point. For hours that ballet
was enacted time after time.
That was my valley. There was nothing I could do to protect myself or get out
of that predicament. Sure, we had survival suits but they were nowhere where
we could get to them in time to get them on in an emergency. And why bother?
We were hundreds of miles form a Coast Guard Station. No plane of ship could
maneuver to us in that storm. The water would kill us in less than ten minutes
even if it didn’t drown us. We were at the mercy of the storm but the
grace of God. And the grace of God won. The storm blew itself out, we found
out where we were in that vast ocean, sailed back to the crabbing grounds, finished
our catch and came home.
Did I think of that comfort during that time? It was all I had to rely on. There is a point one can reach where fear is a nuisance. It is the point where one recognizes that they are not in control of their own survival. At that point fear is just in the way and a person has to act as if they are invincible. To do otherwise is to become mindless and lunacy takes charge. It is this point where all one has is put in the hands of God and we let our training and character take over our actions. Some survive, some become heroes, some become mentally unbalanced.
What we need to consider is why do we have to reach that point to realize God is in charge? Is he less in charge when we walk through the park with our children on a sunny Idaho spring day? Remember that the 23 Psalm says as we walk through the valley of the “shadow” of death, not the valley of death. Death is but a shadow because it directs us for such a short period of time and the blessed hope of the risen Savior takes over our existence forever. With that knowledge cannot we rejoice in any suffering and praise Him for what He has done?