I’m getting behind. I’m home now and it feels like this happened a long time ago, but I had to get it down.
We flew on a chartered jet into King Salmon. Alaska is cold and grey, we see nothing of its supposed beauty and I never do. The state is twice the size of Texas and full of mountains and glaciers, but all I see is the inside of King Salmon airport in all its tininess. There were fake fish stuck to the walls like trophies. All of the people were gradually trickling away in taxis; it was cold and desolate outside. We arrived at the cannery. It’s made up of old wooden buildings that look like they were about to fall down. They tell us not to be deceived by the shabbiness - we run a tight operation here and soon we'll be running 24 hours. Our names were called out and our photos taken. We were told where we will sleep. I will sleep in the Waldorf Hysteria, choice pick of the pun-heavy dorm names. I am to room up with a man called John from Hawaii. Our room was tiny and thin and locked with a combination padlock, my bed an ancient metal latticework affair and the light next to my bed long broken. The window was blacked out with card; we had arrived near the solstice, meaning it was light 23.5 hours a day.
I left the room to see Emily and Kamille and we hitched into town to look at the general store. Everything in Alaska is flown in and therefore 3 times as expensive as anywhere else in the states (we returned to town later, on Emily’s birthday, and bought a $30 pizza). Naknek town is pretty much three bars and a pack of stray dogs. One of the dogs, an old black one with a grey muzzle, follows us as we spend some time on the beach, squelching through deep black mud and dead bloated fish. One year a dead wale washed up there and the cannery girls took its teeth out with pliers and made them into necklaces. We walked under a long dark pier, stooping our heads under wooden beams saturated with bay water, peering up through the slats at the machinery clanking overhead.
Later, when I laid my head down on the foam mattress and tried to ignore the light seeping in from behind the blackout card, words floated through the darkness of the room towards me. It was John and he wouldn’t stop talking. My English politeness damned me again as I felt forced to ‘hmm’ and ‘oh!’ at every one of his boring anecdotes. John didn’t need the money of course; he could make $8,000 by selling just one swimming pool cover. Why is it that you always meet these rich masochists in factories?? The measurements are very precise you know, every swimming pool is unique (‘mmm!’). Oh no, I don’t need the money, rather I’m doing it for the experience. John went on to explain how he spent some months in Hawaii sleeping under a building just for the heck of it. He planned to compile his learnings in a book entitled 'Living the dream'. On the cover it would say living the dream, but in, like, a mirror image, y'know? So it was, like, am I really living the dream, or am I living what I think is the dream when really ... y'know? It's so Plato's cave.
The next day everyone was still in a state of confusion, milling about waiting for the word to begin work. Finally our placements and shifts were announced, everybody crowding around the noticeboard. I was pleased to learn I was working in the cannery rather than 'The Freezer' - the dreaded place down the hill where people sat picking fish bones out of fillets with tweezers 16 hours a day. The freezer was also home to the Slime Line. The unlucky few installed here were to sit with a spoon and scrape out the guts of one salmon per second. This meant true blood line explosion over your face. This meant possible repetitive strain injury. Occasionally, if you were walking down the boardwalk towards the bay to watch the birds or smoke a cheap cigarette, you would see a slime line worker emerge from the freezer - someone so sprayed and splattered with salmon fragments, guts and blood, that his face would be deadened and gait made awkward by the sheer disgustingness of the contact with his own clothes. I once saw a guy, probably having worked for 8 hours or so on the Slime Line, starving and exhausted, simply being turned away from the cafeteria for being too caked in fish. In sum, I was happy not to be on the Slime Line.
