Product Description

A vivid, unforgettable account of the danger, pain, and joy of working on a salmon fishing boat and living in a small village on the farthest edge of Alaska

Set in the tiny Native village of Egegik on the shores of Alaska's Bristol Bay, Bill Carter's Red Summer is the thrilling story of one man's journey from novice to seasoned fisherman over the course of four beautiful, brutal summers in one of the earth's few remaining wild places. As millions of salmon race toward their annual spawning grounds, Carter learns the ancient, backbreaking trade of the set net fisherman, one of the most exhilarating and dangerous jobs in the world.

Housed in a dilapidated shack with no hot water and boarded-up windows that keep the bears at bay, Carter spends his days battling the elements on the river and his nights drinking whiskey with a memorable group of hardworking, hard-living characters. There's Sharon, the tough, charismatic woman who runs Carter's fishing crew; Carl, her stoic but warmhearted colleague; and a half-dozen local fishermen, many born and raised in this unforgiving place. Their stories -- harrowing, touching, full of humor -- all underscore the credo of the village's fishermen: Do the work or leave.

Carter's crew is imperiled a number of times as tides rise, nets are snagged, and the weight of too many fish threatens to sink their boat. Written with gusto and honesty, Red Summer brims with astonishing human experience and joins the grand tradition of books written by great American outdoorsmen-writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, and Sebastian Junger. Red Summer will appeal not only to fishermen, naturalists, adventurers, and armchair anthropologists alike but also to anyone who has ever yearned, however privately, to escape the bonds of modern civilization.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271377 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
"Red Summer is a wonderful book about a rare subject, the mysterious pleasure of brutally hard work. Bill Carter proves again that he is a first-rate writer in the fascinating tradition of Junger and Krakauer."-- Jim Harrison

"Go fall off the edge of the earth and you just might get to a place where life still throbs. Bill Carter fell and felt the blasts of the Bering Sea blow away our pious lies about ourselves and the thing we call nature. This vivid and engaging book sketches the way to get home before we kill all hope of home. And the fishing ain't bad either."-- Charles Bowden author of Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

"A simple but satisfying blend of memoir, cultural anthropology and environmental analysis"-- Kirkus

"...A vivid chronicle of life in Egekik, an isolated village in the Aleutian chain and an outset of struggling families who depend on nature's cycle to survive.-- National Geographic Adventure

"...An honest, refreshingly understated look at a profession that's known for, well, exaggeration>"-- Outside Magazine

"...A resonant memoir..."-- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"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 Egekik."-- New York Times Book Review

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Arrival

I look out the plane's copilot window and from up here the view is perfect and flat in all directions except to the south, where sixty miles away the ground rises in a cone-shaped volcano: the snowcapped Mount Peulik. The sun leans heavily toward the north pole and the land abruptly ends as it disappears into Bristol Bay, which from the air, on a clear day, looks like a flat plate of tinted glass. Looking east and west the flat tundra landscape spreads outward, disappearing at the bend of the earth.

My destination is the small village of Egegik, 350 miles southwest of Anchorage on the western side of the Alaskan Peninsula, a stretch of land that extends out from the mainland 475 miles, and averages 50 miles wide. Cut off from the interior by a vast mountain range, the peninsula is geographically isolated, even from Alaskans. At its farthest point west the Aleutian chain begins, a 1,200-mile strip of islands aimed at Russia in the shape of a kite's tail. The only way to Egegik is by sea or plane, and by sea one must navigate the violent waters of the Bering Sea, not something done by anyone other than commercial fishermen or cargo ships.

I boarded the plane in King Salmon, Alaska, and strapped myself in the copilot chair. The only other seats on the plane were occupied, one with cargo and the other with a female passenger; a Native woman who was busy chatting with the pilot about something. Thrilled by the landscape below I quickly put in my earplugs, and adjusted my sunglasses to shield my eyes from the Alaskan sun, that cosmic torch that taunts all summertime visitors to the Great North.

Now I scan the earth for any clues of a human footprint. A house. A road. A discarded boat, or heap of trash. But there is nothing. From my angle there isn't even a tree, at least one standing over four feet tall. There are no hills, just a flatness, the kind one imagines astronauts see as they peer down at earth from space, the world smashed flat by the relative distance. But there are the thousand shallow ponds that dot the tundra, a broken mirror shimmering the reflection of the plane's metal, exposing how small we are in comparison to the landscape before us.

These pockets of water fill topographical wounds created ten thousand years ago, as the last of the great glaciers slowly receded, scraping the land as they disappeared, like a giant John Deere bulldozer clearing a road. A road the size of Tennessee. As the millennia passed, mountains disappeared, pulverized to rock and pebbles, leaving behind indentations in the earth's surface, which then became lakes and ponds, making the area resemble a gigantic soccer field full of potholes after a fresh rain.

The lack of trees can shock the first-time visitor. The flora is thick but short and bent over, genetically altered by thousands of years of wind blasting down from the Arctic with nearly hurricane force. That isn't to say there is a lack of vegetation. The ground is teeming with green. Tundra grass, alders, and willow squeeze together and cover every square inch of the land. They grow in low thickets, each species intertwining with the next, growing sideways instead of upward.

