My Life as a Dungeness Crabber

Tenakee From the Ferry Dock

 

During my summer working as a crabber, I stayed with my sister in Tenakee Springs, Alaska.  Tenakee is a tiny village tucked in Tenakee Inlet on Chichagof Island, southwest of Juneau.  In the winter there are only about 60 permanent residents, but in the summer the population can swell to over a 100 with tourists and residents with summer homes and cabins in the area.  In my experience, it seemed like the population doubled every time they had a community BBQ.  This suspicion was confirmed when I was told that the traditional Crab Boil for the 4^th of July was cancelled years ago due to the influx of ‘guests’ from Juneau, and even yacht clubs from Washington state.  Despite the lack of crab, the 4^th of July celebrations still bring a lot of weekenders, fishermen and even an occasional cruise ship. 

4th of July Underwear Race

 

Since the town is on an island and is surrounded by national forest, the only access is via boat or seaplane.  There is a single dirt road that runs through the town with beachside stilted houses on one side and hillside homes on the other.  The only vehicles in town are the fuel and fire trucks.  The rest of the residents rely on boats, bikes, 4-wheelers, and carts for transportation.  I usually walked, since everything is within walking distance, and it afforded me the opportunity to pick and eat the many different berries that grow wild along the side of the road: tiny strawberries, delicious thimbleberries, huckleberries, blueberries, plump and colorful salmon berries and even cherries from trees that have beautiful blossoms in the spring. 

The town is named after the local hot springs, which serve as the public bath.  The public bath adds to the communal vibe, but it is also a bit of a necessity, since some of the homes do not have running water, or their water lines run from streams or springs and can freeze in the winter.  The bathhouse is covered in murals, which are one of the first things that greets visitors as they enter town from the ferry terminal.  Inside, the bath itself is little more than a crack in the earth surrounded by a 5x10 foot cement square bathing basin to pool the 108-degree spring waters.  The basin and changing room have recently been renovated, but the structure itself dates back to the 1930’s, when it was built as one of the many Conservation Corps projects in the region. One of the interesting things with having the bath house in the middle of the small town is that you occasionally see people wandering down the street in pajamas or a bathrobe.  And, coatracks double as shower shelves inside the front door of some homes, where shower caps and shampoo share shelves with knit caps, and hangers are hung with rain coats and bath towels.

It's difficult to describe Tenakee in just a few words, and I've heard it described several ways: a base camp for hippies, a Geriatric camp, and even a shire.  Having lived on many military base camps overseas, the base camp connotation makes sense to me.  The town has a generator humming on the hill to provide power, and has to ship in all of its supplies from Juneau or even farther afield, which gives it a base camp kind of feel.  And, although there is a bit of a soldier/survivalist vibe, since you must be pretty self-reliant in such a remote village, it also has a strong hippy vibe, with local artists and a communal atmosphere that comes with living in a small town.  Then there are the rising property prices, which are pricing out new buyers, so the town is filling with retirees and ‘old-timers,’ making the Geriatric camp a fitting description as well.  The communal vibe also plays into the shire reference, along with the gardens, greenery, wild fruits and flowers that grow abundantly in the rain-forest climate. 

However, I would also call it an art community with a fishing problem.  This occurred to me while I was sitting in the local bakery, enjoying both their Artisanal Pizza and all the local artists’ work that decorate the walls and shelves.  There’s the famous work of Rie Munoz, who lived and painted here for several years of her life.  Ken Wheeler has a collection of woodwork, Cynthia Meyer has an assortment of photography books and calendars available, and several other artists have paintings and jewelry available as well.  Also, as I mentioned, the local bath house is covered with murals and has stained-glass for the windows in the changing room, which were all done by a local artist.  



Rie Munoz's painting of the Ferry arriving in Tenakee Springs.  Snyder's Mercantile is the general store on the left, and the bath house is the small white building to the right of the ferry dock, next to the Blue Moon Café.

Cynthia Meyer's photo of me kayaking in front of town. 

