From a Distance

The plane was loading Alaska-bound passengers at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. Brett and Renee Claggett kissed. He held onto his 3-year-old son, Ryan, as if he’d never let go.

Then he did.

The holidays were over, and the fish awaited.

For almost two years, the Claggetts have defied convention. To stay whole, the family split in two, leaping between two worlds like the salmon from which they wrest a living.

Renee, 31, and their sons, Delton, 6, and Ryan, 3, winter in sunny Laguna Niguel, where fast food is a quick car ride away and her days are spent shuttling the boys between kindergarten, day care and soccer practice.

Brett, 32, plies Alaska’s rain-drenched Inland Passage. In winter, he hauls giant clams and sea cucumbers from the frigid waters near his ancestral home, the Tsimshian Indian village of Metlakatla on Annette Island.

In March, Renee and the boys will join him and spend the next six months aboard their commercial packing boat, the Island Dancer.

It is an extraordinary life.

One month, the boys are splashing in a chlorinated pool. The next, they play on the boat’s rear deck as humpback whales gambol in the waters around them. Brett and Renee go from living in the closest of quarters--on a boat at sea--to spending months apart.

The Claggetts say this delicately balanced arrangement saved their union, one of 2 million long-distance commuter marriages in the United States.

Not many Southern California women make a life with an Alaskan Indian fisherman, reach the brink of divorce, then begin again. But Brett and Renee are unwavering in their belief that they are doing what’s best.

“If we hadn’t done this, we wouldn’t be married anymore,” Brett says. “I had to do something to keep my family whole.”

An Uncertain Life

On a sparkling day in early September, Brett steers the Island Dancer through choppy waters, past evergreen shores and cloud-tipped mountains.

The boat, measuring 82 feet by 38 feet and weighing 144 tons, is sturdy, a bit stubby, with a thick, curved prow, a sparkling blue visor and bright orange, beehive-shaped buoys strapped to its sides.

In one day, Brett and Renee haul in a record 50 tons of chum salmon from smaller boats, a load worth $6,000 to them. The next day, a fisherman breaks the ship’s “brain box,” the digital scale that weighs each day’s catch. The repair will cost them $2,500.

The reality is that Alaskan fishing is a tumultuous, uncertain life, but one filled with beauty.

In a free moment, as rainbows arch between tattered clouds and deep green islands, Delton and Ryan play on their version of backyard swings. Dad packs them into a plastic tub that normally holds 425 pounds of ice, hoists it up the ship’s rigging and swings them skyward. They shriek with delight.

When a friend gives the family a bag of sweet Dungeness crab, Ryan asks, “Who caught it?”

“I love that my boys are growing up in a place where they understand that somebody caught the food that they are about to eat,” Renee says. “They’ve seen bald eagles and caught a shark. They’ve seen grizzly bears strolling on the beach.”

Danger threatens constantly. A 1994 industry study ranked commercial fishing in Alaska the most hazardous profession in the nation.

Night and day, Brett and Renee and two crew members shove huge canvas bags jammed with salmon across a slick steel deck frothy with fish blood, ice and rain into the ship’s vast holds.

Two of Brett’s cousins and two of his friends died in fishing accidents in 1992. Brett has had several brushes.

The children are always within eyesight, perpetually clad in tiny life jackets. One night, Brett snatches Ryan by his overalls out of the path of 2,000 pounds of fish being hauled over the boat’s sides. Hollering over the deafening hydraulic hoists, Brett orders Ryan inside.

He finds his still-crying son and sprawls next to him on the cabin floor. He soothes him and tells him how much he loves him until Ryan squeezes out his last bit of energy, flings out a tiny hand and falls asleep.

Love at First Sight

The first thing Renee loved about Brett was his laugh--a raucous cackle of sheer joy.

Startled, she looked across the Camp Pendleton bar at the handsome soldier with the gravelly voice, and she just knew.

“That’s the man I’m going to marry,” she told girlfriends.

He noticed her, too. It was June 1986; he was a special operations Marine and she a trophy-winning outfielder for the Saddleback College softball team. Both were 19.

Brett walked up to the green-eyed Renee and asked her to dance to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” She told him that night they would marry. He didn’t laugh.

They were worlds apart. Brett, raised by a single mom who worked three jobs to make ends meet, had spent half his childhood on Metlakatla’s cannery wharf or on his uncle Bo’s fishing boat. Part Tsimshian, part white, he survived slurs hurled his way.

Renee grew up in a comfortable San Fernando Valley suburb. Her parents, an insurance salesman and a homemaker who later settled in Mission Viejo, were frightened by her choice of life and love. His mother, who tends bar in Ketchikan, Alaska, didn’t think much of “little Miss Southern California,” as she labeled Renee.

But Renee said she and Brett “knew what was inside.” When he left the service in 1988, she quit college, and they went north.

When they married in 1989, despite continued parental grumbling, the minister said he’d never seen a young couple better matched.