With the wind behind us, we fly over a river and a tiny village. It looks deserted, not a person in sight, only a cloud of dust rising up behind a single van driving toward the airstrip. There are a few large water tanks, some heavy equipment, and a row of sea cargo containers, but no people. Several large buildings are covered with rusted tin roofing on the bank of the river. Steam billows from a smokestack. This must be the cannery. Most of the homes look abandoned, the grass growing as high as the windows. As we bank I get a closer look at the Egegik River, which spans more than a mile from one bank to the other. The water is muddy, not clear as I had envisioned.

The plane sets down on a stretch of gravel on the bank of the river, just behind the town. A lone orange wind sock stands at attention; the pilot guesses 30 miles per hour, says that is normal out here. There are no buildings at this airport, no small tin shack with the word egegik on it; there isn't even another plane in sight. Instead a van is waiting at the edge of the gravel, near the grass.

The van pulls up to the belly of the plane and we all pitch in, quickly unloading the luggage, along with the U.S. mail. Some groceries and boxes of frozen goods are transferred as well. The driver of the van is a small Native woman with a round flat face and Asian features. Her age is a mystery and she laughs loudly with the young woman from the plane, who also has a round Native face and Asian features. They are talking as if they have been having a conversation for the last two hours. I don't listen. Instead I hold my backpack close to my side, staring out the window as the van begins to move, trying to pick up any clues that will help shape my perception of this outpost. The driver heads down a single-track dirt road toward town.

"Hey, where you going?" the driver suddenly yells at no one in particular.

I say nothing. The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror. "Yeah you, I'm talking to you. Who you working for?"

"Sharon Hart," I say, blurting out the name of the stranger who called me twenty-four hours ago, asking if I wanted a job as a commercial fisherman.

"Sharon's fishing partner is Carl, my husband," says the passenger. "I'm Jannelle."

"And, she's my daughter," says the driver, pointing at the passenger.

Driving, we pass a few people walking but no one waves, their heads pitched downward as if staring at their feet. I count more four-wheel ATVs than cars, and on one ATV there are stacked several people. It's hard to say whether they are mothers with their children or older siblings with their younger siblings or maybe just friends all riding together.

Finally the van stops in front of a small shack with a caribou rack above the front door. "Sharon's house," says Jannelle, pointing at the dilapidated structure. "There was an opening today, she won't be home for a while. Carl's still on the Fiasco, halibuting."

I nod my head as if I understand.

"Get out. And shut the door," yells the driver. Stunned, I don't move.

My first instinct is to compare this place to a shantytown in the Third World. In some ways it does resemble many I've visited. But there is one clear difference. In poor villages, the world over, the local people are almost always friendly. They may not have food on the table or running water, but they welcome you in. And the poorer the place, the nicer they are. At the other end of the scale are the rich, locked behind tall gates, with twenty-four-hour security guards. But here I am confused. Egegik, by the looks of it, is poor, but the people act rich. I know within the first minutes of being here that this will be a difficult place to understand.

"Now!" the driver shouts, waiting for me to get out of the van.

Standing on the road, I look away from the driver, hoping to discourage her from speaking further to me. The passenger leans out the window, raises her eyebrows, and playfully nods her head in my direction.

"Welcome to Egegik," she says, and the van drives away, spitting sand in my face.Copyright © 2008 by Bill Carter

Customer Reviews

Sockeye Running: A primer on set netting
For the beginning Bristol Bay net fisherman, this is a good book and it doesn't matter if you are going to be a boat based (drifter) or shore based (set netter). It gives a good flavor of the commitment, friendships and hardships faced by the set netters and adds a lot of personal characters traits to the plot. I drifted for a number of years and it provided me an insight into their side of the fishery and brought back a lot of good (and bad) memories. A good don't want to set it down kind of read that made it through our whole family. (Dave Neault)

Bill brought to life what few have ever experienced.
I read Bill's book, "Red Summer" and did not put it down until I finished it. I have first-hand knowledge as to how I know Bill brought the characters and way of living to life; not because I was there but because Sharon, the main "character" is my cousin. He captured my cousins' (David and Ron as well) personalities and lives just as I have known them to be.

I knew my cousin Sharon chose a hard life after she and I graduated from high school (I went to college and she went fishing; this was 1979 and she has done so to this day) but I never knew just how hard that life was for her, and I never, ever heard a complaint about it.

Bill wrote of his life with Sharon as his captain, and with the folks of Egegik, in such a way that you feel as though you are right there with them all. He brings you in from the first page and you feel saddened at the end because you want to read more!

Thanks Bill for writing of your experiences so descriptively that I felt I had spent wonderful, miserable, exciting, tiring, and rewarding summers with my cousin.

- Barb

Good Read As To The Action, the Rest is A Matter of Personal Taste
The book divides itself between the commercial salmon fishing trade, on the one hand, and environmental politics/philosophy/policy on the other. When addressing the former, the writing is crisp and clear. There is lots of action, fascinating characters, and plenty to hold your attention -- just a good, solid read. He really puts you into the place, the action, and the people. When it shifts to environmental politics, philosophy, and policy, it helps a great deal if you share the author's point of view. A journalist by trade, he has strong opinions. If you don't agree, you can skip those parts and get back to the action, which is well worth the time.