Coda BLAIR BRAVERMAN
Useless Bay
USELESS BAY, Washington — ten minutes across by motorboat, and so shallow that when the tide
sweeps low you can walk out a mile on dry
sand and wade another half before you
wet your shorts. There’s Mount Rainier
shining like a ghost across the water and
the lights of Seattle a solid line beneath it,
and here in the bay — what matters to the
fishermen—there’s Dungeness crab and
good halibut, salmon, dogfish, flounder.
There were always stories about the place:
Indian legends of animals with the power
to heal, and pioneer tales of wild storms
and treasures washed ashore—stories
told so many times they wore thin and ratty
as a dirty magazine and began to resemble
something else entirely. Newer stories, too:
my mom, age nine, found an Indian skull
in the slough-o= from the blu=, and, once,
her neighbor reached his hand into the
water to rinse o= fish blood and pulled it out
a finger short, courtesy of a quick-jawed
dogfish. My grandfather—young then—
would tell of a salmon big as the devil that
he’d reeled in sometime last year, a salmon
with more fight than a mama bear and
close to the same strength he’d guess, and
just as he hauled that thing from the water
a seal leapt up after it and stole the back
half in one bite, right there in midair.
The seals ate fish, sure, but the dogfish
were the real problems, gray-skinned sharks
four feet long that scared away everything
good and ate the rest. The fishermen were
always trying to get rid of them. Each time
he caught one my grandfather would bring
it in and lay it flat on the sand, and all the
kids would get sticks and beat it dead, and
just like that there’d be one less trouble in a
world with too much already.
The kids grew up and left after a while,
and the whole neighborhood started to get
old. The fishermen were pulling in less,
but no one talked about it. Pretty soon
crab traps went two weeks without being
checked, and the buoys started thinning,
flickering out one by one like lit windows
on a dark street. But whenever she came
back my mom found fresh Dungeness on
the table, or buttered halibut cheeks, and
she helped like she always had, cleaning
fish and cleaning house, pretending that
everything hadn’t changed after all.
When she was pregnant for the third
time and the doctor told her she might
never bring a child to term, she packed up
and drove home. She sat on the front steps
looking out over the bay, but the sky was
overcast and she couldn’t see Rainier—
couldn’t see any farther than the closest
buoys, shining bright and barnacle-scabbed
against the gray water.
