THE ALMOST UNSINKABLE MARINER OF FRIDAY HARBOR, WA. by Brad Warren

 

CARTOON BY DENNIS DAY
1984
click image to enlarge.
From the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society.

When the only bar on Friday Harbor's waterfront changed hands last year [1983,] its detractors watched the name disappear from its weathered sign and confidently predicted that the raucous Mariner Galley & Bar had finally, and fortunately sunk. It had surrendered its prime location, they gloated, to a fancy new restaurant that would show San Juan Island what "class" could be. But neither the Mariner nor Friday Harbor was ready to be gentrified. The new restaurant fizzled out in November, a financial and social disaster. In December the Mariner's old owners, Ron and Sandy Speers, reclaimed it and fighting the building's owners, and the State Liquor Control Board, brought the bar back to its former self. Almost.
        The Mariner was still a salty den of noisy fishermen, surly rebels, 19th-century holdouts, and 20th-century dropouts––still the stubborn soul of a roistering bordertown, fishing port past, and still for Mariner regulars at least, the place that kept Friday Harobr true to its real identity as "the southernmost town in SE Alaska."
        But the Mariner lost its liquor license––on account of past violations for which it has already paid fines, suffered closures, and fired bartenders, according to the Speers. Unless they could win the license back, their lease will expire. "We'll get it back," said Ron Speers. "I'm willing to fight this all the way into court if I have to, but I'm sure we'll prevail."
        "The Mariner was the first place I worked when I came to the island," says self-proclaimed Marinero Tom Hook. "I went in and saw the piano and asked if they need someone to play it. They put me to work that night. The pay was lousy but it was a great place to work. A few weeks later I met Phil Martin there. I was playing 'Take Five' and I looked up, and there was the biggest fisherman I'd ever seen––he filled the doorway. He had a black beard down to his chest, and he looked like Wolf Larsen, straight out of the Sea Wolf. When he saw me, he said, 'Oh! A piano player!'
        "He walked right over and grabbed the handles on the back of the piano, braced the bottom of it against his leg, and lifted the whole thing six inches off the floor while I was playing it. "My name's Phil, he said with a big smile. "I like country and western."
        "I gulped and looked up at him, I said, "Yeah? Well, I like tips."
        "He put down the piano, slammed a five-dollar bill on top of it, and said, "There's more where that came from, partner if you're any good."
        I met him when we were reporting for competing island newspapers, and we became friends when I started playing guitar at the Mariner with the Crawlspace Blues Band. It was a great rowdy place to play. We were never paid much––sometimes not at all–– but we always got a free meal. That made a big difference when cash was scarce, as it usually was on the island. Nobody had money in the winter.
        If the waitress wasn't around in the morning when were went to collect our free meal, we'd go behind the counter, pour our coffee, and tell the cook what we wanted. Phil Martin and a bunch of local fishermen would be there rumbling or joking about the bad fishing or repairs on their boats, sometimes griping about the Boldt decision, something just staring out the window at the harbor. The Mariner was their place; they ate, drank, and brooded there by day––between turns of a wrench on their boats or knots in a net they were mending––and they came back to cut loose at night.
        Some fishermen had no phones at home and gave out the Mariner's number. One was Dennis Day, a seiner and artist who used to sit at the bar all afternoon when he wasn't working, drawing on napkins: he made magnificent, mythical images of boats riding out storms, mermaids rising from the surf, black-bearded fishermen hauling in nets––elemental, powerful visions. The wall behind the bar gradually became Dennis' gallery as the bartender saved and hung his napkins, and on another wall, Tom Hook hung a hand-drawn map of places to get drunk in southern France.
        The Mariner was full of people whose rough looks hid surprising talents. Many had left their old lives in the fast lane to rust back on the mainland. There were fishermen with doctorates and an amateur live-aboard boatbuilder who had dissolved his successful public-interest law practice and came to hide out quietly on the island. Even Ron and Sandy, the owners, were an unlikely mix. They ran a farm on the island and looked like it. But Ron had graduated from Harvard and been a naval officer; Sandy, the Mariner's fearless den mother, had lived for years in Germany. Almost everyone there had made a sort of stand against nine-to-five, bureaucratic, domesticated, and disoriented mainland American culture. The sea was their antidote. My landlady, an Alaskan troller and sometime teacher in Friday Harbor, once told me, "When you're out there on the open water in your own tiny fishing boat and you see a big storm come up over the horizon, it does something for your priorities. It's you and the sea, and you've got to survive."
        The sale of the Mariner meant a lot more than a change of ownership. It was a signal of Friday Harbor's rapid, painful growth into a prosperous resort and retirement community––a prestigious place to have a second home or yacht. The population of San Juan Island had doubled during the 1970s, and few newcomers fit into the islands' rough-handed fishing, farming, and logging tradition, where good old boys held office and smugglers held out in the islands many hidden coves. That era came to a political finish in the late 1970s, when the new electorate recalled a corrupt county commissioner and voted in strict land-use controls and reforms. At the same time, poor management by the Washington Department of Fisheries and a raft of court-imposed restrictions crippled the commercial salmon fishery in Puget Sound.
        The old diehard spirit, which had reached its apogee when locally notorious lawyer Charlie Schmidt drafted a plan for the island to secede from the union and become a free port, was losing its grip. Islanders watched the changes and said cynically that Friday Harob r would soon be "the northernmost town in Southern California." Land prices were skyrocketing and it looked, in Sany Speers' words, as if "the little people were going to be squeezed out."
        The Speers' precarious revival of the Mariner won't change any of that. But it is somehow cheering to think of returning to find the old crowd still scowling and winking at the ferry as it pulls in, the last dive holding out for all that is un-reconstructible and defiant in Friday Harbor, an enduring chip off the ornery, generous heart of the islands.

Words by Brad Warren.
Published by the defunct Puget Sound Enetai
9 February 1984.

From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.