I love the title that Basho gave his travel journals: "Narrow Path to the Deep North." What I feel as I prepare to sail up the Inside Passage for another season of kayak guiding and commercial fishing in Alaska must be similar to what other migratory animals feel, when the urge for going sets in. There is a physical yearning for the "Deep North" that has been woven into my annual cycle now for over forty years. The salmon are returning. The great migration of birds and whales and humans is in full swing, pulled by the long days and warm weather to a place of Pleistocene plenty.
For most of these years I've been a commercial fisherman, chasing salmon runs from Bristol Bay to the Panhandle, and halibut from Chatham Strait to the Gulf of Alaska. Now my commercial fishing gig is down to a single halibut trip in Southeast Alaska in August, after a month of guiding kayak trips. I'm starting to pull back on the throttle.
But I love both these ways of being in the wild - as a guide and a fisherman - expressions of livelihood, not leisure, played out in a still-primordial landscape. There are stakes involved, and risks. But being a commercial fisherman also has a powerful contemplative strain to it, which links it to mindfulness; a need to be fully present, and a visceral sense that I am a small player in a vastly more-than-human world.
I'm well aware, as a student of the dharma, that commercial fishing contradicts a core Buddhist teaching against taking the life of other creatures. But many indigenous traditions think about this differently. I've always felt a powerful bond with Northwest Coast cultures, whose survival hinged for millennia on a deeply respectful dependence and reciprocity with the "salmon and halibut people". I understand, as Gary Snyder has said, that one day the table will be set around me, and my flesh will flow back into these other creatures. I don't have a problem with this. It gives me comfort, really, and a sense of powerful belonging on this coast. My work as a mindfulness teacher and fisherman are excursions onto the same wild edge, one inner, one outer. Both edges are alluring and untamable, bound by the poignant, transient nature of all our lives.
I will not be updating these posts often while I'm in Alaska. I need this annual cycle of "time outside of time", to lay my heart back out on the long wave. I don't think we're better for being at the beck and call of our media tools every waking hour of our lives, and I will be on something of a media fast over the coming weeks. May you also find yourself sailing on the long wave from time to time during these long days of summer.
Wherever you may be reading this cyber-message-in-a-bottle, I hope it finds you well.