 

In addition to artwork and artisanal food, the small town even has a music scene.  It's hard to imagine that a town with only sixty people would have a band, but it actually has two or three depending on who you ask.  I saw the rock band perform at the local school graduation party (graduating class of one), and I saw the folk band perform at the 4th of July festivities as well as a local birthday party. 

  Folk Band jamming in the 4th of July Parade

 

As fun as it was to hang out around town, the fishing is what I came to town to experience, and as one local fisherman said, “The problem with fishing is, if you want to make a small fortune, you need to start with a big one.”  I wasn’t out to make a fortune, and you can start as a deck hand without needing a big fortune either.  Working on an Alaskan fishing boat has been on my ‘adventure jobs’ list for several years, but I had never really learned much about the industry.  I just figured you either fished or crabbed, but it turns out there are quite a variety of fishing methods and boats, from net fishers like gill netters and seiners, to hook fishing like trolling and long line, and then there is shrimping and crabbing. 

Gill netters use different sizes of nets to catch fish.  When the fish try to swim through the net, they can only fit their head through, and then catch their gills if they try to back out.  Seiners also use a net, but they run a large net around schools of fish using a second boat to pull the net in a large loop around the fish.  Trollers drag multiple lines of hooks with bait or lures to catch fish, much like sport-troll fishing.  Long liners leave lines of hooks and bait on the ocean floor to catch bottom-feeding fish like halibut and flounder.  And then there are shrimpers like Forrest Gump, the king crab fishers of ‘Deadliest Catch’ fame, and the lesser known Dungeness crabbers.  I was one of the latter. 

Rosanna Marie at the Tenakee Springs Harbor

 

I crabbed aboard the Rosanna Marie, named after the original owner’s daughter.  It’s bad luck to change the name of a boat, so it was wise that he didn’t name it after his wife, since he remarried four times.  He had her built after his first boat sank in a storm.  He washed up on a beach, salvaged the ship's compass from the wreckage, and had the compass built into the table of the Rosanna Marie in 1979. 

Compass in the table, next to my laptop as I wrote this blog.

Sinking his first ship didn't make him more cautious at sea.  When he sold Rosanna Marie to my captain, he told him in passing that he had replaced all the windows of the wheel house with Plexiglas after the glass ones had all been blown out by a wave in another storm.  He also said the boat could be used for king crab, and could carry 14 pots and 1200 crabs, but the load would push the deck under water!  Fortunately for me, my captain isn’t as cavalier on the ocean, and Dungeness crabbing is a bit tamer than the open-ocean fishing the first owner had done. 

I crabbed in Tenakee Inlet, off the inner-coastal waterway, which is protected from the winds and waves of the open ocean.  It's also much more scenic than the open ocean.  Rather than a vast and barren horizon, I was surrounded by grand glacial valleys and bays.  The last remnants of winter snow dusted the mountaintops above the lush greens of summer.  The inlet stretches 35 miles to the west off the Chatham Strait, and is up to three miles wide with multiple bays and valleys extending off of the southern shore. 

The head of Tenakee Inlet where we would anchor at night

 

Throwing crab pots for a living.

The crabbing days were long, and physically tiring, but I never grew tired of the scenery.  My captain often spoke about the fall season, and how the daylight was shorter and the weather and water was colder, but the inlet on a blue-sky day, with glass calm waters and fresh snow on the mountains, just couldn't be beat.  Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to experience the fall season.  Instead, I packed my bags and headed for Florida where I'm now enjoying the warm weather and waters of Fort Lauderdale as I search for my first job in the yachting industry.  As far as I can tell, Fort Lauderdale is a party town with a yachting problem, and I hope to have a yachting problem of my own soon.

 

 



You're reading this, and that is amazing

While I was in Taiwan, I visited the Palace Museum.  It is a very impressive museum for several reasons.  First, like many museums, the ownership of its collection is contentious.  After WWII, China continued its civil war, and during that time the Kuomintang government - led by Chiang Kai-shek – took $200,000,000 in gold and currency, plus much of the treasures of the Forbidden City palace to Taiwan.  The treasures of the Palace are displayed at the museum, hence the name, Palace Museum.  Second, the size of the collection is astounding.  It is said to be the world’s largest collection of Asian artwork with 696,000 objects.  With so many pieces, only a mere 1% is on display at any given time, so you can imagine that what you get to see is the best of the best.  And third, of those 696,000 pieces 609,553 are rare books and documents.