It's my first day of work in the cannery and I'm nervous. We arrive and are shown how to sign in with our electronic cards and put on our aprons, hairnets, rubber gauntlets, and rubber gloves with cotton liners. We are then led through a mosquito curtain that blasts cold air downwards, along a walkway and through a gate into the cannery itself. I lower my gloved hands into the hand dip and enter the cannery. The noise is tremendous even with ear-plugs, and it is warm - clouds of steam issue from various machines. Empty cans rattle down from upstairs through little holes in the ceiling, they clink together as they race along little tracks that twist and wind around the machines. Upstairs is called the ting-ting room. I stand stupidly among the machines and conveyor belts laden with speeding cans of orangey-red salmon. Ladies with stony faces stand at the conveyor belts, poking down the salmon with scissors to ensure the cans get a good seal. Cans are snatched from the line, weighed, adjusted and sent back on their course, careering towards the lidding machine where they are pressurised, then shot through the wall to the next room where they are amassed and cooked in the huge ovens. The floor is literally covered with chunks of salmon. A few taciturn old men have been employed solely to spray the floor all day with hoses, shepherding the pools of salmon into gutters than run through the middle of the cannery. A man walks around with a magnetised rod, picking up the bent and crushed cans that have jammed in machines and fallen to the ground. The smell doesn't hit me as the salmon is so fresh; I'm more taken aback by the noise. Each machine operates at its own frequency, and the hissing and clunking, the falling of pistons and whirring of the conveyor belts layer to form a roaring relentless medley. In the chaos, if you close your eyes and concentrate on the sound, you can still pick out an overall beat, a slow deep WHOMP, WHOMP, WHOMP. The heartbeat of the cannery.
I am gestured over by the supervisor Rudy. Rudy is a Pilipino guy who can hardly speak English, he tells people what to do with swift and confusing gesticulations instead. It's too loud to talk anyway. Rudy spends most of his time leaning against a railing high above everyone else, his mouth buried deep in the web of his thumb like a chess player. On breaks he would burst onto the scene like a flamenco dancer to tell us our time was up. He ushers me out of the cannery, away from the machines, back under the mosquito curtain and into the fresh daylight. We go around the corner to a medium sized room with one wall completely exposed to the outside so fork lift trucks can enter. This room feels like a freezer. There is a hole in the wall and a conveyor belt leading back into the cannery. My job is to feed salmon fillets onto the conveyor belt which takes them up to 3 ‘feeders’ who post them into the canning machine. For the first day I do this for 17.5 hours. The salmon arrives by forklift and is never-ending. I am amazed by the sheer number of fillets we process. Someone tells us it is somewhere near 1,000,000 pounds of fish a day. I lift heavy boxes out of large bins and pour them onto the conveyor belt with a guy named Rickey from Sacramento. I soon become very used to the sight of the fillets; they are just under a foot long and just under an inch thick, shiny and slippery and a fresh organic red. They feel silky smooth under my rubber gloves and, when things are not too rushed, it is amusing to toss them playfully onto the conveyor belt and see them be taken up and away. Every half an hour a sullen Quality Control girl dressed in a white apron and hairnet comes to inspect a handful of salmon and leaves again.
It only took a few shifts for my body to start protesting against the work. My eyes stang and my back hurt from the lifting. I was scared of the back pain but more scared of being moved into the cannery proper where people stood still every day, their eyes fixed on never-ending lines of speeding cans. At least I got to move about and chat with Rickey. But the joints in my fingers swelled up, my wrists felt like I’d taken a hard fall on concrete, I twanged something in my shoulder lifting a box and the soles of my feet felt as if they had been battered all day with hockey sticks . My big toes became permanently numb. It was so cold I had to wear three jumpers and dance to keep from stiffening up and shivering. Despite this I was able to carry on in not too much discomfort. Rickey’s roommate, Phoenix, had a hole in his boot and managed to contract actual trench foot, sending him home. Other people had to leave with serious backs problems, and lots soldiered on with bandages covering their crushed hands and inflamed ankles. Rickey and I devised ways of working so as to minimise our pain. We perfected the box lift, the tip, the sharing out of duties. We got hold of a high stool and when work slowed down we took turns to sit on it, hidden from view, and snooze. We called it the throne.
