A Swindle in Time

There are pieces of news that arrive politely. They knock on the door, remove their hat, and ease themselves into the conversation.

Then other pieces of news that kick the door off its hinges, stomp mud across the hardwood floor, and punch a man square in the soul. The news that Tim Johnson has died belongs firmly in the second category.

I had reached out to see how my old friend from Crescent City was doing. The fellow had settled in Round Mountain, Nevada, where a man can prospect for gold, argue with rocks, and avoid civilization with only moderate effort.

Instead of hearing his familiar voice, I learned he was gone. Since then, I have found myself angry, sad, and wandering around with the emotional balance of a mule that has stepped into a yellowjacket nest.

The Almighty has a habit of taking people just when you begin assuming they will always be around. It is one of His management decisions I have never entirely agreed with. A man spends years worrying about taxes, politicians, and whether his truck will start on a cold morning, only to discover that time has been quietly robbing him blind while he wasn’t looking.

I reconnected with Tim in 2021 through the modern miracle known as Facebook. Now, Facebook is generally a place where people argue politics with strangers, post photographs of sandwiches, and announce life-changing events to people they haven’t spoken to since high school.

But, now and then, however, it accomplishes something worthwhile. Through that strange digital wilderness, Tim and I found each other again, and before long, he became a good friend.

Tim was one of those rare men who made everybody around him better simply by existing. He loved his wife Jennifer and his daughters Abby and Zoe, with a devotion that modern society often insists has become extinct.

Yet there it was in plain view. Tim was a husband who adored his wife, a father who adored his children, and the head of what I can only describe as a genuinely happy family. In this age, such a thing comes with the same astonishment normally reserved for Bigfoot sightings.

He was also an author, and a good one. The kind of storyteller who could start talking about a fish, a river, or an old truck and somehow have you listening three hours later.

We had been working together on a pamphlet about organized crime on the Klamath River, a subject that sounds like fiction until you hear enough stories to realize reality often has better writers than Hollywood. One of the stories Tim knew well involved the salmon trade back in the 1970s.

Tribal fishermen were allowed to gill net salmon for personal use but prohibited from selling them commercially. Meanwhile, commercial fishermen offshore could make a decent living catching fish and selling them openly.

As is often the case, government regulations collided headfirst with human ingenuity, and ingenuity won the first few rounds. According to the stories that circulated in Crescent City, fishermen began netting salmon at night, where the catch would be less visible to state authorities.

The problem then became how to turn those fish into money. Driving truckloads of iced salmon to San Francisco apparently proved inefficient.

It required too much travel, too much exposure, and too many opportunities for somebody to ask uncomfortable questions. The answer, according to the tales whispered around docks and coffee counters, became what some called the Ghost Fleet.

After the tsunami years earlier, damaged and destroyed boats remained piled around the harbor. Somewhere along the way, enterprising minds allegedly realized that a boat did not necessarily need to float to exist on paper.

A vessel that existed only in records could still provide legitimacy, at least long enough to move fish from one ledger to another. The scheme, if the stories are true, possessed a certain crooked genius.

Fish could get assigned to commercial operations that appeared legitimate, mixed with legal catches, and sold through normal channels. By daylight, everyone looked respectable, but by nighttime, some people were apparently conducting accounting practices that would have impressed organized crime figures from much larger cities.

Tim loved stories like that. Not because he admired criminals, but because he understood people.

He understood that human beings sometimes spend ten times their effort avoiding honest work as they would have spent doing it. Human nature fascinated him, and he had a gift for explaining it with humor.

The truth is that Tim seemed to know something about everything. If I had questions about guns, he had answers. If I had questions about cars, he had answers. If I had questions about moonshine, he somehow had answers for those, too. We talked about prospecting, history, fires, fishing, old stories, and all the subjects men discuss when they think there will always be another conversation tomorrow.

One of his favorite sayings was, “A bad day prospecting is better than a day at work. Unless you get eaten by a bear or mountain lion. Then it’s about the same.” That sentence contains more practical wisdom than many self-help books that cost twenty-nine ninety-five plus shipping and handling.

We had plans. We talked about getting together, panning for gold, drinking whiskey, and solving at least a few of the world’s problems around a campfire.

Like most people, we assumed there would be time. Time, however, is the greatest swindler who ever lived.

It convinces us there will always be another week, another month, another visit, another chance to say what ought to be said. Then one day there isn’t.

Along with cancer, most recently, Tim had been feuding with pneumonia. He described it in his usual understated way, saying, “Sure was a rough ride.”

The reports were encouraging. Tim seemed to be improving, and things appeared headed in the right direction.

Cancer, meanwhile, continues its relentless campaign against decent people. Reach a certain age, and you begin noticing an unpleasant pattern.

The chairs around the table start emptying. Friends disappear, family disappears, the phone rings less often, and the world becomes increasingly populated by memories and increasingly short on the people who created them.

Yet memories are stubborn things. They refuse to die quietly.

Tim lives on in the books he wrote, the stories he told, and the countless conversations he shared with friends and family. He lives on in Jennifer, Abby, and Zoe, and in every person fortunate enough to have crossed his path.

I like to imagine him now without pain, without sickness, and without the burdens he carried here. Perhaps he is walking through some eternal stretch of gold country where every creek contains color and every pan holds promise.

Maybe he is carrying a gold pan beneath a bright sky and following an old trail toward a distant campfire. And perhaps, somewhere along that trail, he has already run into my brother Adam.

The two of them are probably swapping stories and laughing at the rest of us for taking life so seriously. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left here with the memories.

It does not seem like a fair trade, but it is the one we have. So we hold onto the stories, because stories are how good men remain among us long after they are gone.

Farewell, Tim. You were one of the good ones.

The world always seems to need more men like you, and somehow always ends up with fewer. Until we meet again, my friend, may your rivers be full of salmon, your hills rich with gold, your whiskey barrel never run dry, and your campfire always waiting for your return.