Decline & Fall of a Great Alaskan Cannery

by Tanyo Ravicz

EJ Li

The first time I rafted alone through the notorious Whale Passage on the north coast of Kodiak Island, I celebrated being alive by tying up at Port Bailey Cannery and buying a pack of Camel Lights for $2.70. I had already quit smoking cigarettes but I made an exception. At the cannery store I asked Tammy — she was broke and up from Montana — what the heck was going on. Why were the cannery workers twiddling their thumbs? “Everybody’s sitting around like there’s no tomorrow,” I said.

​“Maybe there’s not,” she said.

​The cannery store sold food and sundries, not just the snack foods that the cannery workers favored, but also the milk and eggs and other staples that the fishermen stocked their boats with. The store being on the main dock next to the business office, Tammy had her ear to the source of important cannery gossip.

​“What happened?” I said. “Fish stop swimming?”

​“Fishermen stopped fishing,” she said. The canneries had offered such a low price for a pound of pink salmon that the fishermen were meeting in town tonight to decide whether to strike.

​“No kidding,” I said. “I didn’t know they had a union.”

​“Just started up. Caught everybody by surprise,” she said.

​Eight or ten rubber-booted cannery workers lounged on the dock benches or leaned against the railings, and when I stepped out of the store and lit a cigarette, they scrunched their eyes up and looked at me.

​“Just heard about the strike,” I said.

​“Ain’t no fish anyway,” one of them said with a shrug.

​“Red salmon run totally sucks is what I heard,” another said.

​“I’m just here to detox,” a third said. “I don’t give a shit about the fish.”

​I felt like I was among my own people again. Like the man who has wandered the earth in search of social justice and finally come home because he couldn’t even find a clean bathroom. Half a dozen cannery workers rushed toward me when I offered cigarettes. I left them the pack and went and said hello to Slim, the plant manager, who had just turned into the office next door. Earlier in the summer — the year was 1997 — Slim had given me permission to tie my raft up at Port Bailey Cannery and to shop at the cannery store and use the pay telephone. The cannery, owned by Wards Cove Packing Company of Seattle, one of Alaska’s major seafood processors, was private property, after all, so I was grateful to Slim for his indifference to my coming and going. He was always busy superintending cannery operations and didn’t pretend to be friendly, but he knew I wasn’t a fisherman, just a local homesteader, and figuring that I didn’t have a dog in the price dispute, he briefed me on the cannery’s latest position. The fishermen wanted fifteen cents for a pound of pink salmon; the company offered a nickel. One Kodiak cannery was willing to pay fifteen cents, but they wouldn’t be able to handle the inevitable glut of salmon unless another company like Wards Cove matched the price.

​“And?” I said.

​“I can’t answer you,” Slim coolly replied, “but I can tell you this.” He stopped in the doorway and nodded at the milling cannery hands. “The ones being hurt when the fishermen don’t fish are those kids. If this keeps up, we’ll have to send them home.”

​This was not an idle threat. When I returned to the cannery a few days later, there was a grimness in the air and a dug-in fatalism in the faces of the workers. Some of them were going home. From the company’s perspective, neither Mother Nature nor the fishermen were cooperating.

​Tammy sighed and leaned her elbows on the store counter. “Not enough fish coming in,” she said. “If it doesn’t get better, it’s going to get worse.”

​“Your job safe?”

​“Supposed to be through August, fish or no fish,” she said. “Who knows?”

​The wind had risen in the bay, a sign that I should head back to my homestead, Cottonwood. I had a yen for eggs and gave Tammy two dollars for a carton of them, and she walked me across the dock and looked out at the water with me. “You’ll get your eggs scrambled before you get home,” she said.

​She was right about that. The smell of raw eggs frankly revolts me, but that’s exactly what I got on my raincoat that day after I stowed the carton of eggs in my waterproof float bag thinking it would be cushioned by the clothes there. The seas were at my back, but in a raft you get knocked around, and when it was over I had just enough unbroken eggs for an onion and Tabasco omelet.

