Gordon Stoddard Read online

  Seated in a large, comfortable chair and feeling considerably more at ease than I had since entering Anchorage that morning, I basked in the warmth of Mr. Manders’ broad, cordial smile. “Here’s a letter from your father,” he said, sliding it across his desk. “Received it just a couple of days ago. He asked me to do anything I could to help you out. So: what can I do? You short of cash?”

  I explained about not having any money I could spend, and he solved that problem immediately by cashing one of my hundred-dollar traveler’s checks, advising me to leave the rest of my checks in his office safe until Monday morning, when I could deposit them in a local bank. Then we talked for an hour, he asking me, with flattering interest, about my plans, I asking him a series of questions about Alaska. When we parted with a firm handshake, Mr. Manders said, “If you need any further advice or help, I’ll feel insulted if you don’t come straight to me. The best of luck!”

  A short time later, surveying the remains of a large, juicy steak in a clean, well-lighted restaurant, I felt fine. Anchorage, I told myself, wasn’t such a bad place, after all. My wallet was again full of negotiable bills and I had at least one good friend. “Waiter!” I called with new bravado. “My check, please!”

  Out on the neon-lit streets again, I saw a new picture of the city. The businessmen and other white-collar workers had gone home for the day and a different type of citizen had taken their place: the surly, growling panhandlers whom I later heard described as “construction stiffs”—construction workers out of a job. I could see, as I passed hundreds of dirty, bearded men lounging against the buildings, that it was unfashionable not to be flat broke in Anchorage. I had the feeling that all eyes were glued to the wallet on my hip, that all minds were estimating, by its fatness, its total in dollars and cents. I knew then why John Manders had advised me not to carry my entire bankroll on my person, and I was as glad as I had been sorry a few hours before that I hadn’t shaved in three days. “I’m safe,” I told myself. “No one would cut the throat of a fellow bum.”

  Selecting a cheap, $2-a-night boarding house on an unpretentious side street for lodgings, I found myself sharing a room with four other men. From then on I spent most of my time pumping my fellow boarders for information about jobs, homestead possibilities, etc., and as I pumped and learned that there was lots of land open for homesteading on the Kenai Peninsula and possible work in the fish canneries near a town called Kenai, a beautiful picture began to form in my mind. I saw myself—hard, tanned and bearded—standing beside a trim little log cabin in a clearing in the woods. Right back of the cabin was a stream in which 50-pound salmon pushed each other around like the crowds on Market Street on New Year’s Eve. A pretty tourist had stopped her shiny red convertible at my gate. She was saying, “And is this yours, all yours? How much land does your property include?” And I was answering, with a sweep of my arm, “One hundred and sixty acres, ma’am. As far as the eye can see. It’s mine. All mine.”

  I also found out that there was no possible way to drive a car down to the Kenai Peninsula: the highway which was then under construction between Anchorage and the Sterling Highway, which began at Moose Pass, wouldn’t be finished for a year. What I would have to do was ship my car to Moose Pass on the Alaska Railroad and follow it a day later on a passenger train. Arranging for all this would take until the end of the week—a fact which, when I learned it, made me restless and itchy: I couldn’t afford to stay in Anchorage very long. With the simplest restaurant meal with no trimmings costing $2.50, the cheapest room in which you could cook your own meals at least $100 a month, eggs $1.15 a dozen, milk 40 cents a quart and hamburger $1.00 pound, I would be joining the “stiffs” on the streets in no time.

  But the arrangements went through without a hitch, and at 3 o’clock on Sunday morning I got off the train at Moose Pass—“The Gateway to the Kenai Peninsula”—to find myself without a car. A few other passengers had disembarked with me, and none of their cars were there, either. There wasn’t even a station, unless you counted the old railroad car sitting, wheel-less, beside the tracks. There was also no hotel, no restaurant and no station master to tell us what to do. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a lonelier spot in my life.

