Captain Phil Harris (16 page)

He slowed to thirty-five miles an hour and drove like the motor home “was on rails, straight and steady.”

In the back, however, Teresa had become quite unsteady.

“I don’t know what came over her,” Mike said, “but she announced that ‘we can’t have any evidence in here, so I’ll drink it all.’ ”

Frantically, she gulped down all the alcohol she could get her hands on, draining the motor home of all the incriminating booze.

“She understandably proceeded to get really, really wasted,” said Mike, “beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

The sheriff’s car followed for about twenty miles, but Mike was smooth enough to avoid suspicion. They made it to the concert and Phil, Mike, and Susan had a great time in the gorge. As for Teresa, she passed out in the motor home and there she stayed for the rest of the evening.

Phil soon found a new refuge from Teresa: Dan Mittman’s spread in Duvall, Washington, east of Bothell. He had a beautiful home on seven acres.

“Phil would come up and do a big pile of cocaine, but later, he’d groan that he had to get back to Teresa,” Dan said. “Teresa hated me, so I wasn’t about to go to his place. She was a master manipulator, very good at what she did. If she didn’t want you around, you weren’t around.”

Phil would apologize for Teresa’s behavior, but that wasn’t really necessary, since most of Phil’s acquaintances didn’t care what she did as long as they didn’t have to be around to watch.

Josh had to be around Teresa if he wanted to see his father, but that soon became impossible. When Josh would show up, Teresa threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. He would look to his father for support, but all he would get was a finger pointing to the door. Then Phil would dejectedly head out to the backyard and the refuge of his birdhouses. If he had been small enough, he might have crawled into one of them.

Josh tried to stay in high school while working hard enough to support himself, but he couldn’t maintain that balancing act long enough to graduate. So he quit school and, like his father before him, became a full-time fisherman.

It’s not as much fun following in your dad’s footsteps if he’s got his back turned to you, so Josh longed to resume his relationship with his father.

He figured he had found a way when he learned Teresa was cheating on Phil. Josh came to see him and broke the news, but Phil refused to believe it. Or didn’t want to believe it. So rather than turn on his wife, Phil turned on the messenger. He and Josh didn’t speak for three and a half years beginning in 1998.

Like his father and his grandfather, Josh felt the lure of the sea. And that pull was so strong, it washed away some of the anguish he felt over his estrangement from his father. It was an opportunity, he told himself, to prove he didn’t need Phil to be a successful fisherman.

“I didn’t want to live in my dad’s shadow anyway,” he insisted.

Josh got his first job at eighteen on a dragger, which catches fish by pulling a trawl net behind it. Not exactly the
Cornelia Marie,
but at least a deck to stand on and a paycheck to live on.

He did well enough to attract another job offer. Josh was hired by a floating cannery to work the slime line. If that doesn’t sound glamorous, it’s because it wasn’t. His job was to gut and fillet pollock being off-loaded from boats. It was the equivalent of working on an auto assembly line, except the parts at an auto plant don’t smell and they don’t stick to every part of the body.

Nobody was going to get a reality show out of the slime line. It was not only disgusting, but exhausting work. With the cannery processing 120 tons of fish every eight to twelve hours, Josh was on duty sixteen hours a day.

And that didn’t count his moonlighting job. Anxious for a way out of the slime business, Josh learned that the ship’s engineer made a lot more money than he did. So Josh had dragged his tired, smelly body
over to the engineer and asked for a few additional hours as his assistant, doing whatever was needed.

What the engineer needed was someone to keep the generator well oiled. Josh was glad to have the work and, when the engineer left after learning he had cancer, Josh became the oiler for all the machinery on board.

Dealing with oil, or dealing with slime for less money? It seemed like a no-brainer. But it was a decision that almost proved to be deadly, an assignment more fraught with peril than anything he would subsequently face on the
Cornelia Marie.

It began innocently enough. While the processing boat was leisurely making its way back to port, Josh went down to the engine room for his routine check of the equipment.

