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Micah's Full Interview

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Micah Ess

Cordova, Alaska

August 31, 2011

My name is Micah Ess. I live in Cordova, Alaska. I was raised in Homer, Alaska, in a fishing town, when I was younger. Our family used to run a shrimping operation before the oil spill. We all lived on a wooden boat and a floating houseboat/walk-in freezer that was stationed out at Knight Island. When we weren’t shrimping, we would all move into Homer and do our off-season in Homer and have a normal Homer life like everybody else.

I was born June 1980, so I was nine years old—eight and three-quarter years old when the oil spill happened.  Let’s see. Before the oil spill, we lived a very humble life. We still do, not much has changed. [laughs] There wasn’t a lot of money in shrimping. My stepfather, who my mother met when I was about three and a half, four years old, we almost immediately started living on the boat when he was on the boat and doing kind of his lifestyle that he had developed. He came up to Alaska when he was 18, lived in California until then, and he wanted to have an adventure and a new life and get away from the central California thing. So when we met Mike, my stepfather, we all immediately jumped on his boat and started working and doing our various things that you do in your family on a little boat and developed the fishing operation, which it is even today, in a family kind of setup, the way a lot of the families in this town did.

It was a long time ago. The thing I think that comes to my mind, the superlative characteristic of the whole thing was, there was never this, like, boom time, “I’m going to make money and then I’m going to go and do something with my money” that we’re seeing now in the fishing industry, where everybody’s like, “Well, I’ll fish for three months and then I’ll do something else or maybe I’ll go fish somewhere else.” It’s always kind of like, you have your eye on the prize now. I do it all the time. Sometimes it’s the only thing that gets me through fishing now, where there’s what feels like a gold rush of some sort, maybe a little more mellowed down, but it seems like an annual, like a perennial gold rush, where every spring it’s really vibed out in the air in the fishing towns.

Back then, it wasn’t a summer fishery, for one. We looked at the summer fishermen as kind of like the pansies who come in and they don’t know anything about the town, because unless you’ve been in a winter storm in December, you really don’t know what it’s like to be out there, yada-yada. And we did it more just because that was—I guess my parents just thought it was the awesomest thing in the world. They both—they weren’t raised in Alaska, my mom’s from Minnesota, my biological father is from Minnesota, and my stepfather is from California, and this whole Alaska thing was just what everybody did in the ’80s, they either came up and worked in the oil field or they got into the fishing industry. In Homer, even, there’s like Spit rats  and everything. So there was never this kind of high-falutin’ money kind of thing, the swagger, it feels like everybody’s a Wall Street broker in Xtra Tuffs [boots] now and the fishery’s developed. So that was the most important thing that—when I think about it, we got by on nothing from year to year, selling the shrimp that we caught to a man in Anchorage, he had a company on paper, but it was this house, he was a seafood broker, and we would go into town, drive the boat up into Whittier, and then drive into Eagle River somewhere north of Anchorage and give him our boxes of frozen spot prawns.

There was never very many boxes. There was never a whole lot of money. At the end of the season, which is think around April 1st or so, when things actually started getting nice in the Sound, we had a few months of decent weather and then we’d be done shrimping. And this is before our family got into salmon fishing completely, so we were reliant on kind of a subsistence lifestyle, and then shrimping income. And it stayed that way. We developed our business a little bit. I popped the heads off the shrimp, that was my job. I’d sit out there and grade the shrimp, the jumbos and the mediums and the smalls, and we’d take the little coon stripes and the pink prawns and put them in a different pile, and that would be what we ate for our own meals. We built a bait floater so we’d have bait to use, we wouldn’t have to go and get bait so often, we could keep our bait in salted, confined areas, and it stunk to high heaven. We kept it anchored, like, half a mile away down in Snug Harbor.

There were about five or six other families in our area of the Sound, which is huge. It’s big. We didn’t know Cordova folk a whole lot, we didn’t really come to Cordova, we were based in the western Sound. We had a float plane come in and fly me my correspondence schoolwork. I was home-schooled by my mom. They would come out every two weeks and check on me and give my mom some ideas for different projects for science and English, give her construction paper and scissors. We had boxes of that stuff laying around, and the whole inside of the house was plastered with sketches and things I had drawn. My brother was six years younger than me, so he was three years old at that time. We had our hands full with all kinds of little projects. That was kind of neat about being so far away but yet having that—the school system had a lot of money back then to throw at putting teachers on float planes. They would laugh at you if you were to suggest that nowadays. You can’t hardly get curriculum from them without having to pay a whole bunch of extra money.

It’s all a little bit foggy. Kind of tough to recall the early days when everything was—I don’t know, euphoric, a little bit, the golden years, I guess, or even younger.