Matt. Fresh-faced, curly blonde hair, baseball cap, smelled like last night's beer and cigarettes. Cargo pants, heather grey gym T-shirt. 26. Thought I was 30 (damn it!).
I had intended to read Out during the train ride, but we started talking because we wanted to look out the window, but we were in an awkward row that faced the space between windows. We cleverly finagled the drapes, voila, kept talking.
Matt is from a suburb of Detroit and went to school in the Upper Peninsula, majoring in outdoor recreation (I was not aware of this major's existence). His mother is a nurse in OB/GYN and hearts delivering babies. He moved out to Oregon after he and his girlfriend of 8 years broke up; she moved to Boston, and he wanted to physically get as far as possible from her within the continental United States.
He eventually moved up to Washington state (working in Olympic National Park), and from there to Alaska, where the job he thought he had secured fell through. After venting at a bar, the bartender hooked him up with her husband's work in fishery. He has been counting salmon 7 months out of a year for 4 years ever since, from 5:30am to 9pm. His company is his iPod (on it? "indie" rock).
He really loves the town he works in, which has about 1,500 people. He says, because it's so small, everyone is held accountable. The whole town relies on the fishing industry, and everyone knows and respects each other. Surprisingly, it's a democratic town.
For the other 5 months out of the year, he does impulsive things, like follow a girl he slept with for less than 2 weeks to Athens, GA, where he found temp work in the botanical garden and decided that he hates her. He stayed there for about two months before traveling back West, slowly making his way back up to Alaska for the start of the season.
Matt wants to get a graduate degree someday. Sees himself counting salmon for at most another 4 years. Hopes to move down to Hawaii. In the meantime, he's delicately dodging his Inuit friend's handsome sister's sexual advances.
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