A Working Stiff's Manifesto (13 page)

On the down side, we have just started shift work again after Christmas, and I am working twelve-hour shifts at night. This means, in order to make my court appearance, I am going to have to miss an entire day's sleep. The courthouse is about five miles away, and I spent all my cash over Christmas, so I'm going to have to walk each way after working twelve hours the night before. Even to get the court date postponed, so that I could attend on a day when there is no crab coming in, I still have to show up in court. They won't give me a continuance over the phone. So if I'm going to go all the way down there, I might as well go to trial.

My day comes, and I walk through the slush and mud of Dutch Harbor. Under different circumstances, this could be a beautiful and interesting town. There are bunkers left over from World War II spotting the shoreline, majestic mountains overlooking the town. Strings of mist circle around the crab boats tied up to the docks.

I discover, during my walk, that Dutch Harbor actually has a college campus, the University of Alaska at Dutch Harbor. UADH is a shack, much like my grandfather's tool shed. The town library is a Quonset hut. The courthouse is a mud-spattered wooden structure on the far side of the town.

But inside, there is no difference from any other small town courthouse. There are wanted posters on the wall, and the ever-present bored secretary sitting behind a plywood desk, looking at a computer screen. She asks me my name and motions for me to be seated on a small bench.

I watch the trial before mine, a fisherman who has been caught with half an eighth of marijuana in his bunkhouse. Apparently, he came home and found his wife in bed with another fisherman and a fight ensued, and the wife called the police. Law enforcement's contribution to the whole affair was to rummage around and find the pot, for which they then arrested him. Talk about a bad day. The judge shares my sympathy, but Alaska has only recently outlawed marijuana. Up until a few months ago, it was legal here to possess an eighth of an ounce or less, and now they are trying to make examples of people who have not adhered to the new laws. Five hundred dollars and five hundred hours of community service.

Next, the people of Alaska versus Iain Levison, unlicensed driver. The judge asks me if I knew my license had expired. I know how to answer that, but it doesn't help. What amazes me is that in this dirt-water town, this lawless backwash of civilization where people wear tourist T-shirts that say “Dutch Harbor … it's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here,” someone has run my driver's license through a computer and determined that it has expired.

“I'm not going to fine you,” she tells me, “but you have to do some community service. The penalty here for driving without a license is unusually harsh because people come up here and think they can get away with anything.” Sure. Of course. Look around you, sister, they
are
getting away with anything.

“Five hundred hours.” She bangs her gavel, like they do in
Law and Order
. She shuffles some papers and nods for the next case.

Five hundred hours. That's about twelve weeks of free work I have to contribute to Dutch Harbor, while I am working a minimum of eighty-four hours a week at Rayford. The only way to manage this would be to never sleep.

I ask the secretary what community service involves, and she tells me that it's mostly stuff with the harbormaster's office, driving around picking up dead sea lions that are rotting on the shoreline, that sort of thing. I ask her if there's anything available at the library. She shakes her head. The library already has two full-time employees. The only thing they need right now is outdoor work, which means physically demanding. And at the end of the day at Rayford, I'm out of gas.

I walk back to Rayford and I find Jeff packing up the last of his things. He has been fired for thumping Billy.

“What're you gonna do?”

“Go home. I've made two thousand. I can afford the plane ticket, I'll have a little left over.” The airfare back and forth from Seattle is astronomical. Most fishing companies will pay it round trip if you finish your contract, but if you get fired or quit, you're on your own.

I like Jeff and I realize I'll miss him. He's a little out of control sometimes, caught up in the macho fantasy world that this lifestyle creates, but he has a good sense of humor.

“Why don't you try to get a job with one of the boats?”

He shakes his head. “I've had enough of this shit.”

I know what he means. No one here with enough money for plane fare home is really that distraught about getting fired. You get back to the world, back to towns with women, where the men say, “Excuse me,” when they bump into you in bars, where everything doesn't smell like fish or steamed crab, and people wear something besides rain gear. And if you're fired, you don't have to think of yourself as a failure for quitting.

