Here fishy, fishy, fishy!

Where are the fish?  That’s the question on everyone’s mind here in Bristol Bay right now.  It was predicted to be another record run of sockeye salmon, but they have only trickled in so far and it’s getting quite late.  Commercial fishermen and women are only allowed to put out their nets, whether set nets from shore or drift nets from boats, when enough fish have gone up the major river drainages to ensure a viable spawning population.  So far there have only been a few 6 to 8-hour periods open for fishing, and the canneries are just starting to really operate. 

That has led to a whole lot of fishermen and cannery workers in town with nothing to do, which often leads to getting into trouble, which often leads directly to the clinic.  Added to the usual lacerations, people being run over by forklifts, back strains, MRSA abscesses and foreign bodies in eyes, are drunks who fall off boats while they’re still on dry land, muscle spasms and stress-induced pains that resemble heart attacks, and 4-wheeler crashes onto rocks on the beach.  My favorite call so far is actually not related to the fishless follies, but was an 80-something elder from one of the small villages who fell off the back of his 4-wheeler while it was parked and bonked his head.  When he was asked why he wasn’t wearing a helmet he said, “There’s only one helmet in Kokhanok!  I’m hoping to get one for my birthday.”  We have extra help at the clinic for the fishing season and have been rotating the night call so that whoever is on call from 5 PM to 9 AM doesn’t have to work the days in the clinic, therefore they can theoretically sleep.

This past week we had a night where I was still at the clinic trying to catch up on all the paperwork I’m behind on, and in the space of two hours we had two people come in with digit amputations, one arriving in the back parking lot by helicopter with his thumb in a plastic bag, a man with severe kidney stones, and a guy from one of the small villages who had burned himself badly three days ago and finally got to town.  It didn’t stop there, though—the burn guy had gotten into an altercation at one of the local bars and then hit the police officer who responded in the head with his cell phone, so by the time he came over from the jail he had a big knot on his head, was covered in blood, and then proceeded to go into alcoholic withdrawal seizures while we were taking care of the burns and the head injury.  We managed to get the guy with the kidney stones and the guy with the amputated thumb (caught in a boat anchor winch) on the same medevac plane to two different hospitals, bandaged up the other guy who had only really lost the very tip of a finger so could go out on a commercial flight the next day, and sent the obstreperous burn guy back to jail.

It’s really been kind of a carnival atmosphere around here, starting in late May and building as fishermen get into town and start getting their boats ready to go in the water, families come back, not unlike the salmon, to fish their family subsistence and commercial sites, and the cannery workers and tourists pack the incoming flights and crowd the local grocery store and eating (and drinking!) establishments.  It kind of rocks our world when our community of about 800 or so swells to 10,000 in just a few short weeks!

It would be an interesting documentary to follow the whole cycle around here.  There is quite a bit of diversity, in the cannery workers especially.  They are from all over the world:  Somalia, Sudan, Cote d’Ivore, the Philippines, Mexico, and even the US.  The US people seem to be divided into two major groups—the college kids here to make a bunch of money for school and have an adventure, and the other folks who are for the most part, shall we say, down on their luck.  I always wonder, as I see them walking up and down the highway from the canneries to town in groups of 3-6, what their stories are.  I get to find out from the ones that come to the clinic with illness or injury, and they are usually very interesting.

This year I have been an Alaska resident for over a full year, so I now have a permit for subsistence fishing, which means I can catch and keep up to 300 sockeye, 10 Kings, 10 silvers, 75 pinks and 75 chum for myself and my household.  Which is me.   I sure hope I don’t get that many!  Subsistence fishing is done using a 10 fathom (60 foot) gill net strung out from above the high tide line into the river or ocean and anchored at both ends with a buoy on the water end.  You put the net out at low tide and come back at the next high tide, and hopefully you have a bunch of fish to pick out of the net.

