A View from the Cannery

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 36: SPRING/SUMMER 2026

One early June morning, I drive to work, my first year of college behind me and a full summer of employment ahead. To piles of pink salmon, silver salmon, red salmon. Piles growing larger as the fishing boats arrive day and night. My second home in the summer months: the cannery. Here, I stand in the damp cold, spoon in hand, scraping out the spinal bloodlines of salmon until the piles are gone. They are long, tiring days. For the paycheck every two weeks, it’s worth it. I am in need of money.

My hometown outside the car is at once quaint and glorious. I have a newfound appreciation for this island of trees and mountains. Except for the winter break between semesters, I’ve lived away from home for the entire academic year, away from the insularity of friends and family, away from the sight and smell of the ocean, in another state that also shares the Pacific coastline, but my college is on the east side of the state, the interior farmland with dusty brown landscapes and a much drier, considerably hotter climate. Ah, the trees. Hello, Tongass Narrows. Nice to see you again. 

“I have a newfound appreciation for this island of trees and mountains.”

This challenging year of adjustment to a new life as a college student makes me feel worldly. The distance has given me an excuse to pooh-pooh the concerns of my previous high school self, the popularity pecking order, the unrequited crushes. My college mates awe me in another way; I am daunted by their wealth and prep school educations. My boyfriend, my first ever, a handsome, kind, freckled young man who lived in my freshman dormitory, hails from the Midwest. The popular kids from my high school have lost some of their magnetism. I believe myself to be above it all. Then, I’m re-immersed in the slime and slog of the cannery. 

The canneries of southeast Alaska have been a source of livelihood since they first opened in the late 1800s. Ketchikan became the supply hub for the mining industry in the 1890s. For those with gold in their dreams but failed plans or fruitless efforts after the Klondike Gold Rush, another rush of riches came from the waters. By the 1930s, there were over a dozen canneries in Ketchikan, earning the city its title of the Salmon Capital of the World.

The long steel table stretching all the way to the loading dock is a continuum of stages, the fish headed and gutted and cleaned down the line. In this cavernous, windowless building where I work, a large metal roll-up door opens to the dock like an eye, allowing the workers a framed view of the water, the long, tree-covered island across the Narrows, and a swath of sky. Before dawn, fishing boats chug to the dock after an opening, a regulated time of harvest, with their hulls bloated with salmon. They unload and leave the cannery workers with literally a ton of work and more. Though technically it is a fish processing plant, locals still call it a cannery.

“Where are you from?” I ask new workers one by one, in pairs, during break, after lunch, waiting for the last bin of fish to empty. The slime line is a table full of conversations waiting to happen if the music blaring from the loudspeaker doesn’t drown them out. 

Michigan. Oregon. Israel. Chicago. California. Australia. Ohio. New Zealand. Montana. 

“What’s it like there?” 

“They were looking for a place to escape or fit in.”

They were hungry for work, loved or fell in love with the wilderness and ruggedness of Southeast Alaska, and were independent-minded if not just plain odd. They were looking for a place to escape or fit in.

“It’s hot.” “It’s different.” “It’s much bigger than here.” “It’s nice.” “You should visit sometime.”

Working at the cannery has grown popular with the young crowd in recent years. The starting wage was $5.50 an hour when I was in high school, a much better alternative than minimum wage elsewhere. If one was lucky to land a job in the retail stores, they paid a mere $4.75. In the cannery, there are ample opportunities in a good fishing season to work overtime, which means time and a half pay, a windfall for many of those eager to make fast cash and eventually leave this place—the cold, the cannery, the island and its confines. 

Then again, some will return for another season or more, either because one forgets the dreadful work and the bone-chilling environment or simply because it is or becomes home. Many of my high school classmates and acquaintances work a season or more at the canneries, but like me, they consider it a temporary situation. Some of them are also studying in college; others find less physically taxing, odor-free, permanent jobs around town. Yet, for more than a few locals, cannery work becomes their livelihood.

“Yet, for more than a few locals, cannery work becomes their livelihood.”

“Where are you from?” fellow workers ask me. We have five to eight hours of fish to clean. 

