Betsy's life.zip episode 3
So, the year was 1994 and I had already started getting my annual bout of Spring fever which continues to haunt me yearly ever since I hiked the Appalachian Trail. If I am in a stable position in life when Spring rolls around.... I start to get itchy feet. It's time to move. That time I went to Alaska with my college roommate Paula. To try to summarize the experience of Alaska in a few words is about as hard as it was to summarize the impact the Trail had on my life. It can't be done. It opened up worlds I had never seen. Before that summer the farthest west I had ever been was Wyoming. California was an imaginary land of sunshine and beaches solely peopled by surfer dudes and movie stars. China was a place I had heard of but never thought about and didn't care about at all. It wasn't even in my frame of reference - about as real as television. So suddenly I'm in Alaska - the wild wild west of America - where I flew in a seaplane for the first time in my life and landed in a tiny little village on a remote island in the middle of abject wilderness that stretched into forever. In this town everyone knew everyone else. There were no cars or roads. There were no police. It didn't matter because you could not commit crimes because everyone would know that you did it and they all had guns. There were wild animals everywhere. Grizzly bears would
wander through town and scratch their backs on the boardwalk. Killer whales would swim by the dock. Bald eagles were as common as crows. That TV show Northern Exposure? That's where I lived but way WAY smaller. I was working in the fisheries in a world where the men outnumbered the women about 10 to 1. The work was not difficult per se - just hard on the body. It left one prone to tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome from the repetitive motion of your handiwork. The reason people do this job is because you get massive amounts of overtime and your living expenses are covered. So you work like a maniac, but you have no time to spend your money and so rack up a pile of cash in a short amount of time. Most people just did their one basic task - the slime line - which was just cleaning the guts out of fish. It was pretty boring work. I never understood how most people could be satisfied just doing their time and collecting their paycheck. It sounded too much like a prison sentence. So after a week or so I started asking them to teach me different things, and then more. By the end of the summer I had learned to do about half the jobs in the plant and had become quite expert at species recognition, which everyone seemed to think was very difficult but which to me was just attention to detail. So I managed to work my way into positions that actually kept my mind occupied as well. I would sort and grade fish at the door as they were offloaded from the fishing boats. I spent my days looking at the beautiful gem colors of watermarks on wild salmon that were freshly caught, sort boatloads of fish by size, species, and quality, and schmoozing the fishermen who would stand by my side and watch over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't cheating. Some were grizzled old men who were cranky or crass, others were young local boys who had grown up there and knew the woods like the back of their hands and were following in their fathers' footsteps, and still others were guys from the lower 48 (as they referred to the rest of America like it were some alien place beyond comprehension) who had walked away from the rat race down below and thrown in their lot to try to make a go of it
up there in the wilderness. Whatever it was, it was all beyond my experiences so far. But my smile has gotten me far before and between that and my eventual skill at being able to tell the weight of a fish within a quarter of a pound just by putting my hands on its head and tail and therefore speeding their offload time considerably because I didn't have to weigh each fish - all of this led to me befriending the fleet so that they would ask for me when they came to offload. I found this job interesting and relaxing with a great view of the inlet, mountains and islands in front of me and wildlife going by. I enjoyed the conversations and the general stimulus of exposure to all kinds of new things. It was lucrative enough that I decided not to go back to school in the Fall because the season went into November - and so I took another semester off
from school. Going back in the Spring was even harder than it had been the last time. Luckily it was my last semester. I only had 2 classes left to finish my double major in ANTH and English Writing and I finished all the work early and took my exams in a coffee shop on the way to the airport a week before finals so I could go back to Alaska early. I had hoped it would be the same but things had changed. We were required to belong to the ILWU (International Longshoremen and Warehouse Workers Union) as part of the job and the company deducted monthly dues from our paycheck. The union tried to renegotiate the wages of their seniority members and when the company refused to comply they decided that we should go on strike. This was a fight we were not prepared to participate in. We understood that the local people had demands and they were