One afternoon the mid-sixties my soon-to-be wife and I were in Seattle visiting Hazel, her old Graduate Art School advisor when, in the late afternoon, there was a knock at the front door. “Get that would you please, Michael?” Hazel asked. “Diane’s there. She has a fish for us”. Diane, the student at the door, was clearly of Mediterranean decent and so beautiful that I caught my breath. “Hi”, she said, “this is for Hazel. Tell her that I can’t stay because I have a few more fish to deliver.” On that she turned and went down the stairs to the street. I closed the door and stared at the salmon wrapped in wet newspaper that Diane’s boyfriend had just caught a few hours earlier in Elliot Bay.
Sometime later when I finally met Jim Smith he was working as a shipwright and had this small boat he fished off of in the waters of Elliot Bay, and its surrounds, which formed the liquid edge of downtown Seattle.
The first thing I remember about Jim was his apology. He would begin many conversations with people he didn’t know by apologizing for having such a common name. The irony was that he was one of the most uncommon guys I’d ever met.None-the-less the apology, as an opening gambit, was very disarming. He was/is tall, muscular, handsome, very well-read and a master of a wide range of materials and mechanical processes. He knew a lot of shit. And he could party like a pro. I had a similar breadth of experience with tools and processes and we were both very curious about everything. We hit it off pretty quickly.
Jim was and remains a quintessential Alpha person. Among his many Alpha qualities what stood out most was his genuine attentiveness to others, which is one of his defining characteristics.
Diane, who by then had become a friend, had introduced us. She was an artist at the University of Washington and a Fulbright Scholar. She and I were coordinating a project for children at the Seattle Center. To obtain our supplies for the project we would visit Educational Surplus where stuff could be bought for ten cents on the dollar. One day Diane spotted a dentist’s examination chair covered in turquoise vinyl. She had to buy it for Jim. I’m thinking, “Diane is really smitten with Jimbo,” a nickname he detested but put up with from his closer friends. Love was very heavy. They lived at the top of a hill and there were more than a hundred steps up to the house. How we got that chair up those stairs remains a mystery, but we did it.
ll
Over the next few years Jim and I became friends. It was one of those relationships that just seem to emerge out of the ether as though the bonds between us had been formed in some distant past. Jim grew up in what was then known as the Jesuit Parish, located on Capital Hill in Seattle. His parents were religious and educated in Jesuit schools. Jim was groomed to lead a seminarian life but turned away from the “medieval education,” as he called it, though not before taking away the instructions of logic and critical thinking. He also studied Latin and Ethics. It was the Jesuits that taught him how to ask questions.
In college Jim joined the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Course). By doing so his tuition costs were paid by the government in exchange for an agreement to serve a two year stint in one of the Military Services. The war in Vietnam was underway and Jim assumed that it would be over by the time he graduated. He was wrong. After graduation he was sent to Fort Eustis, in Newport News, Va. for further training in a discipline of his choosing. He studied transportation logistics and marine shipping activities.
After graduating college he became an Army First Lieutenant in the Transportation Corp. He was stationed at the old French Port in Saigon and was responsible for clearing through customs all the commercial material destined for the US and Allied forces, either transshipping the material to its final destination, or warehousing it at the Port. There were cargos of everything imaginable, from engine parts to Martell Brandy and slot machines. Jim was only 23 and was doing the job of two Captains and a Major. He became the youngest member of the American Embassy Club in Saigon. Everybody wanted to be his friend. He got invited to a lot of parties. Saigon attracted every sort of character imaginable. Casablanca writ large. At night he and his friends would sit on the roof of the Rex hotel watching the tracers streak across the sky in the distance. It was pure Graham Greene country, and like the bartender, Sascha, in Casablanca‘s Cafe Americain, Jim saw everything.
