Travels with Samantha Slide Show Page 17

Quality housing is not a top priority in Alaska

If you worked in a salmon processing factory [BIG] up to your waist in seawater and dead fish [BIG] you might not care where you lived either.

From conversations with cannery workers, I pieced together a portrait of their lives. They only get paid about $6/hour but they work 18-22 hours a day and rack up the overtime.

"Four hours of sleep feels normal to me," noted Pam, "and I just sleep in my office in my clothes. All I have to do is hand out equipment. When someone needs something, they just knock and wake me up."

Her friend Pat doesn't worry about falling asleep and injuring herself.

"My job is just inspecting fish. Anyway, the cannery is pretty safety-conscious. Guys who stuff fish near rotating knives have their hands secured with steel cables so that they can't get within six inches of the knife."

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College students work like fiends for the summer here. Six dollars/hour doesn't sound like much, but when you work 90 hours/week and get time and a half for overtime, it adds up.

[BIG] Roe ready to be shipped to Japan: .

A closer look: [BIG].

I wasn't sorry to get back on the ferry [BIG] bound for the totem-pole tourist trap of Ketchikan [BIG] adjacent to Misty Fjords National Monument, a place of dramatic mountains and lakes accessible only by float plane [BIG].

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