This is how I came to mop garage floors for most of the day. From my layperson point of view, I might say that a garage is meant to be a dirty place, an area in which grease and grime are expected and even invited. Garage floors should not be judged for their dirt. But the EMT garage was destined for an important Park Services meeting later this month, so it had to be spic and span. In addition to disinfecting all of the counters and cabinets, I was also asked to mop the floor using a heavy duty degreaser and hot water that we had to shuttle in from headquarters (since the maintenance shop ironically has no hot water).
Mopping the floor sounds simple enough but let’s be honest – very few of us mop our dirty garage floors. I found that my loose ropey mop mostly smeared muddy water on the floor but did little to remove dirt, even where I had sprayed degreaser on the worst spots. But there's an interesting learning curve to every process, as well as a perfect soundtrack (in this case, for maniacally mopping floors, I recommend Willie Nelson singing Rainbow Connection).
Not far into my task, I decided I had two choices: (1) get down on my hands and knees and scrub like Cinderella or some scullery maid or (2) turn my maintenance task into a Karate Kid workout. I chose the latter. Mr. Miyagi would have been proud. I put a scouring pad under my foot and worked it in every so direction to simultaneously (1) remove ground-in dirt and (2) perfect deadly leg sweeps that could topple any opponent in a karate tournament. (I’ll note here that aside from perching on a dock like a bird, Mr. Miyagi’s workout offered little in the area of lower-body defense and offense.)
There is no doubt in my mind that after Mop Left Foot, Mop Right Foot, I could have kicked Daniel LaRusso’s ass today. With my eyes closed.
Let it be said that a Type A Personality should never be asked to mop a dirty garage floor. I found myself chasing down every errant spot, realizing that it could disappear if enough effort was applied. But such a pursuit is futile; there is no use in making a garage floor so clean that someone could eat off it. It’s a garage. Nobody eats of a garage floor, nobody you want to know, that is. The other problem with obliterating one spot is that all of the sudden, other not-so-dirty-looking places start to look more grimy than when you started. I soon found myself in an endless feedback loop of fervent foot mopping.
Somewhere in all the dirt and grime, and looking for Willie's rainbows, I hit a strange emotional spot. If there is such a thing as a Runner's High, perhaps this might be described as a Mopper's Low. I thought about how I got here, in the EMT garage room in a national park in Alaska, scrubbing floors with a scouring pad under my feet. I thought about what I really wanted to do when I grow up. I thought of long lost loves. I thought of many things wholly unrelated to grease, grime, and garages. Something about a grown man singing a song first made famous by Kermit the Frog had me in a vise, squeezing both sweat and tears out of me. I held it together enough so that the rest of the crew wouldn’t notice that the strange new kid on the block who was doing odd isometric ninja exercises in the garage was also on the verge of inexplicable bawling.
My coworkers have regarded me with some suspect, for which I don’t blame them. I arrived somewhat unexplained, with a strange difficult-to-pronounce name, and for the first day, appeared to do little except serve as the personal assistant to the outsider on-site engineer (my friend J). The maintenance crew gathers at various times in the day: 8am for our initial meeting, 10am for break, 12pm to leave for lunch, 3pm for break, and 5pm to leave for the day. We have a hodge-podge of chairs seemingly randomly arranged around a long table for meeting. I’ve noticed that these chairs, while appearing to be arbitrary and nondescript, are invisibly designated. Each member of the gang seems to base some of his identity on where his butt comfortably sits during break. Since I am new, I have yet to figure out where is best to park my butt.
I also made a huge faux pas today by arriving at our 10am break late. My first union break, and I was already acting like a scab! Break is something the crew takes very seriously. At first, I thought I would get to know everyone better during these fifteen minute periods, but for whatever reason, very little is actually said during break. People sip coffee, twirl around in the chairs, pick out dirt from under their fingernails with pocket-knives. But few words are exchanged.
After dinner, J and I embarked in yet another series of common Port Alsworth activities: preparing salmon for canning and transformation into jerky. The Park Services historian had agreed to lend us his heavy duty pressure cooker for canning, and we got tips and equipment for the jerky from the maintenance and safety officer. J and I spent much of the evening washing fish, cutting fish, stuffing fish, grinding fish, mixing fish. I have to admit, however, his stash of sockeye reds was truly amazing. J had frozen much of it in solid ice, having run out of vacuum bags, and the soft bright red salmon flesh seemed to be as beautiful as it must have been on the very first day.
To make salmon jerky, you must remove the skin from the filets, thoroughly debone the fish with needlenose pliers, and put it through a grinder. For grinding, we borrowed an old-time contraption stored in an original box happily labeled "Making of the sausages" in four different languages.
At the end of our rainbow, we had a beautiful pot of ground up salmon. Patting the salmon jello was a strangely satisfying thing to do, but our work was not done. After adding jerky seasoning, the mass had to marinate overnight before being stuffed into a tube that looks like a caulk gun and then piped out onto a grate for drying in the oven. Luckily those steps had to be saved for tomorrow.
After being dropped off on my side of the bay, I went home to do a late-night prep of salmon for dinner tomorrow, during which we hoped to woo the Park historian with the massive pressure cooker for canning. I had brought along miso paste, scallions, grapefruit to marinate the fish overnight. It turns out the perfect soundtrack for late-night marinating of salmon is Shania Twain.
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