He was immediately hit with the usual blast of heat, in a room where the temperature could soar to 120 degrees. Upstairs, Josh had been wearing overalls with a T-shirt underneath. He pulled off the overalls, wrapped them around his waist, and, cooler in his T-shirt, began his inspection. When he reached a generator, he bent down to check a gauge.

“The generator was going full tilt,” he said, “and the turbo was screaming, sucking in a huge stream of air.

“It sucked the T-shirt right off my back and into the intake and took me with it, right off my feet.”

Josh’s shoulder banged up against the generator, and there he stayed as if he were a sliver of metal and the generator were a giant magnet.

“I was hanging in midair by my shoulder,” he said, “and I couldn’t break free. I grabbed a nearby pipe and pulled, but I wasn’t going anywhere. The suction was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It felt like my skin was going to burst and all my guts were going to get sucked out through my shoulder.”

As concerned as he was for himself, Josh was also able to focus on
the generator, even in that moment of extreme peril. Here he was, just a kid trying to survive on a meager salary, and he might be destroying a piece of machinery worth seven figures.

The generator began to sputter.

“Exhaust was coming out of places where it wasn’t supposed to be coming out of,” he said.

Fortunately for Josh, that black, smoky exhaust came spilling out of the engine room onto the deck, alerting the crew.

When they discovered the helpless teenager in the grip of the powerful machine, it took two deckhands, grunting and groaning, to pull him free. Josh’s T-shirt didn’t make it, the generator instantly reducing it to burned threads.

Though he couldn’t move his arm, Josh was still more concerned about the generator’s condition than his own.

“Screw the motor,” said a deckhand.

When the boat reached port, Josh was taken to the ER, where a doctor told him, “If you had been on there eight to twelve seconds longer, your guts would have been sucked out.”

“Half of me would have wound up inside that engine,” said Josh. “They said it had happened before and that I was very lucky to survive.”

Marie, his girlfriend at the time, did not want him to test his luck any further. She begged him to come back to dry land and find a safer job.

Josh tried sandblasting buildings. Quickly bored with that, he moved on to painting water towers but didn’t like working at such heights and he certainly didn’t like the sporadic nature of the job. Painters don’t work in the rain, a severe limitation in a city like Seattle.

“There was just no excitement for me in any of those jobs,” he said. “It just wasn’t crazy enough for me.”

Josh’s search for a new career ended abruptly when his phone rang in 2001. It was the call he had hoped for. On the other end of the line
was his father telling Josh he was short one deckhand on the
Cornelia Marie
.

“If you want to prove you’re a man,” Phil told Josh, “you’ll come up and go fishing with me. This is your opportunity to shine. It’s red crab, so it’s pretty easy. If you do good, you can continue to work on my boat. I know you can work hard, but I really don’t expect you to make it. Still, I’m willing to give you a shot.”

Phil figured that was the best way to challenge his son, and Josh, anxious to show he was a true Harris, responded.

He started as had his father, as a greenhorn. Phil knew that, if he showed his son favoritism, he would lose the respect of the rest of his crew, but that didn’t stop Phil from worrying about Josh.

His concern was heightened because that first trip was undertaken under conditions that would frighten the most hardened of veteran seamen. The winds roared up to one hundred miles an hour and the waves rose to nearly fifty feet.

Josh’s job was to crawl into the pots after they had been pulled from the water and the crabs dumped out, yank out any lingering bait, hook up new bait, take a quick glance around to look for any crab that might have been missed, and then get out of there as if his life depended on it, because it just might.

At that point the pots were not tied down. If a big wave hit the deck at that crucial moment, the pot could be swept overboard with Josh in it. Or it could go rattling across the deck, colliding with any person or object in its path, leaving anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped inside severely bruised. All Phil could do from the wheelhouse was to maneuver the boat so that, if the pot got swamped by a wave, it would at least stay on deck.

In those first few days on the job under those conditions, Josh made a decision. After this trip, I am out of here, he thought. This is insanity and I want no part of it ever again.

