Captain's Bay, the Ghostyard at the End of the World

 Perhaps the most remote place I've ever been was a season working at a crab cannery on Captain's Bay, near Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands. It is geographically remote, and is quickly becoming remote in my memory. 

Unalaska is across the bay from Dutch Harbor, where Jack London once lived. The town presumably inspired London's novel "Sea Wolf," and local legend says that he named Mount Ballyhoo above Dutch Harbor. Maybe so, but that is not why I was there. I was there simply because I had gotten a job for the summer working in the Adecco Cannery. It was not a career move, it was an escape. I was a Vietnam vet and the real world was too harsh and painful to live in. Instead, a seasonal contract in a place where all my needs were taken care of seemed like a good alternative to facing the grim reality of a post-war lifetime.

My ticket said "Anchorage to Dutch Harbor," but the jetliner landed on a desolate runway in a place aptly named Cold Bay. There were few buildings around, no airport terminal that I remember. According to census maps, Cold Bay has a population of no more than 100 people, and we were changing to a smaller plane. I didn't know any of the other passengers, so "we" simply meant the collection of everyone who was flying off the edge of the world that day.

We walked in the biting wind to portable steps that led us into the rear of a Reeve Aleutian Air DC-3. It was a tail dragger, and after entering the door, I had to climb up the aisle to an empty seat just in front of the right wing. 

Two men were talking loudly in the pair of seats just in front of me. They looked bizarre, even given that this rural Alaska and there were a lot of characters roaming the countryside. One man wore a cowboy had and sported a face-wide handlebar mustache, making him look a bit like I remembered "Paladin" from the old TV western. The other man looked somewhat like the Flying Tiger pilots I encountered in Vietnam ... the steely poorly cropped hair, a scarred face, a small mouth, a barrel chest ... in short, it was easy to picture him as a CIA gun runner. 

The back door of the plane was still open, but by now all the passengers had boarded the plane. The CIA-gunrunner in front of me looked back down the aisle as the back door was slammed shut, then he stood up and looked at the caricature of a TV western gunslinger. Mr. CIA had a 45 revolver in his hand, and he said, loudly enough that the entire plane could hear him, "Where's the pilot of this rattle-trap plane? If he's not going to fly it, then I am."

With that abrupt announcement, he climbed forward to the pilot's seat, put the revolver in a secure bin next to the pilot's seat, and proceeded to belt himself in, start the two propeller engines, do a quick check of the gauges, then let the plane start rolling forward. A slight straightening of the wheel, a fast taxi, and we were airborne. Okay, so he was the pilot, and he had a sense of humor. But he was very casual about everything, and he was flying what felt like a rattletrap. 

I could feel the cold air leaking into the plane from outside. The window was not airtight, and the pilot obviously knew it, because he stayed at a relatively low altitude, scudding through the clouds and giving us an occasional view of ocean and distant islands. After no more than 45 minutes, I could see the water on right side of the plane getting nearer. I looked out the other side and could see a hillside. Then, without warning, we were on the ground, taxiing on a rough asphalt landing strip. When the plane finally stopped in front of a quonset hut terminal, the pilot stopped shut off the engines, nodded to the stewardess in the back of the plane to open the door, and curtly announced, "This is it. Last stop."

I was met by Tom Craig, the manager of the cannery where I would be living and working. He was a clean cut man who was no more than a couple of years older than me. He introduced himself, casually introduced to the marshal of Unalaska ... yes, the caricature cowboy ... collected a couple of other contract cannery workers who were on the same plane, and drove us through the town of Dutch Harbor to a small open ferry, chit-chatted about Unalaska, where he had grown up, then after the ferry docked on the Unalaska side of the bay, drove us through the town, over a small hill, then along a low road that skirted Captain's Bay toward the cannery, which was about two miles outside of town on the way to Makushin volcano. There was no traffic, because the cannery was the only establishment so far away from the town.

I should explain something about the crew at the cannery. Most of the workers were part of a Baha'i youth team raising funds to support traveling teachers. They were for the most part industrious, joyful, and respectful, making the work environment much easier than it would have been with a typical bunch of high-turnover seasonal workers. 

