by Meris Lee
“How you’ve grown! You’re a woman now,” said Eloise.
The other woman took her head out of the bubble and raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget about me?”
Elias turned to the woman. “Queenie?”
“I know, I’m prettier now than the last time you saw me.” Queenie pouted.
Elias hugged Queenie, too. “Are you a dental hygienist now? I remember it was your dream.”
“I never did save up enough money to go to school for that,” said Queenie.
Another person stuck in the ‘hood, thought Elias.
“Speaking of school,” said Helen, “I’ve got a catalog from the community college for you, Elias.”
College? Elias hadn’t thought about going to college. Right now, she was suddenly struck with a desire to skip town for a while. Not to jump her parole, just to have a little time away from home, away from this neighborhood where no one seemed to be able to escape, to be somewhere completely foreign, far, far away, like Alaska, a place she could explore independently, where her namesake mountain stood awaiting her.
“How did the job interviews go?” asked Helen.
Elias shrugged. “I’m not sure there are jobs for me here. Too many qualified and experienced folks, by the truckloads, apparently.”
“Don’t give up,” said Helen. “That’s a great reason to go to school. Learn a new trade and broaden your chances.”
“I was thinking,” said Elias. “I’d like to take a trip.”
“A trip?” exclaimed Helen.
“I’ve never been anywhere but here and prison. I feel trapped. I need to get out and see the world.”
“And when did you decide on that?”
“Just now.”
“Why are you always so impulsive? Can’t you think things through before you act? You’re not a kid anymore.” Helen raised her voice and yanked at Eloise’s hair so forcefully she screamed.
“Where do you want to go?” asked Queenie.
Elias hesitated for a moment before answering, “Alaska.”
“Alaska? Child, you are on parole.” Helen was red in the face. She let go of Eloise’s hair and stormed toward Elias. “You want to go back to prison?”
“Of course not. Officer Paige can help me get permission to leave for a week, or two…”
“Stay put,” said Helen. “You’ll get through parole, and then you can go anywhere you want.”
“But why Alaska? Why not Atlanta?” asked Eloise.
“Or L.A.?” Queenie chimed in. “I’d love to take my kids to Disneyland if I had the money.”
“Will you two stop?” Helen yelled at them.
Elias peered at Helen, her face twisted in anger, fuming.
“Trust me on this,” Elias pleaded. “I have to get out of here, sooner rather than later. I’m afraid I’ll never go anywhere if I don’t go now.”
“You know, Elias.” Helen breathed out slowly, her eyes wet, defeated. “I could’ve left, too.”
Elias hated to see Helen like that, which was how Helen looked the day the jury sentenced her. She couldn’t help it. She just kept disappointing Helen. True, Helen had stuck with Elias through thick and thin, and Elias was grateful. But they said one should follow one’s heart, and her heart was telling her to go, although it didn’t make any sense to anyone, not even to herself if she were to give it another thought.
Chapter Four
Despite Helen’s protest, Elias left home anyway. She had contacted Officer Paige, who for some reason never found the time to come by or ask Helen to bring Elias in for a replacement monitor. So, she decided just to sneak out the back door before dawn one day. She had checked out an atlas from the library and mapped out the general route. Alaska was far, but she thought she could make it there and back in time without having to bother Officer Paige, who, she assumed, was busy with the other more problematic parolees.
Elias left wearing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, with a small satchel that carried one change of clothes and simple toiletries, a bottle of water and a few granola bars, and a handful of one-dollar bills she found in a plastic jar underneath her bed. She first hiked northwest along US 287. It took some courage to stick her thumb out and wave down a total stranger, but she did it. The first ride was with a young man named Brandon, on his way to Wichita Falls to visit his family.
“I’ll be a sophomore in UT in the fall,” said Brandon after Elias settled in the passenger seat. “I haven’t declared a major, yet. How about you? You like TWU?”
“TWU?”
“You go there, right? It says TWU on your shirt.”
