Ron Sanford, business teacher, was waist deep in salmon guts. He stood in a vat of discarded fish entrails, heads and blood, tasked with unclogging a drain deep beneath the surface. Wearing only fishing waders and the same sweatshirt and jeans he had put on every day for the last three weeks, Sanford reached down into the concoction.

For Sanford, this task was a welcome break from the monotony of gutting or filleting fish from 2:30 p.m.-6:30 a.m. for 21 straight days at a salmon processing plant in Alaska.

“For some people the job entailed simply scraping blood and guts out of the salmon after somebody had filleted it,” Sanford said. “That’s how you started out, because that’s a job anyone can do. You just scrape, scrape, scrape all the blood and guts out and shoot it down the line. And if you got better, you got to fillet the salmon. You got to grab it, cut it, and slide it down to the people who scraped out all the stuff.”

Despite the less-than-glamorous aspects of the job, including the long hours, lack of sleep, stench and boredom, Sanford does not regret the weeks he spent working it.

“Alaska’s beautiful, first of all,” he said. “It’s neat stories, and you got really close to the people you were with. I did it to get a down payment on a house, and I did, so it was worth it for that.”