I quickly began to feel like a salmon connoisseur. I took great handfuls of fillets and held them up high, as if a fishmonger weighing a glistening ruby squid, before throwing them to the conveyor belt. I would pick an especially fine looking piece of fish - large, clean-cut, dark red and smooth - and hold it in both hands, resting my elbows onto the table to study it. After the first few shifts though I became hardened and mechanical and desensitised to the sight of the salmon. It was like when a word is repeated so many times and it starts to sound alien and unfamiliar. My mind was being so relentlessly battered with these images of fillets it started to disassociate them from their ... salmon-ness. For a few days I couldn't escape the idea that I was handling cows' tongues. And they did look like cows' tongues! Long, pointy, red, veined and moist. I would pour hundreds of cow tongues onto the conveyor belt when it was stationary and, as my job demanded, slowly and methodically run my hands across them as the belt started up again, spreading them out so they didn't set off the metal detector. It was a surreal feeling, having a velvety river of cow tongues pass under ones hands. Another time the fillets wouldn’t stop resembling great, half-cooked beef steaks, the one grey side from which the scales were stripped showing where each one had been momentarily pan-fried. Another day they looked like fleshy, thick 70s ties.
I often saw faces looking at me from the salmon. The flaky nature of the meat lends itself well to faces. Usually I would spot them as they travelled up and away from me on the belt, faces of horror as the machines rushed louder and louder and they realised they were about to be diced and canned. Once there was a truly remarkable face. As they did sometimes, a piece of salmon had become lodged at the side of the conveyor belt. They would remain there wiggling until you poked them free. I was noticing this mini-event when I realised the piece of salmon resembled a most brilliantly intricate face. It stared at me with two perfect teardrop eyeholes and cried out of a Jim Henson style mouth formed by a hanging chunk of flesh. It was a cross between Munch's Scream and Kermit the Frog and it looked very distressed. It was clearly begging to be released and allowed to travel along the belt with the rest of its number, but its snagging meant it had to endure the anticipation of a mincing indefinitely. I stood there staring at it for a good 5 minutes, transfixed and absent mindedly stroking a fillet, enjoying its silkiness through my gloves. The face lay there moaning and rippling over the corrugations of the belt that passed under it. It's dignity was further trampled when I tipped the carcasses of his fellows on top of him (I had to, it was my job), which slithered all over one another and up towards the feeders, revealing him still underneath and wedged, still protesting and a little more roughed up for his ordeal. As time went by the face became more ragged and delirious looking; the hanging mouth waggled up and down on its hinge as if the face was babbling to itself. Eventually it was smashed and erased.
Every once in a while the drainage hole where we threw the bones and fins and pieces of skin we could be bothered to peel off the fillets became blocked and one of us would spend half an hour unblocking it with a plunger. If it was really bad our room would gradually fill up and we would slosh about in rancid salmon water, making work pretty difficult and revolting. Sometimes a guy came with what looked like a drill, the end of which was a tremendously long and lithe twirling wire which he inserted into our drain and span about a bit. Eventually we decided to stop putting fillets that had touched the floor down the drain, instead chucking them through the window onto the floor of the cannery. A man would routinely come to collect them and put them back on the conveyor belt. I’m sure there are countless more disgusting contamination stories from the cannery. One amusing one I recall was when Emily, suffering a cold as we all were at that point, took some miscreant comfort in observing that her nose was dripping onto the procession of open cans she was examining. Having said that, as soon as we got home we had salmon sandwiches and they were delicious! I kept a tin for a paperweight too.
I didn't end up seeing much of John as our shifts were different. When I left in the morning he would be somewhere in the cannery, surrounded by steam and the rattling of cans, sitting on a chair with a river of cans running towards him which he swept into a huge wheeled basket. When I got home from work he would have finished, gone to bed and was just waking up again, sitting on the edge of the bed with bleary red eyes, obsessively updating the excel spreadsheet of his hours. The first few nights it was hard to sleep; my body was struggling to adjust to this new turn of events and light invaded my room at the edges of the blacked out windows. You could hear voices in the room – voices of workers and of those in the building. The walls were so paper thin I could hear the man next door snoring. Outside there were noises of generators chugging and fork-lift trucks reversing over gravel. I got about 3 hours of sleep before our first real shift. After that there was no problem in sleeping. I peeled off my clothes and lay down and closed my eyes. There were brief visions of the salmon - fillets, tumbling and slithering over one another and being taken away by the conveyor belt - then I was out. You don't dream in the cannery because your body is recovering, repairing itself. Instead you just got a blackness. I and the other workers used to complain about this - it always left you feeling cheated, as if you’d only had a short nap (we knew it really was the beginning of the end when we were sent home early one night and the next day our supervisor, Jason, told us triumphantly that he had experienced a dream). As time went on and my body got more accustomed to the routine I managed to stay up and read a little before bed. I laid on the bed and read my two copies of the New Yorker over and over, savouring the rare moments of freedom until my eyes began to swim. The sound of my alarm started to terrorise me. A few weeks after the whole thing I heard it again, Emily’s phone alarm, a chirpy little melody, and I almost jumped. I’d been completely Pavlovised.