After his tour of duty was over he found himself on the streets of San Francisco with the GI bill and unemployment. Eventually he went to NYC. There a career counselor advised him to take a clerk job with a shipping company. He reminded the counselor that he had run a huge operation in Saigon and clerking just didn’t do it. Next job recommendation was Publishing, another desk job. “Well no,” was his reply. This was about the time the Whole Earth Catalog came out and the anti-war movement morphed into the Return To The Land movement. The young were defying authority and moving to the country. There was a similar catalog that came out about the same time that covered boat building, another escape route from a desk job. After that year spent at the Old French Port his interest in boats, and the freedom they offered, led him to boat building school and eventually to a job as a shipwright in one of Seattle’s boat yards. Soon after that he took up fishing.
lll
It was 1980. Jim and I had remained in touch despite the fact that I’d moved back to Los Angeles after a couple of years teaching at the University of Washington and a tough divorce. I was living in an old swim club, the Aloha Swim Club, located on Washington Blvd between La Cienega and Fairfax. When I was growing up it had been a middle class Jewish neighborhood that had now become an African American middle class neighborhood. While sitting by the pool one day the phone rings and it’s Jim. He wanted to know what I was doing and asked if he could come down for a visit. “Sure” I said, and a few days later he showed up. “What brings you down here,” I asked. He said that he had been telling his friends that he was going to Japan to visit his brother, Matt, who was there teaching English, and he kept running into those friends who remarked, “What, you still here? We thought you’d left a while ago.”
“I had ta get outta town finally because it was becoming embarrassing,” he mused.
A couple of days after he arrived he asked me if I wanted to go with him to Japan. “Sure,” I said…and, as we discussed it, a plan for a larger trip emerged. The next afternoon we drove into Hollywood to see a travel agent Jim had heard about. His office was above the Cherokee Bookstore on Hollywood Blvd.
I can’t remember the Agent’s name but I do remember that his office was cluttered, that he was elderly and very disheveled. After some discussion, and on his advice, we decided to visit Bali before going to Japan and to maybe take some time to see Indonesia and Thailand. “Ok,” we said, “book us tickets to Bali.” As an after thought Jim asked the agent where we should stay. He looked up at us for a long minute and said, “When you get off the plane in Denpasar you’ll find some local transportation and tell them you want to go to Kuta Beach. You’ll find a place there.” We looked at each other with acknowledging shrugs and left the office, tickets in hand. When we got back to the Aloha we were a bit giddy. What had we just committed to we wondered. Being in our mid thirties and a bit macho, there was no going back.
On the day of our departure for Bali and eventually Japan, my friend Danielle, who had a hair salon in Beverly Hills, offered to give us both haircuts, and in the hours before our departure, got us massages and then drove us to LAX. We arrived at the airport and when we got out of her car she gave us big hugs and handed each of us a Quaalude. Our first stop was Singapore where we got a connecting flight to Denpasar, the capital of Bali. We were airborne for nearly twenty four hours. The Quaaludes made a big difference.
Our first stop, Singapore, was unbelievably clean. Without a doubt you could eat off the floors. Chewing gum was illegal. In the airport there was a cadre of janitors who were polishing every surface and forever looking for trash, bugs, you name it.
Denpasar, Bali was another three or four hours south. When we finally arrived and stumbled into the fresh air it was mid afternoon. Sure enough, just as the travel agent said, there were several Toyota pickup trucks with benches on either side of the cargo bed behind the cab. The driver asked us where we wanted to go. “Kuta Beach,” we replied, then tossed our packs into the back of the truck and took seats on one of the benches. When the benches were filled up the driver sped off. The ride was not smooth. With a lot of rain most all the roads were potholed. When finally the driver announced, “Kuta Beach,” we got off at one destination on the Asian version of the Europe-to-India Hippie Trail. The municipal government was in the process of installing a rudimentary sewer system. After wandering around for a while we found what was called a Losman, an Indonesian hostel. In our case it was just a family’s home that had extra rooms.
