Me, Myself, as Mommy: Fish experiences taught personal lessons then and now
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- A retort inside Peter Pan Seafood in Alaska.
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- Meg Sanders, 19, hiking Valdez Glacier.
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- A fishing trip to Mantua.
Gearing up to pay for college tuition, approximately $2,800 at Utah State University in 2002, I convinced my boyfriend the best way to get fast cash was to fly to Valdez, Alaska, and can fish for the summer at the Peter Pan Seafood factory.
As only an immortal teenager would, I salivated over the great wealth and summer adventure awaiting me in The Last Frontier. At that time, Peter Pan hired anyone with a pulse and foolish enough to think a fish factory wouldn’t be that bad.
We spent our summer working 14-hour days on little sleep in the midst of OSHA violations that would make Murray Energy Corporations scoff, interrupted only by several knife fights between drunk employees on the days no fish arrived for filleting. We were paid $8 an hour, making the big bucks by accruing overtime.
I had never been to Alaska and certainly didn’t know what a “retort” was. I learned fast. The retort is a giant metal oven that steams racks of canned fish up to 300 degrees.
Our job was to walk inside, hook onto a “bussey”, a wheeled cart stacked with thousands of scalding cans, and yank it out over and over again. Each bussey weighed about 1,200 pounds. We basically worked in a sauna wearing rain gear and rubber galoshes that protected our toes, but the rest of our bodies were fair game.
Doug went home early after the retort turned on for a few seconds while he was inside, burning his left side. A very tall kid named Tim earned himself a concussion after getting smacked in the head by a giant magnet used to gather the cans. My fingertip was ripped clean off when a metal grate from the bussey got caught on a conveyor belt. Eventually I went home due to severe pneumonia.
OSHA toured the factory once. That’s the only time we were handed hardhats. As teens we didn’t ask questions, we didn’t advocate, instead we were happy to be out on our own, making our own money with no parental supervision.
In the end, my husband came home with a couple thousand dollars, I had a few hundred having bought myself a few fleece jackets and steel-toed shoes but I knew who I wanted to marry.
While we primarily worked in the canning and packaging section of the factory, I made the fatal mistake of telling our boss I wanted the full experience. That’s how we ended up on the slime line. For a nine hour stretch I sprayed out the inside of the cod, my boyfriend ice cream scooped the bloodline from their spine. It was true romance because we still got married years later.
I’m telling you this lengthy backstory because I want to establish that, at one point in my life, I had genuine fishing and fish-related street cred. I was tough. Stupid, but brave enough to fly 2,000 miles away and work in a place where one wrong move brought serious consequences. I could work through fatigue, danger and the slime line.
Which brings me to now.
My 14-year-old son has recently decided he wants to learn to fish. His father hasn’t touched a fish since Valdez. I’ve restricted my relationship with seafood to eating sushi. We are not the correct guides for this new hobby of his but in our minds, living in Alaska was only a few years ago, not decades.
With his sights set on Mantua Reservoir, we made a stop at Smith and Edwards to get nightcrawlers. As my kid looked around at supplies, I perused the middle aisle that leads shoppers to the back of the store. I glimpsed something called a fish whistle. It claimed one blow would trigger fish to leap out of the water. It seemed a better method than baiting a hook with a worm — work smarter and all.
I bought it.
I realized it looked like a regular whistle but missed it was made by a company called Prank-O and felt like a totally moron when my son chided, “fish don’t have ears.” Naturally, he photographed it, added a caption and sent it to the group chat of teenage boys whose entire purpose is to mock one another. They’re having a great time riffing over me pranking myself.
But this gaff hits on an insecurity new to me — am I doing silly, airheaded things because I’m getting older? It’s karma that I’m now the butt of my kids’ jokes when my parents often were of mine.
While I worry I’m not as sharp, I tell myself it’s because my brain has less space and time than when I was younger. Maybe it’s not dull but full. Full of schedules, deadlines, worries and expectations exacerbating my shortcomings. Now I just have a very attentive audience to note all my mistakes. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this youthful fan club, it’s humility.
Peter Pan is now bankrupt. The factory sold off. Looking back, it was a genuine hellscape but it was also the most beautiful, pristine landscape I’ve ever seen. I saw parts of Alaska I know I’ll never get to see again.
When the fishing boats were out, we used our precious downtime to hike Valdez Glacier, climb the Trans-Alaska Pipeline where we came face-to-face with a grizzly bear, fish for king salmon on a few rivers, I even swam Glacier Lake. It was a highlight when I caught a Dolly Varden trout.
If only I had a fish whistle, I would have got that king.
