Rock weed and other slimy things that leave a bad taste in your mouth
Article by Dana Trummert Art by Riley Diehl
The summer began very early in the morning, only five or so hours after the school year ended. But buzzing with the electricity of the unknown, I popped up with ease. My mom shaved my head, and we got on the road.
If you are looking to piss off a loving family, try going to college 2,000 miles away from home, don’t come back for Thanksgiving or Spring Break, and then plan a summer job on an inaccessible island. All love can be tested.
We parked the truck at the ferry landing and unloaded our bikes and trailer. We were the last to board, and as the ferry pushed its way through the explodingly green islands, an unsuppressable smile bloomed on my face. The Salish Sea is the northern side of Puget Sound, both of which are inlets of the Pacific Ocean. If you look at a map sideways, the Salish Sea and Puget Sound form two branches of a tree, whose trunk is the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and whose roots are the Pacific. The branches split north and south, one end flowing up into Canada, the other down to Washington State. Living in the Puget Sound, the Salish felt familiar, but wilder, ruled by different forces than the Sound. I couldn’t wait to meet this water, and come to know and love it. This would be my home, my place, for the next three months. With a freshly shaved head and a mediocre knowledge of flora and fauna, I would be a sea kayak guide in the San Juan Islands.
With all the idealism of something much thought about and little understood, I imagined how awed the guests would be at the natural landscape, how much fun the tours would be, and how naturally I would adopt the skills of a kayaker. Mostly, I imagined how much fun I would have drinking with the other guides, and the funny stories we would tell around the campfire. In truth, I became a tourist sheep-herder, getting them from ferry landing to beach, out in circles on the water, and back to their hotels in one piece. They almost never dressed appropriately, seemed allergic to instruction, and tipped poorly. It was a great time, idealism notwithstanding.
Living in a tent, learning to fly fish, playing disc golf, drinking Rainier beers, chatting around a dying fire. Finding a circle of people huddled in the outdoor kitchen, leaning in to hear the gossip. Eyes always alert, head always swiveling. Raccoons circling the peripheries of light, ready to pick up the remains.
Can of worms, can of pink salmon (brown with bones) (expired). RV smelling like shit and death. Sweet elder Subaru, the abused pet in a toxic work environment, making revolution with a volume knob that only goes up.
I thought it would be nice to live in the same place I worked. I didn’t consider that my boss could (would) bother me while I cooked breakfast, that I could never take a phone call (talk shit) in my own home (tent), and that I was only one bad day away from not having a place to sleep.
The island was a microcosm of tourism and white privilege. Of appropriated culture and veneers of bohemianism. I always had this feeling when I hung out with the locals that something ominous waited at the end of every sentence, sitting in the periphery, just out of my line of sight. And it was never that they were unkind, but there was something about them that I would never, or could never, understand. I chalk it up to money, but it could be something more.
I met a girl who grows psilocybin mushrooms in her closet and works her office job from home. That whole group reeked of money, mid-thirties, and trying to be young again. I didn't know how to say that I was still young and wanted it to be over. Instead, I said “I don’t really know, but you guys feel like my big sisters”.
The training for the job began; I said no goodbyes to the local crowd as I backpedaled into what I hoped would be more familiar territory.
The boss's name was Jake. He was 25, mustached, and very annoying. His laugh was fake, he used corporate lingo in odd moments, and he gave me the ick — big time. Not just in a ‘ew’ way, but in a ‘don’t be alone in a room with him’ way.
I bonded with my coworkers immediately. It was hard not to when training was a three-day camping trip together. There were five of us initially. They were granola-stoner-college grads travelling the country, picking up work where they could and living cheaply. I was star-struck and inspired.
The day we got back from the training trip, my boss fired Al, my favorite coworker. She was the oldest and reminded me of my mom’s best friend. She was also the most outspoken of the group, and "took no shit." She packed her car and was gone in the morning. I learned that speaking up was not a safe decision with this job. She was only on the island for a week.
Then there were four. Two had previous experience guiding and started working immediately. Me and the other girl, Emma, sat around and waited. The season was slow, or so Jake said.
