You get to Whittier through a mountain. The tunnel is two and a half miles long and one lane wide, and cars share it with the railroad, taking turns on a schedule posted at the entrance. Miss your slot and you wait an hour. On the far side is a harbor, a few hundred residents, most of whom live in the same tall building, and Prince William Sound. It was raining when I came out of the tunnel. I am told it was raining when the tunnel was built.
I was there for sablefish, which most people know as black cod and most restaurants know as the expensive one. They live deep. Not halibut deep, where you grumble about three hundred feet, but properly deep, in the trenches of the fjords where the chart reads two thousand and the sunlight gave up long ago. The skipper, a patient woman named Marcy who runs the last trips of the season into October, steamed two hours out to a mark she has never shown anyone and shut the engine down.
The rig is four pounds of lead, a string of circle hooks baited with herring, and a small flashing light, because down there someone has to bring their own. You clip it on, open the reel, and wait. It takes the better part of ten minutes to reach bottom. Marcy uses that time to pour coffee and tell you about every person who has asked whether it is there yet. The reels are electric, and nobody apologizes for it. Cranking two thousand feet by hand, she says, is how you turn one fishing trip into your last.
A sablefish bite at that depth is a rumor. The rod tip nods once, maybe twice, like it is agreeing with something. Marcy watched mine, said that is two, give it a minute, and then pressed the button. The reel hummed for a quarter of an hour. I ate a sandwich. And then they came up out of the green, three of them on the string, long and charcoal black with skin like wet velvet, not a scale you could see, each about as long as my arm.
We had our fish by early afternoon and ran home past a glacier that calved a little as we went by, which Marcy treated as routine. She filleted one at the dock and told me to do nothing clever with it. Salt, a hot pan, skin side down. It was the richest fish I have ever eaten, closer to butter than to cod, and I said so. She said that is what a life spent in the dark and the cold will do for you, and that Whittier has been hoping for the same result for years.
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