Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [39]
The more I learned about this particular way of life, the more rooted I felt. I learned the unspoken rules about harvesting wild foods. You would tell people about the spot where you’d had good fishing luck but not about the wild blueberry patch you’d found on a hike. Nobody hoarded fish; it was what you shared. And you had to be creative about how you put up your fish. While Kenai River red salmon fillets carefully packed and frozen were tastier than what was sold at upscale markets in East Coast cities for nearly twenty dollars a pound, people didn’t think twice about stuffing salmon steaks—bones and skin and all—into glass jars and blasting them with higher-than-boiling-point heat for over an hour in a pressure canner. Once they had cooled, you could stack them in your pantry where they would keep for years. What you didn’t can or freeze could be pickled, smoked, and salted. John and I had learned some things through our mistakes, such as how salmon fillets vacuum-packed and flash-frozen by the plant on the Spit always lasted longer in the freezer than if we packed and froze it ourselves.
NEARLY TWO HOURS later, the fishing had slowed. It was almost slack low tide, and the original surge of freshwater that had triggered the salmon to run upstream was long past. We had about three dozen fish. Although by law we could take many more—twenty-five for each head of a household and ten for every other family member—we had enough. John and Cynthia came back from the water’s edge, nets balanced on their shoulders. Cynthia dropped hers to the sand. Her wide, pale face was lit with excitement and exhaustion. “Beautiful fish!” she cheered. John beamed quietly. This, I knew, was what he’d dreamed of in moving here. As with me, the day had made him feel useful and strong, self-sufficient and resourceful. He felt this as deeply as he felt birds: the deep soul-satisfaction of a day well lived. John, Cynthia, the kids and I—something had come alive inside us in the midst of it all. For us, work was play. Survival and leisure commingled.
All around us, people were cleaning and packing up fish. At the water’s edge we rinsed each salmon—its belly sliced open and its head still on—and rinsed the coolers free of blood, slime, and sand. We packed all the fish back into the coolers. It took two of us to lift each one into the back of the car. As we loaded up the rest of the gear, I could feel the exhaustion settling into my body. My arms were so tired, I couldn’t make a fist. On the drive home, only John, who was at the wheel, didn’t doze off.
I woke up the next morning with the weight of exhaustion still in my muscles. Cynthia brought over the kids and a sharp, Japanese knife around noon and we laid the fish out on the grass next to the picnic table: thirty-three red salmon, cleaned, but with the heads on. For hours we stood at the table filleting the fish. We pressed our knives into the fish behind the head, down to the backbone, and then across the side of the fish to the tail, slicing the flesh free from the spine. Cynthia kept some heads to make soup stock, and we stacked the backbones which still held small bits of flesh against the ribs off to one side. Scales glittered like sequins across the table’s grayed wood top, and from time to time we rinsed everything clean with a garden hose until the silver flecks dripped into the grass.
By late afternoon, when we had finished the last fish, we were exhausted and hungry. Soon we would drive the coolers of fillets out to the Spit where we’d wait on line behind tourists just off charter halibut trips to have our fish packed and flash-frozen. They’d look in awe at the piles of deep red fillets we’d hand over to the packing plant for pickup in a day or so. For less than a dollar per pound, this frozen fish would last us well into March. But before we took off, we could think of nothing but taking a break and stemming our hunger. We put a few backbones on a cookie sheet and broiled them briefly in the oven.