Last night I dreamed that there were giant Alaskan King Crabs in Monero Creek right in front of our house. I was trying to catch them for dinner and explaining to Alan about how to get the meat out of them.
It brought back memories of my brief career as a crab shaker in Copalis Beach, WA when I was 18. The nameless business was based in a 8′ x 16′ windowless shed run by 2 guys. Inside was divided into 2 rooms. My job was to stand at a 4′ square, stainless steel table with a raised lip, divided into 4 quarters, and shake crab. I wore full raingear: waterproof pants, coats, boots, rubber gloves, and hat. The boiled crab got dumped from a huge steamer onto the table, and I and 3 other women, Amazonian biker chicks, would grab a crab, break it up, and bang the sides of our palms on the lip, thereby releasing the meat from inside the shell. Every hour or so, one of the owners came by and scooped the meat onto a scale. Our portion was weighed, then the meat taken back to the canning room. We weren’t allowed back there, but I caught glimpses of piles of canned crab in unlabelled tuna cans. The shells were tossed on the floor to be swept up later. The room was sweltering and so steamy we could barely see each other. We got paid minimum wage ($1.60) plus more based on weight. I was pretty tiny back then, about 95#, and the table was too tall for me to be able to bang hard. so the biker ladies found me a box to stand on. They took me under their wing, showed me their tattoos, road rashes, and Harleys, and sometimes pushed a bit of their meat into my quarter. We smoked pot in the back during breaks.
At the end of the day, the Harleys would spin off, and I’d either hitchhike or wait for a ride from one of the folks back in Moclips. I smelled like rotten crabmeat. Really rank. Once home, I’d peel everything off and jump in the shower. My hands were swollen, red and ached.
We were supposed to get paid weekly, but didn’t, and after a couple weeks I complained. The owners promised to pay us all cash the following morning. That evening, I waited an hour for my ride, then went back to the shed to use the phone. A van was backed up to the door, and the guys were hauling out the huge steamer. I saw boxes of cans in the back. Realizing that they were taking a runner, I got angry and asked what was up. “Oh, we’re taking the steamer to get repaired”. I didn’t believe them and demanded my pay (I probably didn’t sound very demanding, being quite shy back then, but I stuck to it). One finally handed over a whopping $160. I said they’d better pay the other ladies, too. They said “of course!”. Right then, my ride appeared, so I took off.
It ended up that they had stolen that crab from a legitimate operation in Aberdeen, and had done it a number of times all across the Olympic Peninsula. They got busted and I had to talk to the police. The biker chicks disappeared, too. 🙂
In other news, we now have a working solar fridge. Still some work to do to enclose it, etc., but a great step forward.
4Fords Journal 