The one we chose had a few rooms off a veranda and was a couple of blocks from the ocean. Our room had two beds made from teak and the bedding support consisted of a mesh of ropes. There was a mosquito net for each bed and a couple of Gekkos who patrolled the walls and ceiling for insects. After a night’s good rest we awoke to the lilting voice of a young girl who was carrying a large tray with fruits, pastries and tea service down the veranda. At the door of each occupied room she had placed glasses of tea and some red bananas. When I opened the door she was there, a big, round tray with an assortment of pastries on it balanced on one hand. We looked at each other as though we had awakened in a dream. Standing there we understood Gauguin’s fascination with the women of Tahiti. It was only the influence of Europeans that caused Balinese women to cover their breasts.
History records that when the first Dutch landed on Bali, it took the Captain two years to get his crew back. There is a ruin that dates back centuries–former horse baths. They had been converted to public baths whose waters were channeled down from hilltop springs beneath which the baths had been constructed. While nearly all of Indonesia is Muslim, Bali remains Hindu and is purported to have the greatest density of temples to population anywhere on Earth.
Anxious to explore the island, we located a small auto and motorcycle rental business and decided on two Japanese 125cc motorbikes. The local version of a cheap Chevy. We had to get special licenses to ride them on the streets and the agency arranged for us to take the test. One part required the rider make a tighter and tighter continuous turn, a circle really. Jim performed perfectly. I, on the other hand, despite having ridden motorcycles as a kid, fell over. I thought Jim was going to wet his pants he was laughing so hard. I got my revenge a few days later when he laid his bike down while negotiating a traffic circle, badly scraping his knee and denting the bike. While waiting for a mechanic to make the repairs, a parade of very large pigs, suspended upside down from long bamboo poles, slowly went by. Curious, we followed the parade. It turned out that the pigs were being slaughtered and cooked for a large wedding. We were invited to sample the food, which was very spicy and very good.
After Bali, where we’d spent about two weeks traversing the island on the motorbikes, we managed to get an old ferry to Java and boarded a bus for a treacherous ride with the locals to Yogyakarta, the cultural capital of Indonesia. We arrived in the early morning hours and hadn’t figured out where we were going to stay. As we walked the streets we realized that entire families were on the ground under what passed for blankets. As the sun rose these families began to stir. We finally picked out a hotel from a guide book and found a rickshaw, woke up the driver, and told him where we wanted to go.
On the streets hand-made cigarettes were on offer for those who couldn’t afford the Krakatoa Kreteks, which were popular among the Hip and the Hippies. The Kretek’s tobacco was mixed with cloves and rolled in a cone shape with a dried leaf tied with a thread at the small end. No paper. When the cigarettes were burned they gave off an aromatic scent. The handmade cigarettes we were being offered had been rolled using the tobacco from discarded cigarette butts that had been collected in tin cans by street urchins.
We took a room in a beat down hotel, single star at best. The following day we went to the public bird market. Jim and I shared tremendous energy, walking and marveling for hours. Older Indonesians would be in the public parks with their pet birds whose cages were suspended from very tall bamboo poles. The birds would sing their songs to one another almost out of sight of their owners who were sitting below chatting with each another. A nice feature was that the bottoms of the cages were painted with marvelous designs. What kept us going without scratchiness between us was Jim’s willingness to share the lead. It helped too that we are complimentary complainers. What I didn’t like he didn’t like and vis versa. We also liked the same things….from jewelry and folk art to mechanical devices and the natural world. We also shared appreciation for the hand-labor it took to produce ordinary objects like kitchen utensils, and extraordinary things like jewelry. Jim, like me, paid attention to things that reflected special human skills and the amount of time it took to make those things.
IV
The Jesuit’s education gave him a point of view that was founded on questioning, questioning and more questioning. His relentless curiosity could made for tough, uncomfortable encounters. Some people could be put off by Jim’s tendency to challenge everything. His testosterone level kept up with his questioning so that in a group of male friends he often wound up in the pole position. Commercial fishing, it seems, , gave him a group of peers who had similarly high levels of testosterone and robust egos. I was to see and experience this firsthand when I turned 50. Jim invited me to join him for a season in Bristol Bay. I was truly honored and humbled by his invitation. What the hell did I know about fishing? But I jumped at the chance. He’d enlisted another deck hand, young Irish kid. I once asked him how he found the kid and he told me that he’d been in a bar and the kid was the last guy standing when the joint closed.