My boss used the L2 American Canoe Assessment to determine our readiness to guide. This included re-entry skills, self-rescues, and assisted rescues. He didn’t teach us the skills so much as demonstrate them and then ask us to repeat. I don’t know what training is supposed to look like for sea kayaking, but my experience was a lot of waterboarding myself in a scummy lake, and pretending that the water coming out of my eyes was fresh and not salty.
So I spent the first month spraying pesticides and swinging a machete at Himalayan blackberries. I learned about all the invasive species on the island, and slowly exterminated them from the property. When the others weren't guiding, they would cut the grass with a weedwacker. It felt like a purgatorial torture ritual. My birthday happened that month. I had tickets for a concert back on the mainland, but I wasn’t given permission to leave the island, because we had lake training. So instead I spent my birthday re-salinating the lake and flopping around in the water. The other guides gave me peanut M&M’s and drug-store birthday cards. It was a small and unspeakable kindness.
Thankfully, the season started to get busy in June, and Jake's employees got tired of being treated like dogs. Trust is the result of stress and time, much like a diamond. For Jake, trust was more about convenience than material reality. His stress, plus my time pulling weeds, somehow equaled trust. When there wasn't enough work to go around, he didn’t trust me, but as soon as it got busy, I became worthy. Then, and only then, did he trust me to guide. This is a cynical view, and I could say I worked hard to ‘earn’ that trust, but let's be real, who really trusts a 19-year-old? But trust, as I would learn, equaled work. Lots of work.
In the span of two weeks, I ran twelve bioluminescence tours. We picked up guests at 11 pm and dropped them off at 2 am. Some idiots would bring their kids. I wouldn’t get to sleep until 3 am, and wake up around 8 am, 9 at the latest. The sun would rise early and superheat my tent until I ripped the door open, stripping off layers I had put on only five hours before. I don’t remember much from those two weeks except the subtle degradation of putting still-wet wool socks over raisin-skinned feet.
Then the J-1s arrived and made my life look like a walk in the park. One arrived around 10 pm and was gone before the morning. We never heard what happened to him, but I imagine he set his sights on higher things than a two-man tent and a single bathroom shared ten ways. The others stayed, shivering. Details trickled out as we all got to know each other. Having no previous knowledge of J-1 visas, I learned the system and its failings simultaneously:
J-1 students must be housed.
Jake did not house the J-1 students. He lied to the agency, claiming they were staying in a hostel and gave them two-person tents to live in. They were informed of this fact before they arrived, but had no experience camping in variable climates.
J-1 students must be given the number of work hours agreed upon in the hiring process.
Jake could barely keep the five existing guides gainfully employed. When six new employees arrived, he didn’t have a shot.
J-1 students must not be required to perform dangerous or physically strenuous activities.
All outdoor guide work carries inherent risk. Your body is the very least on the line; its abuse a prerequisite to success. The J-1 students were told they would be doing office work, maintenance, and gear packing. Two of them didn’t know how to swim.
After concocting a web of lies to get these international students on US soil, Jake quickly decided they would not be useful to him, so he got rid of them. Some of this happened naturally; most saw the writing on the wall and sought other under-the-table employment. My boss's name was written on their visa, so any outside employment had to be under-the-table; otherwise, their visa would be withdrawn. Soon, all of the international students were working twelve-hour days in town, making the daily commute from camp to work. I would sometimes return from bioluminescence tours around the same time the students returned from their jobs. We chatted in the kitchen, sharing leftover sushi and cigarettes.
The whole situation made me sick. The reputation of the company was terrible, as was guide retention. It was clear that Jake had signed up to receive J-1 students because he needed the labor power and was unable to meet demand with local workers. Yet his mismanagement fucked them over, royally. Many of them came to the island to make money while they could, and instead of the stable job they were promised, they walked into a jobless minefield.
