Salmon Life

When my Dad and I head to the plant to deliver our last trip after a twenty-hour day, we open up the hold. I’m kneeling in ice and slime, pulling the fish one-by-one out of their neat rows and throwing them into the plastic fish tub. Once I fill the bucket, the guys up on the dock at the plant (hey, Braden — you’re welcome for dinner any time) will use the crane to haul up the bucket so they can pour our hundreds of fish onto the silver processing tables.

Several different friends — from the Lower 48, even Alaskans from Juneau and Anchorage — asked what I was doing for work this summer. When I confessed — deckhanding for my dad — they looked at me with gravity. What? I’d ask. “You’re living the dream,” they’d say, with awe-tinged voices.

I made the mistake of ruefully telling my dad this little anecdote early in the season, and he really took to it.

“We’re living the dream!” he’d yell at me over the wind, which I was battling by trying to keep my face pointing into it while keeping the rain out of my eyes so I could see the gear I was running. “This is the dream!” he said when the frozen potstickers we’d tried to thaw had congealed into a brick of potsticker casserole, which we ate anyway, doused in soy sauce. “Well, you’re living the dream,” he said when I crawled out of the fish hold with a nasty attitude after spending an extra hour shoveling ice from one bin to another in the hold because I hadn’t yet learned the path of most efficiency. Living the dream indeed.

And now, near midnight, Dad leans down to check out my icing job — I make sure each fish’s belly is filled with ice, and then tucked neatly between horizontal layers of ice which I replenish daily. We’re in the business for the freshest, highest quality fish in the world — Dad tells me it looks pretty darn good.

And to be honest, looking at these fish that we caught and killed and cleaned and hauled and iced and arranged and kept safe and clean and organized, I know that soon they’ll be flying out of the hold and across the world, landing on white plates to feed more people than I could meet in a lifetime. I pat one of the bigger silver and blue cohos with my orange glove. I kind of see what he means. It’s hard to let them go. Living the dream, indeed.