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Outside Magazine December 2002

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Out There
Gettin' Jiggy (Cont.)

AN AGGRAVATING TING about squid is that they'll clear out at any moment, without warning. That's what happened at Pier 57: Just when I was getting my groove and had enough squid to cover the bottom of a five-gallon bucket, we had a squid shutdown. All the folks sharing our light packed up and headed a ten-minute walk north to Pier 63 without so much as a good-bye.

Matt and I followed. Pier 63 was now a big party. A generator powered a large bank of floodlights, and a crowd of 50 people or so was lined up in the glow. People were dropping jigs down into what looked like a docking slip for a large ship.

The generator's owner, a frail old Korean man, was warming his hands in the buzzing machine's exhaust. "I don't jig much myself,"

A squid landed a shot of ink right on the chest of my coveralls, forming a kick-ass badge. From now on, I would answer only to sheriff squid.

he told me. "I just use my lights so my friends and neighbors here can have a good time." I asked him his name, but he wouldn't say, because you're not supposed to use gasoline-powered equipment on public piers. Now and then some pain-in-the-ass type will file a complaint and the cops will be forced to shut him down. "When they do, I cool it for a week and then come back out like nothing happened," he said.

Matt and I thanked him and squeezed into the line. I was standing next to a 52-year-old Cambodian man named Savuth Thach, who was dressed from head to toe in the plastic bags that car dealers send your old tires home in when you buy new ones. He gave us some dried squid. While I chewed, he told me that he'd fled Cambodia in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took power. He caught squid back in Cambodia by dragging a white rag through the water to lure them up to the surface, where he could net them. "A squid thinks the jig is another squid and wants to mate it, not eat it," Savuth told me. I wasn't going to challenge this theory; Savuth had way more squid in his bucket than I did.

"So do you, like, work the jig in a sexually provocative way?" I asked.

"No, just jiggle and feel," he said, yanking in another squid. "Just jiggle and feel."

Farther along, I met a 30-year-old Filipino named Rudy, who makes his own jigs out of lead, straight pins, and glow-in-the-dark tape. He used to catch squid in the Philippines by throwing dynamite into the water. The explosion would stun the schools of squid, making them easy to net. These days he gives some squid to friends and uses the rest to make a traditional Philippine dish called adobo, with squid marinated in vinegar, garlic, soy sauce, bay leaves, and crushed peppercorns, then cooked and served with rice. I asked Rudy if he thinks a squid wants to mate with the jig.

"The squid wants to fight the jig," he said, "or maybe mate it."

The mood on the pier suddenly turned serious. Some good schools of squid had moved in, and everyone was concentrating. Matt and I crowded into a gap amid a group of Japanese-American college students. They were fixing to make some ika sansai, a cooked-squid salad. So many squid were getting cranked up over the rail that the pier's surface was slimy with ink. No sooner would you drop your jig down than you were pulling up a squid. Matt and I had been providing sea-monster screams for everybody in our area, but the responsibility had grown too demanding. From then on we screamed only for our own squid.

At one point Matt took a shot of squid ink right in the eye and had to retreat momentarily. The ink is harmless, but it stings a little. As he recoiled, his place was seized by a little old Thai lady in a plastic bonnet who'd been weaving through the crowds searching for primo spots. The woman wanted squid, and she didn't want to stay up all night getting them. She set a small stool down, climbed up so she could reach over the rail, and set into a punishing bout of squid jigging. She'd lower a jig down and stare out over the harbor for a moment. Then, as though she'd been struck by a brilliant idea, she would crank up the lure with a squid attached, give the creature a second to expel its ink away from her clothes, and flick it into her bucket. Several times she pulled up her jig with two squid attached. I couldn't help but let out a double monster scream, which failed to amuse her. She'd jiggle her bucket a bit after every catch, as if assessing the needs of several recipes. After she had a couple pounds, she gathered her things into a basket and left.

The squid kept coming. The fishing motif of "first, biggest, and most" was totally absent. There wasn't a trace of that usual pier-fishing possessiveness about who's standing in what spot. The collective goal was for everyone to get something. Rudy was lending out his homemade jigs left and right. One guy with a hot spot next to a pylon kept waving everyone over. When a woman's jig got caught on the pylon, all activity in her area stopped until it was freed.

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