Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman

Amazon.com Price: $23.49 (as of 06/05/2019 15:05 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

The world of the independent fisherman is a world of constant peril, of arcane folkways and expert knowledge, of calculated risk and self-reliance — and of freedom won daily through backbreaking, solitary work. It’s a lifestyle deep in the American grain. Richard Adams Carey spent a year with four New England fisherman, hauling traps, seeding clam beds, learning their work and why they do it. He tells of their luck, good and bad, on the water; of the winds and tides that toy with their boats and their lives; of the currents of history and the squalls of fisheries law and politics that continually threaten to swamp their livelihood. Reminiscent of the work of both John McPhee and Bill McKibben, Against the Tide is narrative journalism at its best, a masterly profile of four working men that on every page opens into something more: maritime history, marine ecology, and the poetic celebration of a special American place.
Like many kids fortunate enough to spend summers by the shore, creator/journalist Richard Adams Carey grew up with a healthy respect for fishermen and the sea, “a world of astonishing color and shape and texture, of surprise and a perceptible knife-edge of menace.” Right through the ’90s, when headlines described the demise of New England’s small-boat family fishermen, he determined to head back to Cape Cod to be informed what he could about a threatened way of living and the forces–political, commercial, ecological–which imperil the survival of the fish the industry depends on. To this end, he spent a year working alongside four veterans of the Cape’s inshore waters: a crewmate on a dragger (a boat that catches groundfish with a dragnet towed along the ocean bottom); a lobsterman; a long-liner (who sets quarter-mile or longer fishing lines sporting baited hooks every three feet); and a quahog dredger (essentially a clammer who harvests in bulk). Carey deftly weaves the main points of their hard-won, unpredictable lives with passages on local and global fishing history, the minutiae of national and regional legislation severely regulating the fishing industry, the vicissitudes of the weather, and a smattering of stories and anecdotes. During colonial times, for instance, fishermen continuously caught lobsters 4 feet long and weighing 45 pounds! Such an ancient, sizable creature is nearly unimaginable today.

Despite the tenacity of the men he fished with, Carey acknowledges that the owner-operators of small family boats off New England are likely going the way of the family farmer. Yet he reminds us that the issues deciding their fate concern us all: “how to tap this continent’s wealth without plundering and despoiling it; how to reconcile our hard-wired demand for growth and consumption with a husbandman’s concern for sustainability; how to mark our limits and resolutely stay within them.” –Svenja Soldovieri

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Northeast » New England » Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman

Recent Products