  After huddling around a pot-bellied stove in the abandoned railroad car for awhile, the other passengers and I—four adults and four children—decided on a practical course of action. We were all hungry, and our first consideration was food. Accordingly, while we men rigged up trout lines out of odd pieces of string and bent nails and went out to see what we could catch from the railroad trestle crossing a glacial stream next to the “station,” the women built a roaring fire on the beach. We caught a good mess of lake trout, cooked them on sharpened sticks over the fire and tore them—half raw—to bits, using our fingers shamelessly like hungry savages. A few hours later one of the group located a grocery store about a half mile up a lonely road, and we filled up the gaps with crackers and canned peaches. Our automobiles, which had, through some mistake, followed us rather than preceded us, showed up that afternoon, and we parted to go our separate ways—some to Seward, the port town, the rest of us over the mountains to the little fishing village of Kenai.

  The land I drove through, after the scenery I had seen in the Yukon Territory after leaving Watson Lake, was depressing. In the Yukon, every turn in the road had revealed a 35-mm. composition in full color. Everywhere there had been water—huge, blue-green lakes, icy rushing streams, their sources undoubtedly the glaciers I could sometimes glimpse so far above. Everywhere there had been mountains, and as I had driven through them, watching the peaks rising higher and higher on either side of the road, I had had a feeling of complete—though not unpleasant—isolation. But this—this Alaska—was desolation: nothing but flat, brown, burned-over ground bristling with thousands of upright corpses—bare, dead spruce trees that told me that even here, in the unpioneered wilderness, the careless tourist had left his mark. Where was the Alaska I had read about?

  Suddenly the vista changed, became a forest of green, living trees. My heart lifted, and 20 miles later I saw the first sign of civilization: a board nailed to a tree with the word “Kenai” scrawled across it. I rounded a curve and there it was—a handful of tumbledown shacks by the water, a few false-front stores, a Russian church, its brightly-painted dome the only spot of color in the entire drab, dull scene. I drove slowly down the muddy street.

  Chapter III—The Wrong Pew

  “HOW MUCH EXPERIENCE have you had?”

  “None,” I replied.

  “Good,” said the superintendent. “You’re hired.”

  That was how I got my first job in Alaska. I didn’t really need a job—my money would hold out for awhile—but on my arrival in Kenai I had learned that the road to Homer and the homestead country hadn’t been completed yet and wouldn’t be open to traffic for at least another two months; in the meantime, I had to do something, and working in a salmon cannery, I figured, could be interesting.

  The next morning I was knee-deep in interest and fish. The first job they gave me was called “pewing.” A pew, I discovered, was a stick with a long, metal, needle-sharp point on one end, and when you stuck the point into a salmon and tossed it somewhere, you were “pewing.”

  Pewing, to the amateur, could be something like playing with a boomerang. You were supposed to pew the fish through a two-foot-square hole in a bin as fast as you could without looking, but if your aim wasn’t entirely accurate the fish would bounce off the wall and slap you in the face. And if you could avoid that, there was always the chance of pewing the wrong kind of salmon into the wrong kind of bin. There were four different bins for four different varieties: the idea was to select the right kind of salmon from a huge Duke’s Mixture and hit the right bin every time. After pewing humpies into the red salmon bin and silvers into the dog salmon bin and failing to find a place to pew the king salmon at all, I was demoted to pewing on the tender.

  The cannery tender was a large boat with a ve
ry small, dark hold in which two pewers with pews pewed salmon into a barrel. After the barrel was filled it was winched up and dumped into a hopper, and a conveyor belt took the fish into the cannery. I was pewing with a will and thought that I was doing quite well until the superintendent yelled down from the wharf, “Pew them in the head, you———, you!”

  My partner, an Eskimo with an expressionless face, turned to stare at me in the darkness of the hold. I stared back. We were waist-deep in fish, and it was almost impossible to tell the heads from the tails without minute examination. But we followed directions, and it wasn’t long before the operation slowed down to a standstill.