We had to work 8-10 hour shifts rending sometimes huge King crabs, grinding off their gills, tossing them into the boiling pot, then moving them onto a conveyor belt  and various machines on which the crab meat was gradually separated from the shell and legs, then sorted and packaged and stored in an industrial freezer. The work was somewhat thankless, even if we did have crab scrambled eggs for breakfast, crab cakes for lunch, and crab a la king for dinner. There was no chance we would eat the profits, because the crab that made its way into the cannery kitchen was crab that had not passed quality control, one of the final stations before it got canned. 

Inside the cannery, everyone wore galoshes, rubberized overalls, large rubber bibs, hats or hairnets, and gloves. One particular day, I was glad that I had all the extra layers of protective gear. I was working in what was called the "butcher shop," because we handled the still-live crabs that had been tossed onto a  conveyor boat from the hold in one of the fishing boats. Grab the crab by the back end of the shell, flip it over to see it was female and had an external stomach organ of some sort that was a prized delicacy for some customers. If it was a female, the stomach got ripped off and was thrown into a separate container. The rest of the crab was pulled apart into two haves, and the shell was tossed aside. The odd parts, the gills and so forth, went onto another conveyor belt. This was done non-stop until the boat was empty, or the large nets where boats had unloaded their crabs earlier, were empty. Then we would hose down all the conveyor belts, sanitize the area, spray ourselves down, then head to the changing room. 

One day, we finished early and the four of us who had been working the butcher shop went around a catwalk on the outside of the cannery so we could go in the back door to watch the day's processing come to an end. The catwalk went about half-way around the building, and was somewhat derelict, so we had to watch our steps. As we neared the door opening that lead back into the cannery, I relaxed my vigilance for half a second, stepped into empty space, and fell through a trap door that let onto a wooden ladder down to the water level, perhaps where a rowboat could tie up. The world was topsy turvy. I saw wood flash past my eyes, I felt myself bounce off something, then landed hard. I opened my eyes, and saw the cold waters of Captain's Bay within easy reach. Amazed that I was still alive, I carefully got to my feet and used one hand to climb the ladder back up to where I had fallen. 

Nobody had even noticed my fall. When I got to the break room and started removing my work gear, it was obvious I needed to get my arm checked out. Within a few minutes, I was in the car with the marshal, who drove me to the public health clinic. By the time we arrived, I had accidentally set into motion a new role for myself, because I told the marshal that I had recently returned from Vietnam, where I was an infantry medic. After a quick exam, my arm was pronounced okay, and I was given the keys to the health clinic so that the nurse could go on a short vacation. Aside from one drunk who drove his motorcycle into the bay at slow speed and escaped with a few cuts, my medic skills were not called on. Well, wait. The cook at our cannery fell. She was an older woman, and she badly twisted her knee, then felt a pain spreading up her leg. The nurse was still away. I iced her knee, then we called the Coast Guard, who flew a cargo plane down from Anchorage. We put her on a stretcher and rolled her into the back of the cargo plane and she took off as the sole passenger in the empty vault in the back of the plane. A week later, we learned that the doctors had operated to remove a blood clot from near her heart. She would recover, but her days in remote Alaska were done. When I look back at this incident, it could never happen today unless I was willing to be called onto the carpet by authorities for practicing medicine without a license, violating HIPAA privacy laws, and having access to any pharmacy and healthcare supplies in the clinic. As it was, life went on as normal in the little remote town of Unalaska.

The Aleutians have a long history. There were stories about the ghosts of armies of Aleut soldiers marching through the mountains. There were huge, quickly abandoned Navy and Marine buildings and artillery emplacements, the remains of a prisoner of war camp (the 1000-mile war, where the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Island chain, was a relatively unknown battleground during the war), and dangerously steep but most shrub-free mountains beaten down by cold weather and winds, including the Williwaw, a hurricane-force wind that would sometimes strike the Aleutian chain. A gust in excess of 250 miles per hour had reported ripped the roof off the cannery a couple of seasons earlier.

