Tucson Green Magazine
Book Review by Laura Fitzgerald
Bisbee resident Bill Carter is a fisher of men.
There. I’ve spent two hours trying not to say it in the opening paragraph of my review of his new memoir Red Summer: The Danger, Madness and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village. But he is. In the memoir, he also happens to work as a salmon fisherman off the shores of Egegik, Alaska.
The slim book put out by Scribner tells a solid story on several levels. First, it’s an adrenalin-pumping armchair adventure. Commercial fishing is among the world’s most dangerous occupations, with a higher death rate by far than any other. Carter gives a skin-tingling account of what it’s like to dance with death on a daily basis under the guise of trying to earn a few bucks.
The work is brutal. In the span of about four weeks, Carter spends hundreds of hours dislodging millions of salmon by hand from the nets strewn across the Egegik River. The skin on his fingers cracks so bad it takes Super Glue to keep it together. Several times, he nearly drowns in the rush of fish swarming down the river in their frantic effort to spawn. The tendons in his arm swell to tennis-ball size. He lives in a shack with no running water and boards on the windows to keep out bears. He regularly wakes in a cold sweat from the nightmares the place provokes in him. His fear never leaves.
“Everything up here experiences a harsh death, humans included,” Carter says in the book. “No one who stays here ever ends up in a hospice. No one drinks green tea and reads self-help books....This is a land of extremes and those who keep returning follow the silent restriction that acts as the only social law: Do the work or leave.”
Egegik’s not a postcard-pretty community. It’s remote. Violent. Unfriendly to outsiders. Almost a shantytown. The place attracts extreme personalities, so any description like zany or stupid or tough falls exponentially short. It’s through the stories Carter tells, with both objectivity and heart, that you get a real sense of the people and place. And while they’re not likely to be people you’d bond with in the real world, they’re fascinating to read about.
There’s nothing romantic about the place, but Carter views it with a poet’s eye. He finds connections between humanity’s struggle for conquest and the salmon’s desperate attempts to reach fresh water long enough to survive, spawn, then die. The other fishermen don’t struggle with the morality of what they’re doing – it’s a business and they’re entitled to seek their profits. Carter does.
“I fish commercially and slaughter thousands….each day, I find one moment, no matter how tired I am or how much slime of their guts I have in my hair or on my body, to stare into their oval black eyes. Their mouths gasp for their last breath, and I feel the weight of guilt.”
In addition to a Hemingway-esque man-against-fish story, Red Summer is compelling from an environmental standpoint, especially in light of the headlines coming out of California about the cancellation of its commercial fishing season due to the collapse of the chinook population. In layman’s terms, you get a clear explanation of the industry and the challenges it faces. The greed of the fishermen continually bumps up against the stewardship policies of U.S. Fish and Game, which through careful management ensures that enough salmon make it upriver each year to spawn and keep the species alive. It answers any questions you might have about how the industry works.
Why does he keep going back? That question is trickier to figure out, but it was foremost in mind throughout my read. It’s astoundingly difficult work, supremely dangerous, the concept of kindness to strangers doesn’t exist, and the pay isn’t even very good. Still, Carter fishes for four summers in Egegik.
Why, why, why? He says in the book, “I return to Egegik because I need a place where nature still has the upper hand, reminding me that my existence is fragile and fleeting.” I think it’s something more.
I think Carter returned for the same reason he went to Sarajevo in the middle of a war, which he chronicles in his first book, Fools Rush In: A True Story of War and Redemption, the movie version of which is currently in pre-production. Probably for the same reason he hiked across Utah with nothing more than a backpack and a tin cup.
It’s because he’s a fisher of men, and only when living on the edge does Carter find the sort of honesty and integrity in people that he craves. It’s then that he feels Alive, with a capital A. He wants to know who a person is – what humanity is -- when stripped of the comfortable yet mind-numbing world of force-fed news and cable television and corporate brainwashing.
In Red Summer, we all benefit from Carter’s curiosity without having to undertake the grueling journey ourselves.
Laura Fitzgerald is a Tucson resident and author of the novel Veil of Roses.