"Red Summer": The adventure of salmon fishing in Alaska

"Red Summer: The Danger, Madness, and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village"

by Bill Carter

Scribner, 234 pp., $25

Author and documentary director Bill Carter lives in southern Arizona. But like a bird migrating to the Arctic to nest each summer, he traveled north for four summers to fish the annual sockeye salmon run on the river flowing past the tiny village of Egegik, Alaska.

Pronounced Ig-GEE-gek, the name of the settlement means "swift" or "throat" in Yup'ik Eskimo, a people with at least a 6,000-year history there, a place where they, too, came to fish. Today, a few hardy souls winter over in this windblown, treeless tundra 350 miles southwest of Anchorage on the Alaskan Peninsula's west side, but most — like Carter — live most of the time in the Lower 48.

A friend recommended Carter for the job. The day after he accepted the offer by phone, he hopped a series of flights. When he arrived in Egegik, he knew neither his boss, Sharon Hart, nor the first thing about commercial fishing. Everything was new to him, so he's a reader's ideal narrator, explaining what he learns and experiences.

Take Egegik, for instance. The only access is by sea or by plane, making supplies expensive, hard to get or both. Streets aren't paved and sidewalks are cobbled together using wood planks. Carter bunks at Sharon's cabin, "a run-down firetrap with shingles clattering in the wind and a roof that leaks," no hot water and a deadbolt on the back door to keep out bears. The nearest bathroom and shower are a half mile away.

Without salmon, Egegik would have no reason to exist. But every year, tens of millions of sockeye, called "reds," enter Bristol Bay, driven to spawn in their home rivers. Almost 9 million are caught in Egegik alone, either by drift nets trailing boats of up to 32 feet or, like Sharon's outfit, by set nets anchored to land and running to a skiff of about 15 to 20 feet. Fish are taken from the nets by hand or pick, resulting in a host of painful repetitive-motion syndromes.

Carter soon learns about the work's long hours, erratic "openings" — four- to 48-hour periods when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game permits fishing — and countless dangers. He also finds the place and its people fascinating. Hard workers, fishermen make the bulk of their income during the sockeye season, so they are a "greedy tribe," he asserts, more likely NRA than Sierra Club members, folks who watch NASCAR on Sundays, shop at Wal-Mart and vote Republican. They are part "carpenter, plumber, welder, weatherman, cook, mechanic, businessman ... priest, drill sergeant, cop and outlaw" — Carter admires them yet believes they would "destroy the salmon run in a few years" without government supervision and severe fines.

Carter admits he's often asked why he goes back to difficult, dangerous work in brutal weather for lousy wages. "At the end of each season I promise myself I will never do it again," he writes, then in the next breath, explains he needs "a place where nature still has the upper hand, reminding me that my existence is fragile and fleeting." Such places, he says, "reconnect us to our primal senses ... " Such places, he adds reverently, still make humans sweat "because the grizzly is at the top of the food chain."