It was a mysterious place. Our cannery compound consisted of dormitories for the men and for the women in what had been barracks during World War II, plus a dining room attached to the men's barracks. Every morning, the foreman, named Chuck, would make sure that everyone was awake and in the mess hall in plenty of time to start the packing lines for the day. Chuck was a giant, a former carnival barker with fists literally as big as hams. He stood well over 6'6, and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pounds. When he walked down the central hallway in the barracks / dormitory, his fists beating on the walls would shake the entire building. Nobody ever dared sleep late.

In the evening, there was a large lounge attached to the ladies dormitory where everyone would congregate. One evening, I wanted to go to bed early, so I excused myself and started to walk back to the men's dorm, which was about 100 yards away. There was usually a floodlight near the corner of the building at would give some guidance, but the fog had rolled in and was so thick that there was not a single flicker of light by the time I was 20 feet from the ladies' dorm. Inky black. Stygian. I could hear the water lapping against the pier to my right, but could not tell how near or how far it was. I walked in as straight a line as I could, feeling my way with my toes, and going slowly so I didn't end up falling topsy turvy again. It seemed like five minutes before I saw a hint of light that eventually blossomed into the welcoming floodlight. It was a scary place, being so remote and so disorienting.

I mentioned that there were lots of young people on the work crew. In my reading, I had come across situations where there were poltergeists (or disembodied spirits that move things around) usually in the presence of somewhat hysterical teenagers. Well, there were reports of a spirit in the cannery. One of the girls on the crew had been working late on cleanup detail when her apron strings spontaneously came untied, and she swore she felt someone or something tugging at them. I found the story amusing, but a few nights later, found myself in a similar situation ... alone in the cannery cleaning and disinfecting the machines. I wasn't thinking about the poltergeist, but all of a sudden there was a hard tapping on my shoulder as if someone had sneaked up behind me and was being a bit too enthusiastic about trying to surprise (or scare) me. I stopped what I was doing and looked around. Nothing. I looked under the conveyor belt I was cleaning. Nothing. The cannery was empty. I was alright, I had faced much worse here in the cannery, and in Vietnam. I shrugged and forgot about it. Like I said, it was a mysterious place full of spirits.

The end of the season was unpredictable. Fish and Game inspectors would close the fishing grounds once a certain volume of crabs had been harvested. We had no more than a few hours notice. We packed, got ferried to the airport, lined all our luggage up on the floor, then waited while they called out our names. The Reeve Aleutian Airways plane, on which we were ticketed, filled up and left. Then the station agent said he had another plane, a smaller one that was routing through King Salmon. They didn't have room for all of our luggage, so the agent promised to send it ahead on another plane. We endured the long flight via the town of King Salmon, and finally reached Anchorage an hour after our original schedule. Of course there was no luggage. The King Salmon Airways crew said to call Reeve Aleutian Airways the next day, or better yet, just go by their office in downtown Anchorage. 

It was cold. It was Halloween. There was snow on the ground in Anchorage. I found the Reeve Aleutian Airways office and let myself in the front door. I stopped at the reception desk and tried to explain how I had flown on King Salmon Airways with a Reeve Aleutian Airways ticket, and my luggage was now lost. After several telephone calls the the airport, the receptionist was still having no luck. Then I heard a voice from the back of the large office space. I looked for the source of the voice, and finally saw a thin older man with a patch over one eye sitting behind a desk that was on a raised floor near the back wall. He looked somewhat like a bald eagle sitting in its aerie watching for prey. He was summoning me insistently. "Come here, sonny," he said. 

Bob Reeve himself. From the framed pictures on the wall, he had know everybody who was anybody. General MacArthur. Eisenhower. John Wayne. Nixon. And now me, without my luggage. I explained my situation to him, and he said to wait a minute while he made a call. He dialed the telephone without looking up the number, and from his end of the conversation, I realized he had called the station agent in Unalaska. He described my luggage to him (it was a Kelty Pack, so fairly easy to recognize), explained why it wasn't on the Reeve plane, then concluded with something along the lines of "Find it and get it here to the office tomorrow morning, or you're fired." 

After slamming the phone down, he looked at me with a mischievous twinkle in his one eye. "Come by tomorrow morning. It will be here." And it was.

Copyright Don Child 2020