Deadliest Catch

I just realized that almost all the television shows I regularly watch are either on cable, reality or documentary style, or both. The show to most recently catch my eye is Discovery's long-running Deadliest Catch. Right now past seasons are running at some point during the day, and I watch one each night via TiVo when I should be sleeping.

My husband, the king of the throwaway line, tells me he's not surprised that I'm watching a fishing show. After all, he reminds me, when I was in college, Sunday afternoons while studying, the TV was regularly on some UHF station for a variety of Westerns following Jimmy Houston Outdoors, a $3.00 production involving an itinerant fisherman who plopped down on various ponds with a local yokel to catch "croppie," whatever the hell those are.

Deadliest Catch is as far removed from JHO as your elementary school talent show was from American Idol. And I watch it not at all for the fishing, but instead for the personalities, the elements, and yes...okay...it's kind of cool in a nerdy, geeky way to see a king crab with a body the size of a man's head. It's also hard not to get caught up in the run for the money, as the bigger boats take in well over a million dollars worth of crab.

Over the past couple of weeks, I watched a fall king crab season. Three men were killed and two rescued - one by the Coast Guard, the other by one of the featured captains. This week it's winter time and they're going after a different type of crab. The waves are bigger, the weather meaner, and the danger ratcheted up a notch.

One of the boats is captained by a man whose wife joined the crew as cook. She's experienced king crab season, but it's her first winter run. On today's episode as her husband captains the boat out into a dangerous storm, she wants him to turn back. He's very no nonsense, but he calls her up to the bridge and tells her something quite wonderful, albeit in his terse and tacitern manner: "I'd wouldn't risk you for anything." Of course, his next line was, "I'd never risk the boat for anything," which mitigated the romantic nature of what he'd said, but he did nonetheless take the time to console, in his way, his frightened wife, even if he took her fear as a personal affront to his ability as a captain. Watching that little scene tripped a trigger in my brain about the male of the species. My guess is that the whole refusing-to-ask-for-directions thing comes from the same place. What do you think?

I'm obviously married to a male of the species, one who deals with the whole direction thing by using VNavigator on his Blackberry (which I man when we're in the car), and I've noticed that at those moments when I'm fearful because of the elements - those snowy trips in Vermont and Utah come immediately to mind - he's almost preternaturally calm. It's as though the alpha male rises to the occasion; he's in charge, he knows what he's doing, he knows how to do it, and his thorough calm is there to reassure me of his sheer leadership of the situation.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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