​A round trip to Port Bailey Cannery, five miles east of Cottonwood, cost me a gallon and a half of gasoline. The cannery’s pay telephone and its mail service, a twice weekly mail service by seaplane, were helpful to me when I needed to buy a tool or to talk with a supplier. When I ruined my power drill by leaving it outside in the rain, I used the cannery telephone to order a new drill, and a week later I boated back to the cannery to see if my drill had arrived on the mail plane. Best of all I could telephone Martina, and if she didn’t answer, at least I heard her voice on the recording. In those days I was still learning how to be alone in the bush, and no matter how laborious it was to launch the raft by myself — it was laborious — I traveled to Port Bailey Cannery more often than I needed to just so I could see the people there.

​There were fewer of them as the summer wore on. An enormous tramp steamer was anchored in the bay one day, and this was an ominous sign. A smaller boat, a Wards Cove tender, lay alongside it.

​“Tramper’s taking all the fish and salmon eggs we got,” Tammy said.

​“Taking it where?”

​“Japan. Slim’s emptying every freezer in the house.” She led me next door and showed me a notice taped in the office window. Cannery operations suspended as of July thirty-first.

​“That’s that,” I said.

​By the middle of August the cannery was down to a skeleton crew. I roamed the premises and hardly saw anybody. A couple of Filipinos were tinkering in a bulbous metal skiff, talking softly in Filipino or in one of the Philippine languages. There was such a strong tradition of Filipinos working at Port Bailey Cannery, one of the bunkhouses was called the Filipino Bunkhouse.

​I found a letter from Martina in the mail crate in the cannery office.

​“Sure appreciate you letting me get my mail here,” I told Slim.

​“Don’t mention it,” he said, not looking up from his paperwork.

​“Cannery going to reopen?” I said. I had seen the Wards Cove tender picking salmon up from the local fishermen.

​“No chance of that,” Slim said. He didn’t deny that Wards Cove was buying salmon again, but the harvest was being shipped to the company’s Alitak plant at the south end of the island. I didn’t want to irritate Slim by asking him how the company had resolved its price dispute with the fishermen, but when I went outside I found a relevant posting in the office window. Due to “an expected shortfall” of pink salmon, the price being paid to the fishermen had risen to twelve cents a pound effective August first.

​Tammy joined me outside on the dock.

​“What’s the word?” I said.

“Real slow,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Silver salmon and chum salmon runs have been lousy. Fishermen gonna be hurting for money this winter.”

​“What about you?” I followed her into the store and bought a three-pack of Cracker Jack. I left one of the boxes on the counter for her.

​“Still broke,” she said. “Didn’t get the overtime I wanted working nights on the line. It’s been a crappy season.”

​In the third week of August I rafted back to Port Bailey Cannery to say goodbye to her. The cannery was deathly quiet now. I would soon head to Fairbanks for the winter, and Tammy was moving on to a cannery in Dutch Harbor. She was glad to be able to say so.

​Dutch Harbor turned out to be more than a one-time gig for Tammy. When I looked for her the following year at Port Bailey, the young woman behind the counter told me that Tammy had relocated to the Dutch Harbor plant.

​“Good for her,” I said. “Bet she cleans up there.”

​“Hopefully.”

​I introduced myself and we shook hands.

​“I’m Alba,” she said. “The foreman’s daughter.”

​“You’re kidding me.”

​“No. My father is José, the foreman,” she said.

​“I guess if l looked like you and worked in a cannery I’d be the foreman’s daughter too,” I said. “That’s a pretty name, Alba. What’s it mean?”

​“It means dawn,” she said. Alba’s mother worked in the cannery kitchen, and her little brother was there, too. Alba had been coming to Port Bailey from Texas every year since she was a child. In round terms she looked to me about fifteen years old and I didn’t doubt that her mom and pop kept a close eye on her.

