Alternative Facts

View of Resurrection Bay from the second floor of the Seward Library

In the summer of 2014, to commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the Good Friday Earthquake in southern Alaska, the Seward Public Library exhibited a series of crayon, pastel, ink and pencil drawings made by a class of Seward schoolchildren in 1964, one week after the 9.2 magnitude quake.

On display were marvelous renderings of the fires that burned on the waterfront, billowing black smoke, buildings and homes and cars destroyed, exploding Texaco and Standard Oil tanks, Resurrection Bay covered in a burning oil fire, boats washed up into the town, and tiny stick figures fleeing towards the mountains from a giant tidal wave. 

Most interesting among the drawings were two by little Jimmy Bradford. In what a half century later would be labeled "Fake News", little Jimmy Bradford had illustrated two alternate factual accounts of the tragedy and its devastation. 

In the first of little Jimmy Bradford's drawings a Nazi warplane flies over the town dropping its munitions onto the defenseless citizens. In the second, a giant reptile, perhaps a dinosaur, has emerged from Resurrection Bay and is rampaging through the buildings on the waterfront.

Perhaps the Seward boy was expressing his incredulity with the official explanation for his town's destruction. But it should be assumed possible too, that little Jimmy Bradford did indeed observe a giant sea creature and an enemy bomber from a war concluded 20 years previous, and that his account was deliberately left unreported by the main stream media.

Monkeyfists

Two monkeyfist knots I tied with an old buoy line

The monkeyfist knot is tied from a single line and adds weight so that the line may be thrown more easily between a boat and the dock. 

A line with a monkeyfist is often attached to a much larger and heavier tie line and is thrown first by a deckhand or dockworker so that the heavier tie line may then be pulled through the water and ashore or aboard. 

Additional weight may be added to the monkeyfist by tightening the knot around a small sandbag or ball or rock. But too much weight will weaponize the monkeyfist, transforming it into a dangerous missile when hurled. 

Art of the Forklift

Greenhorn (Part 1)

 My roommate rushed into the break room.

"There's a woman looking for you," he said. "It's about a boat. It's urgent."

"What woman?" I said.

"She's outside now with the boat captain."

I quickly put my computer in my locker. Outside B. the cannery QA manager was standing with the skipper of the Kamilar. She introduced the skipper, L., who was her husband.

There had been a problem with one of the crew members and the replacement deckhand showed up drunk that morning and was immediately fired. Did I want to replace him? The boat left in 30 minutes. It would be a one week black cod long lining trip through Prince William Sound and east to Yakitat and on to Petersburg. It was the last trip of the season to fill out the remainder of the boat's quotas. I would receive a half crew share and if we caught what was expected I could make $1000. I would fly back to the cannery after we offloaded in Petersburg.

As I considered my losing my employment at the cannery and being jobless after a week, B. added that she had spoken with the plant manager and the deck foreman and they had okayed my leaving and return.

"Then I'll go," I said.

The skipper smiled. "You're sure about it?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"Do you have rain gear?"

"He can take a set from the cannery."

L. shook my hand. His fingers were massive, as large as two of mine put together. "I'll see you on the boat in 30 minutes."

"We'll drive to your room for your things," said B. "Then into town for your fishing license."

I hurriedly packed my clothes and sleeping bag and tossed my duffel bag into the back of B.'s pickup. At the hardware store I bought an AK resident commercial fishing crew member license, good for one year. I also bought two boxes of Bonine sea sickness tablets. I did not think I became sea sick but as we were a crew of three that normally was four, my possibly being incapacitated could not be risked.

On the ride back B. told me she had seen me work on the dock and had no doubt I could handle it on the boat. She believed my personality would be a good fit. She let me out where the Kamilar was tied up. I threw my bag onto the deck and climbed down the ladder. For the first time I was boarding a fishing boat without a hard hat and life jacket. No longer was I a dock worker at the cannery. I was finally to be a fisherman.

Idiots for Dinner

 

 

I will be eating idiot rockfish for the next few nights. Although prized by the Japanese for their soft, buttery meat, idiots are not well known in the United States. Idiots are the tastiest species of rockfish and sold by the cannery for more than a dollar a pound.

