WELCOME TO THE SPLATTER ZONE A Review of SLIME LINE, by Jake Maynard

I’ve never worked at a fish processing plant, but I’ve met a few people who have. The first of these was a mistrustful Texan with Marfan syndrome and a koi tattoo on his throat; I recall he used to carry an empty glass bottle at all times, “for protection.” The second I met when he showed up barefoot to a New Orleans wedding wearing a cravat carved from the innertube of a bicycle tire. And the third was fond of saying that the best job she ever had was at “the body shop,” by which she meant a bio-materials firm that harvested cartilage from donor cadavers. The slime line was all these three had in common. My point is that cannery folks are characters. Not in that they are fictional, but in that they are larger than life.

Actually, some cannery folks are fictional, and I’ve met a few of those, too. There’s the chorus of sunburned urchins who shoal at the mouth of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). There’s the speaker of Nora Marks Dauenhauer’s poem “Salmon Egg Puller—$2.15 An Hour” (2000), who learns to “Grab lightly / top of egg sack / with fingers.” And there’s the narrator of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1943), who washes freshly beheaded salmon in a lye bath until one day a new shape bobs among the fish tails; a worker on the line ahead has “slashed off his right arm in the cutting machine.” Just as their real-world counterparts tend to be larger than life, these literary cannery folk have a way of exceeding the page. I find they cling to the mind like an odor.

Now into this circle lumbers someone called Beaver, who announces himself as the narrator of Jake Maynard’s new Slime Line. What are we to make of him?

For credibility’s sake, let us first confirm that to work on a slime line is to perform the most appalling tasks on offer in a commercial fish plant; at one stage in the process, the worker must hook a gloved finger beneath the dorsal aorta, which is a snotty purple vein that runs along the inner spiny ridge, and snap it free to release the discharge. (The workers wear rain-slickers, on account of the splatter.) And Beaver, as he soon divulges, is but the road-dog nickname of one Garrett Deaver, an impulsive 22-year-old from rural Pennsylvania who has relocated to Klak, Alaska, with the intention of going elbows-deep in the slime — not to find his fortune, nor even to escape his past, but instead to prevent himself from holding still.

Among Slime Line’s most memorable scenes is a flashback to Beaver’s childhood in Pennsylvania. The seven-year-old follows “some spots like red M&Ms in the snow” to his father’s pick-up truck, where he discovers a deer carcass “with legs scrambled at sharp angles.” The young Garrett Deaver is a queasy child, prone to fits of gagging, and when he gazes upon the deer’s “huge dead coat-button eyes” he promptly ralphs all over his shoes. Then his father comes rambling over with “some rope and a cinder block.” “Did you hit this deer?” asks the son. “Not yet,” replies the father. “A couple of days later the insurance agent came to check out dad’s smashed truck and write him a check for the damages.”

Later the father ditches the family for good. He turns up again in the form of a phone call, having killed himself for unknown reasons in some unknown place very far away. And so Beaver sets off for Alaska, where he knows his dead dad once spent some time. He is prime chum for the slime line. He will be a denizen of the splatter zone, where dead animals are everywhere. He will gag no more.

“Men in the business are themselves canned,” mused John Muir after visiting an Alaskan cannery in 1899.^[1] He could have had Beaver in mind. Strenuous and abject, mind-chilling and mood-pummeling, the slime line seems to provide the only kind of routine that can keep him sane. “The processor for me is like an ointment,” he confesses during a rare wistful moment. “If I could, I’d bottle it and rub it on my chest in the downtimes.”

But Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC, is no kind of medicine. A well-oiled scam of an enterprise, it recruits overseas workers through something akin to a multi-level marketing scheme, then nickel-and-dimes them until they board home-bound airplanes at the end of the season. The plant itself is a volatile conglomeration of organic and mechanical energies. A basketball-sized hose sucks fish into a concrete holding pit slick with blood and milt; from there a conveyor belt laps each fish into the mouth of a spinning wheel armed with automatic knives. Workers from all over the world wait below in orderly columns, “hunched over the belt, sixteen hours a day, trimming belly fat from filets with electric knives that send scales and fat flying in every direction.” At night, their exhausted speech takes on the quality of madcap poetry. (“Lend to me, please, your fire machine,” whispers one drunk Maldovan in the dark.)

For Beaver, this uncanny territory will be the site of a great personal transformation. But for the fish, the great transformation has already occurred. Maybe that’s why he fixates on them, compulsively willing his own consciousness into their slippery flesh-packages during his interminable hours on the disassembly line. Beaver is desperate to find his purpose. The fish have already accomplished theirs. In their millions, they transcend blood and slime.

*

Consider the salmon. Imagine it dead. Not just sort of dead, but totally and absolutely dead: beheaded, de-scaled, un-blooded, flash-frozen, airplane-shipped. Now picture it on a plate: a gumball-pink filet. Is the thing you’re imagining still a fish? (When you picture the glint of motor oil in a mud puddle, are you imagining a fossil?) At what point does a glob of myotomes and myosin cease to be a dead animal and become something else entirely?

