Grant, who fishes for Peter Pan on his boat Whitetail, fishes for subsistence once his commercial runs are wrapped up each year. He's got a tradition of gill netting salmon with George and Karen around this time year. George also works for Peter Pan, and Karen teaches a couple of the older elementary grades at the school. They've all been really great to get to know. Grant invited Dana and me to go along with them on this year's trip. I've been dying to go fishing and was thrilled by the offer.
We met him at Whitetail yesterday morning and headed out to Thinpoint, a long and narrow spit of land that forms a cove. A stream that feeds into the cove is a great spot to gillnet, so that's where Grant headed. The weather was decent and the water mild for the two hour or so trip to Thinpoint. We anchored in the cove and took the skiff up the creek to where we fished. The low tide made the creek shallow, so Grant ferried us and the gear inland in stages. I was the first to be dropped off with the gear: the gillnet and a shotgun. I waited alone for him to return from Whitetail with the others. I was glad to have the gun, as there were fresh bear tracks on the low tide shore. I was also glad that it went unused during the trip.
This was my first time gill netting. It's a really interesting process. The process requires a few hands: one person holds an end of the net from the shore while others on a boat go up or downstream to the net. A floating edge and an opposing leaden edge cause the net to travel vertically through the water, and fish become entangled in it through their gills. Once the sweep is complete, the boat then comes back to shore, and the net is pulled out of the water. The tricky part of freeing the fish from the net is last.
George held the net on the shore, and I fed the net into the water from the skiff while Grant drove. We cast three sets: the first two sets brought out about 140 keepers, and the last only brought in about 15. We threw back the “humpy” salmon, as they don't taste as good as the silvers and reds. We bled the salmon as we freed them from the net and tossed them into the skiff. The net also brought in a few flounder, but we threw them back.
Seals occasionally popped their heads out of the stream and watched us. We also briefly saw one bear across the stream. Another couple of King Cove locals were also fishing in the area. They said there were four bears upstream. A small taildragger plane landed on the beach a way off and took off after about an hour. It flushed a massive flock of birds into flight, a very cool sight.
Once we got all the fish back to Whitetail, we began our trip back to town. While Karen and Dana piloted the boat, Grant and George filleted the fish. I washed all the fish and handed them off to the guys. Super slime. Grant and George processed the fish two different ways: they cut the sides of the fish off entirely for fillets, and they also cut the sides off but left them attached to each other at the tail. This second method allows the fish to be draped over racks in Grant's smokehouse.
Dana and I each walked away with about 10 pounds of fillets. Yum! Here are some pictures.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Seagull has Landed—or—Lovers Make Little Milk Drinkers
My quest to find a place to reside during the school year has come to a close. The very kind owner of the only apartment complex in town, Maranatha Apartments, told me she had a one-bedroom with my name all over it. The “Peter Pan Can Man” moved out, she said, and she was holding the apartment for me. “It's important you teachers have good houses. You work so hard.” It might as well be school housing, as I am across the hall from the principal's family and one door down from two teachers.
So, I've moved into this really comfortable apartment. It's large and clean, and it came furnished throughout (complete with a set of four goblets imprinted with the phrase, “Milk drinkers make better lovers.” I hate milk and am generally sickened by the statement but am glad to have something to drink from.) This'll be a fine place to live for the school year. I was lucky that it opened up. Perhaps I'll post pictures following the move-in mayhem.
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But that doesn't account for the hiatus in my blogging. It's been a really eventful and fun couple of weeks. I know I am not going to be able to put much effort into this blog once school begins, so I've got to take advantage of my opportunity to communicate while I can. Here's a quick update.
Dana, the teacher who has been really welcoming and fun to hang out with, went out of town for a couple of weeks. She needed a house sitter for her two dogs and many plants. I really like house sitting, so I offered. Her dogs, Doppler and Gilda, are really easygoing until it's time to go for a walk. They love sniffing around the lagoon. The red salmon are running (meaning they're returning to the creeks in which they were born in order to spawn and die). The creeks leading into the lagoon are packed with salmon. As Doppler so loves to interrupt their cycle, I had to reroute our walks in an effort to spare the unnecessary killing.
Gilda proved to be a perfect hiking companion. Her job was to provide advance bear warning as we made the trek to Paradise Lake, a short (but vertical) hike from the city water tank. I packed all my camera gear up there only to discover that I left my memory card in my computer, a total bummer as the enveloping clouds made the mountaintop hike surreal. It was all for the better, though. Freed of the task of documenting the experience, I shed my bag and romped around Shangri-La unfettered. I gained a tad bit of sympathy for Timothy "Tastegood" Treadwell as I found myself gleefully singing and bounding through the spongy tundra. Gilda agreed that it was pretty flipping awesome up there. I began my descent before I ran out of bear scaring songs. (“Before you eat me, Mr. Bear, please listen to my song.”)
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Dana got back into town yesterday. I took her car up to the airstrip to pick her up and was glad to see that my buddy Giles had been her pilot. He had a few additional mail runs to make between Cold Bay and King Cove. “Hop in,” he said. The flight was unexpected (again cameraless) and awesome. We took the scenic bear viewing route between the two towns. Without admitting to anything that'd get Giles in trouble, I'll just note that he's much more fun to fly with when there aren't paying passengers aboard. Great pilot, great day to go. I love how flying gives me a greater sense of where I am: a different perspective of the beauty and a reminder of the remoteness of this place.
