ALASKA ADVENTURE (THE KIND THAT GETS YOU KILLED) FromUnalaska, Alaska the novel By Wolf Larsen Chapter2 The next morning the flight from Seattle to Anchorage seemed normal enough. There were stewardesses andsoft drinks and buckle your seatbelt signs and all that. The plane went up and then it went it down. Everything seemed normal enough. Then I got to the gate for my flight to Unalaska. Nothing would ever be normal again. A bunch of dudes stood and sat around the waiting area to Unalaska. The air around them was a mixture of gloom and desperation. Everyone’s face seemed to say, “We’re going to the worst place on Earth!” “After one month on land and you’re already going back to sea!” one dude was saying to another. “How did you manage to spend all that money in one month?!? What did you do? Snort a line of coke as long as the Earth’s orbit around the sun?? Or did you just spend the whole month in a whorehouse without leaving??” “I had a good time,” came the reply. “I certainly hope so!” came the response. Then the announcement came. “We will now begin boarding flight number blah blah blah for Unalaska/Dutch Harbor.” No one moved. Five minutes later there was another announcement. “If you have a ticket for Unalaska/Dutch Harbor please board the plane now.” Still, no one moved. I had never seen anything like this before. Usually people all pile up like a herd of cows before the door. “This is the last announcement for Unalaska/Dutch Harbor. All Unalaska/Dutch Harbor passengers must be in line at this time.” A few people stood up – groaned – and headed to the door. Others headed to the door like there was some huge burden on their shoulders. “Is it that bad??” I thought. “It can’t possibly be that bad!” I thought. On the plane I noticed that the only women were stewardesses. I asked the guy next to me, “Are there many women in Unalaska?” “Don’t worry,” he assured me, “there’s one behind every tree.” I breathed a sigh of relief. When the plane started to land I looked out the window, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. There were no trees. Not a single one. It was the most barren place I had ever seen in my life. The South Side of Chicago didn’t even come close. The South Side of Chicago has whole empty blocks where only one abandoned building is standing, but Unalaska was much more barren than that. I had never seen anything like it. The island was volcanic mountains sticking up out of the ocean all over the place. It was beautiful! But it was the most brutal kind of beauty that I had ever seen in my life. People from our boat met us at the airport. “Are you Jessie?” some dude with a clipboard asked. “Yes,” I said. “But people call me J”, I lied. I was starting a new life for myself, so I was starting a new name for myself. “Is that ‘J’ as in J-a-y?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. New name. New life. It was that easy. We all got into a van. The van drove. Outside it was gray and dreary and miserable. The weather couldn’t decide whether it wanted to snow or rain, so it settled on some miserable cold wet in between. The van stopped at the Alaska Commercial Company. Everyone got out to buy something except me. It was going to be a long time before anyone would have a chance to go to the store. I stayed put in the van because I didn’t have any money to buy anything. Everyone got in the van and the van drove. No one said much. The boat was big. We walked up the plank. They showed us our bunks. I was in a room with eight guys. Then we went to the galley. The guys were all talking about how much fun they had had on their vacations. “I had so much fun I probably got AIDS,” said one laughing. He was just a little fat and very greasy looking. The kind of guy that can eat fifty hot-dogs in a row at the state fair competition. Almost everyone appeared to be white trash. There was some trash from other races thrown in the mix too. I was all ears. These guys – most of them – had been on vacation for months and months. They had walked off this boat with a nice chunk of cash, and had done whatever they felt like every day, until they ran out of money. And now they were back to get some money to go back on another nice long vacation. The idea of walking off this boat with a big chunk of money excited me! Although what I planned to do with all that free time and liberty was a bit different than these others. The boat steamed out to sea. Everyone spent most of their time sleeping. They wanted to sleep now because they expected to be real tired all the time real soon. Within a day or so there was a horrible roaring sound. It woke me up. I went into the galley. I asked someone, “What’s up? What’s all that noise?” “Haulback,” came the response, “get ready to go to work”. I went to the change area. People were putting their work clothes on, which were thick rubber boots and thick plastic raingear pants (that went from our feet to our chests), and thick cotton gloves which we put plastic gloves over, and then up to the deck we went. We went out on deck to watch the haulback. A huge round mechanical drum struggled and creaked and groaned with the difficulty of pulling up the tremendous load up out of the bottom of the ocean. As the big roller pulled and pulled there was endless banging and creaking and more banging while the machine roared and roared. When the net came up it was huge! There were so many different kinds of fish and many of the fish were struggling and fighting – their mouths were opening and closing and opening and closing as they suffocated in the air. “There’s so much fish!” I exclaimed to the guy next to me. “How much fish is that?” “It’s only about 15 tons. Not much,” he responded. He was a tall skinny man with a big coke nose that leaped out of his face. “Fifteen tons is not much!” I thought – “Wow!” “What kind of fish is that?” I asked. “That’s mostly Pollock,” said skinny tall coke nose. “All the freezer sections in every supermarket from Japan to America is filled with Pollock, Pollock, and more Pollock! And we’re the ones who catch it.” We went down into the factory. There was a whole big mess of fish pushing out of something they called the “live tank”. The smell was awful. Up until that time it was the most intense smell I had ever experienced in my life. It wasn’t so much the fish as the factory. And the factory was clean! However, it was obvious nothing could rid the factory of the smell of the endless tons of fish that had rolled through here. One of the