Jim warned me that fishing in the Bay was extremely hard, and dangerous. You lived on the boat which was only 32 feet long and had only two bunks below deck. The hold, centrally located between the bow and the stern, had five slots spanning the beam of the boat. Each containing a heavy duty bag, called a Brailer Bag, like those you see at construction sites holding about a cubic yard of dirt, only that these bags were deep and narrow to take advantage of the space between the deck and bottom of the hull. The bags on the boat held about the same quantity, except they were to be filled with Sockeye Salmon, not dirt. One of my jobs was to toss the writhing fish that had been picked out of the net into the bags that were suspended in their respective slots. Care had to be taken to equitably distribute the fish. Not doing so might cause the boat to list dangerously. Since you couldn’t see into the bags the only way to do that was to try and keep count of how many fish you had tossed into each bag. Picker and tosser would be standing ankle to calf deep in salmon averaging five to seven pounds each. There was a lot of slime and sometimes guts. Salmon also have a lot of teeth. The actual toss covered a distance of about ten feet.
When bags were full, Jim would pull along side a processing vessel where a crane would lower a cable with a big hook over the deck and one of us would slip the hook into the bag’s handles. Once secured the bag would be lifted out of it’s slot and hauled onto the deck of the ship where it was weighed and then emptied. While this was going both boats were being rocked by the waves. It was a very dicey operation. Each bag might contain a thousand pounds or more of fish and everything was swaying back and forth. Someone on the processing ship’s deck would hand Jim a weight tally and the Chris R would pull away to await word of the next opening by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, who determine what hours and locations can be commercially fished during the season based on their estimate of how many fish had made it into the river to spawn. Jim told me to bring warm clothes and be prepared to fucking work.
My first day on the Chris R was spent helping Jim repair the insulation around the engine exhaust pipes. The second day I had to learn how to put on a bright orange survival suit. This was supposed to be done in under a minute. After about five minutes Jim began to chuckle. At ten minutes he broke into full laugh.
All the boats in the Bristol Bay fishery were restricted to a certain length. I think it was 32 feet. A preferred hull for many of the fisherman was a commercially manufactured aluminum one except that it was a bit too long to meet the 32 foot requirement. The solution…cut off enough of the bow to make the length and weld a plate to close the gap, giving the boats a snub nosed look. How you tricked out the rest of the boat depended on how much money you were willing to spend. Jim wasn’t a big spender. In fact he was downright cheap. Some boats had wall-to-wall carpeting in the cabins, flat screen TVs, tape decks for movies and music, even flush toilets.
Not Jim’s. Our toilet was a five gallon bucket with a rope attached to the handle. You’d swing the bucket over the side and fill it with sea water. Once that was done you put it on the back deck where you picked the fish from the net, and got the toilet seat from under the stove and placed it atop the bucket. If it happened to be raining there was an umbrella. With or without the rain, it was a tough shit. The only bright spot was since the seat was kept under the stove it was always warm. Despite me being a rube from New York City, Jim’s fellow fishermen cut me some slack because they knew just how crude Jim’s boat was. Whatever money Jim had spent on the boat went for gear, instrumentation, and duct tape. The Chris R was kept in Dillingham, Alaska. I’m just recalling now, as I got closer to Dillingham on my journey there, the planes got smaller. When I finally arrived Jim picked me up and we went straight to the boat.
And I’m reminded as well that the year before my trip to Alaska a friend’s wife had asked me to help her dispose of her husband’s collection of Hustler, Juggs, Penthouse, and Swank magazines. About five shopping bags worth. By the time I’d gotten those bags into my car I knew what I was going to do with them. I packed them into two boxes and sent the boxes to Jim’s PO Box in Dillingham, Alaska. When he arrived to begin that season’s preparations, the boxes were waiting for him. He duly distributed their contents to his good friends in the fishing fleet. Of course he generously divulged their provenance and when I arrived I was warmly welcomed, even embraced.
