Category Archives: alaska

22 Nov

Jobs I’ve almost had

To continue from last week’s ruminations on working at the cannery, here’s another half written job adventure from my past. In theory, I have better career options now…

    This is how I almost went deaf in one year: I walked into the Westin Bayshore approximately eight minutes too late to attend an info session and become a customer service rep for Alaska Airlines. The woman packing up the registration table told me there would be another in a few weeks; I thanked her and walked back out onto the Seattle streets, slick and gray with the ambient humidity so prevalent in the city.
    I’d been looking for a job for the last month and a half, and had racked up a pretty dismal record. Even the coffee shops didn’t bother to call me back.
    Since I was already downtown, I decided I might as well as try and find the office for Princess Cruises, where I had forgotten to go to an interview the day before, and offer my apologies for being a space cadet in person. A fifteen minute walk took me to Belltown, and an elevator took me to the fourth floor, where there happened to be an information session starting shortly. I chatted with a number of women hanging around to provide information, took a test to prove that I could type what I heard on a headset, and that I was able to competently use a calculator. A few days later, while I was on the phone with a my alma mater’s career resource center trying to figure out how to network myself into employment, I got another call, offering me a job. The next training class would start in two and a half weeks, just after I got back from visiting relatives for Thanksgiving. Happy to be able to pay rent, I said yes.

    Bright and early, at eight am on November thirtieth, I stepped off the elevator and joined my fellow trainees in a small conference room. The Seattle office, I’d been informed, was a smaller sattelite of the main Princess operation in Santa Clarita, California. They were Princess Cruises, we were to become a part of Princess Cruises & Tours, which handled the addition of land packages to the actual cruising. During the training period, if we were late more than twice, or if our average test score dropped below eighty-five percent, we could continue our employment search elsewhere. Here was the paperwork to fill out, and here was the employee handbook.
    The Princess dresscode dictates “business casual,” which means no logos, no t-shirts, no jeans, no facial piercings, and no sandals or sneakers. Jeans, t-shirts and sneakers may be permissible on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, which are designated “casual” days. On the occasion that a Seattle team may be playing, it is permissible to wear a team jersey for the Seattle teams. Jerseys for teams opposing Seattle shall be frowned upon.
    Lest you think this strict, the dresscode for Northwest Airlines customer service agents dictates the ways in which an agent is allowed to wear the different company issued pieces of the Northwest ensemble. The red sweater is not to be worn over the polo shirt. Except for skycaps working the curb, the sweater may not be worn with shorts. Skirts must be knee-length, no longer, no shorter. The red scarf is to be worn around the neck. It is not to be worn around the waist (see below for acceptable belts), nor is it to be worn in the hair. And let’s not even start on the regulations for footwear, which cover color and heel height.
    The training period was mainly memorization of codes. We started with airport codes. Hartford – BDL. Toronto – YYZ. Seattle – SEA. Portland – PDX. Washington-Dulles – IAD. Orlanda – MCO. Since the hurricanes, the code for New Orleans seemed ironically appropriate – MSY, messy. We remembered Louisville, SDF, as “southern deep fry.” After the first morning, we started at 7 am, and I called my boyfriend during our first break, when he was usually on his way to work. ‘What about Portland, Maine?’ he’d interject into conversation, picking random cities we hadn’t been tested on and I didn’t know.
    After the airports, it was the specs on the ships, each of which can be referred to by a two letter code, or by a single number or letter, which don’t neccessarily correspond to the two letter or the name of the ship. The Grand Princess, AP, or merely A. When searching for sailings, you put in AP. When you find it, the voyage number starts with A, as in A615. The 6 is for 2006, and the 15 for the fifteenth voyage the ship has made that year. A615, specifically, would be a seven-day itinerary in the Caribbean out of Galveston, Texas, but that part I only learned with later experience.
    The ships not only have reference codes, they have deck plans, and tonnage, and year when built. Random semi-famous person who was on hand to christen the ship. Even numbered cabins are on the port side, which is also the left side. Starboard is the opposite. Cabins are divided into four types. Insides have no windows. Outsides have windows, but there’s a difference between obstructed and unobstructed oceanview. Some cabins may have a lifeboat in front of the window. Balconies have balconies, and suites have sitting rooms.
    We progressed further, watched powerpoints on the destinations, and began to make practice bookings in the training version of the computer system. Various celebrities, friends and relatives were scheduled to go on the most exotic itineraries, and didn’t even know it. We ran out of made up names and booked Mr A Passenger, traveling with his wife Mrs B Passenger, or the Jetson family, the Bradies, the Simpsons… One girl, the trainer told us, had always booked herself travelling with Brad Pitt. I booked Che and Castro, Lenin and Stalin, Bush and Kerry, Bush and Blair. When we practiced removing passengers and adding new ones, Bill Clinton decided to travel with Monica instead of Hillary, and then Chelsea didn’t want to go at all. Since they were in an inside cabin on the bottom of the ship, I can’t blame her.

