Awake in Alaska
I awoke this morning not knowing where I was or how I got here. My mind drifted gently in the ebbing tide of consciousness, slipping softly from the calm waters of evanescent bliss into the rolling seas of now.
"Now! Get your ass out of bed man! We're at the tender. Gotta unload in five minutes." It is four a.m. and all of my questions are being answered faster than my lumbering mind can process them. The forecastle smells of lingering farts and wet socks. I know where I am now. On a fishing boat seven hours north of Ketchikan, Alaska. How I got here I still do not know.
The five minutes have now passed and I am wearing stiff green hip waiters in three feet of 34 degree water surrounded by ten thousand pounds of gourmet rigor mortis. The acrid locker room smell has been replaced by the foamy broth of death and fish cum in which I am now wading. I flail away blindly with a plastic shovel pushing your dinner into a pulsing vacuum tube sucking the stiff corpses by the thousands one rung up the food chain.
A mammoth chum salmons writhes spastically in the blood and froth of a spawning journey gone horribly wrong. I admire his strength. I admire the beauty of his life cycle returning to trickling stream of his birth. I stand in awe of this amazing fish and bludgeon it on the head with the handle of my shovel. There is not opportunity for contemplation while wading in a pool of death. Ask Dick Cheney. He can tell you this.
As I crawled out of the now empty fish hold into the radiance of the raising Alaska sun with its brilliant yet gentle purple hues bathing the horizon I now knew exactly where I was.
"Now! Get your ass out of bed man! We're at the tender. Gotta unload in five minutes." It is four a.m. and all of my questions are being answered faster than my lumbering mind can process them. The forecastle smells of lingering farts and wet socks. I know where I am now. On a fishing boat seven hours north of Ketchikan, Alaska. How I got here I still do not know.
The five minutes have now passed and I am wearing stiff green hip waiters in three feet of 34 degree water surrounded by ten thousand pounds of gourmet rigor mortis. The acrid locker room smell has been replaced by the foamy broth of death and fish cum in which I am now wading. I flail away blindly with a plastic shovel pushing your dinner into a pulsing vacuum tube sucking the stiff corpses by the thousands one rung up the food chain.
A mammoth chum salmons writhes spastically in the blood and froth of a spawning journey gone horribly wrong. I admire his strength. I admire the beauty of his life cycle returning to trickling stream of his birth. I stand in awe of this amazing fish and bludgeon it on the head with the handle of my shovel. There is not opportunity for contemplation while wading in a pool of death. Ask Dick Cheney. He can tell you this.
As I crawled out of the now empty fish hold into the radiance of the raising Alaska sun with its brilliant yet gentle purple hues bathing the horizon I now knew exactly where I was.
posted by Yonder Vittles at 3:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home