valid and worthy of a strike. But most of us were college students who had spent a lot of money to get up there and had no interest at all in sitting around not working, nor would we benefit in any way since we would be leaving at the end of the season. Needless to say a rather large schism formed in our small little community. It got a bit nasty. A dangerous situation in a place with no police and loaded guns on every living room wall. And then it got worse. The company retaliated by making life miserable for everyone who worked there. Their intent was to break the union and make everyone want to quit so they could hire all new workers from the Philippines and pay them minimum wage and then fire them at the end of the season and keep doing that every year to keep their costs down. My world became small and miserable and meaningless. The conflict was not worth losing friends over. When we tried to voice our rights they found someone who would play their game and tried to get us to train them
for our own jobs. So it was time to move again. I had been seeing Chris at that time for several years and so together we decided to hop the next ferry south and get the hell out. He was the foreman at the time. When the crew found out we were leaving (what few that were left by then) a bunch more left with us. It was a mass exodus and cut the population of town by quite a bit. In the end their great plan backfired. Since everyone quit, they were left only with brand new people who hadn't ever been trained properly, and none of the management people actually knew how to do any of the skilled positions. They ended up going out of business before the season was over. I have to admit I felt a twinge of satisfaction when I heard about it. So, suddenly we had a rather abrupt change of plans and didn't know what to do next. We got off the ferry in Bellingham, WA and had planned on taking the bus to Seattle, where I had relatives, and try to decide what we wanted to do with our lives. But all the same hot sweaty people who had been on the ferry with us in the 90 degree heat for the last 3 days were getting on that bus. So, on a whim we went to a car dealership and found a used car that we bought with cash, piled all of our belongings in it, and started driving south. We stopped in Seattle for a few days to see my aunt and cousins, and we enjoyed our visit but the town didn't really feel like what we were looking for. So we got back in the car and drove south some more. We got as far as Portland, Oregon before the car broke down. While we were waiting for it to get repaired we found an apartment and just like that a new chapter began.
So, the year was 1994 and I had already started getting my annual bout of Spring fever which continues to haunt me yearly ever since I hiked the Appalachian Trail. If I am in a stable position in life when Spring rolls around.... I start to get itchy feet. It's time to move. That time I went to Alaska with my college roommate Paula. To try to summarize the experience of Alaska in a few words is about as hard as it was to summarize the impact the Trail had on my life. It can't be done. It opened up worlds I had never seen. Before that summer the farthest west I had ever been was Wyoming. California was an imaginary land of sunshine and beaches solely peopled by surfer dudes and movie stars. China was a place I had heard of but never thought about and didn't care about at all. It wasn't even in my frame of reference - about as real as television. So suddenly I'm in Alaska - the wild wild west of America - where I flew in a seaplane for the first time in my life and landed in a tiny little village on a remote island in the middle of abject wilderness that stretched into forever. In this town everyone knew everyone else. There were no cars or roads. There were no police. It didn't matter because you could not commit crimes because everyone would know that you did it and they all had guns. There were wild animals everywhere. Grizzly bears would 
wander through town and scratch their backs on the boardwalk. Killer whales would swim by the dock. Bald eagles were as common as crows. That TV show Northern Exposure? That's where I lived but way WAY smaller. I was working in the fisheries in a world where the men outnumbered the women about 10 to 1. The work was not difficult per se - just hard on the body. It left one prone to tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome from the repetitive motion of your handiwork. The reason people do this job is because you get massive amounts of overtime and your living expenses are covered. So you work like a maniac, but you have no time to spend your money and so rack up a pile of cash in a short amount of time. Most people just did their one basic task - the slime line - which was just cleaning the guts out of fish. It was pretty boring work. I never understood how most people could be satisfied just doing their time and collecting their paycheck. It sounded too much like a prison sentence. So after a week or so I started asking them to teach me different things, and then more. By the end of the summer I had learned to do about half the jobs in the plant and had become quite expert at species recognition, which everyone seemed to think was very difficult but which to me was just