Eagles

Pacific Cod

Pacific Cod season has opened on the Sound. The Russian boatmen returned Monday for ice and bait (Argentine squid). Some will fish for halibut using pollock. There will be a mass of heavily loaded boats arriving later in the week. 

Russians

 

 

As pacific cod season came to a close we worked 15 hour days. We worked in driving snow and rain. Without the sun it was very cold. A wind came down from the farthest north and blew against us on the docks. It was almost too dangerous to operate the cranes. The Russian fisherman continued to arrive, boats riding low in the water with p-cod, their holds and decks overflowing. They came in one after the other as the week came to an end. It was necessary for the Russians to arrive before Sunday so as not to violate the Sabbath. Their wives met them on the dock, dressed in long colorfully patterned dresses and their heads wrapped.

 

 

 

We unloaded boat after boat, the Filipino pitchers down in the holds filling buckets and me and the other forklift driver emptying those buckets into totes and weighing them. When the sun went down behind the mountains the wind blew upon us and the dock turned to ice. 

 

  

On Saturday night the ice machine broke. The blue crane began to leak hydraulic fluid and quit. One of the new guys had had enough in the hold and climbed out of the boat. He was done. Boots was now down there alone and I turned the forklift over to the crew lead. I took the lifejacket off the new guy as he came up and I went down myself.

 

It was the slimmest of holds, hardly room for a man, and the p-cod were stacked far back into it in both directions. I called Boots up and went down. I sunk down deep into the blood and guts and began gaffing p-cod in the eye and throwing them up to Boots who tossed them in the bucket.

 

We worked that way until it was done. I was back on the forklift for the last boat. The long-bearded Russian followed me to the scale to verify the weights on the totes of fish. We would finish before midnight and the Sabbath. We removed the fish off the decks of the three other Russian boats and delayed the unloading of the holds until Monday.

 

 

Back in AK

 

 

 

When the rains ended and the mist from the melting snow had parted, the proud mountains were again visible. It was cold and clear and we worked four Russian boats, each with 35,000 lbs of pacific cod and some skate and rockfish and pollock mixed in. We separated the large sized p-cod from the smaller and sent the separated fish to different lines for their processing. A sea otter swam on his back in the turquoise waters of the harbor, snacking and rolling playfully. A pair of bald eagles landed on the ice house and watched us on the dock.

 

We worked into darkness. The bearded Russian fisherman looked on. They let their beards grow after they married. The only boats in the water fishing p-cod were the Russians. At $0.30/lb. it kept many of the long line boats from fishing.

 

 

The Conquest was the final boat of the day and from it I selected a beautiful 8 lb. yellow eye rockfish to purchase from the cannery. I paid the wholesale price which meant the freshly caught yellow eye was just $5, food for this night and perhaps two more. After finishing the boat, I fileted it on the dock, careful to avoid its sharp and dangerous quills. It cooked quickly in the pan and made for a fine supper. It was very good to be back in the far North.

A Death On The Dock

It was a beautiful late summer day. Salmon season was ending and the seiners were coming into the harbor after two months of fishing on the Sound. A seiner was docked at the crane and having its nets and a small skiff lifted up onto the pier. The Kaylor T had made its last contracted trip and the big tender was next in line. The captain was in the Fisherman's Lounge. He wanted a huge section of steel housing removed from the deck and put into storage at the cannery until next season.

The Plant Manager directed Francisco Flores to get the old mobile crane truck. The captain of the Kaylor T was an old friend. There was no reason to call him from the lounge to move the tender to the dock-mounted crane.

Francisco Flores advanced the old mobile crane to the edge of the dock above the Kaylor T and secured the stabilizer legs. He extended the boom out and began to lower the hook. It was low tide and the boat was far below the dock in the water. Francisco Flores let out a lot of cable to get the hook down to One-Eyed Eddie. The section of metal housing they were to move covered half the deck. Nobody had any idea what it weighed. Eddie secured the big four-ways sling to each of the corners and clasped the hook to it. "Winch up! Winch up!" Eddie yelled, signaling with his index finger.

