I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.
I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.
I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors.Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.
Now somehowit’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor.1 The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.
Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.
The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.
Names and identifying details of individuals have been changed. ↩
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