​The cannery store stayed open that summer of 1998, but I didn’t see as much of Alba as I’d seen of Tammy. Mostly I stayed at the homestead finishing the cabin trim and interior.

Martina and the kids would join me in August and I wanted the cabin to be ready for them. And Port Bailey wasn’t as diverting as before because there weren’t many people around. The cannery remained active, loaning nets and skiffs to the company fishermen; boats docked at the cannery; a fuel tender dispensed fuel there; but the fish processing operations, the canning and freezing lines, didn’t reopen after their untimely closure last summer, and so the line crews didn’t return, and without the workers there wasn’t the old summertime liveliness at Port Bailey. The warmth was gone.

​Even so, I rafted there to use the pay telephone and the mail service. I ordered a Stihl bar and sawchain from Jackovich Industrial in Fairbanks. I complained to Shakespeare Marine Technical Support about the lemon of a reconditioned radio they’d sold me. In the cannery store I bought an eight-pack of beef franks from Alba, and she went and got me a loaf of wheat bread from the cannery kitchen. It was a morning in June and I was her first customer of the day.

​“You going to eat all those hot dogs?” she said.

​“We’re having a bachelor’s party, me and my neighbor,” I said. “You know Richard Pederson?”

​“That old man? He’s married, isn’t he?”

​“Yeah, it’s just an expression. ‘Bachelor’s party.’ But yeah, his wife’s not around. Mine neither.”

​“I knew you were married,” she said.

​“How’d you know?” I passed my hand in front of her eyes. “I don’t wear a ring or anything.”

​“I just knew.”

​“How? Maybe I can do better next time.”

​Alba laughed and looked somewhere safe — at my split ends. “You got kids?” she said.

​I made a peace sign. “Five and one,” I said. “You?”

​“No!”

​Now it was my turn to laugh. “There’s no hurry,” I said. “Hey, I gotta make the tide, Alba. See you next time.”

​Port Bailey Cannery operated as a supply base for Wards Cove fishermen in transit to the fishing grounds of Bristol Bay and mainland Alaska. It also served as a regional headquarters for the tenders that freighted fish from the north island waters to the Wards Cove plant down at Alitak. But the heart of the old cannery, the canning and freezing lines, never restarted. It would be some time before we understood how Port Bailey Cannery had been caught up in and doomed by the changing economics of the seafood industry in the 1990s, by the globalization of every segment of the seafood market, labor and supply as well as consumer demand. We saw the early signs, though. In September 1998, Wards Cove sent an appraiser to Port Bailey Cannery to determine the value of the plant machinery. According to Dennis Bell, the newly arrived cannery caretaker, the company wanted to borrow money on its hard assets. Why? Dennis, when I asked him why, gestured at his shabby clothes and his scruffy, blear-eyed face and said, “Do I look like they tell me?”

​Nevertheless, Dennis speculated that Wards Cove planned to open a new cannery in Russia, where they already co-owned a plant with the Russian government. “Plenty of labor in Russia,” Dennis said, “and the country’s like Alaska, but industrially they’re seventy-five years behind us, so there’s still plenty of fish there.”

​Dennis and Barbara Bell lived in the modest caretaker’s residence that overlooked the cannery from the hillside on the south. Their job was to maintain the machines over the winter and to mind the premises. They also monitored VHF radio channel 79, an important duty because Port Bailey remained a communications hub for the island’s north coast. The Bells were people whose lives had been irrevocably touched by the ocean. Dennis had come to Alaska from Washington state in 1957, a deckhand on a halibut boat. His crewmate on the boat was Barbara’s father. When Barbara visited Alaska, her father introduced her to Dennis, and they were married twenty-eight days later. “I thought any man who was okay by dad was good enough for me,” Barbara said.

​After Martina and the kids joined me at Cottonwood, a boat trip to Port Bailey Cannery became a family excursion, an outing made memorable by the conversation and refreshments we enjoyed with the Bells, either up at their house or in the cannery’s front office. Barbara had gathered boxfuls of paperback books and sweatshirts left behind by the cannery workers and she let us pick through these and take what we wanted. We continued to make use of the mail service and the cannery telephone, and on mail days we crossed paths with peninsula neighbors whom we rarely saw otherwise.

