If you are one of the millions of Americans who have been seduced by “Deadliest Catch,” the Discovery Channel’s testosterone-fueled show about king crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, then you know that commercial fishing is dangerous work — and irresistible to watch. Every year, boats sink, fishermen drown and captains clash with the elements, all of which result in huge ratings. In Bill Carter’s “Red Summer,” his account of four summers working as a set-net fisherman in a rough town in southwestern Alaska, the fishing and the weather are less extreme, but the danger level is tantalizingly high. Death, we are reminded, is always one mistake away — a shoelace caught in a net, a skiff overloaded with salmon. Fall into the 42-degree water and you’ll be dead in minutes. But if you live in a town as tough as Egegik, it’s the lifestyle that’s going to kill you, not the fishing.
“Red Summer” is about life at the extreme edge of the food chain, and nowhere is the food chain more violent, more awesome or more intense than in Egegik.
Every year tens of millions of sockeye salmon surge into the Egegik river to spawn, and 1,000 to 2,000 commercial fishermen converge to greet them — many with gill nets. From late June to early August, the fishermen pull about nine million salmon out of the river system, a bloody haul that drives the town’s economy and sustains its tiny year-round population. Thousands more go to the grizzly bears that wander the shores (and sometimes wander into people’s kitchens), and to the eagles, wolves, marmots, foxes and wolverines that make up the neighborhood. But the characters in town are just as wild as the critters, and their fight to survive is just as brutal.
No comments:
Post a Comment