A journey into the entrails of the slime line

GABRIEL BOYER

May 16, 2008 at 8:22AM AKST

Before I begin this story of my time in Dutch Harbor, I’d like to reveal a few things about myself.

I was a forest firefighter last summer in the Oregon woods. When friends asked why I was going to Alaska to work as a fish processor, I’d throw my hands in the air and exclaim, “From fire to ice,” as if this made perfect sense.

Before working in Oregon, I was a high school English teacher just outside Shanghai, having moved to China largely for the food only to discover I couldn’t breathe, what with the fog coming in daily smelling of rotten eggs and car exhaust.

That’s me, and then I’m standing on a platform, waiting for the train that will take me to certain death in the near-Arctic north, I was convinced, legs solid with the ground, muttering that I’ll never pull a stunt like this again.

Then it was an uneventful train ride to Seattle, where I stayed up all night chain-smoking out in front of the Clarion hotel, the potted plant to my right a graveyard of cigarette butts.

It was just past midnight, and I was staring straight ahead when I sat down, still there at 4:30 in the morning when the shuttle pulled up, and I climbed in with all the other potential food processors destined for the Bering Strait.

In Anchorage, I spoke with a professional carpet cleaner who himself had spent the last summer cleaning the rugs of Yosemite National Park. Our flight was postponed due to the weather.

I have met people who think the flight into Dutch Harbor more dangerous than any blazing wood. The plane was a puddle jumper, bouncing in the heavy winds. The sea below was like granite on the move, and then we were surrounded by mountains that seemed like triangles of chocolate dowsed in a heavy coating of confectionary sugar. We had arrived.

They packed us into the back of a van only to unpack us a moment later. I was ecstatic when I climbed out the back of that van.

Westward Seafoods’ Dutch Harbor plant is perfectly positioned within what appears to be a photograph straight out of National Geographic, complete with bald eagle, aka “the Alaska pigeon,” roosting on banister.

To my right was the Royal Dutch Inn, a squat gray building, its floors sopping wet and halls full of smoke.

We were assigned rooms, given linens, then continued on down a hallway thinly carpeted and cluttered with people from every corner of the globe, against the wall and furtively smoking, eyes rolling at some story, grinning and wild in the face or sedate, wrapped in exotic cloth or swaddled in Carhartts.

Then on to my room, it being just as I’d imagined, a rusted eggshell-colored heater hanging out the faux wood-paneled wall, with a single bench tied to one of the two bunk beds.

Westward Seafoods is divided into two work areas, Seafood and Surimi, the former where black cod and crab are processed, the latter named after the Japanese word for a food product made from white-fleshed fish that has been pulverized to a paste and attains a rubbery texture when cooked.

It’s where I’d work eventually, in fillet case-up, for as well as making surimi out of pollock we also made fillets that were frozen in anhydrous ammonia-powered freezer cabinets.

For about a week, I spent most of my time smoking one cigarette for every four I gave out to men who were just waiting to work they said, and they’d be sure to repay me in kind.

I’d rise from my reading to refill my Styrofoam cup with weak coffee and sample pastries — cinnamon rolls thick with cinnamon in their crevices, apple turnovers, etc. — from the trays replaced hourly by a woman who had the sort of grin usually reserved for the sun.

Two tables down one of the Filipino women from QC (Quality Control) gave her well-groomed boyfriend a quick birdlike peck, then bumped hips with him and giggled.
The above episode took place about midway through that first week. I’d been to the library in town daily, read “Moby Dick” and ran everywhere.

I was stunned when I saw a red fox cowering near the door to the galley and waiting for a scrap, and the eagerness of everyone in town, like the inhabitants of Shangri-La.
My first night working we washed pans. The soapy water was warm, my body completely sealed within the raingear we wore to protect our clothes from the water.

The door was open and letting in a strong draft into the unheated warehouse. Ragu Oromo to my right, who was from Somalia, easily offended under his otherwise rakish exterior, periodically shouted, “Va va voom.”

Ended up I was sent to go help out in Seafood that night to lay cod on trays, checking to make sure all the guts’re gone, then lifting the tray onto a rack. This job was called racking.

The woman who was to be our supervisor had been working 20 hours straight, I could have sworn she said, but she was so silly with sleep deprivation, breaking into little bits of song and easily distracted, that I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of anything she said.

I almost retched a few times when ripping out some intestines, and by doing so squeezed excrement out the fish’s rectum all over the soon-to-be-frozen scales and my already slimy gloves.

By the end of the night the floor was littered in fish guts that looked like used prophylactics and sour milk, cranberry jelly and occasionally exactly what they were, gonads. The season had finally begun.

Gabriel Boyer is the editor-in-chief of Mutable Press, resides in Oregon and spent the 2008 pollock season working at the Westward Seafood plant in Dutch Harbor. He can be reached at gabe@mutablepress.com.