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fighting with a guy who was on top of him pounding away. Andy and I ran out of the house in our underwear to pull him off. I was carrying a baseball bat ready to kill the guy, but we separated them.
    The guy was furious. “I’m going to call the cops on you.”
    My dad calmly told him, “You want their number?”
    The guy looked suspiciously at Dad, who told him, “It’s F-UC-K Y-O-U.”
    I loved the old man. There was nobody like that guy.
    Andy and I picked up his body at the morgue. He was lying on a table, and we froze at the sight of him lying there vulnerable, like he never was in life. I said, “OK, let’s do what needs to be done.” We dressed him in work clothes and a Time Bandit jacket and wrapped him in blankets. We drove his body home in my Chevy pickup. Before we nailed the lid shut on the coffin, we put in a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, a Louis L’Amour paperback, a pack of Luckies, which had killed him, and notes that we wrote to him that we slipped into his pockets. A thousand people attended his wake, and nearly everybody cried. He could be generous and charming when he wanted to be, and people remembered his thoughtfulness.
    The next day, we placed his casket aboard his boat Bandit, and with Time Bandit following in its wake, we sailed to the southern side of the Kachemak Bay, where Dad and my stepmother lived and where he asked to be interred. We dragged his coffin up the side of a hill, but before we could bury him, we had to dig a grave. We found an area of topsoil on the side of a cliff overlooking the water, but when we started digging we hit bedrock and his casket would not fit. My stepmother suggested a solution. She said, “I climbed over him many a night when he was passed out drunk, so just leave him there. It’ll be like old times.” Laughing and crying we finally buried him surrounded by solid rock with his head facing north.
             
    O ur old man was cut from a rough mold. His name was John Wesley Hillstrand. A fisherman through and through, he was tough, uncompromising, and profane. He worked as hard as he drank, and when he was drunk, he could be mean, but sober he was loving and even charismatic. With five young sons, he had his work cut out at home when he was not toiling on the sea.
    We loved him. He was and, even now that he has passed away, is still our lodestone. As boys we thought he was fun to watch from a safe distance. For instance, at the fuel dock in Kodiak men looking for crew jobs would wait for Dad to bring in his seine boat. They knew from his reputation that he fired one or two deckhands after each trip, and by waiting for him to return to Kodiak, they could take their jobs. He fired fifty hands one summer on the same boat.
    When his hat came off, man…it was like a signal flare lifting off in the air. We would laugh but never so that he could see us. One time he was screaming and cussing, probably at us, when a seagull flying by shit in his mouth. My brothers and I howled with laughter, and this once, he saw our point. As a perfectionist and a great fisherman, he saw black and white, with no gray. He would meet someone new and he would proclaim, “I don’t like you,” in three minutes if that was how he felt.
    He owned the 91-foot Sea Wife, the 86-foot Invader, and both Bandit and Time Bandit, and he skippered them back when fishing on the Bering Sea went beyond dangerous. This was before boats were designed to carry tons of water in the middle crab tanks. In those days the Coast Guard did not look for crews of boats that sank. Boats went out on the Bering with no depth sounders, no EPIRBs, and no life rafts. (Dad was unusual in those days for carrying onboard his boats a twenty-four-man Northwest Airlines life raft.) For him not to have died before his time was a miracle.
    Dad fished for shrimp, halibut, salmon, cod, and crab. They were all one catch to him, but he reserved a special place in his heart for king crab. Dad was confident in his