With so many documents, one might think it is more of a library with an art collection, but even the books are works of art, and during my visit the museum had a special exhibit focusing on book binding.  The display included some works written on bamboo strips bound together, but most were paper, but beyond being bound, they had intricately designed covers and storage boxes made of wood. 

This exhibit reminded me of the collections I saw at the Library of Congress where they have two bibles on display side by side.  One is hand-written and the other was printed using a printing press.  The hand-written bible begins with impressive artwork and calligraphy, but these details disappear towards the end.  Why?  Because the other bible was printed at the same time the written bible was completed, and the new technology was making the old art of hand-written books too expensive and time consuming to continue. 

As I continued to look at the rest of the museums works, the theme of writing continued throughout the collection, from the calligraphy - as its own art form or on pottery, ironworks and paintings - to a peace treaty inscribed on a bronze tray.  And in another section of the museum, our guide pointed out some of the pictographic characters of Chinese writing. 

This all led me to think even more about writing in general and its progression through history.  There are the forms of writing: from earliest petroglyphs, to pictographic writing, to logographic writing systems and the alphabet I’m using today.  As well as the mediums: from stone surfaces, to leather, wood, paper, and now the paperless writing I’m doing today.  It is quite amazing that I can put my thoughts into words, then I can write those words in a form others can read, and today those words can be published and read almost instantly around the world on a e-medium.  However, as instantly and widely as they are electronically published, the lack of a ‘hard-copy’ makes them much less timeless than the ancient and indecipherable scratchings of cavemen that still mystify us today.

 

The development of writing forms is also very interesting.  The earliest forms of writing initially served the purpose of logging inventories and numbering, which became important as people transitioned from nomads to settlements of collective farming efforts.  Then as these settlements grew into larger civilizations, the record keeping grew more complex and the writing systems did as well.  However, because the writing systems were complex, only the elite learned to read and write. 

Chinese is probably one of the most interesting written languages because it is one of the earliest written languages, has pictographic origins, which led to thousands of characters, and it remains in use today.  More recently, Korea’s Hangul was developed in 1443 to simplify the complex characters of Chinese into 24 simple phonetic forms.  This made the written language easy to learn, making reading and writing more accessible to the entire society, rather than being reserved for scholars and the elite.

To use a biblical reference, when you read the story of the Ten Commandments, you may not even think twice about the fact that the commandments were written down.  However, they were written in 1300BC, around the same time as the Hebrew script was being developed. So the Ten Commandments would have been one of the first written documents of its kind, and no sooner had they been written then they were destroyed.  Also, the fact that Moses’ was raised by the elite of Egypt meant that he was likely one of the only people that could even read them.  The rest of the Jews - having just escaped slavery - would not have been able to read.

Today, literacy rates are used as a measure of a nation’s development.  In Taiwan, the literacy rate is 98.29 percent, which is pretty amazing when you consider they are reading one of the most complex languages in the world.  Even South Korea falls slightly behind them at 97.9, and English speaking Australia is only at 96 percent.  (However, if we include N. Korea’s reported literacy of 100 percent, then Korea as a whole would beat Taiwan.  But, then we would have to believe that N. Korea is telling the truth.)

In his book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, Thomas Cahill discusses the Greeks use of written language and their phonetic forms, from which we derived the word alphabet.  Cahill claims that “the ancient Greek alphabet announces a civilization of leisure.”  No longer was language just about counting wealth and maintaining control.  Instead it was a tool for entertaining.  However, this also changed the art of the entertainer and entertainment.  The storyteller no longer had to memorize all the tales, nor did you need a storyteller to recount them.  Instead, you could sit at home and read the Iliad or Odyssey alone.  The storyteller lost his job, and the society lost the communal aspects of an oral tradition.

