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FM: But, going back to the bad things, I remember the bad things. What was bad? Well, to begin with, the steerage condition of going from Seattle to, to Waterfall in this freighter, only about two hundred feet long, low tonnage, I don't know how many, eight thousand tons, whatever. And down, and at the upper deck level there are these cabins for the hakujin workers. Down below are the Asians, Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, whoever. And it's just a big dark hole -- this is a nice place -- but it's a dark hole and you have bunks, maybe three levels and if you're lucky, well you get one that's a middle level. Bottom one is not very nice because it's, all the smell is down there and the upper one you have to climb up and... but nevertheless all these bunks are laid out, you know, one after the other very close to each other. And it's a stinky set-up. And the food is terrible on these, and they kind of dish it out for you and you sit at this table and eat quickly and get away from it.

The one nice thing about these trips on the boats, great thing I remember are these beautiful areas we would go through. From here to Campbell River at the middle of Vancouver Island, nothing much to see, it's terrible, horrible trip because the boat is so slow. And you just have to live there twenty-four hours from here to Campbell River, it seems, and, amazing that one would, could take so long getting from here to there. But once you get into the Seymour Narrows it's a beautiful sight and I shall never forget the first time I saw it and I guess I remember the last time I saw it. It's just a phenomenal sight of going through this canal, channel, with mountains, huge mountains coming straight down in the water and dropping down, somewhere down below. No beach, no white beaches, but the, if especially on a calm day when the waters mirrors, mirrors the mountains, it's, and you have some birds, geese flying by or something, it's just incredibly beautiful. And this is the kind of thing I remember from these trips.

The other part of the trip that I remember are the occasional storms we would run into in... what is that called? Hetica Strait or something, north of Queen Charlotte Island, we'd get into this open water area of the Pacific Ocean and occasionally when it's windy, stormy, this two-hundred foot boat would be shaking up and down because of the huge waves that would bounce it around. And I'd think, wow, what a scary thing this is. But, that was only a matter of six hours and it's okay. However, if you experience that, you then realize what it is that the Alaska fishermen face when they go out into the Bering Sea or out, somewhere out in the Gulf of Alaska fishing for salmon or crab or whatever. You can understand why every now and then there's a huge accident that kills two, three, four, a dozen people and it's a frightful thing to encounter when you face it.

Okay, about, among the bad things, the first, especially the first time I went to Alaska, the food at the cannery -- well, I should describe the bunkhouse to you, I think, the layout of the cannery first. The layout of the cannery, and this is fairly typical, I think, although Waterfall, as it happens, was a very beautiful place, again. And that was another thing I enjoyed about Waterfall, and caused me, I guess, to go back the twelve years, successively. Waterfall is an isolated, well, it's on an isolated part of Prince of Wales Island in Southeastern Alaska, about eighty miles from Ketchikan. And there, it's in an inner channel where there are islands on the other side. But you can also see breaks between the islands where it's looking out into the Pacific Ocean, so, this was the kind of isolated area it is. And in order to get out, in and out, you have to have this boat or fishing boat or airplane, occasionally airplane would come in, even back in 1930, already, there were airplanes flying in and out, occasionally. In this... and it's beautiful enough so that, today there's no longer a cannery at Waterfall, there's a summer resort. And the resort area is built up such that people with yachts going north will stop there and enjoy the pleasures of a very attractive spot in Southeastern Alaska. It's called Waterfall because there is a waterfall about, let's say, well, say a mile's walk from the bunkhouse. And my friends and I would, rather frequently, take the walk up to the waterfall because we could enjoy that and the stream, the river that was coming down. The river coming down was also interesting in itself because by late August when the fish would stream into their spawning area, this river, which was perhaps a hundred feet wide at the sea outlet and would become narrow as it went up the mountain, would be full of salmon, millions of salmon, so to speak. You almost have the feeling you could walk across the top of the backs of these fish because of the numbers that would wade into this river and literally you could throw out hooks, un-baited hooks, two or three on large hooks and just pull them in and you'd catch two or three fish this way. So this is a dramatic area, and there was a nice beach, beach wide enough and nice enough so that we could play football there. And this is part of getting to know my Nisei friends, you know, play football, we'd play basketball, we'd play sumo or whatever. And, and, of course, fishing and crabbing were part of the activity.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.