Tuesday, June 19, 2012

The Long Drift

 "Hey what is that over there?" the client asked as he pointed to something in the ocean.
  "Looks red like a jerry jug gas can," I replied.
   Just this morning I had spoken with another one of our guides who showed me a jerry jug he had found floating in the ocean the day before.
  "Look at the writing on it," Paul had said. I looked and then did a double take. It was in Japanese.
  Telling the client to keep the faded red jug in sight, I turned the boat in a wide loop so as not to tangle the lines I was trolling.
It took some maneuvering of the boat, but finally I was lined up and heading to the orange jug.
  I netted the jug and brought it on board.
  "Look at the writing," I commented to the client. His eyes bugged out a little. 
  "What is that?" he asked.
  "It is Japanese," I informed him. I then went on to explain how a lot of the debris from the tsunami was now reaching our coast of Alaska.
  We had a good time looking over the jug and talking about how far this very jug must have drifted.
  We took many pictures of the jug, and then got back to fishing.
   "Sure hope there is not radiation on that jug," the client said some time later.
  I had not even considered that. "I hope not myself," I said as I looked at my gloves I had just been handling the jug with.
  We enjoyed a good day of fishing, but all through the day I would look up and see the red jug and think about it floating from Japan since March 2011 only to be discovered in Sitka, Alaska in June 2012.  Just one tiny piece of rubble from all the destruction that had hit their coast.
  I would love to know where the jug had been washed from. Maybe a marina along the coast. Perhaps it had been stored inside a boat before the boat was lost in the big quake after shocks.
  Who knows? I will keep the pictures of the jug as a reminder that even though an ocean may separate us, we are still connected as humans on this earth.

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