Francisco Flores began to slowly bring in cable, lifting the massive section of ship housing up off the Kaylor T. It was halfway up to the dock when they heard it. It started as a wail, just audible over the engine of the boom truck. The wailing grew louder and louder, and then it was an ear piercing screeching. The Dock Lead yelled at Francisco Flores to put it down, put it down! The front stabilizing legs on the boom truck were bending, the steel shrieking, and as Francisco Flores lowered the load, the legs snapped, pitching the boom truck forward, skidding across the pavement and crashing into the low wooden barrier at the dock edge, and Francisco Flores was ejected from the cockpit of the crane truck out over the edge of the dock.

His head hit two rungs on the dock ladder before he landed on his back on the deck of the Kaylor T. Francisco Flores had fallen more than thirty feet. His hard hat lay beside him, cracked in half.

Eddie was the first to him. The left side of Francisco Flores' head was cleaved open and there were bits of brain in his hair. He lay upon the steel cover of a fish hold, blood pooling under him. His eyes were open and he seemed to respond as Eddie knelt beside him, talking to him.

Someone pulled Eddie away and the lady from human resources kneeled down and started pumping his chest. Blood sputtered from Francisco Flores' mouth. Eddie yelled at her to stop; his back could be broken and the CPR could kill him. But she continued pumping his chest, and listening for breathing, until finally Francisco Flores groaned and the last air went out of him. There was nothing more to be done.

On the dock the Plant Manager had called over two forklift drivers. He told them to pick up and move the damaged mobile crane truck. He wanted it moved off the dock and taken across the street and put inside the welding shop.  He wanted it moved as quickly as possible.

The forklift drivers had just gotten the mobile crane truck off the dock when an ambulance and two police cruisers arrived. On the deck of the boat the EMS team declared Francisco Flores dead. There was nothing to be done for him. The police officers were furious. The mobile crane had been moved, disturbing the accident scene. The Plant Manager was told he was likely to be charged with evidence tampering.

The company lawyer was immediately dispatched to a tiny pueblo in Chihuahua, Mexico to deliver the bad news to the wife of Francisco Flores and his four children, as well as a check for $25,000, if only Señora Flores would sign three documents, inconveniently written in English, a language she could neither speak nor read. The cannery pledged to put up half the money for the funeral and the lady from human resources, who had unsuccessfully performed CPR on Francisco Flores, collected the remainder in worker donations.

A meeting was called on the dock. The Plant Manager announced that in memory of Francisco Flores the mobile crane truck would no longer be used. He explained that Francisco Flores had made a grave error in attempting to lift a load clearly in excess of the capacity of the mobile crane. It never should have been attempted. The lady from human resources added that Francisco Flores had been negligent in filling out the daily safety checklist and signing his name to it, as all equipment operators are required. After the meeting, One-Eyed Eddie dropped a pallet of frozen herring on the Plant Manager's BMW and got himself permanently banned from driving a forklift.

Today, in the employee break room, there hangs on the far wall in the corner and only partly obscured by the Pepsi machine, a framed photograph of Francisco Flores standing on the dock and smiling broadly, and beneath it the caption, "We Will Always Remember, 1970-2012."

Pitching Fish

It was the fifth boat of the day. I was crouched in the corner of the ship hold, my hard hat pressed against the ceiling. Beneath us were thousands of pounds of halibut and black cod hidden under ice.

"Send down the weapons! Send down the weapons!" Jorge shouted up to crane operator.

The large metal bucket containing plastic shovels and ice picks descended into the hold.

We each took a shovel or ice pick and started to break apart the ice and shovel the chunks into the bucket. Hunched over in the cramped space it was difficult to work quickly.

The bucket filled and Jorge shouted, "Cease fire, men! Cease fire!" He shouted at the crane operator, "Up! Up! Up!"

The bucket craned up out of the hold. We continued to break apart the ice with our shovels and picks.

"Coming down! Coming down!"

