From river to table
I need to see the whole picture before settling into the assembly line
Good morning, or afternoon, wherever you are (physically, emotionally, developmentally…) at this moment. I’m sitting at a friend’s desk watching light rain fall and thinking about how less than a week ago I was sitting at my own desk watching just slightly heavier rain. I stared at a particular puddle on a roof across from my office and saw the drops make concentric circles in the standing water. It was beautiful, this moving pattern. I wanted to take a video of it, to “capture” it forever. But then I thought, no, this is not the kind of thing an iphone camera video from across the street through a dirty office window can capture. Best to keep the mental video and bore my newsletter readers with its retelling.
A similar thing happened yesterday while I was lying on my friend’s couch. I noticed a reflection of her palm tree on the glass coffee table. I thought, yes, this is a great photograph. Let me take it. So I did, and now will obligatorily place it here.
Speaking of (?) patterns,1 I recently took the Human Design test and discovered I’m a 3/5, also known as a “martyr heretic.” Honestly, it fits. Apparently the world likes to project its expectations onto me, but if I spend time people pleasing and don’t follow my “natural genetic strategy” in life, bad things happen. So I must go through life figuring out, through trial and error, what does and doesn’t serve my life purpose.
Thank you, Human Design, for giving me a permanent excuse for why I can’t seem to learn lessons until I do something myself, despite all the research or advice I may have been given beforehand. The only way is through.
In the vein of trial and error,2 last month I got to go “dipnetting”—a type of salmon fishing reserved for subsistence use by Alaskan residents. It’s been written about very well by others, and its retelling its not necessarily the point of this story. Needless to say, it reminds me in the best ways of public New York City beaches—a rare moment when people of all ages, races, and socioeconomic status congregate together for a shared purpose. In New York, that purpose is playing by the ocean. On the Kasilof River during fishing season, that purpose is to catch a whole lot of fish.
So there we were. It was a beautiful afternoon, my favorite volcanoes glimmering in the sun across the inlet. I stood in freezing water up to my chest, held a five-foot circular net on the end of a pole, and waited for fish to hit. That’s what it would feel like—the handle would shake, or jiggle, or thump when a salmon encountered the net. Usually the fish got stuck in the webbing and I’d be able to haul the net and the fish onto the beach.
The next step was to kill the fish. I’d hold it down and bash it between the eyes as swiftly as possible, trying to minimize pain. Sometimes I’d borrow a mallet from someone else on the beach, and other times I’d just use a rock. Then I’d thank the fish for its life, cut its gill to bleed it, and flip it onto its back. I’d slice into the chest, learning the right spot to hit and how far to reach the entire cavity, pull out its guts with my hands, rinse the cavity in the water, and put the fish in a bucket. Back to the river and repeat.
Even typing that out just now made me a little nauseous. This summer was only my second time fishing, and my first time killing, gutting, and processing my own fish. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. I spent the day before researching all my questions online and talking to friends about what it might mean if I felt unable to kill fish with my own hands. If I couldn’t do it, should I go back to being vegetarian? That felt only right.
It turns out that anxiety spiral was unwarranted. I caught a bunch of fish and then I killed them. I quickly learned to do it better—to bash them swiftly, hoping that in just one blow I could knock them unconscious, relieve any pain. Thanking them helped a bit, too.3 I thanked it for providing me food through the winter. Dipnetting is only permitted for Alaskan residents’ subsistence, meaning no fish caught in this way can be sold. I didn’t like killing the fish. But it seemed, in the scheme of things, to be a somewhat humane way of doing so.
The next day was the real work. Back in Anchorage, we set up shop in my friend’s kitchen to filet and process the fish. The first step was to finish gutting the ones we hadn’t yet—the fishing got so good at the end of the day we saved time by just killing and bleeding them, saving the gutting for later. I already knew how to do this part, so set to work in the sink with the knife. It felt worse somehow, in the clean kitchen, than it did on the beach the day before. The fish seemed heavier, more slippery. I was more aware of the mess, the violence. But still, it had to be done.
After they were gutted we filleted them, trying to waste as little flesh as possible. Everyone had their own filet method—I watched my experienced friends, then started my own. It felt awful to waste meat. This is a space where perfectionism might be helpful, maybe.
Finally, we rinsed the filets and vacuum-sealed them. Then it was off to the freezers. A winter’s supply, all caught in a day.
I liked working the vacuum sealer best. It was soothing, methodical—feed the plastic into the machine, press the button, release. Place fish filet into the bag, feed the end of the bag into the machine, press the button, release.
I would have been happy to only do the vacuum sealer. If we had gone pure assembly line and that was my role, the experience would’ve been downright positive. No blood on my hands, not really. Just working a machine, pushing buttons, making tidy little vacuum sealed filets ready for freezing.
It’s hard not to see a parallel with more nefarious assembly-line compartmentalizations.4 In legal practice, prosecutors and judges are often not intimately aware of what it’s like to be in jail, or a psychiatric facility, or a foster care group home. Yet their words, their arguments and decrees, effectuate physical consequences on the people moving through the legal system. It's an assembly line separated into the word of law and the execution of violence.
We’ve designed our system this way on purpose. Robert Cover’s essay Violence and the Word begins with the sentence: “Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.” Judges issue rulings—mere words—that effectuate violence, pain, and in some cases, even death. Yet the judges are never the people who carry out the violence; they are not prison wardens or executioners. For better or worse, our system relies on the separation of the word from the execution.
Speaking as someone who used to represent a child protection agency, there’s a danger in not seeing the whole process. Perhaps it’s just the martyr-heretic in me5 but, I found it very troubling that I’d be asked to make arguments in favor of keeping a child inside a juvenile detention facility without ever having visited that facility myself. When I hadn’t experienced the place or its violence, who was I to say that being there served the “best interests” of that child?
Eating salmon feels different now, after having done the work myself. I have a vivid picture of inside of the fish, its anatomy. I also have a glimpse of what it takes to provide such food, to make dinner happen. I feel quite late to this lesson; I grew up in a city and never made time to learn much about food systems. In that way, I am aware of the dangers of our globalized world’s compartmentalization, our assembly line process for everything.
Through just one day of subsistence fishing I affirmed that for me, it’s important to experience the whole process before settling into any one part in it. I saw how much I liked the vacuum sealer job, how I would have preferred to stay there and not wield the knife, not touch the guts. How easily that metaphor translates to other jobs, including within my profession. Luckily I’m not a prosecutor or a judge—my words will hopefully not enact direct violence on others. But in other small ways, I’m sure this happens all the time. We’re all culpable. I see it just a little more clearly now.
Cheers, and thanks for reading. As always, I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
-Julia
How’s that for a transition!
Are these transitions getting better or what!
I sense some irony here. Consciences are weird.
It could also be the prison abolitionist in me.