other greenhorns threw up on the spot. Then one of the crewmen grabbed a fish and bit its head off. Then he spit out the head of the fish at the feet of the guy who had just thrown up. “Don’t worry” – said the fish head eater to the greenhorn that threw up – “You’ll be able to do the same in a month… or in a week if you ain’t a pussy!” “Oh Alex! That’s nothing! When you bite a fish head off you’re supposed to chew it!” said another guy standing nearby. “Well, let’s see you do it then you big talker!” responded the fish head eater. So the second guy grabbed a fish and bit its head off and chewed it up, and then he spit it out at the feet of the guy who had just thrown up. The guy looked down at the chewed up fish head at his feet. Then he threw up all over again. I went to one of the conveyor belts, which was filled with fish rolling through the factory. “You grab the fish,” a guy with a shrieking voice explained to me, “and you grab this knife.” The knife was thick and big and huge and sharp. It looked like a cross between a kitchen knife and an executioner’s axe. If a kitchen knife and an executioner’s axe ever met and had sex this would be their baby. “Hey! Pay attention!” shrieking voice said. “You grab the fish like this, and you chop its head off like this.” The decapitated fish’s body went down one conveyor belt still squiggling and wiggling. The chopped off head went down a different conveyor belt, its mouth still opening and closing and opening and closing. It seemed easy enough. And then I tried to do it. I made a massacre of that fish. It was a big mess. When I got done with that fish it looked like some kind of abstract sculpture. “No! Chop it off in one big swoop,” he said showing me how it’s done. And off went the headless body wiggling and squiggling down one conveyor belt, and off went the bodiless head its mouth still opening and closing and opening and closing just as beautiful as before. “Now try again,” he said. I tried again. It was a little better. “Well,” shrieking voice said, “the bad news is that you suck! The good news is that you’ll have 16 hours a day 7 days a week of practice to get better,” he said laughing. I tried to smile. I tried to chop off the fish heads as best as I could. I tried as best as I could not to chop off my own hand. Obviously, I succeeded in the last part or otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about it. As I began working the misery of the job began to really eat through me. Surrounded by all this dead fish and all these white trash people and the blaring machinery and the blaring music and that horrible smell all I wanted to do was quit. It was only the first hour of my first day working and all I wanted to do was walk out of this factory and never come back! I wanted to quit! I wanted to quit!! I WANTED TO QUIT!!! All I wanted to do was quit and get out of this big horrible mess I got myself into. But what was I going to do now – swim home? Half of me wanted to quit, but the other half of me wanted the money. Half of me wanted to walk out of this factory right now! But the other half of me kept saying, “Don’t quit! Stay right where you are! Keep working! Make that money!” Working next to me was a white trash farm girl named Sally. She had a slightly less trashy friend working across from us. There was something about them – I thought maybe they might be lesbians. Then again, maybe not. Maybe dick or pussy it was all the same to them. I was curious because Sally sure had a nice ass. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have given a damn whether they were lesbians or not, because they weren’t anything close to pretty. “So you’re from San Francisco?” Sally asked me. “No, I’m more from New York,” I blurted out. I’m not homophobic, but I didn’t want to be pegged as “the fag from frisco” on this boat. “You’re a New Yorker then,” Sally said. “No, not really. I was born in Chicago,” I said. “Oh the windy city!” she exclaimed. (I hate it when people say that. Everybody says that. It’s like everyone talks in broken records.) “Maybe he’s from Mexico,” Sally’s girlfriend said, “I heard him talking to Pablo in Mexican.” And then somebody hit me in the side of the face with a fish. “What the…” was all I could say before one of the skinniest runts I had ever seen was SCREAMING at me from across the factory, “STOP CUTTING THE ROE YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! AND HAUL ASS! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU STANDING THERE LOOKING AT ME FOR! HAUL ASS! WORK!” I kept working. I said nothing. I figured there must be a reason why the skinniest runt in the world was bold enough to yell like that. “This is the roe,” Sally said as she showed me. “Whatever you do don’t cut through that, because cutting through the roe is cutting through our money. Don’t forget – we’re getting paid by the fish not by the hour!” “What is roe?” I asked. “Eggs. The Japanese love it.” “Who’s that guy that yelled at me?” I asked. Sally smiled. “Oh that’s Cueball,” she said. “Cueball is his name?” I asked. “Yeah, because he shaved his head, so everybody calls him cueball.” “Is he an assistant foreman or something?” I asked. “No, he’s a processor just like you,” she said. At that moment I felt rage surging inside of me. But I held my tongue. The last time I vented my rage at someone that confidant I almost got shot. Then the fish ran out. We started cleaning. We were cleaning and cleaning and cleaning for a small forever before the foreman said, “You’re done”. We sat in the galley to eat. The food wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good. It was heavy and filling – perfect for manual labor. “Pick and shovel food” was what the fish head eater called it. The female cook was a fat dumpy blond. She was fucking one of the deckhands. He was a big fat guy. She showed me a picture of her fiancée back in Louisiana while a fuck flick moaned and groaned on the television screen above us. Her fiancé looked like the responsible type. If she got knocked up at the beginning or the end of the trip by the deckhand, the guy in the photo looked like a good father and husband type. But if she got knocked up in the middle of the trip, the guy in the photo looked smart enough to figure it out. I said something pleasant to her about the man in the photo, and she smiled. Copyright 2004 by Wolf Larsen I worked as a seasonal worker in Alaska for nearly 12 years. If you would like to read more you may go to: Alaska adventure
