The Multi-Million Dollar Art Project

I came back to Alaska in February of 2006 feeling refreshed from my travels and ready to put all my energy into working long hours and replenishing my nearly nonexistent bank account so that I could continue with my new world of traveling during the off season. At first I was just an off-loader and general worker at the plant but through a series of bizarre and unexpected events mostly attributing merely to my being in the right place at the right time - somehow I ended up being the production manager as we attempted to pull the plant back into full production. This was a situation it had not been in since its hey day nearly a decade before when I had worked there just out of college. But I had learned well many of the jobs involved and understood the general process of things as well as having a good rapport with the fleet. So, rather suddenly, this opportunity involving a good deal of power, control, and autonomy landed in my lap. We started recruiting workers mostly from Eastern Europe : Russia, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey... We were shorthanded at the beginning, so most of us who had any experience were generally doing the job of about 12 people each. So we immediately started training new people for individual positions to try to take some of the load off of ourselves. It was quite an adventure trying to integrate all of these foreign cultures into the small town frame of mind that was this remote fishing village. There were some issues of ethnic friction among the employees - as some of these countries have a history of war and bloodshed from time immemorial - and often left to their own designs the natural instinct of people was to segregate into their various ethnic divisions and maintain an US vs Them mentality. We managed to pull together a small team of management people, ALL of whom had about as much experience in "management" as me - namely NONE. But we were young and fresh, with all kinds of ideas, and we spent time brainstorming and doing problem solving exercises as a group, and then were actually able to implement our solutions and watch the results unfold whether it be success or failure. It was an amazing experience to be able to be in a position to effect that kind of change on such a large scale. I found myself filled with a level of confidence I had never felt before when 2 months into our season one of my co-managers and I stood out on the plant floor listening to the hum of a smoothly flowing operation of 100+ employees speaking 5 different languages who all knew how to do their job and work together as a team. We looked at each other with such a sense of pride because when those kids had arrived not one of them had ever worked in the fishing business before and our first month or so had been complete chaos, but here we were watching everyone moving as cogs in a well oiled machine. It was particularly incredible because none of our little management group were your typical "business" types. We were all a bunch of artists and hippies who had a very different way of looking at how things should be run. I won't say our first attempt was perfect : we certainly came away from that season with a long list of changes that we wanted to make and improvements to our management plan, but it was a positive first attempt and the upper management group were happy with our team and wanted us to return in the spring. Before we all departed for the winter, we sat down to a little brain storming session to list all the problems we had that year and try to come up with ways to solve them. All of our little group went away with our minds bustling with ideas of changes to be made in the next season to make things work even more smoothly and ways to reduce the ethnic friction that had occurred at the beginning by simply forcing people to work in small groups with people of other ethnicities. Through the removal of the possibility of clannishness and the bonding that occurs from working together closely for long hours and under duress - we found that friendships began to form across ethnic divisions. This gave us even more ideas and a hope for the future more profound than anything to do with working in a seafood processing plant in Alaska. This season had an enormous effect on me and when I left that winter to begin my first real SOLO travel in a trek around the world, I did so with a level of confidence and satisfaction I had not previously had, and a solid belief in my own ability to effect real change in the world.

Alaska Immersion

I got back from China with $25 to my name and feeling like my tail was between my legs. I bolted straight for Pelican which somehow seemed like a safe haven. I was awash with emotions and mostly hid at my friend Paula's house for the first few weeks when I was not at work. But the cocoon did it's job and it wasn't long before I started spending time with a local guy of Russian and Inuit background who had grown up there. He was very outdoorsy and loved to go hunting and hiking through the wilderness that surrounded us. In the following months all of our spare time was spent traipsing through the muskeg and wandering deep into the wilds experiencing the natural vicinity of this place in which I had spent so much time but which I had never really known. I grew to be very attached to Alaska and found the wildness and enormity of Nature's boundless beauty to be breathtaking and so healing. We would take a skiff out to the ocean and go wave jumping through the surf then tie up at some remote location on one of the small unnamed coastal islands and wander off into the unknown, perhaps traveling in places no one had ever set foot on before. No trails or paths, just forging through the wild, sharing space with the very real threat of Grizzly Bears, hypothermia, storms that could leave you stranded and unable to return - just a few miles from town but completely out of contact... The danger attracted me. This idea of living on the edge of things. This was one of the things I always loved about living in China as well. The safety of life in America was always one of the things that left me feeling bored and unfulfilled. Ever since I hiked the Appalachian Trail and had a taste of a life where every day was a question of survival - it is like a drug I cannot get enough of. And the untamed quality of life is also intoxicating. There was some part of my soul that was finally rearing it's head with no trails or path burned in it yet - just a miasma of wilderness and uncontrolled emotions pulsing endlessly in a wild dark night. Alaska spoke to me in secret quiet ways. I could stand at the mouth of the inlet and look up at the mountains that stretched all around me up into forever. And the boundless stars made the sky into infinity. This period of time helped me regain my calm, refreshed me with a silence which I didn't realize had been missing during my time in a country with a billion people... It struck a chord in my heart and filled me with a deep love for this quiet corner of the world where everyone knows each other by their first names and would help even their greatest enemy in a time of trouble because that is what you do when death lies just around every corner. Alaska was cemented in my heart in a thousand ways it never had been before and I knew that it would always be a part of me.

I was there from September to December, and then I headed back into the world and spent the winter visiting family and friends who I hadn't seen since I left for China.