By Sean Chartier
In the spring semester the year before last, I met Heather, who rowed on the HSU women’s team. Late in the semester she told me that she’d be going to Alaska to work in a fish cannery called Peter Pan Seafoods. She invited me to come along.
I called the Peter Pan headquarters and talked to a manager named Alex Wu, who eventually mailed me an application. Soon I was hired and looked forward to spending the summer in Alaska.
Heather departed for Alaska a day before I did. I took a turbo prop to Seattle, where I would board Alaska Airlines bound for Anchorage. Jim, the proprietor, gave me some advice, telling me that I might get depressed at first because I would be working long hours in the cannery. However, he told me that sooner or later I’d get the hang of things, and before I knew it I’d be $6,000 richer.
I arrived in Anchorage and boarded another turbo prop for Valdez. Wu met me at the small airport in a white company van. He told me to get some dinner in the mess hall before they closed for the night. I was amazed at the landscape around me. Tall, rugged, snow-capped peaks surrounded the entire town of Valdez. The air was brisk, cool and refreshing, like stepping into an ice rink. On one side of the plant lay a marina, on the other the Prince William Sound. I almost felt as if I was in the Arctic. In truth, I wasn’t all that far away.
I was put into a dorm room with four unoccupied beds. Since it was only late May, many people who would work that summer hadn’t yet arrived.
The first couple of weeks were fairly slow. Alex had me check out raingear and heavy leather boots. I was a member of the clean-up crew. I was assigned the tedious such as cleaning and scrubbing the fish processing machinery, washing and hosing down the walls. I was not impressed with my job, especially since it only paid minimum wage. However, once a worker exceeded eight hours in a day, he or she would get paid time and a half.
While I was in the break room, I entered into a conversation with the supervisor of the freezer crew. I asked her for a little detail on what kinds of conditions a clean-up crew worker would face.
“You’ll be working around the clock, buddy!” she said. “You’ll get only about three or four hours of sleep at most a night when the busy season hits. Twenty hours a day, six or seven days a week, buddy!”
My co-worker Dan worked on the boats as they came in, helping to haul the huge king salmon into a plastic bin which, when full, was raised up from the boats on a crane, dumped on the dock, and then lowered again to the boat until it was empty. I worked with Dan on the boats, helping him to pick up and heave the heavy king salmon into the plastic bin.
“Be careful not to get fish slime in your eyes, face or hair,” Dan told me. “You can get the fish crud. Man, I had that before, and I’m telling you, you don’t want to get it.”
I always made sure I wore the hood of my raingear when I was working on the boats.
I was standing by in my heavy, yellow raingear when the first boats arrived to off -load their catches of king and pink salmon, watching as the men on the dock lowered a large, powerful suction hose that sucked up the salmon and the water.
The fish traveled through the hose up over the dock and were dumped high up on a conveyor belt. A man on a catwalk shoved the fish down a metal slide where they landed in a tall bin.
The bin was raised and the salmon dumped onto a huge metal platform. Several workers sorted the fish on the main processing belt, preparing them for passage through the decapitation machine. An advanced decapitation machine, using a laser that showed exactly where a fish’s head would be cut off, was positioned on one side of the belt. On the other side a worker positioned the fish by hand, using braces so his fingers wouldn’t get chopped off.
Once the fish were decapitated, they were sent down the belt into machines that gutted them. The fish were passed on down the belt, where workers stood on either side wielding huge knives to finish the gutting process.
After the fish were processed on the main belt, they were dumped into a tub of water for cleansing, then hauled up onto another conveyor belt where other workers, mostly women, packaged the fish into cardboard boxes. Large heavy plastic bins that were simultaneously filled with shaved ice to keep the fish fresh, or put on metal trays that rolled on wheels. Then the salmon, chubb, or halibut were usually put into the freezer for storage.
I worked maybe 16 hours a day the first few days. When the season picked up I found myself working past 2 a.m. I would sleep only three hours or so a night.
Every morning I was the first one in the cannery, at 6 a.m. I was responsible for filling large plastic buckets with zepadine and fish dip. The zepadine, similar to iodine, was used for washing the fish slime off gloves and raingear. The fish dip was used in case any salmon fell to the concrete ground. If any did, it was required that they be placed in the fish dip for a moment before being processed. The dips had to be filled periodically, at every break and every meal. I also carried those heavy buckets to any place they were needed in the plant.
At night I was the last one left cleaning up the plant. I cleaned the conveyor belts and their associated machinery. I pulled fish guts with my hands out of the machine. This was very tedious because fish guts get stuck in odd, hard-to-reach corners.
I used high-powered water hoses to rinse down the machinery. Everything had to be spick-and-span, and it would take hours to get the whole place clean.
At times I felt I would die of exhaustion. The physical and mental strain was hard to endure.
There’s at least one good thing I can say for working at Peter Pan’s the food. At least they fed me well. The mess hall contained a huge buffet bar that offered cooked salmon, steamed vegetables, rice, potatoes, salads, hamburgers and hot dogs.
I would not do it again. Standing for 20 hours a day in cold, wet conditions wearing heavy raingear that causes one to itch all the time is not worth the money.
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