  Soon we heard a new voice—that of the owner of the cannery. “Pew the————fish anyplace!” he hollered from above. “I want that barrel filled up NOW!”

  Fish flew in all directions as we bent to our task, my partner pewing with really admirable zeal. With a powerful thrust he drove his pew into a pile of salmon, gave a mighty heave and sent two fish, my left leg and me spinning smartly toward the barrel. “See what I mean?” called the owner.

  Two days later, when I was able to walk again, I was given an “easy” job on the “sliming” table. It was to the sliming table that the salmon came on moving belts from the “iron chink,” an ingenious machine which cut off their heads, sliced off their tails and fins and very neatly disemboweled them in one swift, simultaneous operation. Using sharp knives, a dozen workers received what remained and scraped off any clots of blood left inside. This was a job which took fingers of steel to hold the slippery salmon steady and the sure hand of a surgeon to wield the knife, and, probably because they’re supposed to be impassive, most of the workers were Indians. They were also women, and working with a bunch of mothers and grandmothers made me feel like a little boy helping with the dishes. It took some doing to keep up with them, too, but gradually I got my speed up to where I could hold my own with the slowest.

  At this point I was informed that I was to be transferred to the cutting machine. I was so overjoyed at the news—I hadn’t liked the sliming job—that when I went into the sliming room to hang up my rubber apron on my last night I failed to notice that a plank had been removed from the floor for the purpose of washing the gurry through to the tide flats ten feet below. Digging my way out of an immense, stinking pile of rotting fish heads and entrails, I surprised two dining seagulls, who flew away screaming in terror. Then I looked around for a way out. Where I was it was dark, but far off in the distance was a point of light which I knew must be the midnight sun shining at the end of the cannery wharf. Slipping, sliding and falling, I crawled toward it. When I finally emerged, it took me two hours to clean salmon guts from my clothes and body.

  On reporting for work on the following morning, I was led to the cutting machine, which was to be my constant companion for the next four days. As operator, I was supposed to grab the salmon as they came from the sliming room and toss them onto the cutting machine belt on their backs. The machine would then chop them into slices and send them on to the canning machine. The job looked simple enough, but even at this I wasn’t successful. The canning machine operator, who controlled both his machine and mine, would speed up the cutting machine to such a peak that it was impossible for me to place the salmon in the proper position. I got my revenge one day when I sent a few choice fish heads, a pair of gloves and my shirt through to him on the belt. The next day he and I were ordered to switch jobs.

  Now I found out what real work was. There were three levers to work, the most important being the one which controlled the canning line: this started the entire canning process and stopped it when there was a “jam-up.” The other two levers controlled the stopping and starting of the cutting machine and speeded it up or slowed it down. In addition to working these levers, I had to keep an eye on the salt hopper to see that the salt flowed at the correct rate of speed, manipulate the valve which controlled the salt flow, keep a steady hand pressure on the chunk fish moving into a trough and going down a chute, and watch the empty tin cans which came down a chute from upstairs to see that they never stopped coming. With my left hand on the speed lever, my right hand pressing salmon, my left eye on the cans and my right eye checking the salt flow, my feet felt ashamed.

  One thing I couldn’t control was the speed of the can line: this was done by the superintendent, somewhere up above. He gave me a week to get the feel of the machine and then pulled out all the stops. The empty cans came clunk, clunk, clunk down the chute like bullets shot from a gun, and the noise they made reminded me of target practice in the Navy. I speeded up the cutting machine to match the pace but it went berserk, splattering pieces of salmon all over the cannery floor, ceiling and me. I tried to shut off the machine but the lever was stuck. Then the salt hopper shook as though in anger, the salt stopped flowing and all hell broke loose. It was as though the machine was a person and the person had gone mad. “Shut down the line!” somebody bawled. And somebody did.

  And then there were the times when a defective can entered the chute. All would be well until it was filled with salmon and sent with its brothers to the end of the line where, when it entered the lidding machine, it would be squashed flat. This would precipitate the other cans violently in all directions, sprinkling the walls and workers with hot cooked fish. And it always took a mechanic an hour or more to pull the mangled tin bodies from the machine with a pair of pliers.

