The Bottom of the Ocean

After leaving the oil rigs my life changed dramatically, as in, it went back to roughly how it had been before I worked on the oil rigs. At first this meant a near-complete deflation of the mythology; I had other things on my mind, and was more than happy to leave the dark destiny of the Undigestible Man behind me. This lasted for about four months. I think the first relapse after that was pretty significant, because it really set the precedent for persistent obsession over this thing. It also underscored the reality that the mythology is not nearly as coherent as it would like to be. It would like to pretend that there's one big story building here, with precisely attuned elements being added all the time. But you can see for yourself.

The next salient aspect of the mythology is the Remote Fishing Resort, chosen likely because about four months after I left the rigs I took a job working on a semi-remote fishing resort. The job itself wasn't nearly the perfect picture of hell that the rigs had been - it was in the middle of the summer, I spent most days on a dock drinking coffee (with only a few hours each day devoted to gutting fish and mopping blood out of speed boats) and the other crew were really cool guys. We talked a lot about film and history and, for some reason, how much we all really hated the guests. This was a weird aspect of the job that I took for granted at the time, but it wasn't just our resort. The same company that owned us also owned about seven other places, and I got the impression from guys who had worked other resorts that just about anybody who was put in the position of helping fat Texan guys catch large salmon ended up completely resenting them for it. It was like we all shared some reverence for the symbolic purity of the ocean, and felt that we too were being abused when these ungrateful mammoths raped the sea of its precious resources for sport and glory. Whenever one wasn't in ear-shot, every crew-member referred to the guests as "chows," presumably because they chow on things (like food and resources? I don't really know).

The thing that really got my symbolism-mongering going was the rock cod. Because the fisheries around our resort were drastically over-fished, the chows would often come in from a day's fishing empty-handed. This led them to occasionally give up on fishing twelve-feet deep (where the salmon typically are) and let their lines spool out so that they were trolling the bottom of the bay. And by this method they would sometimes come back with gross, ugly fish like rock cod - inedible, smelly, and really really old. These things were basically dinosaurs, built like tanks to last forever doing hardly anything, so a couple feet worth of rock cod meant about three hundred years of life. Incubating since the industrial revolution just to be gaffed by some chow named Dwayne who has a personal policy of "I catch it, I bonk it" (don't you see how miserable these cretins were?) Other times they would catch even weirder stuff. We had a guy on our crew who had a degree in marine biology and had lived in the region his entire life, and a couple times he had no clue what he was looking at, some of the fish were so ancient and prototypical. They were like archetypes, milling around at the bottom of the collective unconscious.

And that is precisely what about them I became obsessed with.

The fishing resort has had a hard time fitting in with the overall mythology. Sometimes the Undigestible Man works at the fishing resort before he goes on to the rigs (and subsequently finds the controls to the planet), but in general the resort doesn't serve any special purpose other than to highlight the similarities between weird ancient fish at the bottom of the ocean and the concept of archetypes milling around in the collective unconscious - in both cases, just waiting for ill-advised fisherman to go hunting after them, not knowing what they're getting into by doing so. Also in both cases, providing me with an obsession I can hardly articulate, let alone express in a way that will help anyone else care. I could perhaps write a short story for some kind of Jungian Appreciation Society, but even then, there are better Jungian premises to work with.

There is one set of scenes that stick in my mind: The Fish Master who runs the resort, knows everything about fish, hates the chows, never goes fishing himself - he's a pretty haunted guy (not unlike the Undigestible Man), and has made some pretty bad choices in his life, but we have no idea what. The resort is his life now, his permanent exile. At the crack of dawn every morning he goes down to the dock and peers out over the bay, watches the sun peer out above the darkness. One morning he sees a shadowy figure, almost human-like, appear on the horizon, walking across the water towards him. He freaks out and runs back to his cabin, afraid of something he doesn't understand.

A little later on he's called down to the docks because a guest has caught something really strange. He'd been trolling the bottom of the ocean out of boredom, and after a drawn-out fight had dragged in something weird and ancient and really large. It's vaguely green with webbed arms and legs, but, much more disturbingly, its rough dimensions are somewhat human. Its eyes are dead, but otherwise resemble human eyes without pupils. The crew, not knowing what to do, dump it back into the bay.

As time progresses, the crew never see the Fish Master anymore - he never leaves his cabin, and is incredibly paranoid and irritable whenever he's disturbed. They would like to have him replaced, but the resort is too isolated, no civilization for a hundred miles in any direction - no one comes or goes except by twice-monthly sea planes that drop off supplies and new guests. A couple of the guys swear they see some weird figures lurking by his cabin one night, but they're gone by the time they get close enough to see.

And then, one morning, the Fish Master is suddenly back at the dock, preparing the crew boat to go fishing. The morning shift are too shocked to say anything but whisper curiously amongst themselves. The Fish Master has prepared a specific kind of bait, and as he heads out into the bay, knows exactly where he's going. He reaches the spot, carefully ties his bait onto the line, and sinks it to the bottom of the ocean. And then, he waits. And then, there's a tug. And a moment later, his line is jerked violently, pulling both the rod and the Fish Master over the side of the boat, and down to the very bottom of the sea. His thoughts and guilt and fears and hatreds had finally found a way to reach him, and he'd lost the final confrontation.

Again, yes, pretty dark. But there it is.