And now, you are reading a blog on the internet.  You probably gave the act of reading very little thought, but literacy is pretty amazing.  And the fact that this blog is a paperless medium that could be read by anyone with an internet connection - except China and other countries that restrict the use of the internet – is also amazing.  And, the fact that there are 7 billion people on earth, but only about 40 will read this blog… well what is the opposite of amazing?  We'll just say it makes you part of an elite group of readers.  Anyway, most of these thoughts could easily unravel into doctoral thesis, but I’m not writing a thesis, and I’m guessing you didn’t come here to read one. 

The Korean Wedding Industry

Recently ,I attended my first Korean wedding, and it was quite the experience.  There are three basic styles of wedding in Korea.  First, there is a traditional Korean wedding.  However, they are no longer very common.  My co-teacher told me that his English teacher married a Korean, and they had a traditional wedding.  It was the first traditional Korean wedding many of the Korean guests had ever attended, and it was for a foreign groom!  Then there is a “western”/Christian-style wedding conducted in a church, which is also not very common.  And finally there is the most common style of wedding, which reflects Korea’s industrial rise of the past 50 years. 

Much of Korea’s modern traditions and culture can be traced back to the Korean War and its aftermath.  Since the nation was decimated by the war, as well as World War II, which also brought the end of Japanese colonial rule, the nation was practically starting from scratch.  After the wars, there were several false starts with corrupt officials and one fleeing president, but in 1961 General Park Chung-hee took power in a military coup and went on to lead the nation’s industrial revolution.  He was assassinated in 1979, and remains a controversial figure, but almost everyone gives him credit for the economic ‘Miracle on the Han,’ which transformed the nation into the industrial powerhouse that it is today.

So what does that have to do with weddings?  Well, the Koreans have imported many industries, from steel production to ship building.  In each industry, they mastered the systems and techniques from other nations and further refined them to become world leaders in each field.  And when it comes to weddings, they’ve done it again.  They took the western wedding, stripped away everything inefficient, added a staff to direct the production, and created a wedding industry.  And what industry could function without a factory?  Certainly not weddings, at least not in Korea, so they have built one-stop-shop wedding factories to further streamline the process. 

Like a typical factory worker, I carpooled to the wedding with some of my fellow teachers.  We clocked in at the basement-level car park before joining the large lines of fellow wedding attendees at a bank of elevators.  Heading for the sixth-floor wedding hall, we passed the first few floors dedicated to pre-wedding planning and shopping services: Sales and Counseling, Dress Shop, Make Up, Flowers, and even the Travel Agency to plan the honeymoon. 

- This wedding hall was on the second floor of the bus terminal in Suwon.  I guess it is the definition of efficiency.  Bus everyone in, second floor for your I do's, third floor for the buffet, and back to the first floor to bus home or on to the honeymoon.

 

We exited the elevators into a sea of attendees for two simultaneous weddings, because the wedding hall level is split into two halls to facilitate maximum output with double-barrel shotgun weddings.  In front of each hall, receiving tables were manned by the parents of the bride and groom.  Guests filed through and gave the customary envelope of cash rather than gifts. 

An interesting note, gifts are actually considered less personal than a gift of cash by some Koreans.  Also, the amount of gift money is pretty formalized.  Depending on your relationship to the couple, you are expected to give between $30 and $100, using crisp new bills in a simple white envelope.  This system makes sense when you consider the cost of the average wedding is $50,000.  However, I initially thought the cash was for the bride and groom, but it turns out it's actually for the parents - a little thank you for raising these two crazy kids.

Also, due to this formal monetary gift culture, and the expectation that you attend the weddings of your co-workers' children, there is also an expectation that children should marry before their parents retire, so that the family/parents get a ‘return on previous investments’ for all the other weddings they attended for co-workers.  This was true in my co-teacher's case. Her father decided to retire early, so her wedding date had to be moved up as well.