“I'm gonna have to leave myself pretty soon. I got five hundred hours of community service for driving those fishermen around. There's no way I can do that. And I barely have enough saved for a ticket. If I jetted out right now, I'd be flat broke in Seattle, which is why I came up here in the first place.”

He snorts. “Five hundred hours. What a fucking joke.”

We shake hands. The door closes. I have six hours to sleep before I have to work a twelve-hour shift.

My new roommates are Rus and Colin, two college kids who are a refreshing, clean-cut change from the social pathology that I have become accustomed to. They seem young and energetic and find things like the water on the floor a charming change from their middle class environments. They think Dutch Harbor is an exciting place, and their first day here they buy a book about the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians during World War II.

“Come upstairs,” Rus tells me breathlessly as I am lying in my bunk. “You gotta see this!”

“What?”

“Just come on.”

I've only just laid down, but I figure this must be something great, so I pull my boots on and follow him. We go out on to the foredeck, where Colin is holding the book open and looking at the mountains.

“Look at this,” Colin tells me excitedly. He points to a photograph in the book that shows Japanese bombers swarming over Dutch Harbor. “The mountain formations in this picture are exactly the same as the mountain formations right there. This happened right here, right where we're standing!”

I nod. “Cool,” I say politely, and head back to my bunk.

This is how these kids are about everything. Even the crappy Filipino food we are given to eat is intriguing and new. Rus, who didn't bring enough money with him to buy tourist crap, asks to borrow $100 so he can go shopping in town and send stuff back to his folks. I lend it to him because he lives with me and he's not going anywhere and I know he has a job. Then, their second night at work, Andre falls off the dock into the water.

This is Alaska in midwinter. The water in the harbor is so cold that if they don't fish you out in a matter of seconds, your muscles freeze up and you just slip beneath the surface. Colin's in the water for about ninety seconds. They get him, and the next time I see him he's physically okay, but he doesn't think everything is amazing anymore.

“This place fucking sucks,” he tells me two days later. Rus has picked up on this too. It was bound to happen. The water incident just sped things along. Dutch Harbor is not a vacation spot, and treating it like one doesn't make it the Bahamas. The next day I get off shift, go down to my room, and their bunks are empty.

I go up to the office. “What happened to those two guys in my room?” I ask.

“Family emergency. Had to fly 'em back today.” The office guy has more important things to think about.

“Were they related?”

“Said they were cousins.”

“They weren't cousins. They were college roommates. They told me they only met each other last year.”

“I'm just telling you what they told me,” he says.

“Fucker owed me $100.”

“I'll tell you what. Before I send anyone else home, I'll check with you first.” This guy is more sarcastic than I am. He has heard every bullshit story in the book. But he adds, almost sympathetically, “We verified it with a phone call home.”

It's never hard to find a sister or girlfriend to pretend to be a grieving relative of two guys who aren't even related. I wander back down to my bunk, where I now have one of the largest bunk rooms on the ship all to myself. Another $100 lesson learned. The lessons are piling up.

With Jeff and Hale gone, I'm now the chief of the deck crew. For that matter, I'm the entire deck crew. The deck boss goes and gets me two college kids fresh off the plane to help load pallets.

One of them, a slight, fresh-faced all-American named Chris, was working on his father's mink farm in Oregon a week ago when he suddenly decided he wanted a change. He got his wish. He looks a tad slight for the physical work, but he seems pleasant enough.

The other is a big, muscular frat boy named Brian who wants to “make money to buy nice things.” Someone told him you can make a ton of money in Alaska. He knows everything about loading pallets, he knows everything about mackerel, he knows everything about Koreans, with whom we are working. He knows everything about everything and takes to the job eagerly. From the size of him, I figure he'll find this type of work easy enough.

