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| Silver salmon and halibut fillets. |
It’s not unusual to find an Alaska freezer overwhelmed by fish toward the end of the summer fishing season.
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My freezer contains big bags of salmon and halibut fillets, and another in the house is full of silver-salmon steaks, cured roe and rockfish. My landlord, who recently returned from working as a captain on a sport-fishing boat out of Seward, filled a spare, refrigerator-size freezer with thousands of dollars’ worth of vacuum-sealed cuts. Our house, like many nearby, I expect, is teeming.
The fish fillets are sealed in plastic and frozen. The roe is cured, dropped into garbage bags and also frozen. This stuff shouldn’t go bad for months.
That’s why a rotten odor coming from the landlord’s freezer stopped me in my tracks. A red pool was forming at its bottom corner, like a Hollywood blood puddle, even pinkish and fake-looking.
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| A summer's catch begins to defrost after |
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| exposure to room temperature. |
The freezer door was open. It turned out, the shelves were crammed so full of fish that the seal couldn’t catch, and pink liquid from some roe was trickling out the corner. The landlord had cured the roe with red-colored preservatives (for use as bait in the future).
Any one of a hundred fillets on the packed shelves could’ve been the culprit. The ones in front were already squishy—defrosting—and wet with condensation. Who could say how long they’d been exposed?
With rearranging, I got the seal to catch. By then, the pink puddle had already dried into black crud on the floor, and a sour-fish smell had permeated the house. The smell wasn’t bad, unnoticeable even, if you stayed put. But when you stepped out and came back in, a powerful odor hit.
The landlord spent a day making sure that wouldn’t happen again. He moved all the fish into coolers and stripped the freezer of caked-on frost. He scrubbed the door and floor and fanned out the rooms. By the time I got home from work, I could barely smell fish in some parts of the house.
Like a lot of people around here, my landlord’s a resourceful guy. He acts quickly and works hard. During my three-month Alaska internship, which ends today, I met so many people that fit that mold, counting them wouldn’t make sense.
I won’t enumerate, either, the lengths they went through to do me favors, educate me, put me in harm's way and then salvage what was left of me. When I take off tonight at midnight—the only time anyone's likely to catch a flight out of Anchorage—I’ll miss these Alaskans.
But I’ll be happy to get out of that fish-smelling house.
Sarah Alban is an editorial intern at Alaska magazine.