Learning to Earn

A gap year is a good thing. I graduated from a pretty high end high school in Connecticut where something like 96% of our class went directly into high end colleges and universities, with scholarships and funding from parents. My parents were trying to start their 'legacy vineyard' at the time in Oregon and pretty much told my brother and I that we were on our own until we took over the vineyard 20 or 30 years later. So I bopped around at a few different jobs that didn't quite work out. Finally got fed up, bailed on everything to hitch hike back to the west coast.

Ended up nearly completely broke in San Diego working the graveyard shift at the 3rd most robbed 7-11 on the west coast.

Came out of work early one morning, completely down and dejected, and just had to go look at the ocean to keep myself from loosing it completely. I walked out onto a pier and sat down on a bench next to a guy who I thought was an old homeless beach bum, both of us watching a pile driver punching telephone poles into the sand to fix the old wooden pier.

Somehow we started talking. I told him my story. He told me his. Turned out he was a semi-retired tuna fisherman named Steve. I invited him for a cup of coffee at the Burger King that I was about to start my first day as the lunch time french fry cook guy, just to learn more about tuna fishing.

Never showed up for my second job. Never went back to the 7-11, even to collect my pay for three hellacious nights working there. Turned out the 250 foot tuna seiner Steve had worked on (incidentally named the 'F/V Sea Hawk') was limping back to port in a few days after a tough bought with a hurricane in Mexico. The captain had asked him to repaint all of boat's graphics and Steve needed an assistant. I was eager to get away from the 7-11 and towards anything remotely nautical.

I grabbed my back pack from the surfer flop house I'd been staying at and moved in with Steve and his wonderful wife Beth. For about 2 weeks Steve and I got up every morning at 5:00 and rode the bus down to the harbor to work on the boat's graphics, including a full on mural of a hawk plucking a tuna out of the sea across the front of the ship's bridge.

Try as I might, doing everything I could, I couldn't get hired as crew for their next trip.  Finally, the night before the ship was about to leave, Steve and Beth's phone rang at about 10:30. Turned out one of the deck hand's wife had just found out she was pregnant and told her husband she was going to leave him if he put to sea again. The captain had a job for me if I could make it to the boat before they left at 7:00am. I couldn't sleep, gave Steve and Beth a big hug, and was at the boat by 4:30am, just hanging out on the back deck until the cook noticed me around sunrise.

15 weeks later we came back, unloaded just under 2 million dollars of frozen tuna at the Starkist cannery in Long Beach, and I had enough money in my pocket for a bus ride back to Connecticut and most of a year at Norwalk Community College. The rest of my life is the same kind of history.