This may have been awkward if the groom had not already proposed.  But in Korea, couples typically don’t have a formal proposal before wedding planning begins.  Instead, they simply move directly into wedding planning.  I guess the rejection is not as bad if she is only saying no to planning a wedding, rather than the question, ‘Will you marry me?’ 

Back at the factory, attendees exchanged their gift envelope for a buffet reception coupon.  Again, to maximize efficiency, the reception was held on the next floor, rather than some banquet hall across town.  Plus, some guests didn’t even waste time with the ceremony, but headed directly for the buffet. 

I wanted to experience the entire assembly-line tour, so I was escorted to the photography studio where the bride was taking pre-ceremony portraits.  I peaked in to say hello and was quickly directed in, posed next to her, flash, flash, and escorted on to the wedding hall. 

Pre-ceremony photo session.

 

The hall looked like a typical a banquet room divided by a raised, catwalk-style aisle with round tables on each side for the bride and grooms parties.  A montage of wedding photos played on two wall screens as people took their seats.  The master of ceremonies announced the wedding would begin in five minutes.  The ceremony began with the arrival of the couple’s parents.  They were posed for pictures as they conducted traditional candle lighting ceremonies and were quickly escorted to their seats by a group of wedding choreographers. 

Next, the bride arrived in typical fashion, before the groom rapidly marched down the aisle to her side.  Rather than a priest, the ceremony is conducted by a respected elder, selected by the groom.  It is often a superior from work, or in this case, one of the groom’s university professors.  As he began his speech, the team of photographers and choreographers swarmed around the bride and groom, fluffing the wedding gown, straightening jackets and snapping away paparazzi style.

Suddenly, the couple was turned, a cake wheeled out, candle lit and blown out, sword presented, cake cut, and wheeled away again.  The couple then turned to the audience and was surrounded by the bride’s friends in matching outfits for a choreographed dance performance.  Next, the microphone was handed to the groom to sing a love ballad, followed by ceremonial bows to each set of parents, and just like that, they were married and marching down the aisle.  Newlyweds in 30 minutes or less.  The choreographers fired confetti poppers over their heads, and began sweeping it up before the last streamers had even hit the ground. 

A few bouquets were moved and they changed gears to wedding group photos.  Family shots, flash; bridal party, flash; grooms party, flash; bouquet tossed, flash; and we were out the door.  As we headed for the reception, we passed the first wave of diners lumbering down the stairs with full bellies and toothpicks in hand.  The buffet was packed with people from both of the weddings, and I quickly realized why some people opted to skip the actual ceremony.  It was crowded, but the food was excellent.

Meanwhile, the bride and groom took a detour to change into traditional Hanbok attire, and possibly had a small traditional ceremony with their parents, before arriving at the buffet to say hello and thank you to everyone who attended, or at least anyone who had not already done a dine and dash.

And that was it, my first Korean wedding was a wrap.  We hopped back in the car, clocked out of the parking garage and started our commute, the longest part the day. 

Beautiful Soup?

So I am wrapping up my first few weeks here in South Korea, the land of the morning calm, or the Empire of Han.  The name of Korea in Korean is apparently up for debate.  In North Korea it is Choson, which is land of the morning calm, and in the south it is Hanguk (Han-gook), the country or empire of Han.  This brings us to where I’m from, I’m Miguk (Mee-gook) or American, or a literal translation Beautiful Country.  However, in Korean, country is more commonly ‘nara’, and ‘guk’ is soup; which means Miguk (America) could be translated as Beautiful Soup, which I guess is somewhat fitting, since we call ourselves a mixing pot.  So, in the kitchen that is America, we throw in a little of ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’ simmer them in amber waves of grain, beneath purple mountain majesty and spacious skies, and end up with a beautiful soup of culture that is all American. 