The mess hall had long tables and the food is served on plastic trays. It was a bit like saved by the bell only you weren't sitting with AC, you were sitting across from a tall stern man with a receding hairline, silently munching on his defrosted hashbrowns and thin flat oily bacon strips and powdered scrambled egg and french toast and sipping his cherry juice drink. The atmosphere was often euphoric in the mess hall. Girls sat with shadows under there eyes, flecked with salmon, in hysterics over trays of hamburgers and tacos. I often felt elated too, and would frequent the softserve ice cream machine to make concoctions with peanut butter and almonds. Incidentally, I shoved an ice cream into Emily's face as the coup de grace in a long running prank war. Terrifyingly I found out later that she was planning to somehow acquire a bucket of fish guts and pour it over my head in retaliation. I thank my lucky crab’s legs this never happened. The meals were flipping huge but my appetite shrank during my time in the cannery, I never knew quite why. For a time I ate only bowls of cereal and oranges. I think it was the smell that you got used to and never really noticed, but was always there humming along in the background, keeping me in a perpetual state of minor nausea.
Breaks almost felt hysterical. They came every 4 hours and there would be a large selection of donuts, hot drinks and some kind of nasty savoury food like a corndog or dubious burritos. It turns out sleep deprivation, monotonous work and severe hunger turns everyone into a bastard – there was pushing and shoving, people taking more than there fair share meaning those at the back got none, etc. etc. Everyone became addicted to sugar, and without the donuts and sugary coffee I don’t think I would have been able to carry on. People literally devoured the food to get back on the sugar high. The hotdogs caused me to have the shits. I quickly got fed up of the break area, the jostling, the raised voices and crass jokes. Wisely, Rickey usually slept in the freezer room during breaktime. Sometimes I would take a donut and go to the dock, or sit alone in a corner somewhere. There was untold pleasure in those donuts.
The end of a shift was when people really went mad with happiness. I have only seen such mood polarisation before in the mentally ill. Previously grim faces were now overjoyed, singing dancing and whiskey swigging. The most merry-making came on Independence Day when a large group of us marched out to a lake and sat on a large industrial pipe. To get there we squished through a marsh and batted away a thousand mosquitoes. Kamille played some mournful notes on a harmonica and everyone swigged whiskey. Someone set off some fireworks which were barely visible in the bright daylight. I wandered down the pipe which turned into a kind of jetty made of pallets. There was an old rowboat moored up there surrounded by grass, and then the lake itself. I took off my boots and paddled a bit; the bottom was a very spongy feeling mud. There was this long floaty grass everywhere. I launched myself into the water and it was wonderful. It felt like I was swimming away from the cannery. My aches and pains, and the mosquito bites were gone as I forged a path through the strange floating grass, it catching in between my fingers giving me green tassels.
The cannery was rife with rumours, gossip, sexual tension and bitching. The fishermen had burnt down the sauna. A disembodied bear’s head was found behind the freezer (or was it a decapitated bear’s body?). All of the students would go home first. All of the blonde girls would stay on longest (this one turned out to be sort of true). A machinist and a QC girl had sex in the QC office. The gap toothed man who wore a baseball cap, couldn’t speak a word of English and helped me clean the giant fish bins was, in fact, a paedophile. Information on when the salmon was going to dry up was purposefully withheld from us and, consequently, most of the rumours revolved around this topic. Towards the end people became nigh on obsessed with how much time was remaining. A girl from the can shop wrote poems about it in thick felt tip pen on the brown cannery paper and showed them to me. One was entitled ‘cans’. I heard people comparing the speed of the work and dates with previous years in attempts to calculate when we would be released. A boy in the mess hall claimed the high temperatures were a signal that the salmon would move on earlier than usual. One of the QCs told me you could tell we were near the end because the quality of the fish was deteriorating (the older salmon are, the more beat-up they become, hence the image of salmon literally falling to bits upon reaching their final resting place: the shallow stream where they were spawned). This led me to fixatedly examining the fish for a couple of days. I managed to convince myself they weren’t as deep red and glassy as they were in the beginning but paler orange and fluffy like mashed potato. One of the machinists managed to convince a young girl that there was one huge red salmon lurking at the bottom of the bay and we were waiting until he was caught before we could go home.
