Caribou Island

The wash table was a cold aluminum trough, a wading pool of blood and saltwater. Carl’s hands aching from the cold, fingers sore. The salmon came to him gutted and beheaded, but he needed to grip thin, clear membranes with his triple-gloved hands and pull them out, then flick onto the floor. Four or five tries for every membrane before he could find it, and sometimes it wasn’t there.

The chu-chunk of the beheading machine a steady rhythm, every few seconds, another fish coming his way, and he was starting to panic. Too many fish, a backup at the wash table. Metallica blasting on speakers above.

Three others were working the same job, all faster, but the fish were piling up, filling the blood bath. The woman across from him, another college student, wasn’t actually grabbing any membranes, so that was stressing him out. She’d give the fish a light caress on each side, to wash off the blood, then give a peek inside the gutted area of the body, where the membranes were hiding, and throw the fish onto a white plastic chute in the middle of the table, sending it on to the inspectors. Each time she threw, she managed to splat the tail against the chute, flicking slime and water onto Carl’s face. She had it perfected. And she’d throw three fish for every one of his.

The inspectors two more women, similar age but not in college, at the end of the trough. They were supposed to give a quick check and sort the fish. Any with gashes or broken spines thrown into a side bin. Any other species of salmon in another bin, because they were packing sockeye only. But they’d pull a membrane or push out a blood spot or pluck a bit of gill if the fish wasn’t clean, and they didn’t seem to care that they had to do this with every one of this other woman’s fish and none of Carl’s. They chatted the whole time, locals, having to shout over the Metallica. They’d worked here for years, and they had a low opinion of the place.

Dude, you can’t get fired from a cannery, one said to the other, especially this cannery. This is as low as it gets.

They chatted about men and money, and they’d had this job so long they didn’t have to pay it any attention. But Carl struggled with every fish. First the membrane, trying to find an edge somewhere down by the asshole, then looking for two blood pockets up near where the head had been removed. He had to push hard with a thumb to get this blood to pop out. Then checking for any leftover pieces of gill and trying to scrape the extra blood from the backbone. Impossible to get all of it, and he had no tool. Just a rough cotton glove over a plastic glove over another cotton glove. Because theoretically, everything had already been removed by a person with a gutting spoon on the conveyor belt. So that was the person Carl resented most.

Carl resented everyone upstream of him, though. They were all skilled, all higher paid, and all had easier jobs. One stood with a shovel and helped move fish from enormous slush tanks. This guy spent a lot of time just standing there watching the fish go by. Then someone lined up the fish so their heads faced the same way. This is the job Carl would have liked. Then a guy made one quick slit from asshole to gullet. One flick of the knife for each fish. Then the beheader. He moved the fish only a few inches, lining up the head for a heavy set of blades. A guillotine, and dangerous. But he wore a lanyard that was attached to the table and kept his hand from scooting too far forward. And he moved the fish hardly at all.

Only men at the head of the stream, until the next station, ripping out the guts. A woman did that. The guts traveled on a small conveyor belt to another woman who sorted the roe, the red sack of eggs, into a small plastic basket. Like a diviner, reading futures from each plop of guts onto her table. Then she’d scrape it clean with a quick swoop before the next plop came.

After that, knives and men again, one quick slit to open the blood along the spine. Then a woman with a spoon to scoop out all the blood and a man with a spray nozzle to wash it down. All of this on a wide conveyor belt, light blue plastic, and the fish exited with a flop into the wash table trough. Every flop spattered the guy standing to the left of Carl, and the guy flinched every time. Worst position in the plant, and though Carl had to pee like a madman, he wouldn’t leave, because he knew the guy would step to the side and Carl would get stuck there.

So the problem was either the woman with the gutting spoon or the man with the spray nozzle. One of them was supposed to be getting the membrane and the last of the blood, but they just sent the fish on as quickly as possible. The salmon kept piling up at the wash table until they were in danger of spilling over the sides and the conveyor was backing up, and there was no water within reach for washing. A mountain of carcasses and no way to wash, and Carl thought he might scream.

Sean, the manager, appeared at the clean aluminum table beyond the inspectors and barked for fish to be sent his way. So the inspectors grabbed fish from the wash table quick and scooted about fifty. Sean glanced inside each one then passed it along to where it was boxed in ice, ready to be shipped. Another sign that Carl’s job was entirely pointless. The boss sending all these fish along in a bypass, after Carl had endured over an hour of rubbish, at five a.m., about quality control in the plant. There was a bucket of hot chlorinated hand wash behind Carl that he could dip his hands into, for instance, and this would help keep the fish cleaner and increase shelf life, but he could never risk walking over to this bucket to warm his hands, because then the guy next to him would step to the side and Carl would be splatted by every arriving salmon. A roving inspector checked temperatures and made sure everyone was doing their jobs, but he stood by the woman across from Carl and seemed to think that her nothing peek into the carcass was sufficient.