    Then training receded into an impenetrable blur of worksheets and early mornings, followed by the first heart-stopping afternoon on the phones. They moved us all down onto the floor, set us up in two “pods” worth of cubicles. The phones were agonizingly slow. We waited, headsets adjusted and readjusted, sweaty palms gripping pens. For five, ten, fifteen agonizing minutes no calls reached my pod. Talk was hushed, as we waited to see who would get the first call. ‘Beep beep,’ the warning prompt in your ear, and suddenly a live travel agent on the other end, assuming that you would have the answers to her questions. Suddenly they were upon us. First one voice broke off conversation, then another, echoing each other like a corporate version of ‘row, row, row your boat.’
    ‘Hello and thank you for calling Princess Cruises and Tours, this is Hello and thank you for calling Princess and Hello and thank you for calling Princess may I help you today? help you with today? today?’

15 Nov

My first salmon job

Another half written essay while I’m doing NaNoWriMo.

I started working at the cannery the summer after I turned 16. My parents insisted that I find a job, and I tried hard. I hated talking on the telephone, but I made a list of all the places in town I thought would be decent to work at, and called them all. Plant nurseries, book stores… The woman who owned the bookstore hired me briefly to touch up the paint on the outside of the building. From menstrual blood red, she’d painted it pumpkin orange. Or maybe the other way round–in any case it started out a wild color, and ended up another wild color, and no job inside the building was offered. In retrospect, it was probably for the best — if I couldn’t handle calling people on the phone, how would I deal with customers? For all my love of reading, I didn’t know enough to recommend anyone anything.
Off to the cannery I went, over my parents’ protests. Well, I suppose my mother didn’t protest; she was glad I’d be occupied. My father, however, didn’t understand why I would stoop to such a job. When he moved to Juneau in the seventies, he told me, he had pledged to himself that no matter how bad it was, he would never work in a cannery. For me, I had made my own promise to never ever work at a fast food restaurant.
To become a fish processor, the main qualification is being a warm body, at least to begin with. Standing in water and handling mostly frozen fish, you didn’t stay warm very long. I got a parental release, filled out my very first IRS forms and joined the day shift. The foreman was named Jeannie Day, appropriately enough. She was a middle aged woman who was motherly enough to look at me, still painfully shy and awkward, and set me to an appropriate task: roe.
Another young worker ferried me in sky blue plastic baskets, covered in blood and slime, filled with fish guts. I stood at a table covered with a huge white block of plastic, like the cutting boards we had at home, only five feet long and three or four feet wide and sorted salmon roe from the rest of the guts. A basket full of just roe was rinsed in a big vat of salt water brine, drained, and measured into five gallon buckets. A bucket containing forty pounds of roe got a lid, and then went onto a pallet, and the pallet went away with a forklift to a truck and then to a larger plant, where Japanese technicians did something else to it. I didn’t know what, but one of the forklift drivers quoted me an outrageous per pound price that roe was sold for at a Japanese holiday. I counted buckets one day, and estimated that, during a twelve hour shift, I handled enough roe to pay for a house.
