Sea Lion

TANYO RAVICZ

Lonny K was already on probation for a felony when he was photographed shooting at a sea lion. What had begun as a verbal turf war between him and his neighbors, commercial fishermen on Kodiak Island’s west coast, had escalated into violence when Lonny rammed the neighbors’ fishing skiff with his own, a 23-foot aluminum skiff driven by a 150-horsepower outboard engine. That’s where the felony comes in, because in the eyes of the law a moving boat is a lethal weapon.

As a felon, Lonny shouldn’t have been anywhere near a firearm, but there he was shooting his rifle at a sea lion that was robbing the salmon from his net and tearing holes in the mesh. Lonny’s setnet, anchored in place and stretching perpendicular to the beach, was completely vulnerable to the sea lion, but shooting at a sea lion is a federal crime, and the neighbors, the ones Lonny had feuded with, snuck over and photographed him doing it. That’s how Lonny K came to spend the next part of his life behind bars.

It’s hard to say where a life pivots, where a fateful course of events is set in motion. Character is one thing, circumstance is another, and if the one looks inescapable, the other may look freakish or unfair. People who knew Lonny, friends and family, thought it was a mistake to have accepted a five-year felony probation in the first place. “Five years! That’s a long time to stay out of trouble.” “You better not even have a bullet, Lonny. You’re a felon. Don’t take your gun to fish camp. They’re watching you. They’re laying for you.”

All this turned out to be true. “In one ear and out the other,” his mother Audrey said. Sometimes Lonny drank too much, and it wasn’t for nothing that he had a reputation for hot-headedness. Even after the photographs emerged, the ones that showed him shooting at a sea lion, the Alaskan prosecutors would have dropped the probation violation if Lonny had been willing to sell his commercial fishing rights. They didn’t want him going back there and stirring up trouble with the neighbors. But the federal authorities had a different agenda. Lonny’s crime was shooting at a Steller sea lion, and the feds weren’t interested in doing anything but making an example of Lonny K. Lonny’s friends saw the federal government as a massive golden sea lion lunging out of the water and shaking a salmon in its jaws.

At the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility in downtown Anchorage, Lonny and the other arrivals waited in a hot windowless cell, a foul-smelling hellhole of a cell. To Lonny the place stank worse than a pack of sea lions. The sweat rolled down his sides and he was left there to stew for a long time. His ordeal had begun.

His mother Audrey visited him there and she later remembered the indignities with a bitter shudder. She thought she would rather die than be locked up like that. Audrey felt sorry for her son, but he had been given many chances to straighten out. She was old school in this regard, a law-and-order, take-responsibility woman. Lonny had always been a jock, humored and indulged, and the pattern of indulgence had finally caught up with him.

Privately, Audrey believed that a tendency to alcohol abuse ran in the genes, on her late husband’s side. But this was no excuse. Lonny was thirty-four years old. He had time to change his ways. Pink-faced, square-jawed, handsome, Swedish and German by blood, and with winning blue eyes, Lonny had looks that worked magic on certain women, often women who had a fire-breathing streak of their own. One of these was his girlfriend Florence, a twenty-two-year-old from one of the island villages. Privately Audrey had doubts about Florence, who liked to “party hearty” and who might not be the best influence on her son. But Audrey didn’t want to hex Lonny by giving up on his judgment. If he would leave off drinking, if he would wed Florence or another woman and find room in his heart for God, Lonny could turn his life around.

For his part Lonny had a single great fear: that his grandmother would learn that he was in jail. He was extremely fond of his grandmother and he begged his mother not to tell the old woman what had happened.

It was January when Lonny began serving time at the Cook Inlet Facility, and until his sentencing he was locked up for twenty-four hours a day except for commissary trips and twice weekly gym exercise. He was eventually moved to a minimum security wing where his cellmate was a smalltime drug offender. In February his sentencing made Kodiak’s newspaper, the Daily Mirror. The townspeople who didn’t already know Lonny’s story now read it in the newspaper. Fortunately his grandmother lived out of state and his secret was safe from her.

For taking potshots at a sea lion Lonny was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. He had already served two months; fifty-four days were suspended; leaving him with fourteen months to serve on the federal charges.

In March, Lonny was transferred to a federal prison outside of Alaska. This happened abruptly and without any notice to his family. His sister Janice had sent him a letter with an enclosed religious pamphlet and a picture of Jesus, and the packet was returned to her undelivered with a note informing her that the material she had sent was “contraband.” His family worried about him until they learned that they could write to him at the Federal Detention Center in Seattle. “Be sure to use the correct inmate number,” they were told, “or he won’t get the mail.”

Because the move to Seattle happened so abruptly, only a day after his girlfriend Florence visited him, Lonny suspected that the authorities relocated him to deprive him of this last happiness of receiving visits from his girl. He was alone now to ponder his transgressions. But not really alone. At the Federal Detention Center in Seattle, Lonny was surrounded by illegal immigrants and petty drug users. He wasn’t sure how to interpret this. Did it say something about the relative gravity of his offense? Did it speak to the efficiency and appetite of the criminal justice system? “There are so many innocent people here,” he wrote home in a letter. And indeed it shocked Lonny that ordinary people served long sentences for a simple drug possession or a border violation. Most of them were good people, and he sometimes thought of them as his roommates, not his cellmates.