​Dennis had the job of weekly changing the oil in the Northern Lights generator, a 55-kilowatt generator that powered the dormant cannery in winter. The powerhouse also housed four diesel generators rated 250, 250, 400 and 420 kilowatts — enormous machines, yellow Caterpillars — plus a water system generator and circuit breaker panels for the entire cannery, the machine shop, the kitchen and bakery, bunkrooms, caretaker’s house, the freezer compressors and so on, a reminder that a working cannery is like a small city. This is an aspect of canneries that always fascinated me, how the profit motive, or the motive to satisfy a popular appetite for seafood and to profit by doing so, led to the flourishing in remote parts of Alaska of these mechanized outposts of civilization. Two residences, apart from the caretaker’s house, overlooked the cannery complex, the superintendent’s house and a guest house, and below these, kitty-corner to the main processing plant, were the mess hall and living quarters for the workers: the Surf House, Island House and Filipino Bunkhouse. The cannery offices — front office, radio room, general store — were centered on the main dock, and a sprawling breezeway linked the offices to the cannery proper. In the breezeway a variety of boats and vehicles were parked, pickup trucks, four-wheelers, forklifts and seine skiffs. Port Bailey Cannery had a welding and machine shop, a wood shop, infirmary, laundry, battery shed, a “beach locker” where oil and chemicals were kept, and, at the edge of the dock where a boat could pull up to it, an ice house.

​What we saw when we approached Port Bailey Cannery by sea from the west was the immense cannery itself projecting from the shore on pier and piles, a long white warehouse with thirteen square vented windows in its side and a tin roof. The several large attached structures included a green-roofed hangar on which the seagulls often congregated. In front, at each of the seaward corners of the dock, a crane stood ready for lifting and lowering cargo. On one of the main facades the words PORT BAILEY were painted in huge black letters easily visible to the cannery crews arriving by seaplane.

​Inside, the crews either froze or canned the incoming harvest of salmon. The freezers included five blast freezers that instantly crystallized the fish and a deep-freeze chamber that held above a million pounds of product at thirty degrees below zero. The salmon, after being headed, gutted and washed on the slime line, were fast-frozen, glazed in a salt bath, packed in shipping boxes and moved into deep freeze. Five red compressors valued at a million and half dollars compressed ammonia gas into liquid as part of the freezing process. There were tanks and valves and condensers at every turn. Water, power and refrigerant lines passed along the walls and overhead. As I explored the vast cannery, either alone or in the company of the various caretakers who came and went, I craned my neck looking up into its highest heights and farthest corners.

​In May 1999 the Bells were replaced by the Garbers, John and Midge, another longtime Wards Cove couple, devoted to the company. A man like John Garber, who knew plumbing, electricity and diesel engine generators, who knew the working guts of a cannery and had the virtue of loyalty, was of tremendous value to a company like Wards Cove. When I walked the lines with John I learned details about the equipment that I never would have known or thought to ask. I had worked in canneries in Bristol Bay and Anchorage, I’d been a gutter, a giller, a spooner and a grader, I’d stood in slime lines and packing lines cleaning and boxing herring, halibut and salmon, and I’d manned freezer lines hefting my share of fifty-pound boxes, but these were low-level jobs of the sort in which the laborer, cut off from the greater design of the cannery, is too timid to ask questions for which he expects no answers or too indifferent or muscle-weary to care.

