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| Slimeline workers process halibut in St. Paul. |
Flying from Anchorage to Southeast Alaska is an exercise in patience on a good day. There is a daily flight south, but it’s a milk run if there ever were one. It stops in Juneau, Petersburg, Wrangell and Ketchikan before traveling on to Seattle. At each stop you have to sit on the tarmac waiting as passengers disembark, new passengers embark, luggage is unloaded and loaded, and the flight attendants repeat their safety spiel. So a trip that takes a total of 3 hours flying time can be stretched out to 5 or 6 hours of travel time.
Another option, if you are flying to one of the points farther south in Southeast like Wrangell or Ketchikan, is to catch a direct flight to Seattle, then jump on the northbound daily milk-run flight, thereby avoiding most of the stops along the way.
Either way, you can’t avoid the milk runs and, in the summer, the flights are always full on every leg as travelers and locals move between tourism and fishing hotspots.
Last week, when I flew to Wrangell, I was on the southbound milk-run flight, because that was the cheapest option and, these days, it’s not worth the fight to convince an accounting department that a more expensive flight to the same location is a better option. Figuring I could use the time to read during tarmac layovers, I settled in for the long haul.
As usual, every seat out of Anchorage was full, and this time most of the seats in the plane were occupied by people I quickly deduced were slimeline workers—fish processing and canning plant employees—transferring from Naknek, in western Alaska, to Ketchikan. Mainly seasonal workers, most slimeliners are Hispanic (usually from California) or Eastern European (usually college students looking for a lucrative, international summer job).
As we taxied for takeoff, I listened to conversations I could not understand between the people around me and wondered if I would be able to sleep at all, and if the man two rows behind me would ever stop whistling and singing snatches of songs in Spanish that made his friends laugh every few minutes.
And then, I heard it, the sound that makes any airplane traveler’s blood run cold: the productive cough of a germ-carrying passenger. The woman by the window three rows up was making a phlegmy hacking noise. And so was the man in the middle of the row in front of me. And there it was again, from a few rows over behind me. The slimeline workers were all sick!
It’s not surprising that so many of them had the same cough, really. They live in dormitory housing, eating, working and recreating together in towns where there isn’t much to do outside the plant. If one of them gets sick, it spreads pretty quickly among them all. And now here I was, smack in the middle of a crowd of sick slimeliners, breathing recycled air for 5 hours! No amount of handsanitizer or Vitamin C was going to save me.
So, I resigned myself to catching it, quickly texted my husband before the flight attendants told us to turn off all electronic devices, asking him to stock up on cough syrup and tissues for my return in 4 days, and settled in for the flight.
Excuse me, I need to go and blow my nose now.