"I remember waking in the night and feeling the room moving and feeling the ocean and longing so badly to be back in Ouzinkie … just like my heart was breaking. There was no place I wanted to be in the whole world but back in Ouzinkie."
The place Shannon Spence longed for that night in 1974 was a tiny fishing village on Spruce Island near Kodiak. Shannon had moved from Ouzinkie months earlier, taking his earnings from working in the shrimp cannery there and relocating to San Miguel de Allende, a city in central Mexico, with his then-girlfriend, Joan.
But while he'd left Ouzinkie behind, it clearly hadn't left him. Still hasn't, in fact.
"I have to tell you, that sense comes over me even to this day," says Shannon, who now lives in Portland. "I'll be over on the Oregon coast, hiking by myself, and get a little bit of the feeling of what it used to be like on those trails in Ouzinkie … of how much I loved it there."
Shannon's journey to Ouzinkie began in July 1973 with Tim Southworth, his friend from Oregon State University. Tim knew Bob Quaccia and Bob, who was already in Ouzinkie, knew the cannery needed workers.
"Bob had written saying, 'If you guys want to come down and work in this cannery in Ouzinkie, it's cool and we live in a little cabin in the woods.'
"It sounded terrifically romantic and Tim and I said, 'Hey, let's go!' So we went. Just on Bob's invitation."
With little fanfare and even less cash, the two men headed north, via thumb and ferry.
A recent email exchange from Shannon to Tim about their arrival in the village on July 25, and their first sighting of the cannery and its foreman, Dan Abell, reads like a prose poem.
Tim, do you remember when we first arrived in Ouzinkie, the very first day? We flew in on that big float plane … and it landed in the harbor and taxied up on the beach. We got out with our gear and Bob was there to meet us. We three were yakking excitedly, non-stop, thrilled. We walked up the beach — that crunchy sound of the gravel underfoot — and up along to the boardwalk.
When we came around the corner and into view of the cannery, Bob interrupted us quietly.
"That's Dan," he said.
The cannery had a big second-floor delivery door as I recall, and Dan was there in the doorway, light on him and framed by the darkness of the cannery behind him. He was leaning against the door, wearing a pair of slim fitting black jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved black shirt. He was watching us. You, me, and Bob walked by below him in dumb silence. Not a word from Dan. Silence. Carried a pistol in his back pocket.
He spoke though. One time we asked him what to do with a big pallet of freezer-burned bullheads someone had kept too long for bait. He said, "S—can that muther——." While we were dumping it off the dock I remember his words glowing inside me like coals. I longed to have the authority to say it myself someday.
I was barely 23 years old. Dan may have been 30.
Shannon was one of the first people Laurie Cronin met when she arrived in Ouzinkie a month or so later. Laurie had impetuously decided to accompany her friend Celeste Quaccia to the cannery, too. They arrived and immediately went into the freezer room to find Bob's girlfriend (now wife) Jan.
"And here comes Shannon from the next room and he had cleaned something with the high-pressure hose, and, this is hilarious, he had this knit blue cap that he washed that was too small and he was all covered in shrimp bits. He was just a riot," Laurie says.
She doesn't remember exactly how she met Tim, whom she would eventually marry, "but I remember meeting Shannon because he was all covered with this stuff and he looked so hilarious with this little hat. But you couldn't buy another hat anywhere!"
Despite the shrunken knit cap and shrimp bits covering every square inch of his rain gear, Shannon had unexpectedly found a home of sorts in the fast-paced cannery, amid the largely 20-something crew working in a village on the shores of a rain-forest-covered island.
"That summer in Ouzinkie gave me, maybe for the first time in my life, a sense — a really clear sense — of place, of a place that I could define, a place that I was wedded to, and a place that had a clear definition — the outline of Spruce Island.
"It was a world," he says. "It was an entire world."
But not an entirely welcoming one. Within a few days of arriving in the village, Shannon remembers being with Tim and running into some young men on the boardwalk who wanted to fight and engaged in a "little shoving and some shouting." At last, the young men insisted Shannon and Tim join them in drinking from a bottle they were passing around.