low tide set

The well-hung net

This spring I took a net hanging class that really impressed me with how complex and detailed the whole thing is!  So nets are not factory made—the webbing is, the line is, the twine and corks and needles are—but the functional net itself is constructed (hung) by hand.  There are all different kinds of mesh for different size fish, different fishing conditions, etc., but they all consist of a line with floats, called corks, strung on it which you attach to the mesh at the top and a line filled with lead pieces that you attach to the bottom.  You have to figure out what kind of a net you need to hang and then do the math to figure out the spacing between knots, which is different at the top than at the bottom.  Then you have to learn how to do several different kinds of knots for different things.  Most people use a bench that is set up so that you straddle it and have a metal bar with a sort of claw-hammer-looking piece on the end that you use to anchor the line to as you tie the mesh onto it with twine.  It is really both an art and a science!  I wore several blisters on my fingers hanging my net, despite the electrical tape I used to cover them with, but I eventually ended up with a serviceable (I hope!) sockeye salmon net of my very own.  I still need to get some line to set up a pulley system and a couple of anchors, but I have my brand new shiny buoy and I am making my permit sign.  I’m pretty excited to be able to actually do this with my own gear!  Stand by for the score in the next installment.

I also took a skin sewing class this winter and made part of one half of a set of beaver skin mittens.  It really hurt my hands to push the glover’s needle through the leather, and so the woman who taught the class has graciously consented to let me pay her to finish the mittens for me. 

They will go well with my beaver skin hat!  Here’s hoping we get a real winter next year; the last two have been pretty mild and VERY dry.  I haven’t been able to cross country ski or skijor with the dogs at all.

I discovered last month that turning 60 hardly hurt at all, and although other people my age look really old to me, I sure don’t feel that old!  I just keep avoiding the mirror and never have to have the shock of realizing that I look just as old, or older, than those other people do.  I had a wonderful trip to Katmai National Park with my friend Diane Chung who is the park superintendent and who also turned 60 last month.  I was privileged to stay the night in her cabin and saw quite a few bears and made a trip out to the scene of the Novarupta eruption known as the Valley of 10,000 Smokes.  We sang happy birthday to ourselves and each other and agreed that 60 is a mighty fine age except for the body starting to fall apart, starting with arthritis in the well-used hands.

Courtship at Brooks Falls

Yes, it was this close!  From one of the viewing platforms

Mamma and adopted cub plus her own

The birthday girls

That's a lot of ash!

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I agreed to become a foster mother to another dog whose family had to move into Anchorage and can’t have her currently at the place they have rented.  She is a female northern breed village dog, all white with blue eyes named Maggie.  At the moment she just slipped away from me again and is off doing a walk about that will probably end up at her former residence about 2 miles away.  At least that’s where she ended up last time she gave me the slip.  Sigh…  Late breaking news—Maggie showed up back here about an hour after she took off, so I guess we’re making progress after all.

I was pleased to be able to go to California in April to attend my nephew Justin Ernest’s wedding in Camarillo.  It had been a very long time since I saw my sister Sharon and her family and we had a great time!

Sisters

One of the great perks of 22 hours or so of daylight every day is how fast my garden is growing!  It’s been interesting seeing what I can grow here and what I can’t.  So far all the greens are doing quite well, as are the potatoes and peas.  Carrots are intermediate, and the peppers are struggling a bit.  But I have a tree-like jalapeno pepper plant indoors in my hydroponic aero garden, so I plan to just grow peppers indoors out of the wind.  The days have been gorgeous, unseasonably hot (into the 90’s!), and mostly sunny, but always cooling off at night. 

It’s hard to describe how life here shifts so far to the evening in the summer; because it stays light for so long people work and play until quite late.  It’s not uncommon to be mowing your lawn or weeding the garden or picking your subsistence net at 11:30 PM.  It makes it that much harder for me to stay in touch by phone or text with the lower 48, since we are already an hour earlier than Pacific Time.  I usually don’t get home from work until at least 8:30 or so my time, which is already past most of my working friend’s bedtimes down there.

My love affair with Alaska just deepens with every day I spend here.  I know my kids would like to have me closer when grandkids start coming along, and of course I would like to be able to spend as much time with them as possible.  And I do miss my friends and family down in America.  My commitment is to be here at minimum until October 2017 and then reevaluate.  I would like to find a way to have the best of both worlds, and may be able to pull that off in time.  Until then, my invitation to all of you is to come on up—I have room to spare to put people up as long as this house I’m renting doesn’t get sold out from under me, and I’d love to show you why I love this place so much.