  But all the thorns in my side didn’t come from the mechanical department. Two women sat on either side of the canning line clipping the bones and meat off the tops of the too-full cans with scissors and filling in the cans that weren’t full enough with extra chunks. And they were always complaining. Either the line was too fast or it was too slow. Theirs was the roughest, toughest job in the plant. And whose fault was it? Mine.

  One day I became sick of their constantly-repeated tale of woe. When I started the line after lunch I purposely put a little less pressure on the fish in the chute, A second later the two women jumped to their feet, dropped their scissors and started to yank half-empty cans from the line. For every can they filled they had to snatch three more from the conveyor belt, and in five minutes cans were stacked so high around them that they were completely lost from sight. After awhile I relented and put the pressure back on, and everything returned to normal in a very short time. But yes, they did have the roughest, toughest job in the plant that day. And after that there was no more complaining—not in my hearing, at least.

  Life in a cannery could be dangerous. One day when I was pressing fish down into the canning machine an especially bony piece of salmon caught my right hand and gradually pulled it down with it. I had visions of my fingers turning up on assorted crackers at a fashionable cocktail party and was so fascinated with the thought that I made no move to stop the inexorable process. But when my arm had disappeared and my shoulder began to follow suit, I managed to reach up with my left hand and pull the lever to stop the line. Then I sat down and shook for awhile.

  The superintendent of the cannery had an annoying habit of coming into the canning department and destroying the peace and calm of the place. Sputtering and fuming in his muddy Norse dialect, he upset the workers so much that they weren’t much good for anything for the rest of the day. He bothered me, too, and once, when he was passing my machine, I pushed down hard on the fish in the trough. A great spurt of gurry cascaded up, splattering him from head to booted toes like an enormous custard pie. I apologized, he smiled weakly and turned and walked out. I expected to receive my walking papers that night, but I didn’t. From then on, when the superintendent wanted to supervise, he did it from the safety of the doorway.

  Once when the line had been going along steadily for two hours without a breakdown, I felt in need of a rest and stopped the entire proceedings. The silence attracted the super to the door. “What’s wrong?” he inquired.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “What for you stop the line?”

  “I felt like it,
” I said. “We all need a rest.” I looked at him with what I hoped was a leer and dared him, silently, to do something about it. In laboring circles—I later learned—this attitude is known as being “stake-happy.” All Alaska workers and construction men catch the disease when their pockets are full of greenbacks toward the end of a season. My pockets weren’t full of greenbacks—you didn’t get paid as you went along, on this job—but they were likely to be, very soon, and I, apparently, was as stake-happy as they come.

  The superintendent probably couldn’t see my glaring eyes for the gurry on my glasses, but he was intimidated, just the same. “Ya, sure,” he said nervously. “You take a rest for a few minutes. You’ve earned one.” Then he made a hurried exit.

  We were working fourteen hours a day, now, and the strain was beginning to tell. My domestic worries weren’t helping my disposition any, either. While working in the cannery I was sleeping in my car in a cow pasture nearby, and though I was the interloper—not the cows—it had begun to seem as though one of us would have to go. To keep them away from my improvised fireplace and grub box, I had built a rough enclosure of spruce branches. One morning I awoke to find a group of Elsies trying to knock it down. I drove them off before they could do much damage, but the next morning they came back again with some new recruits, and I opened my eyes to the sight of my fence knocked flat and about ten ruminating cows standing around. One of them had an emptied ten-pound flour sack between her teeth and another was worrying what was left of a bag of sugar. Leaping out of the car with blood in my eye, I courageously dispersed the mob with a stick I picked up off the ground. Then I surveyed the damage. The grub box was open and half cow-licked jars of jam and peanut butter lay broken in the ruins. The camp was a wreck. And most crowning insult of all: my frying pan was filled to over-flowing with fresh cow pie—all ready for the frying.