I was paid $6.25 an hour, which seemed like a lot, but also pitiful compared to the value of the roe. Later, I learned that the roe was what made the money – often processing the salmon flesh was done at a loss. If there were too many fish waiting, male fish would be the first to be discarded.
I learned a lot about fish that summer, mostly about their insides. The roe, called ikura in Japan, was beautiful, and I learned to tell the different species apart from the variation of the eggs. A salmon is not simply a salmon–there are five species of Pacific salmon, each with two names. The biggest are kings, or chinooks, which never came through the line. Reds, or sockeye, have a tight skein of eggs, in a red color which matches the flesh of the fish. Silvers, or coho, are very similar to reds, though the eggs are perhaps a little paler in color. Pink salmon, also known as humpies for their distorted spawned out bodies, have roe of an almost yellow cast. Where the skeins of the reds were compact, the pinks’ skeins were loose and voluptuous, with colors that shimmered even under the fluorescent lights. They are the most highly prized, along with the roe of chum, or dog, salmon. Chum roe was opalescent like pink roe, but bigger, and orange and would be the most beautiful if chum salmon didn’t seem to have more parasites than any of the other species of salmon. Because of the parasites, or because of a tendency towards grayish flesh, chum salmon are the least appealing to the Alaskan palate. As the moniker dog salmon implies, they are often used to feed sled dog teams.
My second summer at the cannery, I started to branch out a little from the roe, and spent some time as a grader — looking at filets of salmon as deciding if it was an “A,” “B,” or “musher”  as quickly as possible. Oh, and weighing them as well. If the line was backed up and the fish had gotten warm waiting for attention, they would get red splotches on their white stomachs, a phenomenon referred to as “belly burn.” This affected the quality, or at least the saleability of the fish. Bite marks and bruises from run-ins with seals or other predatory marine life also affected the appearance of a fish. An obvious bite mark, and that’s a musher.
Jeannie Day was gone, the whole operation had moved to a different plant, rented from another company which was contracting, and the night foreman had become the only foreman. With only one shift working, we weren’t limited to a twelve hour work day. During the high point of the salmon run, in July, there was a week of two of fifteen hour days. This produced conflicting feelings in me — a fifteen hour day was better than a ten or twelve hour day, because it meant more hours of overtime paid at 150% of my normal hourly rate, but it also mean longer time standing, elbow deep in slime and blood, watching fish go by, pulling roe from intestines.
07 Nov

Growing up with local foods

Last week was the Sitka Wild Foods potluck, put on by my employers, the Sitka Conservation Society. I already transferred my meager stash of wild food to my freezer in Seattle where I can nostagically eat salmon and huckleberries over the winter, so I didn’t have anything to contribute. But, to the topic of wild and local food, here’s a half written essay on what I ate as a kid, inspired by a question from former supervisor (who is also active on the interwebs!). One thing I see now is that this essay doesn’t mention that my diet as a childhood diverged from the average American diet on account of living in Alaska, as well as having food allergies.