By June, Lonny was working six days a week for six hours a day in the prison bakery. The job relieved the tedium of incarceration, and in his spare time he studied the Bible for self-improvement. Fishing was the work he loved most, and this was the first summer in memory that Lonny didn’t fish. He normally setnetted for salmon in the summertime, and in the winter he crabbed for king crab in the Bering Sea. Lonny had always said that crabbing was a young man’s work and he would quit it after he turned thirty years old, but he was too fond of living on the edge—it’s a lucrative thrill, catching crab in the Bering Sea—and after he turned thirty he kept heading west to the crabbing grounds. Now in federal custody he fished for nothing.

Back in Kodiak many of Lonny’s colleagues, dismayed by the bullying tactics of the government, spoke freely on the subject:

“If the people who made the laws were turned out and had to earn their living fishing, things would come around different.”

“You got that right.”

“Sea lions yank a salmon right out of my hands. They’ll rip out the stomach and leave the rest. Roll around in the net and take what they want and leave the fish heads.”

“They get us seine fishermen, too. Swim right into the seine before we close it. They’ll toss out thirty or forty salmon and go get ’em. You look in your net and the sea lion got more fish than you did.”

Kodiak’s fishermen were distinctly unimpressed by the government’s heavy-handedness in punishing Lonny.

Lonny fished for a couple of seasons after his release from custody in the spring of the following year. He repaired the bear damage at his neglected fish camp, and during salmon season he deployed a hundred fifty fathoms of moneymaking gillnet. In the winter he crewed a crab boat in the Bering Sea, as in the past, but the catch of king crab wasn’t what it used to be. The crabbing season was shorter than ever, and when he factored in the required weeks of preparation and cleanup, his paycheck, just under ten thousand dollars, was a disappointment.

Florence had gotten pregnant in the fall, and their baby would be due in June when the next commercial salmon season opened. Ordinarily Florence would have her baby at the Native hospital in Anchorage, but she decided to stay in Kodiak so that Lonny would not have to choose between the baby’s birth and the start of salmon season. If it ever came to a choice, though, she wondered what choice Lonny would make, and she asked him. Lonny pondered the question and decided it was a tossup. He played cool about the prospect of becoming a thirty-seven-year-old father, but Flo wanted the baby a lot, and this made him happy.

Lonny’s sentence included three years of state probation and six years of federal probation, and as an ex-convict he needed to pay attention to every rule. Even a fuel seep from his engine filter could land him in trouble, and Lonny couldn’t afford trouble. “I’ve got friends where I’m going,” he would say, speaking of his nemeses on the fishing grounds. Lonny’s supporters, gauging how his experiences had changed him, noticed that he used the word “seem” a lot, as if he didn’t quite trust in appearances anymore. “Seems like it’ll be a nice day today,” he said. Or, “He seems like a nice guy.”

Not to be caught in a trivial infraction, Lonny used buoy paint to stencil his boat registration number on the bow of his fishing skiff. Enforcement of the boat registration rules was passing from the Coast Guard to the Alaska State Troopers and a crackdown was expected. As for the sea lions, Lonny refrained from actively repelling them, but it vexed him that people didn’t understand the scope of the problem. It wasn’t one or two sea lions inconveniencing him, it was twenty of them violating his net. They were predators. He thought about poisoning them, but a bevy of dead sea lions washing up on his beach would look very bad indeed.

Although Lonny was pleased that he hadn’t buckled to the government’s pressure and sold his fishing rights, the truth was that Lonny had wearied of fishing. And this was something he had never believed would happen. The fishing was less productive than it used to be, and he wasn’t getting younger. He had long ago dreamed of becoming a high school wrestling coach, but this dream was impossible for a felon. With a baby on the way he thought about finding work in the North Slope oil fields, and he contemplated an apprenticeship in the trade of heating and air conditioning, but these possibilities lay in the future. Lonny still had a difficult choice to make before the way ahead became clear to him.

The commercial salmon season was set to open on the ninth of June, and in early June Lonny left Kodiak town and headed to his fish camp to prepare his equipment. Florence, knowing that the baby was close, broke into tears when Lonny told her he was leaving. She begged him to stay in town with her, but Lonny’s fishing instinct was so strong at this time of year that he really had no choice. He had to go. It was not an easy decision to make, but he made it.

At three-thirty on the morning after he left, Florence went into labor. From the hospital she called Lonny on the satellite telephone, and Lonny got the news and tried to return to town to be with her, but the weather had changed since he left, with gale winds blowing and dangerous seas, and Lonny couldn’t get closer to Kodiak town than the village of Port Lions. Stranded there during the storm, Lonny missed everything, both the baby’s delivery and the start of salmon fishing.

“He’ll hear about that one for the rest of his life,” the old salts in Kodiak say, and they tell Lonny’s story with a laughter born of a lifetime’s learning. “He made his decision and it was the wrong decision.”

This turned out to be the last season of commercial fishing for Lonny K. Today Lonny lives with Flo and their children in the Pacific Northwest, far from the fishing grounds of Kodiak, Alaska.