"Have a drink, partner," Shannon remembers one saying. Then, "HAVE a drink, partner. HAVE A DRINK PARTNER. HAVE A F—— DRINK, PARTNER!"
He did, to keep the peace.
"I don't know who those kids were," Shannon says now. "Little bit older than me. They certainly seemed a lot tougher than Tim and I did."
When he wasn't being challenged to a fistfight on the boardwalk, Shannon was working. Constantly. He read an old letter from those times recently in which he wrote of working a 16-hour shift, and of that being the eighth day in a row of working more than 15 hours.
Long hours
"The Mylark and the Cloverleaf (shrimp boats owned by brothers Ralph and Lee Russell) were delivering steadily … All we did for a long time was work and work a lot," Shannon recalls.
"You know there'd be breaks and (owner George Grant's wife, Donna) would have piles and piles of cookies and we'd just devour them and go back to work. Cookies and coffee!"
Still, "I thought it was thrilling," he says. "Back then I began to get an inkling of the man I'd become. I've always been very, very determined and willing to put in long hours. I've always worked really hard, I've always kind of liked it.
"I liked binge-working and working at the cannery was like the greatest binge-working job I could ever have hoped for."
By late November, however, work had begun to slow down at the cannery. Shannon had long planned to take his earnings and move to Mexico for the winter. He'd met Joan on the cannery crew and she was going with him. But before they left, another opportunity arose.
"I got invited to crew on the Mylark," Shannon says. "It was one of those pivotal moments where I was about ready to get out of town and (skipper Ralph Russell) said, 'I'm looking for somebody to crew, want to do it?' But I had maybe some cabin fever and was eager to go, so I said, 'Thanks, but I'm going to Mexico.' "
So he did, with Joan, but even there he felt the call of Ouzinkie. Why does he remember that time and place so fondly?
"I was born on the coast and always have had an affinity for the water. All my growing up years, any chance to go to the beach … it's where my connection is."
And "that was a really incredible place to make that connection — in Ouzinkie on Spruce Island — because it had water all around and all different kinds of water. From the harbor on one side to across that little spit with the view on to Marmot (Bay). I think that that place was meant for me."
Return trips
Shannon was to return three more times to Kodiak to work on fishing boat crews, in 1980, 1990 and 1991. He says all those trips were just as thrilling as the first.
"I was just in the place where I wanted to be. In the Kodiak archipelago, I thought that was the best."
He never felt endangered, either, despite a co-worker with a pistol, men sometimes eager to fight on the boardwalk and a young woman who got lost on the island and died of hypothermia while he was there.
"I never felt like I was scared or in trouble or like something bad might happen," he says of his time in Ouzinkie. "That happened later when I went back up to fish. There are a couple things I just don't like to think about. Honestly, I just don't like to think about them."
"The scary things happened for me when I was in Kodiak, not Ouzinkie. For me, Ouzinkie was where I felt like I was cradled in moss and silence. I felt like it was a very, very peaceful place."
He describes a sensory overload of pleasurable smells — diesel from the boats, the wet rocks at low tide. The place got its hooks in Shannon and never really let go. He still isn't sure why. He was young and just coming into manhood and who he would become, but it wasn't just that.
"To separate my age from the experience and all that is a little bit tough, but if you were to ask me: 'If you'd been anywhere else at that time, would you have imprinted so completely with the place?' I'd say, 'I don't think so.' "
Susan Morgan is an Anchorage freelance writer. From 1972-74, Morgan's family lived in the small village of Ouzinkie, operating their shrimp processing plant, Glacier Bay Seafoods. Last year, Morgan received a grant from the Alaska Historical Society's Alaska Historic Canneries initiative to locate and interview people, many from the Lower 48, who lived in Ouzinkie and worked in the cannery during that period. Ouzinkie is on Spruce Island, nicknamed "The Island of Romance" by some, because of three lifelong marriages that came out of the small crew that worked at the cannery during the summer of 1973. This piece is one of seven that have been completed so far for the project. Morgan is writing a book about her family's experiences.