Elias looked down on her shirt, which she had randomly picked out of the pile of clothes Helen bought from a Goodwill store. “Well…What are you interested in?”
“Everything,” said Brandon. “So many possibilities. I feel like I can do anything I want, and I don’t want to do just one thing, you know?”
Not really, Elias wanted to say. She didn’t have so many possibilities or feel like she could do anything she wanted. She was only good at one thing, cooking, but she didn’t think Brandon would consider it a glamorous career.
“Where are you headed?” asked Brandon.
“Alaska,” said Elias. “I’m going to get on a boat in Seattle and go to Valdez.”
“What’s in Valdez?”
“From there, I’ll hitchhike to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and see my namesake mountain, Mt. St. Elias.”
“Wow!” said Brandon. “Some of my friends are backpacking through Europe this summer, but I don’t have the money to go. I might do what you’re doing instead. I don’t know my country very well. I’ll bet the landscapes and cultures are not less interesting than those in Europe, right?”
Elias had no answer. She didn’t know backpacking through Europe was a thing. But she was glad Brandon thought her journey a great idea.
When it took her a whole day just to catch rides and get out of Texas, she realized she underestimated the time it would take to get to Alaska. Google Maps said it would take only a day and seven hours to drive from Fort Worth to Seattle, did it not? Elias tried to bring up the memory of that particular screenshot in her mind. While she held up a sign asking for a ride, food, and money outside a gas station in Albuquerque, she thought long and hard about whether to turn back. Helen, though most definitely distressed, probably had not told Officer Paige she disappeared. She could go home now, and there would be no trouble.
But as she went from the grassy High Plains of the Texas Panhandle into the semi-arid Tablelands of New Mexico, she was impressed with the vastness of the world, and she was desperate to see more. And the people she’d met were fascinating. There was the truck driver whose son died while saving his fellow soldiers in Iraq. Elias wept with the heartbroken father who was still trying to make peace with God. Then there was the physician who took a year off to travel with his wife and two children in an RV. He gave his version of the State of the Union address. Elias appreciated it because no one ever discussed these things with her and she felt so grown up, even though she didn’t have much to say regarding healthcare regulations or the United States’ stand on the conflicts in the Middle East.
No, she didn’t want to go home. She wanted to go on.
And so, on she went, traversing through the ponderosa and blue spruce forests of the Rocky Mountains with gem-like lakes and cascading waterfalls, and then the rugged canyons of the Colorado Plateau topped with sandstone arches. Somewhere along the White Pine Scenic Byway of Coeur d’Alene, she was picked up by a couple of retired school teachers, the Konos, who were driving to Seattle. They were flying to Tokyo, where they were born.
“It was very difficult for me to learn English when I first moved to Idaho with my parents,” said Mr. Kono. “But I had a great teacher. She was very patient. She made me want to be a teacher. Teachers make doctors, lawyers, politicians, businessmen, you know, the leaders.”
Elias pondered for a second whether teachers made criminals and prisoners, too
, but she kept that thought to herself.
For the next few hours, until they reached Seattle, the Konos told Elias about their excursions around the world, the people they met and the food they tasted, the architectural treasures and the natural wonders. Elias never met anyone who traveled so much. She was jealous. Why was she not bestowed with such privilege to roam the planet as these two? Why was she born into circumstances so inferior, so asphyxiating there never seemed to be a way out?
Chapter Five
A commercial fishing vessel at sea, with its machines churning and the hull slicing through rough waves in the howling wind, was a clamorous place, Elias soon realized. At the Fishermen’s Terminal, Port of Seattle, she had managed to persuade the captain of the F/V Sardinia to give her a ride to Valdez in exchange for three weeks of work onboard the 163-foot freezer-longliner dedicated to the harvest of sablefish in the Gulf of Alaska. Elias produced no identification. But this was not as problematic because this particular boat missed its original departing date due to a last-minute repair, and most experienced workers had already left with other factory ships, leaving the F/V Sardinia no choice but to take anyone still looking for work regardless of qualifications and leave Seattle right away so it wouldn’t miss the entire sablefish season. The captain, Elias was told, would have to assemble new hires in Valdez anyway, as it was without a doubt Elias wouldn’t be the only one leaving the ship there. Such was the nature of the fishing industry, always in flux, never a constant.
