on the cover / By Heidi Walters

People of the Crab

They tread the line between ‘tough and dumb’ balancing love, money and adventure

(Dec. 27, 2007)  Weathervane

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Almost 6 p.m., dark. Two of the resident boats at Woodley Island Marina have strung Christmas lights from their masts, Vs of cheer hanging upside down in the blue-black night. Other boats lie dark, or with one white spotlight ablaze to aid a last repair. Except on Dock B, where a broad yellow glow suffuses the bulk of the Jenna Lee. A stocky, wary-eyed black dog on board the boat puts his paws up on the edge and sniffs. He’s just being friendly, says 19-year-old Jenna Lee, who’s cleaning up the cabin and trying to close shop for the night.Her dad, Kevin Pinto, goes out all day to pull in crab, which he drops off in the afternoons at the dock for his daughter to sell. Theirs is the big square yellow “Live Crab” sign on Highway 101 south that you see as you enter Eureka.

“The first weekend was out of control,” she says. “Tons of people down here. We sold out the first day.”

Dead calm tonight. The only things blowing around are small, flash-white killdeers, calling out plaintively as they mimic scraps of paper in the grass and parking lot next to Woodley Island’s sparkly marina. Jenna Lee says she can’t wait to spread her wings, branch out, get out of Humboldt. But she says it like a Humboldt girl, smiling around at the familiar sights she loves. To the south, the pulp mill down on the north spit glitters from every window and its white steam plumes rise straight up into the night sky, unwavering.

“Someone said, when the pulp mill plumes are parallel to the water it means strong winds,” says Jenna Lee. “Straight up, it’s calm.”

The plumes are straight up. Anyone looking to that lone mill on the north spit — it and the anachronistic woodchip power plant, sputtering nearby, so squarely out of place amid the stripped post-industrial lots, the run-down former company houses, the lumpy dunes stalled by beach grass — might shiver as if sensing a ghost before nodding, yes, the white steam plumes corroborate what the weather service says.

Even so, the pulp mill plumes can’t help much beyond plain weather. They can’t speak of ill winds between processors and fishermen. Nor predict oil spills and late openings. Or whether your wife is going to leave you. Or if your buddy will have more crab pots than you this year. They certainly reveal nothing of what goes on below the wind, under the waves on the ocean floor: can’t tell you how many sad-eyed crabs will wander into your round, wired-cage traps lured by gory bait, or how many small ones will wander back out the escape holes, or whether any crabs of any size are even around to do any wandering in or out at all. As far as the plumes can tell, you might just catch a pod of sticky starfish, or moonglow.

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