Hypocritical Mass

I don't eat meat because I have no desire to chew and digest anything that would hold it against me. And while I'm not a militant vegetarian, I am human and American and am therefore comforted by news items that validate my choices: vegetarians are more likely to be more intelligent, says one story. "Clearly," I say. I don't eat particularly well, and so I find little to interest me in stories about the ill effects of meat on the heart; I pretty much fill the "ill effects" gap with baked goods. But I've always been able to feel a certain superiority of character whenever I hear about the treatment of livestock in megafarms and the, well, slaughter of living things perpetrated at slaughterhouses.

Once again, however, television has found a way to knock me off my high horse. It's held a pixelated mirror up to my face and said, "See? You're not so great. You think that high horse wants you on its back, especially after all those baked goods? And you say you care about animals. Ha!" For though I hate the thought of animals slaughtered for consumption, though I believe whole-heartedly in their ability to think and feel in a way completely on a par with human beings, though I will surely go to the special hell reserved for puppy kickers and Ann Coulter, I must admit, I love The Deadliest Catch.

The Deadliest Catch is a brilliant show that follows six fishing boats locked in a deadly showdown with the merciless Bering Sea for the potential riches of crab fishing. There is an absolute ton of money to be made: a deckhand on a successful ship like, say, The Cornelia Marie could make more than $30,000 in a few weeks fishing. That's if you've got a good captain like Phil. I'm sure there are plenty of vessels out there that are not doing so great. It all depends on where the captain strings the pots, huge metal cages that sink down to the black and freezing ocean floor. The fishermen bait the cages, let the pots "soak" for a few days, and then come back and pull them up.

And this is where this shit gets awesome. These fishermen have their whole livelihood riding on what's in the pots when they go back and get them. They've only got so much time to catch their crab. The Discovery Channel's helpful computer-generated crab reenactments show the complex workings of the ocean floor. Giant herds of crab rove along the seabed, crawling over each other in an enormous rolling mass in search of food. The captains of the crabbing ships have to try to predict where their quarry will go next and then string their pots in the path of the crustacean stampede. It's awesome.

Over the course of a crab-fishing season, you get to know the ships, their captains, and crews. And if you, say, watch a marathon on the Discovery Channel while your roommate is away for the weekend, you might even end up peppering your speech with ill-used lingo of the Bering Sea. "That pot's coming up empty," you might say when you see someone trying to parallel park their SUV on a crowded city street. Or when giving directions, you might tell someone to take a starboard turn on Victoria Street. The king crab season ends, and the opilio season begins. You watch it all, rooting for the underdog Time Bandit but secretly reveling in the predictable dominance of the Northwestern.

Watching this show, I am reminded of a harrowing experience from my youth. My brother and I were camping with our dad at a park on the Mississippi River. A big part of the camping experience for them was fishing. For me, that meant sitting on the cooler in the middle of the canoe and reading a Nancy Drew mystery.

On one such outing, we came across a log apparently floating upstream. Further investigation revealed fishing line tangled around the driftwood. Something was dragging that log upstream. My dad caught hold of the log and started to pull in the line. There was something big, something powerful on the other end of that line, and after a few minutes of tugging, my dad gave up, to my enormous relief. I had watched, clutching the handles of the cooler on which I was perched, absolutely terrified of what could be on the other end of that line, lurking in the depths of that ancient river...and how pissed off it would be to find itself dragged to the surface. I imagined its eyes breaking the surface and darting from the line caught in its fish lips to the line strung on our fishing poles. It would do the math and squint angrily at me as it launched itself out of the water on prehistoric fins and snatched me right off the Igloo, dragging me to my murky end on the riverbed.

If you find yourself tossed into the Bering Sea, your only hope is in a survival suit. Even then, if you're not rescued within an hour, your chances of getting out of the water alive aren't great. While I'm sure any number of sea creatures would dub the season they're fished as "the deadliest," the crab fishing season claims the most human lives of any. And that is why this show is epic. That is why I can't take my eyes off it. The producers are banking on the audience's willingness--perhaps even desire--to see horrible things happen to animals and humans alike. People die all the freaking time to bring crab to the dinner tables of the world.

And so Deadliest Catch covers all the major epic struggles of literature and lore...
Man vs. Man: which boat will bring in the greatest share of the crabbing riches? Man vs. Nature: can the captains outmaneuver Poseidon as he blasts them with arctic gales and tosses their ships on 30-foot waves? Man vs. Shellfish: can the crabbers stay one step ahead of their elusive, ever-moving prize, or will the crafty crabs sidestep the sunken pots and force the men home with empty hulls and empty pockets?

I watch with hungry eyes, if not a hungry stomach. With every pot that's winched up from the ocean floor, my heart races: will it be full of crab, empty, or will some other creature wait between the bars of the cage? The monster I envision is twisted in on itself by guilt, a tortured soul that wants to do right but is weak in the face of great entertainment. I'm on the edge of my seat, which has come to feel oddly like an Igloo cooler.