The thoughts were similar to those expressed by Phil so many years earlier on the
American Eagle
at the start of his shot at crab
fishing. And much like his father, Josh reconsidered after surviving and being handed a large wad of cash for working less than three full days.

•   •   •

In the years Josh was out of his life, Phil still had to handle Jake, and that became increasingly difficult as his son grew older. The kid who didn’t speak much until turning five was, by the time he had become a teenager, looking for his own distinct voice. That wasn’t easy because he was always in competition with his older, more articulate, more aggressive brother, leaving little wiggle room for Jake to verbalize his feelings.

There were other ways to get attention, but they always seemed to backfire on Jake.

When he was sixteen, he took off without permission on Phil’s favorite Harley. For a couple of hours he ran the hell out of it, king of the road with the wind whipping across his face.

It was a euphoric journey until he tried to return the bike to the sanctuary of Phil’s garage. Pulling into the driveway, he lost his balance and crashed his father’s pride and joy on its side, damaging the handlebars.

Jake struggled to get the mammoth machine upright, but he just wasn’t big enough or strong enough. Frantically, he called a friend and, between the two of them, they got the motorcycle up and slid it into the garage. Now they just had to pray that Phil didn’t notice those not-quite-right handlebars.

Not a chance. That was Phil’s baby, and the next time he hopped on the seat, it took him about ten seconds to see what had happened and about five more seconds to figure out who the culprit was.

“I had to replace a lot of stuff on that bike,” Jake said, “and that shit’s expensive.”

After that, Jake was forbidden to drive any of Phil’s toys until eventually Phil relented and let his son use his fancy Chevy Silverado. Jake was cruising around Seattle in the truck when he decided to roll into
a drive-through Starbucks. Determined to be extra careful with Phil’s vehicle, Jake pulled up a little farther out than normal from the takeout window.

The pert redhead on duty, noticing how Jake was keeping his distance, couldn’t resist teasing him.

“Is that truck too big for you?” she asked.

That was the wrong thing to say to Cool Hand Jake, who promptly replied, “Well, hell no,” slapped the gear into reverse and punched it.

The truck smacked into the railing, scratching up its bright, distinctive paint job.

Once again, the first question in Jake’s mind was: Can I hide this from the old man?

He shuddered at the probable answer.

The next day, Phil and Jake were driving another vehicle on a stretch of road in a heavily forested area outside Seattle. The sun was peeking out for one of its rare appearances, and Phil was doing what he loved most, telling a funny story.

Jake wasn’t reacting, sitting there silent as a mime, wondering how he was going to break the news of his latest accident.

“Why so depressed?” Phil asked. “You look like someone who crashed their father’s truck.”

Damn, got me again, thought Jake, giving his father that all-too-familiar hand-in-the-cookie-jar grin.

“I’ll get it fixed,” said Jake softly.

Phil almost literally hit the roof of the car. He had just been teasing his son, totally unaware of what Jake had done.

“You what?” Phil yelled. “You idiot!”

He eventually decided to just give the truck to Jake, who added a whole new paint job featuring gnarly skulls and flames. Jake still has that Silverado today, a treasured tie to his dad.

Jake may have driven his father into a rage at times, but he also made his dad proud by graduating from high school, and grateful for
the crucial role he played in the house as a buffer between Phil and Teresa.

When Jake moved out, Phil was left alone with Teresa. All the birdhouses in the world wouldn’t be enough to make that situation work.

In 2003, ten years after they married, Phil divorced Teresa.

While nearly everybody else thinks that was the best thing for Phil, Cornelia Marie isn’t so sure.

“I really, seriously believe Phil loved Teresa,” said Cornelia. “I think they were alike. They had the same type of personality. Phil put a lot of effort into the relationship. He tried to make her happy any way he could. This is a man who would send his wife a dozen roses on their anniversary every year. He also did that every year for her birthday. He was always trying to please that woman, going the extra mile to try and make their marriage work. His passion for her really caught me off guard. To give that much effort, he must have truly loved her.

“The divorce was very hard on him. I believe it took two years off his life.”