The Claggetts bought their first boat that year. At times, they got by on handouts of moose meat and potatoes. They worked as much as 20 hours a day for three years, pouring their profits into bigger and better boats.

Renee was half the reason for their success. Ignoring superstition that a female on board was bad luck, Renee hauled heavy tubs of ice, unloaded nets full of thrashing salmon and handily beheaded tons of shrimp for market.

The last week of salmon season in 1992, they out-fished everyone else in the local fleet. Then Metlakatla elders banned outsiders from free fishing, partly out of concern over outsiders exploiting native waters.

Renee could stay on land like a traditional fisherman’s wife or buy a $50,000 permit to fish elsewhere. But they couldn’t afford a permit, so Brett fished, once coming home just long enough to throw his catch on the docks before heading back out.

While caring for son Delton, born in 1993, and Ryan, born in 1995, Renee tried different jobs. But increasingly, she felt “like I was going to rot.”

Fights became common. By the summer of 1997, “all hell broke loose,” Renee says. Divorce papers were signed--and torn up--before Brett agreed to see a marriage counselor.

“[The counselor] said if she could smack us, she would,” Renee says. “That after all we had been through, we belonged together.”

But Brett conceded that even if fishing were all he knew how to do, Renee and the boys could be spared gloomy Alaskan winters.

“I felt like I was risking everything,” Brett says. “Everyone on the island told me I was nuts. . . . I told them to go to hell. . . . I needed to bring us back to being a family.”

A Shrimping Vacation

By Labor Day, patience is wearing thin aboard the Island Dancer. The coffee pot hasn’t been turned off since Memorial Day.

Barred from fishing native waters together, the Claggetts instead ferry the catch from the island’s fishing boats to the docks.

Sleep is grabbed an hour at a time, before another fisherman radios he is ready to unload. As the pace slows, nerves are on edge. There are quarrels, and crying jags from the boys.

Brett’s red pickup truck is sitting in Renee’s parents’ driveway 1,646 miles south. The thought of driving it to a mall for a cheeseburger is intoxicating.

On Sept. 4, after hauling 4.7 million tons of fish and netting $60,000, the family takes its first day off in 95 days.

So what do they do?

They go fishing. For shrimp. As Brett steers the boat north to state waters where they are allowed to fish together, he blasts the soundtrack to “Last of the Mohicans,” his personal theme song, he jokes.

By nightfall, there are 150 pounds of the striped crustaceans.

It is growing dark earlier. A full moon rises; fog curls off the creeks and over the jagged Cleveland Range. According to legend, it is the Fog Woman, beckoning the salmon home. While hiking the next day, the boys spot two salmon struggling upstream to lay their eggs before they die.

As Ryan is tucked into his pajamas that night, he asks: “When are we going back to California?”

Brett gazes out the galley porthole at the rising mists. He cannot leave this place, even though it means being apart from loved ones half the year.

“I could not, not do this; I would dry up and blow away,” he says.

Brett curls up on the wheelhouse floor, where he goes when he gets insomnia. The generator below deck vibrates with a deep, constant purr. He lies there, comforted.

Delton Starts School

On Delton’s first day of school, the whole family walks hand in hand to Hidden Hills Elementary School in Laguna Niguel. There, Delton’s teacher, Mrs. Cruz, bends down and gives her newest charge a welcome hug.

Brett fights back tears while watching his son through the window as lessons begin.

Inside, the teacher introduces the new boy and tells his classmates he’s been living on a boat!

“What’s the name of the boat, Delton?” she asks.

“The Island Dancer,” he whispers.

“I’m worried he’s going to like [school] too much,” Renee says, weeping, thinking of March, when she will pull him out of kindergarten.

Brett thinks hard about options.

“Maybe I just have to . . . get my commercial fisherman’s license; work out of Long Beach.”

His stomach churns at the thought of leaving. Even though he can fish again in tribal waters, being alone hurts.

“All summer long, I wake up at 6 a.m., and Ryan comes and sits in my lap . . . while I steer the boat. I’m completely different on my own. . . . I’m not as nice.”

In early January, after spending holidays with his family, Brett heads north again. In just two months, Renee and the boys will be back aboard. But their plans are being fine-tuned. They may return to California in April for a few weeks so Delton can play soccer. Home schooling is off the list.

Next time, she and the boys may stay in Laguna Niguel for the school year. In the future, she says, “pretty much if at any point they decide they don’t want to go to Alaska, we’ve decided we’re going to respect their wishes.”

But Brett and Renee never want to abandon the island.

On a stormy day back in Metlakatla, they drive the boys to the cemetery at the edge of town.

“This is where we’ll all go down when our times come,” says Brett, pointing to where his relatives are buried beneath a traditional covering of crushed white seashells.

“I want the boys to know that this is where they come from, that they will always have this place,” Renee says. “I like knowing that even if I go away for 30 years, this is a home I feel comfortable in.”