attention to detail. So I managed to work my way into positions that actually kept my mind occupied as well. I would sort and grade fish at the door as they were offloaded from the fishing boats. I spent my days looking at the beautiful gem colors of watermarks on wild salmon that were freshly caught, sort boatloads of fish by size, species, and quality, and schmoozing the fishermen who would stand by my side and watch over my shoulder to make sure I wasn't cheating. Some were grizzled old men who were cranky or crass, others were young local boys who had grown up there and knew the woods like the back of their hands and were following in their fathers' footsteps, and still others were guys from the lower 48 (as they referred to the rest of America like it were some alien place beyond comprehension) who had walked away from the rat race down below and thrown in their lot to try to make a go of it 
up there in the wilderness. Whatever it was, it was all beyond my experiences so far. But my smile has gotten me far before and between that and my eventual skill at being able to tell the weight of a fish within a quarter of a pound just by putting my hands on its head and tail and therefore speeding their offload time considerably because I didn't have to weigh each fish - all of this led to me befriending the fleet so that they would ask for me when they came to offload. I found this job interesting and relaxing with a great view of the inlet, mountains and islands in front of me and wildlife going by. I enjoyed the conversations and the general stimulus of exposure to all kinds of new things. It was lucrative enough that I decided not to go back to school in the Fall because the season went into November - and so I took another semester off 
from school. Going back in the Spring was even harder than it had been the last time. Luckily it was my last semester. I only had 2 classes left to finish my double major in ANTH and English Writing and I finished all the work early and took my exams in a coffee shop on the way to the airport a week before finals so I could go back to Alaska early. I had hoped it would be the same but things had changed. We were required to belong to the ILWU (International Longshoremen and Warehouse Workers Union) as part of the job and the company deducted monthly dues from our paycheck. The union tried to renegotiate the wages of their seniority members and when the company refused to comply they decided that we should go on strike. This was a fight we were not prepared to participate in. We understood that the local people had demands and they were valid and worthy of a strike. But most of us were college students who had spent a lot of money to get up there and had no interest at all in sitting around not working, nor would we benefit in any way since we would be leaving at the end of the season. Needless to say a rather large schism formed in our small little community. It got a bit nasty. A dangerous situation in a place with no police and loaded guns on every living room wall. And then it got worse. The company retaliated by making life miserable for everyone who worked there. Their intent was to break the union and make everyone want to quit so they could hire all new workers from the Philippines and pay them minimum wage and then fire them at the end of the season and keep doing that every year to keep their costs down. My world became small and miserable and meaningless. The conflict was not worth losing friends over. When we tried to voice our rights they found someone who would play their game and tried to get us to train them
for our own jobs. So it was time to move again. I had been seeing Chris at that time for several years and so together we decided to hop the next ferry south and get the hell out. He was the foreman at the time. When the crew found out we were leaving (what few that were left by then) a bunch more left with us. It was a mass exodus and cut the population of town by quite a bit. In the end their great plan backfired. Since everyone quit, they were left only with brand new people who hadn't ever been trained properly, and none of the management people actually knew how to do any of the skilled positions. They ended up going out of business before the season was over. I have to admit I felt a twinge of satisfaction when I heard about it. So, suddenly we had a rather abrupt change of plans and didn't know what to do next. We got off the ferry in Bellingham, WA and had planned on taking the bus to Seattle, where I had relatives, and try to decide what we wanted to do with our lives. But all the same hot sweaty people who had been on the ferry with us in the 90 degree heat for the last 3 days were getting on that bus. So, on a whim we went to a car dealership and found a used car that we bought with cash, piled all of our belongings in it, and started driving south. We stopped in Seattle for a few days to see my aunt and cousins, and we enjoyed our visit but the town didn't really feel like what we were looking for. So we got back in the car and drove south some more. We got as far as Portland, Oregon before the car broke down. While we were waiting for it to get repaired we found an apartment and just like that a new chapter began.
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