 “I want to know what you ate” said Mike, who’d been supervising me for a summer internship. “What was on the table?” I realize now that I should have made a crack about spam, since Mike’s from Hawaii.
I had food allergies as a child, so perhaps my diet diverged particularly far from the average American. The main things off-limits were wheat, eggs and chocolate, but I was on an opt-in plan, and went to sleep-overs with a list of allowable foods. If Mike was looking for tales of a subsistence lifestyle,  there were three main foods we ate “off the land” and that I still feel strange about buying in the grocery store — fish, rhubarb and blueberries.
Rhubarb grew in the yard of our house, near where we had a garden some years. Several starts had been given to my mother by a neighbor, and something about the soil made it very happy.  Those rhubarb plants are happily and abundantly growing to this day.
Our yard also had a few blueberry bushes, but not enough to feed the family. For that we made a yearly pilgrimage across the Bay to Seldovia in the late summer.  In the woods near the head of Seldovia Bay, the blueberries grew thick and sweet in the understory of the spruce forest. We filled five gallon buckets with berries and motored home with purple fingers. The berries would sit in the buckets, with water, for a day to drown out any bugs, then there was endless inspection to remove twigs and leaves before the berries were frozen in the full size freezer in the basement.
Fishing was mainly undertaken by my father. He had the magic touch, the siren call that fish could not resist. Or perhaps he enjoyed it more than my mother, and my sister and I were too young to compete. In any case, he was the provider of salmon, Dolly Varden, rainbow trout and so on. Occasionally we also went halibut fishing, which is pure torture as a kid.
 Here, we’re going to spend all day sitting on the boat, and we want you to do nothing but hold onto this fishing pole and waggle it up and down slowly. Tell us if you feel anything. Oh, and every so often you may reel up two hundred feet of line with a lead sinker attached to check if there is still a third of a herring on the hook for bait. There are exciting stories about halibut fishing – if you catch one big enough, you have to shoot it in order to kill it and keep it from thrashing apart your boat. The trick is to shoot it while it’s still in the water – but, by and large, halibut fishing is a terrible bore.
The only thing that kept me interested enough to participate was the knowledge that halibut is a milder taste than salmon. That’s right – I didn’t like salmon. It tasted funny. Now I am happy to get salmon, but when I was eight salmon was yucky, but halibut was pretty good. My favorite halibut dish? Cut in chunks and fried in cornmeal, eaten with ketchup and mustard.
Occasionally we had other proteins. We went clamming , although my mother is allergic to shellfish and couldn’t eat any. Clamming was much more interesting than fishing. You got to muck around on the beach, and find all sorts of creatures under rocks. We clammed at Big Jakalof, where there was a dock, and sometimes moored there overnight. Once there was a diver there, who brought up a huge sunflower star, blue and slimy with half a million legs, to the kids who were playing on the dock. Another time we found a wee little octopus and took him back to town for the display at the Pratt Museum.
When I was very small, I remember getting crabs and shrimp, but I think later the fishery for those was closed. There were a number of pots, made of rebar and mesh, slowly rusting behind the chicken coop in the yard. I suppose it’s neither fish nor berry, but we kept chickens as well, and collected eggs from them. Most years we got a pair of baby turkeys in the spring and named them Christmas and Thanksgiving. My parents never wanted to dispatch the turkeys in front of the children. One year our husky got loose and took care of it for them. Another year I came home from a slumber party to see nooses draped over the swing set; the turkeys had been executed.
I don’t think I was ever very upset about the turkeys, though, as I was never very attached to them. My mother tells me that when I was a year and a half old, they had a batch a leghorns chickens, which roamed loose in the yard rather than being cooped, and were supposed to be able to defend themselves somewhat. One day the rooster attacked me, scratching up my back with his leghorns. He was boiled up, and I’ve never been a big fan of birds.
03 Nov

Let the record state

…that on November 2 and November 3, it was clear and sunny in Sitka. This is after it rained so hard one night earlier this week that the noise of it woke me up at 3 am. And on Tuesday it pretty much rained an inch before lunch. So I am loving this sunbreak, and hoping it lasts.

I took a little time off work this morning and walked down to the harbor near the Forest Service office (just one of five harbors in this island town) and did not slip on the frost covered dock.

This crow was very impressed by my capable surefootedness.

Just kidding. This crow stood still long enough to see that I wasn’t going to toss it anything edible, and then left the scene.

Fishing boats on the dock are much more patient subjects, though.

Mmmm… sun….

Those are pretty much all trollers, with their, umm, troll poles up. Here’s one leaving the harbor, will poles extended.

There are baited lines hanging off those extended poles, which drag behind the boat as it slowly trolls through the water. A troll boat is crewed by one or two people, who immediately bleed and ice the salmon they catch, mostly coho and Chinook (also known as silvers and kings). This is your highest quality fish because it gets personal attention.

