Journey to Alaska, part 1

We walked through the door and stepped out onto the factory floor. Our new brown rubber boots and green raingear were fresh from their packages, having been opened not an hour earlier. We had our hair tied up and baseball hats on, and we felt a mixture of fear, adrenaline and anticipation. Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” started up, blasting through the loudspeakers as the Foreman gave us the tour around the factory floor. The irony of it didn’t escape us. The smell of blood was overpowering and as we stood watching, somebody opened up the doors to a huge freezer which sent a layer of mist out over the factory floor. The scene was surreal and we looked at each other, wondering just what hell we had gotten ourselves into.

We were four women in our early twenties, fresh from University, on an adventure designed to delay the start of “real life.” We had spent a psychedelic mushroom-induced day in a field outside of Boston with a good supply of water and magic markers for tattooing ourselves. It was Senior Week and nobody knew quite what to do next. We had seen the ads in the back of magazines for working on fishing boats in Alaska and decided this was just the diversion we were looking for.

Lancaster Cow
So we piled into a 1980 Chevy Malibu - four women, two hundred bags and a guitar – and headed west. We would camp along the way and figure out the rest as it came up. We sang “America” by Simon and Garfunkel, counting the cows on the Lancaster Turnpike, made truckers pull their air horns, read smutty magazines, ate in greasy spoons along the way and it took all four of us to close the overstuffed trunk of the car. Sharon had been given a video camera for graduation and we quickly got used to being recorded.

We were on our way.