Back in Korea, they do love their soup and eat it every meal of the day, from their morning calm to dinner, the staples of every meal are soup, rice and kimchi - a fermented and spicy cabbage.  In addition to those staples, I must also mention Soju, the national liquor.  You might be thinking “What is Soju?” And I’m glad you asked, because that just makes the next statistic even more impressive.  Soju is the highest-selling alcohol in the world.  The Jinro brand sold 61 million cases to beat out the world’s number two liquor, Smirnoff Vodka, which only sold 24 million cases.  AND, coming in at number three was another soju brand at 23 million cases!  So combined, they beat out Smirnoff by over three times the sales.  That is a lot of drinking done mostly by 50 million South Koreans.  Tonight, I’m trying to share in the glory by drinking my ‘white russian’ with soju instead of vodka.  Now the question is, would that make it a white Korean, or am I the white Korean?  Or, should I put down the soju, because it is some powerful stuff, and this line of thought is getting a little too deep.

In addition to Soju, Koreans are also starting to drink coffee.  However, in their fast-paced life they don’t seem to have time for the slow drip, and prefer the speed of instant coffee.  They even sell it with cream and sugar all in one handy single-serve satchel.  I, however, prefer the real bean experience and spent several days shopping for a coffee maker, and then a few more days looking for real ground coffee instead of crystals. 

I finally popped into the coffee shop just up the street from my apartment where the smell of the roasting coffee was wafting into the street.  Inside, I found two coffee chemists behind the counter meticulously monitoring the controls and temperature gauges on the computerized roaster, and taking occasional bean samples to measure the roasting progress.  The only thing they were missing were lab coats, which they had substituted with coffee house sweaters. 

On the counter were test tubes with slow, cold ‘Dutch coffee’ drips running for the coffee drinkers that don’t drink it for the caffeine.  Apparently it is the heat that releases the caffeine in coffee, so brewing the Dutch coffee with cold water leaves it with very low caffeine content.  Yeah, I don’t see the point to caffeine-free coffee either, but they bottle the Dutch coffee in wine bottles, for the sophisticated drinker, and it’s a bit of a thing here. 

Anyway, lining the walls of the coffee shop were large plastic bins and burlap bags filled with fresh coffee beans from around the world, awaiting roasting by the coffee technicians at work behind the counter.  In short, this place takes coffee seriously. 

Just inside the door, they have a book case of small-batch coffees with names like Gentleman, Geisha, Tchembe, Panama Diamond Mountain, along with a few I actually recognized.  I asked one of the chemists what he’d recommend for a French Press, and he went into a ten-minute monologue arguing the pros and cons of a few choices and finally settled on the Tchembe.  Bear in mind that in most shops where I had looked for a coffee maker, the word “French Press” and my best charades impression got me nothing more than quizzical looks; but here, it got me a coffee thesis.  Unfortunately, it was in Korean.  I was in luck however, because the label listed flavor notes in English: Dried Banana, Strawberry, Spicy, Heavy. 

Banana?  Strawberry?! What have I gotten myself into?  I thanked him for the advice and continued to browse the shelf reading the flavor notes for something a little less daring, and suggesting a darker roast.  As I narrowed my search, the only other patron sitting at the counter chimed in to ask if I had understood anything from the recommendation.  And he asked me in English, so I now had a translator on the coffee safari.  After some discussion, I decided to try the ‘Gentlemen,’ which said it had notes of caramel.  And, after a little more discussion to explain that I did realize it was not a tasting room, and I would have to pay for the drink, I sat down to watch the coffee-making performance. 

The barista began by pouring hot water back and forth from one kettle to another, extending his arms to extend the pour, either for show, or to aerate, or maybe even cool the water to the right temperature.  Whichever the case, he was happy with the results and next, he poured some in the coffee pot to warm it, and then poured it out.  Then, he carefully dampened the filter, before adding the grinds and beginning the slow-pour brewing.  After he finished brewing, he sampled two small shots to check the quality before pouring a cup for me and my translator at the bar.  I didn’t dare ask for cream or sugar.

My first choice was nice, but had a bit of an acidic finish, so I decided to try the Tchembe that he had recommended.  After another preparation performance, I found it had a cleaner finish and, possibly due to the power of suggestion, I could actually taste a hint of strawberry.  After an hour of sipping and chatting with my new translating friend, I thanked the coffee chemist crew and headed home with a bag of fresh ground Tchembe goodness.