Jim is one of those guys who exemplifies the motto, “I’ll do it myself.” Over the years that has extended to rehabilitating an old telephone exchange building, the Melrose Exchange, into several apartments, and one of Seattle’s first studio glass production facilities, including glass furnaces for blowing, and the other machinery necessary for the production of studio art glass. Jim has most of the skills necessary to maintain a variety of vehicles, having built several of them including his money-maker, the Chris R. Along his life’s way he acquired and developed a twenty five acre organic farm in Quilicene, WA. For more storage and accommodations for friends or tenants, he built a yurt and then a timber frame barn on the farm. Then there is his clam farm. The clams, known as Geoducks, are a large burrowing mollusk and a Chinese delicacy. (Their image appears on a popular postcard featuring a young boy riding one while clutching the clam’s extended siphon like a giant penis.) Before buying the necessary tidelands, Jim familiarized himself with the clam’s ecology and life cycle. After some looking he located a suitable stretch of beach. Jim bought five acres. The farm is only accessible by boat or a fantastic hike through a fern and giant Cedar forest. The surround was primeval. He seeded the farm with sixty thousand or so tiny geoducks, known as Spat (like the past tense of spit), purchased at a local hatchery. He thought of this as his retirement since it would take three to five years for the Spat to reach a harvestable size. Only Jim never really did do retirement. When he’s dead, then he’ll be retired. He is a person who, when he takes an interest in something, goes deep into it, seeing where things connect and how the various parts are assembled into wholes.
V
Jim is also something of a mama’s boy. This comes out not infrequently in his caring for animals, people and tools. He does not restrain the expression of his anima and this partly explains his attractiveness and attraction to strong, accomplished women. A mother or wife with benefits, so-to-speak. His mother, Betty, was steeled by her own life and developed a toughness and sharp sense of humor that can be seen in Jim. She was widowed early and left to raise three boys and a girl, Terese, who died after a long, hard struggle with a brain tumor. In a desperate attempt to forestall the inevitable, Jim, his sister, and Betty spent a week in San Diego, crossing the border into Mexico daily to seek treatment at a clinic claiming miracle cures using shark cartilage. For someone as rational as Jim this was a profound experience and perhaps one of the sources of his self described Attention Deficit Disorder. This experience certainly shaped Jim’s interactions with others. He rarely equivocates. For him decisions appear to come easily with little anguish, after applying the question template his Jesuit education gave him.
The A.D.D. he acknowledges has served him well in many respects. Travel around with him for a day and you are exposed to a staggering array of projects demanding his attention. From emergencies, like a leaking roof or stalled vehicle, to a rowing skiff under construction for about ten years (finally finished), Jim soldiers on. Along the way are tractor repairs, a new well at the farm or fixes on a fence of a coop where chickens have been killed by a marauding fox. Never a dull moment. Somehow he is also able to take a range of cultural practices thanks to his considerable knowledge of fine and applied arts.
The Melrose Exchange is Jim’s longest running project, consuming his creative energies for more than forty years. Because he did it himself there is an industrial grade wood shop along with some metal working tools and equipment on the ground floor. Jim’s generosity has extended to making his shop available to tenants and friends. Over the years the Exchange has attracted extraordinary artists and characters who contributed to the Exchange’s development and in the process became Jim’s friends. They all shared his motto, “I’ll do it myself,” and became the core of a creative community that has defined the building’s existence since Jim began working on it. In the beginning, when many of the artist/occupants were facing money issues, Jim would forebear on the rent and accepted their work in lieu of money. There was Trimpin, who eventually became a MacArthur Fellow. Well before his “genius award,” I remember him showing me a file drawer full of rejection letters from applications he’d made for financial support. One of his musical pieces is installed in a wall in Jim’s apartment. Trimpin’s studio featured dozens of instruments suspended from the ceiling and racks of computers and keyboards. Miles of cables connected all the computers and other electronic equipment. Paul Marioni, and his son, Dante both traded work for rent in the early days. Paul became one of the founders of the Studio Glass Movement, and with Jim’s help, built a glass blowing furnace and studio on the ground floor of the Exchange. Dante and Janusz Posniack (star of the reality show, Blown Away) now run the shop which has been modernized and upgraded.