I looked up and the bucket was coming down through the opening and I crawled to the side. We filled the bucket with ice. We filled buckets with ice until we dug down to the black cod. The next empty bucket came down and the Filipinos started pitching black cod into it.

"Cod! Cod!" Shouted Jorge.

There were black cod flying over your head, behind you, past your face. You dug through the ice and grabbed them around the tail, one in each hand and pitched them two at a time into the bucket. You gripped them hard or they slipped from your hands. You pitched them as fast as you could.

We pitched the center of the hold so that the bucket descended to the floor. Then we pitched the sides. My clothes were drenched with sweat under my raingear. The level of fish had dropped and I was able to stand up.

We worked through the twenty-five thousand pounds of black cod and reached the halibut. The halibut you grabbed under the chin where they were gutted, or by the tail if they were smaller, and heaved the big flat fish into the bucket. The big ones needed two guys to lift them and a few had to be roped through the mouth and craned out.

We finished pitching the halibut and shoveled the last ice off the bottom of the hold and we climbed up onto the deck. It was cloudy and the light was fading. Beyond the bay were black clouds over the snowcapped mountains. A storm was blowing in from the Pacific.

We weren't on break for long when the crew chief came in and told us there were seven more boats to pitch. Breaks would be short for the rest of the day. It was time to go back out. We quietly pulled on our raingear.

It was dark now and the wind was blowing a gale. Sleet stung at my face. I put on my life jacket and hard hat and descended the ladder onto the boat with the others. A deckhand positioned a floodlight to shine into the hold. One side was a bin of black cod and the other was halibut. There was little ice. I lowered myself down and climbed atop the black cod. We waited quietly. Jorge yelled for the bucket.

The bucket came down and we began pitching black cod into it. The gusting winds rocked the boat and we often lost our footing and fell. We worked down through the cod and pulled the bin boards and handed them up to the deckhand. We filled bucket after bucket. Then we started on the halibut.

As the first bucket of halibut lifted out of the hold, the boat rocked hard and slammed against the dock piles. I grabbed a bin board to keep from falling, and something fell into the hold and hit Jorge and he went down. The little Mexican lay face down not moving. Next to him was a big halibut, at least a hundred pounder. The bucket was twenty feet above us, swinging wildly in the wind. One of the Mexicans talked to him in Spanish. Jorge mumbled something about his tomato farm in Mexico.

We didn't touch him. After a few minutes he sat up on his own. The halibut had glanced off the back of his hardhat and landed on his lower back. Two of the Mexicans got out of the hold and we passed Jorge up to them. They helped him to the infirmary and we finished pitching the halibut.

After the next boat, two Filipinos quit and went back to their rooms. It was very cold and the wind and sleet pounded the last boats. There were only four of us pitching. I didn't feel my toes. My hands hurt so much I could hardly grip the cod to pitch them. Nobody said anything. The pitching went very slowly. We didn't finish the last boat until after two o'clock in the morning.

On Farm Raised Salmon

All Atlantic salmon are farm raised. All supermarket filets labeled "Wild Atlantic Salmon" come from fish farms. There are currently no legal commercial fisheries in the Atlantic Ocean. 90% of available salmon on the US market comes from Atlantic fish farms. Of this total, 30% come from hatcheries and the rest are raised in offshore aquacultures called “open net pens."

In order to maximize space up to a million salmon are crowded into the net pens. Crowded conditions, a diet of corn and soy pellets, and massive amounts of salmon excrement in the water necessitate the administering of antibiotics and pesticides to combat disease and parasites such as sea lice. Copper sulfate is also added to the water to control algae accumulation on the nets. Many net pens are placed in estuaries that historically are home to native wild salmon runs. Enormous amounts of feed and excrement escape the net pens, along with the pesticides and antibiotics, polluting these estuarine environments. Broken nets have led to farm raised salmon colonizing and crowding out native wild populations. To protect its wild salmon runs, Alaska has banned net pen salmon farms.

