It happens once a year. I get the hankering to pack my things and head up to Alaska for the summer. Those two summers were the best of my life and their memories are etched into my mind forever. My own little Alaska sleeps with her eyelashes gentle on her baby-doll face and I can't sleep because I am thinking of salmon, never-ending evenings and working my bum off to pay for college the next year.
People always ask if I hate the smell of fish after they learn that I worked in a cannery for a couple of summers. No. Fresh fish don't stink. They smell of iron and cold bay water. They smell ok, as far as dead animals go. And as long as you don't think of them as dead animals and more like food they tend not to be so gross.
The cannery is not totally enclosed so it allows for the weather to get in and sift through the smells, whisking away the smell of iron and replacing it with ocean air. It's the smelliest in the morning after it's been closed for the night and the smells have been contained within the walls. The cleaning crew does a good job of getting all the chunks and bits and pieces, but the smell remains. It's smells like iron. Thick in your nostrils as if you have a bloody nose.
My early morning job that I assigned myself to was getting the ice water to cal berate the thermometers. I would walk from the office through the cannery, past the gutting operation and chink machine and through the temporary storage where you could always find a few fish wheelbarrows or plastic pallets to stand on. I would sneak through the fillet station and on into the freezer where there was a mountain of ice stored. I would scoop into the mound with my water pitcher and fill it with ice, hustling back to the office before the rest of the QAs showed up where I would be sweeping when they came in. My routine was well known and some of the other early risers would shout out greetings to me. There was one hispanic guy who I had become acquaintances with (but since we're in Alaska, we're going to call us friends, even though we never hung out.) He would shout out Hola, and ask me how I was doing in Spanish. I would answer the only Spanish sentence I knew from my two years of High School study of the language and he would get the biggest kick out of it. It was a great start to the day. He would often make sure that I didn't have to get my ice from the freezer, which was a bigger pain then you could imagine, but would have a wheel barrow full of it for me to scoop into.
The Dillingham cannery is one of the oldest canneries in the business and because of that, everything is made from wood where more modern facilities sport metal. The wood has to be painted over and over again so that none of it splinters or chips in the cans of fish racing through. That is what pre-season is for. Painting. I have painted a lot of ridiculous things, including the floor of the QA office that was once painted on a whim and now must be re-painted each season because it gets so scuffed up it's a hazard. We painted wooden stools for the patchers to sit on for the last part of the season. We painted the ceiling. We painted the machines. We even started to paint the outside of a building one season when the fish were exceptionally late.
Another pre-season chore is to clean the bussies. Bussies are huge iron crates with wheels that the canned salmon are 'swept' into by way of manual Turkish labor. The carts become full and are pushed to the ovens where they are cooked 10 at a time. They get mighty nasty over the course of a season with such hot temperatures and the occasional exploding can of fish because it wasn't properly sealed. They get a kind of grit on them that only comes off with sanding paper and on bussie cleaning week it's not uncommon to find 15 of us sitting inside these huge crib-like contraptions with a chunk of sandpaper, sanding away and then hoping to the next when we think we're done. These days are always the dirtiest and you can't wear those clothes again until wash day. Logistically, we all wear the same clothes for about three days so that we still have something to wear at the end of the week.
One pre-season things were especially slow and there were new orders that the overcoats that so many of us wore to keep fish flesh off our clothes could no longer have pockets. Two other girls and I spent four days ripping pockets off of coats with only two seam rippers between us. It was a long process. But at least we were warm and clean while others were chosen to scrub the holding tanks and sand more bussies.
We always got off at 5, right before dinner, on those pre-season days. And then, because we had nothing else to do, we would explore or play cards or watch movies.
My first season up there I went alone. I didn't know anyone and my friend who I did know wouldn't be coming for two weeks. Luckily there was one other American girl up there who introduced me to all of the American boys. We always went to their room after dinner and Jenna would bring a book to read while I would bring my journal and we would sit on one of their beds while the boys gathered around a table in the middle of the room and played cards. Other times all 8 of us would go exploring down the beaches, which aren't like beaches in the states. These beaches are all rock and mud. No sand in sight. And tons of sea glass. Which is most likely from all the drunks you see hanging around town, tossing their bottles into the ocean after a long lost love.
There are two stores up there. One the main grocery store and another that sells a few more things like clothes and rain boots and more groceries. It's always a toss up to which one you should go to. They're only a rock's throw away from one another and the prices are comparable. One boring day we were looking for a bouncy ball to play kick ball with and we trudged through both of them, the whole pack of us. It's obvious that the natives don't like the cannery kids. Not necessarily because we're obnoxious, but just because we're better off. We're in Alaska by choice.
The natives are really beautiful people. They've got their long, dark hair and their little noses that honestly look like God took his fingers and made a place for eyes and a mouth and the little mound that was made by dispersing the clay of man made their nose. It's just a little moosh on their face and is absolutely to die for. So soft looking. But the girls especially are unfriendly. I heard it said once that it was because they were afraid us 'American Girls' were going to take their native boys and marry them. There aren't many boys to begin with and if we were to take one of them back to the states with us, well, you can imagine.
The Bulgarians are the most friendly of the Europeans that are flown to Alaska. They're hard workers and still live in a country where women do not do manual labor. They treat all the girls like angels, making sure that they have the best. There is one QA job in particular that requires some big muscles. In order to be sure the machines are doing as they ought someone catches 5 cans from each line and then takes them back to the warm office to open them and measure the sealing and the pressure and all that. It's one of the more comfortable job but takes an efficient person to get the measuring done before the next set of measuring needs to be done. Anyways, they open up the cans, dump the fish into a bucket and proceed to measure. By the end of the day that bucket is full and heavy. One year we had a girl doing the measuring and the Bulgarian clean-up crew would never let her take the bucket to the grinder. They would insist that they take it and would often be waiting at the door at the end of the day to take this huge bucket of fish for her.
The Bulgarians are used regularly for the clean-up crew (they get the worst hours, but the best pay). They are like gods in their orange rain gear while everyone else wears yellow. They are the ones that make sure you don't slip on fish guts and who keep the water from pooling around your feet. The Bulgarians also work on the patch line with any other unfortunate American girl. For some reason only girls work here, perhaps because it's a precise job that takes some detail thinking. As much detail thinking as you can expect in a assembly line. There are 10 girls on either side of a table and the cans of fish whiz by. A scale is attached to a breath of air. If a can is too light or too heavy the air pushes the can off of the assembly line into the table and a patcher must fill it with more meat or take meat out of it. There are large trays filled with cute up meat just for this purpose of patching. When things were slow (or they were totally overwhelmed) I would go and help the girls down there. I was the only QA who would touch the fish and they all thanked me for it and because of it I often got the best patchers because it was first come first serve as to which patch line you were on and they all loved my line the best because instead of getting frustrated when things weren't going right, I would go to the source of the problem and help them out.
The Turks are alright. Sometimes you can find one or two that you can connect with, but for the most part they are a little lazy. They are used mostly in the fillet station and for sweeping cans onto the bussies in the cannery. There was one little guy that I met my second year that had some kind of eye infection and I was the one he chose to pour the eye drops in. We're still friends and talk often about how we were both so grossed out about the whole ordeal.
I have just been laying in bed thinking of all this and had to get it out. It only happens once a year that I wish so badly I were going up there. And I guess this is it. Perhaps it may persist the rest of this month and I will add bits and pieces of my adventures as we go along. For such rough country I really did love it with all of my heart.
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