Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman - Softcover

Carey, Richard Adams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 061805698X ISBN 13: 9780618056989

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2000

Synopsis

With its spectacular beaches and charming towns, Cape Cod is known around the world as a vacation spot and a summer retreat for the well-to-do. But there is another Cape Cod, a hidden, hardscrabble, year-round world whose hunter-gatherer economy dates back to the Bay Colony. The world of the independent fisherman is one 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 is a way of life deep in the American grain.
Haunted by the numbers of family fishermen who have recently been forced to abandon the profession, Richard Adams Carey spent a year among a handful of men who stubbornly refuse to do so. Reminiscent of the work of William Warner and Joseph Mitchell, AGAINST THE TIDE is a masterly profile of four New England fishermen in which every page opens onto something more profound: maritime history, maritime ecology, and the poetic celebration of a special American place.

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Review

Like many kids fortunate enough to spend summers by the shore, writer/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." During the '90s, when headlines described the demise of New England's small-boat family fishermen, he decided to head back to Cape Cod to learn what he could about a threatened way of life 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 details 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. Throughout colonial times, for instance, fishermen regularly caught lobsters 4 feet long and weighing 45 pounds! Such an ancient, sizable creature is nearly inconceivable 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

About the Author

Richard Adams Carey was born in Connecticut and educated at Harvard College. After his graduation, in 1973, he went to work in a northwestern sawmill, and he has since divided his time between Alaska and New England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 061805698X
• ISBN 13: 9780618056989
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384