Not having an ocean diet of crustaceans, algae and other sea nutrients, means farm raised salmon contain none of the omega oils and carotenoids that function as potent anti-oxidants. These carotenoids also act as a natural pigment on salmon meat, responsible for the distinctive red and pink color. The corn soy pellet diet of farm raised salmon results in meat dull gray or light brown in color.

Focus group research conducted by pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche concluded that consumers connect deeply colored red salmon meat with higher quality, freshness and a better taste. Consumers shown salmon fillets matching the hues on the Hoffman-La Roche SalmoFan™ Color Wheel preferred Color 33 by a two-to-one margin. To replicate this color in farm raised salmon, Hoffman-La Roche has produced an astaxanthin pigment (petroleum based) which is added to the food pellets.

 

Alaska Work Totals

Days Worked: 98
(May 22 - August 27; no days off)

Total Hours: 1120

Average of 11.4 hours/day

Max Day: 18 hours

Minimum Day: 8 hours

Farewell

Stories of Alaskan fish processing to appear in the coming months. 

Illegal Activity

            White meat humpies (pinks)

Salmon Season

                   Salmon tenders

              Metal tote of pink salmon

         A professional forklift operator

Front Dock

                       Front Dock

My forklifting experience got me the opportunity on the front dock, but I did not do any forklifting for some weeks. A young man named Chris was the other new addition brought on because he came from Maine, as did Gil, the crew chief. We were brought on and in the first days we were tested. 

We were sent down into the ship holds of every boat. We went down with the team of Mexicans or Philipinos and Chris and I didn't get a break or a boat off. We were sent down into the thousands of pounds of stacked halibut and black cod and rock fish and the thousands of pounds more of ice, and we had to pitch and shovel it all out into the heavy metal totes and buckets lowered into the ship hold by crane. 

Your joints felt like they were being torn apart, your fingers and wrists ached, you got ice in your boots and your toes went numb, your back hurt from being hunched over in the tiny ship hold, but you kept pace and pitched fish into the bucket and then you broke the solid ice with a chisel and you sweated and shoveled it out. 

Gil told us after the first day to come back in the morning at 8. Another day of pitching and shoveling in the holds and we were told to come back again. Then one day we had five boats and we made seven trips down into the holds and it was after dinner, after 13 hours of brutal work that day, that just Chris and I were sent into the final ship hold, a tiny, narrow hold containing halibut mixed in with the dangerously prickly-spined red rock fish. 

There was slush and fish guts up to our knees in this hold and we had to dig down into it--unable to use a gaff hook-- feeling for the prickly rock fish, or feeling for the chin of a halibut. The work went slowly, but there was the feeling that this was to be the final test, that this day and this last ship hold would get us confirmed. 

Our raingear covered in fish guts and slime, our clothes sweated through completely underneath, our rubber gloves torn to pieces by rock fish spines, fingers and hands burning from the pricks, we had the hold cleaned out and came out after 10 pm. Nobody said anything to us. Then Gil said we were on tomorrow at 8 am. Keep coming in at 8 unless someone tells you otherwise, he said. In the first few weeks that was how it went on the front dock crew. 

The Summit

photos taken from the summit of Mt Marathon

Mt Marathon

Photos from my ascent nearly to the summit of the more than 3000 foot peak. Loose bedrock and unmelted snow where it became dangerously steep forced me to turn back. I feared a wrong step would lead to settling all accounts with the Lord. I could just see the Pacific Ocean beyond the last mountain pennisula. It is all good country here and unspoiled. 

                          Seward 

Treacherous loose bedrock led me to concerns of causing a slide or avalanche

Today was a day off as no boats were scheduled to arrive and the salmon have yet to come in great numbers. Each July 4th there is a famous race up and down Mt Marathon. Jose, the Mexican security chief, described it to me as a string of colorful ants ascending the mountain. Later, at 10pm, fireworks are shot over Resurrection Bay, despite the bright sunlight of the Alaskan summer.  

(Update: it is not a day off. Salmon boat with 10,000lbs that we are going to pitch by hand at 1pm. Then a 3pm boat with halibut and black cod and rock fish. There is always work on the front dock.)

ARR

The Alaskan Railroad ends in Seward.