It's Cannery, Bitch

Tragic tales from Alaska in the depths of salmon season. 

[justcannerythings-blog]

To quote my lovely assistant: I’m Audi 500

[justcannerythings-blog]

Going Home

It is almost midnight, and here I sit in the Anchorage airport, waiting for a flight that won’t leave until 5:30 AM. Ah, such is life.

It’s been a good season - lots of work, and surprisingly more enjoyment had than my last season with all of its downtime. As many, many, many people have said, if there’s one thing I gained from this, it’s perseverance. Working that much for that long is difficult, and I know going back is going to be jarring in many ways. An eight hour work day is simple to me now. Light and day and night are strange, changeable things that I can’t say I rely on to orient myself. Since I’m going back to California, I’ll be forcibly reminded what summer weather feels like, I’m sure.

What’s probably the weirdest though, is how much I don’t want to leave yet. I go to this job and this place knowing there’s going to be stupidity and hard work and emotional upheaval, and still, I know I’m going to miss it. There’s a reason people come back, and it’s not always the money. It gets inside you, somehow.

For my own sake, I hope I find a more permanent job that I love and that pays well enough I won’t feel like I need to come back next season, but there’s a part of me that kind of hopes I’ll be able to come back anyway.

[justcannerythings-blog]

I’ve become this strange creature that misses the outdoors and the sun, but no longer understands or likes it

[justcannerythings-blog]

My weekend off is just an endless mountain of hours of free time, and I have no idea what to do with it.

[justcannerythings-blog]

The Aftershock

Living life without having fish every day is very disorienting. Waking up early and knowing it’s okay if you’re not on top of your game. Starting to get feeling back in your feet and watching the skin on your hands heal. Returning to the not-blown-out voice of before the season.

All these things are making clean up week at once awesome and disconcerting. It’s nice - we get to hang out with people and don’t have to wear earplugs all the time and I did laundry tonight. But it’s very odd after all the...everything for the past two and a half months.

[justcannerythings-blog]

Bought my train ticket to Anchorage today! One more week and then I’m out.

[justcannerythings-blog]

Olga, bring the box of death!

Anson

[justcannerythings-blog]

This guy is going to be in town tomorrow.

Should be exciting! We are officially a no-fly zone and almost everyone is considering ditching work to go try to see the President. We’ll see how that goes...

[justcannerythings-blog]

Aight, so it’s actually the day after the last day of canning, and do you know why?

Because after fifty seven days straight of working, your first priority is to be unconscious. Everything else, including the internet, comes after that. So while I was totally psyched to watch the very last can go through and know that freedom awaited me...posting about it had to wait.

So now, we’re going into post-season clean up. Way more relaxed and only eight hour days, which feel like nothing. I had no idea what to do with my day after work today. I went shopping, watched an episode of an online series, organized my clothes, dealt with a crisis. And it’s still earlier than I would normally be even finished with work, let alone daily clean up.

Still, work starts at seven every day and I cannot actually get enough sleep to catch up. Not for a while yet.

So yay! But also, aw man, let’s keep going I guess.

[justcannerythings-blog]

Last day of canning tomorrow!!

[justcannerythings-blog]

Fighting with the real world is awful

[justcannerythings-blog]

[justcannerythings-blog]

Taking in the Scenery

When you work as much as we do, sometimes the only moments you see the outside is while walking between work and your bed. When you do that for months at a time, it starts to feel like you exist in one long time loop, or a single day with multiple naps. Today, the power went out twice, right around nine pm. When I got to Alaska, sunset pretended to happen at about midnight, but it was dark when the power went out the second time just before ten. I was surprised, which tells me a couple things... Time is meaningless. In the sense that the time of day is irrelevant to my life. It's day until work is over, and then night happens. Time is meaningless. In the sense that days are numbers up until you realize it's gone from early summer to almost autumn, and it's difficult to pick out one day from another. I am still very tired. Because I saw that it was sunset-ish the first time we went outside and promptly forgot about that in the fifteen minutes it took for the power to go out again. Memory is iffy when exhausted. Still, the harbor was pretty and the mountains were beautiful. It's like being in a cold, windy postcard. And you take your chances to stare at the landscape people pay a lot of money to see when you can.

[justcannerythings-blog]

[justcannerythings-blog]

A few too many short days, even finished at two thirty today. Of course, that means everyone’s confused and wants to know if we’re going to have early layoff, when’s layoff, do you think layoff will be- Stop. 

I don’t know. I don’t know how many fish we’ll have tomorrow. I don’t know when they’re calling layoff. I don’t know anything. I know I will be at work tomorrow morning like I have for the past something-like-fifty-days. I’m confused too.

[justcannerythings-blog]

Too many short, easy days in a row. There’s gotta be a catch.

[justcannerythings-blog]

Three hour lunch, amazing burrito, early finish. So much sleep was had, maybe there’ll even be a shower! Might get crazy...