In the early days Jim had figured out how to use the heat from the glass furnace to warm the rest of the building which was about 20,000 square feet and constructed of concrete with brick walls eighteen inches thick. There are sixteen foot ceilings and large wire mesh glass windows from which you can see the entire downtown of Seattle, Elliot Bay, and all the way to Mt. Rainier. From the roof of the building the views extend for miles and you can see the Cascade and the Olympic Mountain ranges. Before Jim bought the building it had been an abandoned telephone exchange constructed by Ma Bell when all the phone switches were mechanical. I walked through this “Melrose Exchange” with Jim when he was first considering buying it. On each floor there were floor-to-ceiling banks of switch panels and the upper reaches of them were accessed by rolling hardwood step ladders with low handrails, not unlike those found in fancy libraries for accessing the upper shelves of books. It was a huge job taking all that stuff down and out. Jim did it. In the brick walls on each floor were niches that had contained soldering irons used to make and repair phone wire connections. Jim turned a few of those into tiny windows with small dioramas in front of the glass. This project, the conversion of an old telephone exchange building, Jim did by hand, as they say. The human energy it represents is staggering. Every time I visit or stay there I am transported. In Jim’s own personal library he has one of those hard wood ladders mounted on one wall and on another a sea turtle shell at least two feet across and a five foot long brush from the mouth of a baleen whale, Objects he’d found on the beaches of Alaska. There is also at least a four foot long (at least) model of a Zeppelin suspended from the ceiling and the wheel of an old schooner. Needless-to-say his collection of glass artwork is one of the finest in Seattle. Most all of it resulting from his accepting the pieces in lieu of rent in the early days. The Chris R was built in the Exchange’s parking lot.
Vl
During the season I fished with him I remember a terrifying night. we had been at the outer tip of the Aleutian Island chain fishing runs up the Ugashik River. In Spanish history this place was the end of the known world. The schools of salmon were thin so Jim decided to move the boat to a different river delta closer to the mainland. This entailed many hours of driving the boat through swells which broke over the cabin nearly submerging the boat. Rain squalls, temperatures near freezing and ocean swells eight feet and over covered the course. I was mostly scared shitless and huddled below in one of the bunks in a down sleeping bag bouncing against the hull with each swell. Finally I went up to the cabin. There was Jim, one arm on an armrest, the other on the wheel keeping the bow perpendicular to the waves as they crashed over the cabin. He was the picture of calm, as though he was behind the wheel of a car going out for a picnic drive on a lazy afternoon. I was much relieved by that image and returned to my bunk and sleeping bag. For me it was a kind of watershed moment. I’ve taken many serious risks in my life and have seen death up close. To put yourself into the hands, balls and brains of someone and feel comfortable even though you are at risk of dying, was for me, a kind of shanti, a peaceful state of mind. Once there I was able to close my eyes and sleep.
Jim might have looked relaxed but he was vigilant as he watched the surface of the water looking for signs that might tell him when the next wave would be coming. He understands how important patterns are when navigating through weather or listening to the engines and other machinery on board. Such patterns are in many ways like music. The same events repeating themselves with a distinct rhythm. At the edge of awareness where patterns form or disintegrate, (and artists like John Cage were at home), is a familiar place to Jim. It is a continuum that requires flexibility both physically and mentally, to recognize what’s new in the now. For Jim, this hyperconsciousness is a necessary component when steering a boat through a storm. Maybe it dates to his experiences in Vietnam with the surreal calm of the port in the midst of a raging war, or perhaps the origins lie even further back, to his trip with his mother and dying sister to that clinic in Mexico. From a lifetime of flux and still points a fully rounded person emerged. A two legged encyclopedia of knowledge about the physical and emotional parts of life, immutable and adaptable at one and the same time.