​Port Bailey Cannery had seven giant retort cookers for sealing the newly canned batches of salmon. The retort operator turned a wheel to open and shut these massive vats each of which accommodated many hundreds of cans. The trays were slid in, a red light went on, and the cans were brought to a temperature of two hundred sixty degrees Fahrenheit for seventy-two minutes. The heat was generated in an oil-burning boiler that stood upright in the middle of this array of vats. The salmon had been prepared beforehand, of course, on a mechanized cutting line that hadn’t changed much since its invention early in the twentieth century, though the despicable nickname of this machine, the “iron chink,” has fortunately gone the way of the prejudice that spawned it. The incoming fish were headed, tailed, gutted and pressure-cleaned by machine, cut into can-size pieces, a salt pellet was dropped into each can, and a lid put on. Even with the automation it took a shift of twenty-four souls to run the twin can lines. The workers guided the salmon through the cutting and filling machines, scraped the guts and trimmed the meat by hand if necessary, graded the salmon and removed the valuable roe to the egg house.

​An entire can line was missing now, a few rollers left behind on the floor and some power cords dangling from the ceiling. John Garber told me that the apparatus had been shipped to Russia for Wards Cove’s new venture there. As the company looked abroad for cheap labor and unexploited consumer markets, it streamlined its business at home by closing and consolidating plants. Alaska’s seafood industry had been bleeding a hundred million dollars a year. The watchwords were efficiency and cost-cutting. In April I had seen several tenders leaving Port Bailey Cannery with fishing gear for the upcoming herring and salmon seasons, but also with dry goods taken from the shelves of the cannery store where Tammy and Alba used to work. If there’s a sure sign that a cannery is dying, it’s the closing of the company store. By the summer of ’99 it was clear that Wards Cove meant to rid itself of Port Bailey Cannery. John Garber never gave me the skinny on a cannery sale, but once as we walked in the breezeway he pointed at a sixteen-foot Lund skiff and told me that Wards Cove would let me have it for a couple of hundred dollars if I wanted it.

​John Garber was a large, kindly, patient man with a head of white hair and a Lincolnesque beard. He had commercially fished with a thousand-foot driftnet and had maintained entire canneries and fresh-frozen plants, but he still liked to fish from the dock with a simple rod and reel in the hope of catching a simple codfish, which he considered “not bad eating, if you scrape the worms off of ’em.” Before John got too busy with his summer duties we would sit on the dock and chat in the spring sunshine. I enjoyed hearing stories of his gold-mining operation on remote Tugidak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. Tugidak, one of the Trinity Islands south of Kodiak, a government-owned island protected for its harbor seals and other wildlife, officially has no human population, but John and Midge Garber, when they weren’t caretaking canneries in the offseason, had lived on their Tugidak Island gold claim, a leasehold, since the 1980s. The gold was powder, not nuggets, and the work of separating it from the black sand of the beach was labor-intensive, to say the least. John used a four-wheeler and a trailer at low tide to move the sand, and at high tide he sluiced the sand to extract the gold. This amounted to moving tons of sand for a pittance of yellow metal. When I met John, the price of gold had fallen from four hundred dollars an ounce to two hundred seventy-five dollars, and the work no longer paid. “A guy does well to take out twenty ounces a year,” John told me, “and you might use four ounces of that, or twelve hundred bucks, to charter to town and back to sell your gold.”

​John’s wife Midge emerged smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette, and she sat with us on the dock and turned her face up in the sunshine. The fleece cap on her head was superfluous, but I have noticed that after winter some people continue to wear a favorite hat out of habit or a feeling of security. A mutual acquaintance had advised me that Midge Garber had an “active imagination,” and I suppose this was intended as a warning. It could be that living on isolated Alaskan islands and haunting out-of-the-way canneries does this to people, gives them an active imagination, or maybe some of us no matter where we live are disposed to counter emptiness and loneliness with dreamy imaginings. Midge told me that having “copped out of the corporate world,” she didn’t plan to return to it, and when I asked her what corporate world she had copped out of, she confided to me that she had worked in government intelligence for twenty-six years. A grandmother, Midge had blue eyes and short blonde hair that converged to a point over either cheek. In her gaze a sharp intensity alternated with a lost-my-train-of-thought abstraction. With her everpresent Lucky Strikes and her convalescence from various ailments, Midge was perhaps not an undemanding woman, but John appeared to be devoted to her and responsive to her needs, even when it meant forklifting a couch through the window of their house or launching the runabout to take her to sea. Midge’s other protector was a light brown Yorkshire terrier named Woody who must have come into the world hot-style, biting its mother and snapping at its siblings. That Yorky was a terror.

