How I Got Introduced to On Our Backs, Alaska, and Astronomical Poetry
All Along the GirlTower, 1981
A love poem brought me to On Our Backs. A great erotic gust that picked me up and dropped me down in rich dirt like Dorothy Gale.
I was twenty-two. I had one credit left to graduate from college, my “hard” science requirement. I’d transferred to U.C. Santa Cruz from Cal State Long Beach, where activism and adventure were an easy fit. But U.C.S.C. still expected me, a high school drop out, to learn my molecules and formulas.
I procrastinated. I thought I might get rich for a summer, in 1981, joining my friends who were planning a season of work in Alaskan fisheries: salmon, salmon, and more salmon. The scheme was, we’d eat donuts and fish and fly to Hawaii when the season came to a halt or our fingers went numb.
Young people like my Santa Cruz girlfriends poured into the fishing town of Cordova, Alaska, a every year with such dreams— but the summer of 1981, there was a catch. The fulltime fishery workers were o…