Us guides were unified on this point, and simultaneously consumed with our own struggles. We went from underworked to overworked in the blink of an eye, some guides running morning, mid-day, evening tours back to back to back. Returning from these long days, all you could do was drink, or smoke, and stare into the fire with dead eyes, hoping to rekindle the warmth of your soul with the company of friends. People who actually knew your name. But god, did we gossip. Exhaustion, anger, and indignation fueled the litany of complaints against Jake, a list that only expanded with the passing of days.
Our kitchen gossip organized into demands, and we formed a loose workers' union. I sat in the library typing up a Google Doc, researching other guide unions, heart beating fast for no reason at all. We all knew we weren't making Google Docs for fun, but the precise moment to hard-launch our unofficial labor union was unclear.
Until Jake demanded the J-1 students pay $500 a month "for rent." He would later claim that it was all his mother’s idea. This was untenable to everyone and made it clear that action was necessary. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I saw a screenshot of an email one of the J-1 students, Bozidar, received. Jake had emailed the agency, informing them that Bozidar had been "non-compliant" and was no longer an employee of the company. This was grounds for Bozidar’s visa to be canceled. When employees don’t go along with your schemes, Jake decided, just deport them!
I walked to Jake's office. I knocked on the shit-smelling RV. I didn’t step back. He answered. I asked to talk with him. He said, “Let's talk tomorrow." I said, “No, I need to talk to you now."
I told him I heard about the email and that I was unhappy with how he had treated the J-1 students. It was his responsibility to give them work and a place to live. He made that agreement when he signed up to host J-1 students. They were working people with lives, not numbers in his spreadsheet. The rent was the final straw. To charge his employees rent after denying them work and leaving them potentially jobless in a semi-remote area of a foreign country was cruel. And on top of it all, to cancel Bozidar’s visa because his employees are dissatisfied, fucked up.
I told Jake I wouldn’t run my tour that night unless he rescinded the email to the agency about Bozidar and reduced the rent according to the J-1 student’s terms. I told him I was not interested in working for a company that treated workers the way he was treating us.
I walked away feeling like I was going to vomit up my heart, along with my god damn kidney. I sent a stupid text with jittery fingers, something to the effect of “Let's do this shit,” or “it's on.”
He asked each of the other guides if they would take my shift, they all said no. He called a meeting in the kitchen, co-opting our sacred gossip zone. He was a fucking disaster. He accused us of "emotional violence." We all held our tongues, for the most part. We had our Google Doc. He had no choice; he agreed to our demands, wheedling small pieces away here and there. The email was rescinded, and the rent was renegotiated according to the J-1's terms.
After that, I ran another bioluminescence tour. The work was still pretty shit. But there’s something nobody can tell you about it: No matter how tired you are, how pissed or apathetic you have become to the job, something happens when you pop out of the van and greet your guests. You black out a little bit. A piece of you returns to shadow, and the script takes precedent. The same joke is funny every night. The same drive, the same commentary, the same small talk. Timed out minute by minute. Hour by hour. And you think it will never end while it's happening. It feels impossible and undetermined, like you are alone on the water, talking to ghosts in kayaks. And then your digital clock ticks past 12:35 am, and you raise your voice and turn on your headlamp to shuffle the sheep back to shore. And you smile and fake laugh and tell everyone how much fun you had, manifesting that your false joy will generate false thank yous, tens and twenties, I have Venmo or Zelle, too. They never tip on the night tours. Something about 2 am and wet feet doesn’t inspire generosity in even the kindest of people. Driving home screaming. Driving home in silence. Driving home with the dead eyes of a fake smile finally dying and returning to hell. Driving home with nothing in my hand. Driving home with a clutch of bills. Making myself wait until I got back to camp to count it. Consumed. Half-asleep and buzzed. And you go home just to sleep, just to wake up, just to do it all again, to smoke weed and get too high and curl up in your tent and fear the rustling grass and the shivering trees. You sleep and wake up on fire. You close your eyes and wake up on the water. You forget what your voice sounds like, forget what it sounds like without its cherry cola bubbles. It awakens with a croak, or a groan, or a scream. Just to do it all again in the morning. And the worst part of the vicious cycle?
You fucking love it.