The rigid lifestyle onboard the factory ship reminded Elias of prison. Every morning at four o’clock, she climbed down from the top berth in her narrow cabin, put on her orange PVC bib overalls and brown rubber boots, and followed her roommates out to start fourteen hours of labor. Elias had signed on to help the ship cook, and so she was largely confined to the galley. Cooking on a seaborne vessel was much more difficult than she imagined. One time, the boat was tilted to such an angle that the meatloaf pushed out of the oven and crashed into pieces on the tiled floor. Elias, horrified, held on to the edge of the sink in order not to fall. The ship cook, however, had already been thrown off his feet and was on the floor, laughing and waving a spatula coated with tomato sauce. “Oh, look. Jailbreak for the brave meatloaf. So sad it didn’t survive.”
When the sea was calm again, Elias cleaned up the mess, and the brown flakes stuck to the terracotta slabs reminded her of the moldy showers in prison. Maybe she would end up like the meatloaf, destroyed and unsalvageable. But she savored her freedom right now, despite having to contend with the treacherous environment of the sea with its perpetual piscine odor and unpredictable weather.
When she was not cooking, she was assigned to the gutting station where she, for hours on end, inspected the inside of each fish already cleaned out by a machine. On her first break, she would come above deck and watch as miles of hooks on a longline, automatically baited with pieces of squid, shot rapidly into the open ocean. Then, on her next break, she would observe men gaffing large black fish one after another out of the sea, at a rate of sixty fish per minute. Elias was told there were close to eight thousand hooks on the longline, set and retrieved twice a day.
One day, two deckhands named Jack and Mike pulled a twelve-foot-long fish out of the water. “Whoa! We got a Pacific sleeper shark,” Jack shouted.
Elias backed away as she eyed the large creature with fear. “Is it alive?”
“Nah.” Jack freed the shark from the hook and tossed it back in the water. “Most bycatch is dead by the time we see it.”
“That’s awful,” said Elias.
“I used to work on a trawler,” said Mike. “We caught all kinds of stuff: dolphins, turtles, corals from the seabed. That was a lot worse. With longliners, we’re concerned with catching the birds, and so far, we’ve only caught two or three birds. Right, Jack?”
“Yes,” replied Jack, never slowing down in his repetitive motion of bending over the notch on the starboard side of the vessel and hauling each sablefish out of the water onto the conveyor belt where the machine separated the fish from the hook. “But one of them was a black-footed albatross…”
“Jack was torn up,” said Mike. “He loves birds, and the environmental nuts say the albatross need protection. What do you do? You have to fish and make a living, right? There is no perfect way to do it.”
Elias could see Jack was upset. She had little knowledge of the fishing industry and its various side effects, and she never contemplated the method with which the fish on her dinner plate was obtained. Before she got a job on the F/V Sardinia, she didn’t even know what a factory ship was, let alone its impact on life in and around the ocean.
Below deck, the conveyor belt brought each fish to be beheaded and gutted by an apparatus so loud Elias wore earmuffs, or she would be deaf by the end of her shift. The fish were then sorted by weight and placed in trays to be frozen. There were men whose sole job was to dump frozen fish blocks out of the trays all day, and others did nothing but wrap up the fish blocks in cardboard boxes and drop them down a chute to storage. Such demanding and monotonous labor! But everyone kept a stoic face, and no one dawdled for a second.
Down at storage were walls and walls of neatly stacked cartons of frozen fish blocks. Elias was told the ship could hold over 1.5 million pounds of fish, worth around 10 million dollars. In storage, which was a walk-in freezer, men constantly moved the cartons, each weighing fifty pounds, from the bottom of the chute to the top of the latest stack, which at times could be over six feet tall. One of the men mentioned he’d developed arthritis since he started working on a fishing boat a few years ago and now he hurt everywhere. Elias asked him why he had not quit.
