Valdez: fishing for salmon

I like good fish as much as anybody and more than some. True enough, it wasn't famous Alaskan salmon that brought me 4,000 miles from Manhattan to Valdez; it was heli-skiing. Still, what's wrong about eating cake and having it too? A hefty chunk of fresh salmon can be a great desert to a follow a full course of Chugach powder meal.

A month before the trip, I had rented a kitchenette room in a hotel and I salivated. We would buy king salmon and halibut, caught just a day before, I thought. We would grill it or fry it lightly on a pan or just have it raw. Some salt and pepper, a drop of lemon and the sizzling fish would melt in my mouth like the best Jamon Iberico fattened on olives and acorns in sunny hills of Spain. It would not be rotten pink salmon farmed at crowded New England fisheries, flaccid like the lifeless arms of New York party girls. Instead, it would be muscular and strong, glowing red, almost like chili peppers. Or it could be halibut, pearly white, translucent yet powerful, the slayer of smaller fishes. Or it could be some other fish coming out of ocean just few miles away from the town.

As a reader inferred from the previous post, our first skiing day fell through. Depressed and sad we drove 30 miles to Valdez, the gloomy sky crushing our hopes down. The clouds covered the mountaintops, dripping snow and rain all over us.

Icing without the cake is better than nothing, I thought. King salmon would help us to last through the night. Google maps directed us to the only large food store in town. We walked into Safeway and rushed to the fish department. And we stood there dumbfounded at a complete and utter loss. As Misha said later, it felt like he went to a blind date only to meet his ex-wife. There was a total of two products: a frozen cod filet imported from Vietnam and a tilapia from Thailand. Welcome back to the Soviet planned economy of our childhood where a cargo train dragged Crimean fish from Black sea across 8,000 miles to Kamchatka at the Far East; only to pick up a load of Pacific seafood to transport it back to Crimea. We looked at the selection, we looked at each other, we stared back at the two long dead chunks of fish products on a one foot long store shelf. The fish products stared back at us. Hello, they said. Buy tasty us. We walked to a cashier, a young stout girl with bright red cheeks and a name tag that declared Hope.

"Hi, Hope", I smiled at the girl and she smiled back at me politely. "What's going on with the fish department? How come they import fish to Alaska from Asia? Where does the local fish swim to?"

"Oh," Hope said, "the local fish goes to Anchorage packaging and processing facility. Health regulations, you know. Then, the fish comes back to the local distributors but they are all closed this early into the season anyway."

I opened my mouth and closed it several times, like a fish just out of the ocean. Overwhelmed by this amazing feat of a free American society. "Well," I finally responded, "would you by any chance know where I could get some fish?"

A local guy in his thirties, in construction pants and a wife-beater shirt was buying some food next to us. Apparently he was listening to our conversation since he turned to me and said, "You could still catch some off the dock."

"Do you all, guys, eh catch your own fish all the time?" I blurted.

The cashier and the wife-beater guy looked at me somewhat confused and chorused, "well, yes."