At the head of the table nearest the docked boats, three or more workers we call “headers” grab salmon being thrown on the table and, one by one, chop off the fish heads with large-bladed knives or cleavers. They push the de-headed fish to those next in line, four workers with paring knives, who slice open the bellies and pull out the pink guts. These gutted fish are then pushed down the longest part of the table with eight workers or more holding spoons with spray mechanisms connected to a water line. They scrape and spray out the gelatinous spinal bloodline and gut remnants until the fish is fully emptied of its innards and the orange-pink flesh gleams. These fish bodies, now at the other end of the table, slip into a shallow metal tub of frigid water for a final bath before being tossed into a huge tote and forklifted into a large refrigerated room. 

I am always a “slimer,” spooning out bloodlines on the slime line, the front of my plastic apron smeared in blood and my rubber boots covered in fish guts.

“Ketchikan,” I answer, admiring the iridescent scales of the coho, the red shimmer of the sockeye, the speckled tail of the king salmon as the fish slide down the table.

“Not much to do here, eh?”

“Yeah, well." 

From these slime line workers, adventure-seeking travelers who’ve landed beside and across the table from me, I always want to know why they came to Alaska. Some say: “To work on a fishing boat,” only to have soon discovered how difficult it is to land such a job once they arrive. Others say: “To make lots of money." “’Cause I hated my other job.” Or: “To go fishing, hiking, mountain climbing, kayaking.” And: “It’s beautiful up here!”

Whenever I hear talk of the beauty of this place, I see the island anew, admiring it like a chiaroscuro painting (a term I learned in art history), illuminated by the contrasts of their worlds and this one.

Nourished by cool weather and copious rainfall, this dark green island called Revillagigedo is part of the Alexander Archipelago, a chain of islands in Southeast Alaska covered in dense forests of spruce and hemlock. Its rocky coastlines are fringed in gold kelp, its waters stocked with salmon and halibut. When clouds cover the sky, the waters turn black, the mountains sullen, as if dusted by fine particles of charcoal, a gray veil falling on every contour. Under these generous showers, the island’s inhabitants move about their daily lives interrupted only by some of nature’s harsher whims, the occasional snowstorm or high winds. Then, they yearn for summer, for a break from work or school, for clam digging and halibut fishing. They sigh at the return of the sun that erases temporarily the memory of foul weather.

“By summer’s end, I will miss many of them and their stories of their travels, their homes in other states or countries.”

It's my third season working in the cannery. My fellow slime line workers and I have just finished singing along badly with the latest on the loudspeaker, “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League. By summer’s end, I will miss many of them and their stories of their travels, their homes in other states or countries. I will work with a few again the following season, or see them around town, or, at the least, learn of their whereabouts from other workers. As for the rest, I will never see or hear of them again. They will perhaps be fulfilling their dreams to travel to Mexico or to move to LA and get into the film business or bum around South America, or they will have returned home to their loved ones and familiar jobs.

It’s the summer of 1985. Ronald Reagan is serving his second term. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova are battling it out on the tennis courts and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wins the Finals MVP. Rock Hudson has AIDS. A bomb explodes on Air India Flight 182 over the Atlantic and kills 329 people. For two weeks, someone slips the same tape into the stereo—AC/DC—and somewhere between the twentieth and thirtieth play, I conclude the lead singer of this vexing rock group must have worked in a cannery too, developing his ear-splitting shriek from staring at teeming piles of stiff salmon slipping and sliding across the table, unable to escape the acute, pervasive stink of fish. 

Most often, after a flurry of conversations in the face of mind-numbing labor, us slime line workers retreat into our interior worlds. We become robots. My fellow workers are outfitted in bright yellow or dark green rain gear, some wearing baseball caps while others wrap bandanas around their heads like pirates, waiting for the allotted fifteen-minute break every two hours so they can stand outside on the building’s sidewalk to smoke a cigarette. If they are fortunate, the sun will appear to thaw out their half-frozen bodies. 

Routinely, though, thick gray clouds blanket the sun. 

Between the sky and earth, between dreams and smoke, fall buckets and buckets of rain.