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.