​Port Bailey Cannery got busy again in early June before the commercial salmon fishing opened. The cannery remained a base from which the company loaned skiffs and nets to its fishermen. The Viking Star and other boats docked at Port Bailey one day and John was so busy helping the crews that he forgot to put his lower teeth in. There was an enormous red building called the web loft at the east end of the cannery complex, essentially a warehouse for lines and nets, the floor crowded with pallets on which folded salmon seines and herring seines were stacked, and here a fisherman might hang a fishnet from overhead cords in order to inspect and repair it. But despite these spurts of activity at Port Bailey Cannery, the decision had been made in Seattle to shut it down, and there was no talk of processing fish here again. The price disputes with the fishermen, the labor actions of the up-and-coming United Salmon Association — these added uncertainty to a market already challenged by the spread of aquaculture and foreign competition. The drive to consolidate was relentless. The Blazer, a Wards Cove tender which held a hundred thousand pounds of fish on ice, carried the local catch south to the company’s Alitak cannery in Lazy Bay.

​John Garber and I pondered what we would do with Port Bailey Cannery if we could buy it. With its bunkhouses, its docks, its anchorage and seaplane beach, the place had a fantastic appeal. Its greatest glory was its setting near the foot of Kupreanof Mountain in Dry Spruce Bay. John envisioned a summer camp for disabled kids. I had in mind a wilderness retreat or halfway house for “ornery” kids. We liked each other’s ideas almost as much as our own.

​I never saw John angry or despairing when he made the rounds of the fallen cannery. Wearing a Gold Miners Association of America cap, John was calmly Calvinistic about things. “You have one million fish one year, ten million the next,” he said. “How do you prepare for that? You can’t. It’s too unpredictable. Right now, down at Alitak, they’re going full steam because they’ve taken all the work this cannery used to do. At the moment there are more fish than you can say grace over, but the writing is on the wall. The future is in farmed fish and Alaskans will have to join in that industry or lose out.” In John’s opinion commercial fishing was as doomed as one-man gold mines.

​After the Garbers left, another couple came on as caretakers, Brian and Melinda from San Antonio, Texas, and they were followed by a local couple from Kodiak. To me the cannery had become a melancholy place. When I wandered the cannery premises, I noticed the smaller things now, the details that evoked the people who had worked here and the routines they had followed, the hand dip station, the earplug dispenser, the cage full of rubber gloves, the warning signs about the machines and the dangers of moving parts. I could just about hear the clangor of the machines and see the fish-laden belts going by and feel the chill from the freezers. But mostly it was the absence of the workers that affected me, affected me as powerfully as if they had all been suddenly present, all the cannery hands who ever worked here, expended muscle and spirit here, all of that energy coalescing in a single great shout — an outcry — a crescendo, and then that too died away and I was alone in the echoing silence.

​In the end the cannery was a ghost cannery, an echo of itself, killed off, finally, by the same modernization and the same balance-sheet logic that at one time had animated and made of it a thriving world. In its twentieth-century heyday the cannery was a factory producing countless tons of canned and boxed salmon that fed countless people around the world. Port Bailey Cannery was sold for a comparative pittance in 2003, its grounds suspected of being contaminated by fuel and other hazardous wastes. The subsequent owners have met with mixed success in transforming the sprawling property into this or that profitable enterprise.

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Tanyo Ravicz lives in California. He lived for many years in Alaska, where much of his writing is set. His indie book Alaskans: Stories is a selection of his short fiction. His novel A Man of His Village relates the odyssey of a migrant farm worker from Mexico to Alaska.