After five hours of loading pallets, Brian is worn out and starts complaining. This type of work is hard on the muscles when you first start, and you need to pace yourself. Even if you're in good shape, it'll still wear you down. The boxes aren't light and they have to be placed a certain way, then they have to be shrink-wrapped to prevent them from sliding when they go up on the crane. Lifting and stacking the boxes is the easy part; the shrink-wrapping is a bitch because you have to bend down and run backwards in circles around the pallet, holding a heavy roll of clear plastic wrap that makes an explosive noise as it unravels. The pallets are over six feet high when fully stacked, so on the last few rotations around the pallet, you have to hold the plastic wrap over your head, which wears out your arms in a hurry.

All this has to be done in a rush, to keep the flow of the offload going smoothly. If Brian and Chris fail to wrap the top boxes carefully, they'll go spilling into the water between the two ships. Each sixty-pound box of crab legs is worth hundreds of dollars, so it's my job to make sure this doesn't happen.

“We need to take a break,” Brian tells me, panting, as another load of boxes comes out of the hold on the hydraulic lift. He's only been here a day, so he doesn't get it yet. You just don't say things like that. It's a given that everybody working on the ship needs to take a break at any given time, but the break times are scheduled, and not scheduled often.

“Just a few more pallets,” I tell him. “Then it's break time.”

“I need a break now.”

The workers in the hold are waiting for me to get this new load of boxes off the lift so they can bring it back down and load more. I don't have time to argue with him, so I hand him the tally clipboard, which I am using to count the boxes coming out of the hold.

“Take this,” I tell him. “We'll switch out for a bit.”

I help Chris, who hasn't complained at all, and we finish off the next few pallets before we take a break. When our break is over, I decide it's not fair to give Brian a break and keep Chris working just because Brian whined, so I offer the tally sheet to Chris, to give him an easy hour or two.

Brian starts complaining again.

“Look,” I tell him. “You've got the easiest job there is. You could be down on the slime line pulling crabs' legs off for twelve hours. Do you want that?”

“Yes, if I don't have to use this plastic wrap any more,” he pants.

“Just a couple more hours, then see. We've just got to get this off-load finished.”

It takes seven more hours, and Brian whines the whole time. When it's over, we go to the break room where they have a pay phone, and Brian heads right over to it.

“That's a satellite phone,” I warn him. “It's not hooked up to a land line. It costs ten dollars a minute. If you want to make a call, you're better off going into town.”

He shrugs and goes over to make the call.

The crew supervisor comes over and asks me how the guys he sent me are working out.

“Big guy's useless. Send him down to the slime line. The little guy's a keeper.”

“Yeah, that's what I expected. The ones that won't shut up never do too well. Hell of a waste of all that muscle.”

The next day, I get a tiny Mexican named Jorge who works like a maniac and never says a word. Brian is sent down to the slime line to pull crabs' legs off for twelve hours a day. Ironically, we don't have a ship coming in to pick up an off-load, so we spend most of the day milling around, cleaning up the deck, finding busy work.

“I don't think I can make enough money here,” says Chris. He's only been in Alaska two days, but he's already researched the jobs enough to know that processing on board the
Rayford
puts him at the bottom of the Alaskan pay scale. We make five dollars an hour and get most of our money in overtime because by Alaskan law, anything over eight hours a day is overtime. Working eighty-four hours a week, which is light by Alaskan standards, gives us $530 a week in pretax paychecks. Then the government rips out a nice chunk, leaving about $400 a week for all that work. The real benefit comes in the fact that we have no expenses, as room and board are on the house, so everything I make goes straight into the bank.

Anyone who wants to make real money in Alaska is either a fisherman, which is dangerous and brutal work, or a processor who works for percentage of the catch, as opposed to hourly wage. Chris has decided he doesn't know enough about fishing to try it, which is smart. But he's hell-bent on getting a percentage processing job.