There was an uncomfortable mix of young attractive girls and leering middle aged men in the cannery, and the overbearing air of sexual tension was often discussed. At our first group meeting we were told a certain number of people get sent home each year for sexual harassment. It was certainly a working environment from which there was no escaping, and a harasser could make your life a living hell. Sure enough there was pestering and indecent remarks. There was creepy and suggestive graffiti, including, in a toilet I frequented, a very carefully etched stick lady surrounded by 5 stick men, all pointing towards her. As seedy as the whole situation was I didn’t expect anything serious to happen … then it did. A friend was woken in the night by a man in her room, hooded and crouching next to her bed, stroking her exposed upper thigh! He ran off and she gave chase, but they never caught him. They say Alaska is a haven for criminals and ex-cons, having the highest proportion of any state. There is little police force to speak of out in the sticks, and Red Salmon certainly didn’t run a background check on me. I found out about halfway through that all the Mexicans were in some sort of gang. A large number of them always wore some item of red clothing which, Rickey explained to me, meant they were part of the Bloods. Rickey also pointed out gang graffiti in the toilets, another gang name I can’t remember.
Inspecting the fish one day Kamille joked that it would be funny to find a lone crab buried under the piles of salmon, or something more scandalous like a condom or a razor blade. This was the scope of our humour: fish related. It was hard to tear our minds away from something that occupied it 16 hours a day. Later she decided it wouldn’t be funny if a crab emerged from the salmon, ‘it would be like you or me crawling out from under piles of chimpanzee flesh!’ Another day she had a great epiphany - the fish eggs cast to the factory floor! The terrible waste, and the perversity of it all! Thinking about it, it was very hard to justify what we were doing there. It reminded me of Mac cunningly trapping the frogs in Cannery Row. The salmon had no way of preparing themselves for this large scale harvesting. If old school rod and tackle tactics were fair game then this was a merciless reaping. It was a wonder any fish were left to go on up the river and spawn the next bunch. And was the whole process humane anyway? At what point did the salmon actually die? How do you humanely kill a fish?? (If this has set off any ethical antenna twitching, I point you in the direction of David Foster Wallace’s most excellent article, Consider The Lobster: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster ).
My disconnection from outside world was complete and day melding began to set in. This was compounded by Michael Jackson’s death holding complete news dominance for two weeks straight. Not only was any useful news from the real world blotted out, but it made me feel like I was re-living the same day over and over again. Things weren’t helped by the utter shoddiness of the mosquito ridden, garbage filled internet shack which contained one PC boasting a connection speed circa 1993. It was all I could do to sit munching on my Cheerios in between shifts, staring at regurgitated footage of Jackson like a perturbed Bill Murray until my disappointing pay check arrived. And then we were gone! They told us when our flight home was half a day before it left, presumably to keep us working hard up until the very end. It ended up being 19 consecutive days work I think, 16 hours a day.
I was sad I never saw the beautiful side of Alaska. When we got home we realised just how bad we actually smelled. Some pieces of clothing were beyond de-salmoning: no matter how many times they were boiled, tumbled and hung out in a stiff Washington breeze the stench of dead fish wouldn't bugger off. And so we had to throw them away. I even had to throw away my shoes. And yet, in the cannery my face, hair, hands and every item of clothing I had were more or less encrusted with salmon all the time and I hardly cared. After a recovery period Emily and I drove to Texas where she started her new job. I bought a flight home with the Alaska money and proceeded to get the date wrong like a fool and miss it. So, 240,000 thrown fish for nothing! I am now back in the good ol’ U.K. and about to embark on a Masters course at Cardiff in Music, Politics and Culture. Prepare for this blog to become that little bit more boring.
charizard.