“Are you crazy?” said the man. “This is the best paying job I ever got. I can deal with the pain. When I get off this ship in Valdez, I’m going to get me some beer, and that’ll cure everything.”
Elias didn’t think beer was good medicine, but she decided not to voice her rebuttal out of respect.
When the F/V Sardinia neared the Prince William Sound, Elias saw dozens of airplanes flying in and out of the Port of Cordova. Hundreds of fishing boats were reeling in gillnets full of large, silver fish.
“The salmon run,” said Jack during a coffee break. “Those ships don’t freeze the salmon as we do with sablefish. They bleed and dress the salmon, put them on the ice, and send them to get boxed up on the dock. The jets take the salmon to Seattle, where fresh king salmon fillets sell for forty bucks a pound in Pike Place.”
“Sounds like good business,” said Elias.
“It’s good business for the big seafood companies. An Alaska Native upstream will disagree.”
“Oh?”
“Many Alaska Natives practice subsistence fishing, meaning their lives depend on the salmon. Most of the king salmon are caught by commercial fleets before they get upriver to be caught by the subsistence fishermen, who, you can argue, have a bigger stake in the salmon run than the deep-pocketed connoisseurs in the lower forty-eight, who have so many more choices when it comes to food.”
“You sound angry.”
“I am,” said Jack, dumping the rest of his coffee in the sea. “I’m an Alaska Native, but instead of fighting for our fishing rights, I’m helping the big seafood companies profit off our lands and waters. Well, money got me, didn’t it?”
Elias watched as Jack resumed the task of gaffing sablefish out of the ocean with an irate fervor. She couldn’t imagine how money could transform a person, for better or worse, but it was obvious money was a very complicated thing for which people were willing to sacrifice precious sea life, personal health, and cultural heritage. She always thought of having money as a defining feature of adulthood. Money was a vehicle by which an adult could get what he needed and wanted. But could money hurt, too?
They reached Valdez on the day of the June solstice. The captain of the F/V Sardinia let Elias keep the coat and the boots. Elias waved goodbye at the crew, smiled, and started toward town. She was excited to be in a
place that was foreign to her. In town, she asked the driver of a dusty Subaru Outback for assistance getting to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and accepted the offer for a ride to Chitina. Chitina was just sixty miles from McCarthy, and McCarthy, according to the Subaru owner, was the gateway to the park.
Chapter Six
The wooden, two-basket fish wheels at the wide confluence of the Chitina River and the Copper River tugged at her heart at a very primal level. Perhaps, Elias thought, it was because she had just spent three weeks on a highly efficient fishing vessel, and so the fish wheels, powered by the current of the rivers, catching one or two salmon every minute or so seemed almost primitive and pitiful. She slumped back in her seat and looked out at the black spruce trees lining the bank of the Chitina River as the Jeep she was riding in started down a rough gravel road.
“I hope we don’t get a flat today running over old spikes,” said Katy, the Jeep driver Elias had flagged down in Chitina. “This used to be a railroad bringing copper down from the mines in Kennecott.”
“Copper mines?”
“That’s how our famous river gets its name.”
“Does the mighty Copper River get its start from Mt. St. Elias?”
“No. It’s from a glacier of Mt. Wrangell, but the Chitina River on our right comes from a glacier of the St. Elias Mountains.”
Elias was glad to hear it. She couldn’t believe she was following along the bank of a river coming down from her namesake mountain. “I want to see Mt. St. Elias.”
“You have to go to Yakutat for that.”
“How do I get there?”
“You need a boat or a plane,” said Katy. “My boyfriend’s a tour guide, and he takes people to Yakutat on his plane.”
Elias frowned. It would cost money to get on a plane for sure. “Are there jobs in McCarthy? Or Kennecott?”