I could tell you how much of the commercial catch for the different salmon species is allocated to the troll fleet, because I’m spending my professional time on the ever growing Tongass Salmon Factsheetbook, but I won’t. (Although I will send you a copy of the facts if you want.) Then there’s the Fisheries and Watersheds report to do. And I’m devoting my free time in November to NaNoWriMo. Nothing too literary, really, more of a sci fi pulp sort of novel, but the exciting thing is the hope of finishing a writing project!

The rough storyline is that a photographer is hired by an environmental group to publicize some cute little animals whose habitat is threatened by Big Bad Business of some sort, however it turns out that the environmentalists are actually more interested in the plant that the animals eat because it can be made into an expensive drug, the sale of which is funding their organization and its work. By the end the photographer will probably hook up with a drug enforcement agent, or a conflicted environmentalist…

Anyway, this is all to say that there may not be too much in the way of new Alaska adventures up on the blog for a bit. However, I have a plentiful stash of half-written things from years past on my hard drive, some of which amuse me and I will share with you. Check back on Monday for the first one!

P.S. I went to the pointy top of that mountain before it snowed.
31 Oct

Stormy Weather

 I went across the street this weekend to see how the beach was doing with the fall storms. The windy weather has certainly whipped up the waves, and the waves have seriously rearranged the rocks. I will have to go back with voice recorder to capture one of the most striking things about the beach in the storm: as a wave pulls back there is a gurgling, grinding noise of the cobbles of the beach settle back after being pushed up by the water. It doesn’t come out in pictures if you’re not familiar with the beach, but big piles of rocks, up to softball size, have been pushed up toward the high tide line.

I was hoping to find lots of fabulous new treasures on the beach, and I did find one cool thing: a license plate from 1961!

I took a bunch of pictures of the waves, but it’s hard to capture them as photos when what makes them cool is the whole sensory experience – the sound of crashing water (and the rocks!), the feel of the ocean spray and the wind, watching the water rolling in and in and in…

Want to know how waves work? All the particles of the water are moving forward together, pushed by the wind, then as it reaches the beach the lowest layers catch against the bottom. Meanwhile the top layers are still going full bore ahead, and they run out into space without the base of the wave to hold them up. Foom, the wave breaks!

It’s like if you are running and trip–your feet suddenly stop, but the rest of you is still moving. A wave is the ocean falling on its face, over and over.

So here’s a bit of Sitka Sound tripping onto the beach. If you look close, you can see some black spots in the water off the point.

This picture is pretty good because there was a sunbreak.

 Here, we can look closer together. I took a zoomed picture. Hint: not seabirds!

Sitting in the swells.

Both Saturday and Sunday there were hardy folks out in wetsuits, appreciating the waves in an up close and personal way. Now you can tell everyone that yes, people do go surfing in Alaska.

Surf’s up!

25 Oct

Halloween Death Heads

I’ve been in Seattle for three weeks – I got married and then left my husband in the Lower 48 for safekeeping. Now I’m back to Sitka for my last month as Tongass Salmon Forest Resident and Southeast Alaska is about the same as I left it – gray and damp, and ten degrees cooler than Western Washington.

It’s almost Halloween, and I saved these photos out of my earlier posts on spawning salmon for their, umm, seasonal appeal.

We’re a little short on pumpkin patches in Southeast Alaska, but the tail end of the salmon season provides plenty of ghoulish remains to get you in the Halloween mood.

Salmon Skellington
Empty eye sockets – the sea gulls make sure of that.
Yep, the skin is just rotting of the flesh here.

Those are some gnarly teeth!

I’m also looking forward to the Stardust Ball, which is how Sitka (at least a certain subset of the adults) celebrates Halloween. It includes a lip-synch and costume contest, and if this video from last year is anything to go on, will be a hoot.

Here’s hoping my planned costume (Carmen Sandiego) will be up to Stardust standards!