My first day on the job, when my boss handed me a pair of oversized plastic earmuffs, I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t actually thinking much of anything at the time, mostly because it was five-thirty in the morning and I had already been up for an hour. That I had somehow managed to pilot my bike through the streets of Portland in the half-light of pre-dawn and arrived at the wharfs safely was a miracle. The asphalt was a conveyor belt, street signs and traffic lights a non-issue, and then there I was, looking down the sketchiest dock ladder ever into a waiting fiberglass skiff. Earmuffs? They somehow made sense a half hour later at our destination, a floating tin shed…