Dana helped me move into the apartment when I got back from the great mail adventure. Then we went berrypicking. We found a jackpot patch of orange salmonberries, a kind I didn't know existed. I've got so many berries. Oh, and my first attempt at making jelly was a huge success!
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I've also been spending a lot of time at the school getting my room, lessons, and head ready. The first day for teachers is next Monday, the following Monday for students. Preparing instruction for five different levels of English is daunting. The graduated vocabulary lists (which I am beginning to question), five different books simultaneously, back-to-basics grammar that doesn't make them stage a riot, different levels of ability and maturity...AHHH! So, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on menial tasks--like the hour-plus I spent making signs that say "Hot Lava" which I hope will deter students from lounging on the long shelf that runs beneath the windows and from crowding the door near the end of the period. I've got a year to figure it out and to write about it, so that's enough for now.
Countdown: 30 days until my dad visits and delivers my truck (filled with veggies) on the ferry.
I catch myself saying “Peter Pan Can Man” aloud and laughing a lot. I must be having a good time.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
What Goes Around Comes Around—or—Simplify
I was unsure of what to take with me as I prepared to move to the far reaches of the state, country, and, to some, the Earth. The Aleutians were somewhere I'd never traveled, and I'd never lived near water. That it rains and blows (and rains and blows) in King Cove was about all I knew. Rain gear and irrigation boots: check. Hoodies: check. My laptop, a few good books, and a year's worth of cold medicine: check, check, check.
(Having moved quite a bit, I've mastered the task. I pack the tops of my boxes with rags and disinfectant, so as to have something available with which to clean whatever gnarly place I am moving into—no matter what box I open first. And, I've learned to not pack all my clothes in clothes-only boxes. Rather, it's best to cram them among other things. Clothes make great packing material for fragile objects, and one never knows if a change of underwear will suddenly be needed while unpacking the dishes.)
“But what else will I need out there?” I kept asking myself during the moving process. I had recently loaded up my truck with my belongings from my [squalid] apartment in Fairbanks and headed to Anchorage. Although I've got many more close connections in Fairbanks, geography necessitated that I used Anchorage as my staging ground as I prepared to move to King Cove and for the year that would follow.
In reality, my “staging ground” was the parking lot of Anchorage's Northern Lights Post Office. There, I spread out everything I own and began the real shake down: what stays in storage, what goes to KC, and what is anonymously gifted (out of equal parts embarrassment and humility) to the homeless shelter. Taking up as many as six parking spots, the ordeal looked as though a renegade Chevy S-10 had run down a multi-family yard sale and a Pride parade, finally coming to rest crashed through the front of a Barnes & Noble. “Is everything okay?” more than one passerby asked on his or her way into the post office.
After hours of organizing and a fists-on-hips visit from an unimpressed Postmaster, I decided, defeated, that I'd deal with it all in King Cove. I zip-tied totes closed and began carting them inside to be mailed away. Everything must go. I wrote “Tim Coray—General Delivery, King Cove, Alaska, 99612” on box after box. I walked out of the post office both delighted with my progress and wondering if I'd ever again would see, among other things, all those teaching supplies I had just spent a hefty amount on.
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The feeling of relief after sending everything off turns more and more back into anxiety with each box that I open. Like I am still trapped in the post office parking lot beneath my junk, I continue the process of going though all the things that I own—or, an oft-made point, the things that own me. Seriously. A map of Antarctica? Batts of raw wool that I've had for years and have never gotten around to felting? Shorts?! Unsure of what my school and classroom would be equipped with, I even mailed myself nearly an entire OfficeMax. Now that they're here, I secretly wish some of the boxes would have been lost in transit so I could collect on the insurance and have less to go through.
Perhaps I brought so much stuff because I am materialistic. Perhaps it's a manifestation of the importance of preparedness so deeply ingrained in me during my Mormon and Boy Scout upbringing. What's more likely: it's subconscious compensation for what little I am bringing in the way of rural experience and knowledge of teaching. (“Well, students, I don't know what the hell you're going to do today, but I am going to sit back and admire this pair of shoes I brought exclusively to wear on Wednesdays.”) True, with all that I have here I could McGyver my way out of many sticky situations, but how will I know how to define irony so that it's understood by a room full of 7th graders?
I am reminded of a teacher with whom I worked in Fairbanks. She has successfully taught in villages all over the state: Barrow, Little Diomede, Anaktuvik Pass, among others, all of which she went to with little more than a backpack and a bicycle. What does she know that I have yet to learn?
My last box arrived today. “Yeah, yer stuff's still comin' for ya,” said the woman behind the counter at the King Cove Post Office. She handed me a large beat up cardstock tube that looked as though it had been kicked all the way to the end of the Alaska Peninsula. It was a package that I had had begun to lose sleep over, one that, in retrospect, I should have insured for the amount of my entire first-year teaching salary. I surveyed the damage on the tube that contained the posters that I am going to hang throughout my classroom. Like I was as a student—tardy and dented—at least the package arrived.
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