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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 selfimprovement.
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
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