The notion that a wild salmon caught on the Alaskan seaboard can be consumed “fresh” at, say, a casino restaurant in Las Vegas is on its face an outlandish proposition. It ought to be downright scandalous for me to say that a sockeye plucked from Alexander Bay can be promptly disassembled, flat-packed, and shipped on a rack to any marketplace in the world. If I were, furthermore, to suggest that the long-distance transit of disarticulated fish-proteins, at sufficient scale, can reliably generate revenues well exceeding investments — thereby making certain people and entities extremely fucking rich — you could be forgiven for thinking me delusional. But I assure you the miracle is real. Like fish, reality bites.

The production of calories is nowadays analogous to the production of steel or waistcoats. We moderns are sustained not by foods but by food systems. Game animals are farmed behind fences. An entire desert valley grows iceberg lettuce in neat little rows; in the next valley there is only asparagus. The synchronized labor of a hundred immigrant workers produces a single cut of shrink-wrapped and refrigerated meat, over and over again, indefinitely. The systems by which we feed ourselves are uncanny by nature.

Fish, however, have a special way of overspilling human designs. This is especially true of anadromous species, like the Pacific salmon, whose life-cycles are organized by mass rituals that unspool across maritime geographies so vast and complex as to boggle the mind. Each year adult salmon migrate to the far-away headwaters of particular freshwater streams, where they spawn, then die. The salmon are guided on their journeys by egg-like clusters of magnetite that gather inside a part of their snouts called the olfactory rosette. (“They got coordinates lodged in their peanut brains,” as Beaver puts it.) For centuries, if not millennia, the salmon’s annual migration has held a special nutritional and symbolic significance for the indigenous people of what is now southeastern Alaska. “The staple of life, and the most delicious, is the salmon’s dried flesh,” writes Tlingit memoirist Ernestine Hayes.^[2] But the miraculous fish attracted monstrous visitors. First came the fur-capped Russians, and later came the Americans, who, in 1878, established the Department of Alaska’s earliest commercial fish plant.

First, the American North West Trading Company set tactical seines to inhibit subsistence fishing. Then, a few lean years later, the U.S. Navy bombed the nearby Tlingit community of Angoon, killing six children and demolishing a winter’s food supply. Left with no good options, indigenous fish-carvers sought work on the original slime lines, where the fish-canning cartel appropriated their expertise. As the industry grew, the cartel imported other categories of workers to supplant these indigenous women. Some of the new arrivals came from China, others from the Philippines, still others were white English-speakers from the Lower 48, but what they had in common was that nearly all of them were men. I imagine them now as boatfuls of nineteenth-century Beavers, with unruly tempers and unexplained cravings for blood and gristle.

In less than a (human) generation, what had been “the staple of life” became a fungible food commodity, sealed in crocks of tin. This was a disaster for almost everyone involved. Predictable cycles of overfishing and ecological collapse repeated like a bad joke throughout most of the twentieth century. Then, around the turn of the millennium, the ambitious avatars of a new science called “resource management” undertook an accounting of all the fish in the sea. Drunk on the wine of cybernetics, these technicians proposed to rationally manage the reproduction of the world fish supply through a globally networked actuarial system. Their endeavor effected a transformation in the very substance of reality.

According to the Norwegian scientist Petter Holm, the cybernetic revolution in fisheries management accomplished nothing less than the “reconstruction of the fish, from a wild creature of the sea” into “a true cyborg: part nature, part text, part computer, part symbol, part human, part political machine.”^[3] The French sociologist Michel Collon christened this new entity the “cyberfish.” But he also pointed out that the sea itself was already pretty uncanny; the cyberfish could only swim into history once “the dark and mysterious ocean had been transformed into a transparent aquarium.”^[4] 

Slime Line is a dispatch from the aquarium’s bloody rim, where blinking envelopes of biomass are disassembled into protein-slabs for the far-away fish-eater. Beaver is a parasite on the cyberfish. Many times each day, he gazes into the dull retina of the “true cyborg,” and sees reflected only a fisheye distortion of himself. 

*

When I say that cannery folks are characters, I think what I mean is that they are saturated with symbolism. Observed in the right light and with a sufficient blood-alcohol level, slime-liners may appear to us nowadays as extraterrestrial, angelic, more proximate than humanly possible to the deep musculature of some lost or lacquered-over world. In our dislocated and dehistoricized era, it seems we like our angels how we like our folk singers — costumed in anachronistic work-clothes.

“A slippery notion of authenticity underpins Americans’ conception of rurality,” Jake Maynard wrote recently in the Baffler. When it comes to extractive industry, we emplace ourselves not in real territories and histories but instead in the nostalgic fable of wild nature and rugged man. The essayist Nathaniel Rich has made a similar point about our conception of terrestrial reality itself: “What we still, in a flourish of misplaced nostalgia, call the ‘natural world’ is gone, if it ever existed.” ^[5] Yet we hike through the scrub-growth of an over-logged hill and conjure the atmosphere of an ancient forest. We press our noses against aquarium-glass and convince ourselves it’s the wine-dark sea. Like the child who spots a bloodtrail and sees only red M&Ms, we moderns confront the uncanny with an inexhaustible capacity for deluding ourselves.

But not Beaver! Not anymore. Welcome to the splatter zone, he says. It’s everywhere, whether you look at it or not.