Fishcamp: Life On An Alaskan Shore - Hardcover

Lord, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559635258 ISBN 13: 9781559635257

Publisher: Island Press, 1997

Synopsis

"Summers, I live at fishcamp. June through August, Mondays and Fridays, my partner and I catch and sell salmon that pass our beach on their way to spawning streams. The rest of the week, and parts of May and September, Ken and I mend nets, comb the rocky shoreline for useful poles and cottonwood bark, do a thousand camp chores and projects. We live quite happily in a tiny cabin at the top of the beach." --from Fishcamp

For the past eighteen summers, Nancy Lord and her partner Ken have made a living, and made a life, fishing for salmon off the west side of Cook Inlet on the southern coast of Alaska. In Fishcamp, Lord provides a nuanced and engrossing portrait of their days and months in camp at the inlet.

Beginning with their arrival by plane on a freshly thawed lake, she describes their joys and tribulations as spring gives way to summer and the long months of summer unfold. With poetic cadence and magical tone, Lord draws the reader into life at camp, sharing experiences that range from the mundane to the sublime: the mending of nets; the muscle-wrenching labor of the catch; the exquisite pleasure of an improvised hot-tub; the often unnoticed bounty of the inlet's flora and fauna. Interwoven throughout the descriptions of quotidian adventure are threads of the deeper history of the region -- stories and legends of the native Dena'ina; anecdotes about past and current inlet residents; discussions of the lives of their neighbors, both human and animal, who, like them, live with fish.

Fishcamp is Nancy Lord's eloquent paean to the place she calls home. In clear and richly textured prose, she captures the simple beauty of a life lived with nature, "a part" rather than "apart." As Lord explains, she shows us in Fishcamp "something about what even one place and its infinitely varied life contributes to the connections among us all and to the wholes we call 'world' and 'culture.'...Wherever our places are and whatever we do in them, perhaps we might all begin to pay more attention to the little and big things that do indeed connect in profound ways to all the rest, miles and eons and cultures apart."

Fishcamp is a remarkable combination of personal, cultural, and natural history from what will surely be recognized as one of the most talented new voices of our time.

About this title

Review:

Nancy Lord writes like an angel about the hard, often lonely, and always rewarding work of fishing along an agate-strewn Alaskan inlet, where she and her partner do what she calls the "sustaining work" of landing evasive salmon far less efficiently than do the neighborhood grizzly bears. That sustaining work grows ever more difficult, she writes, as it becomes more unusual for individual fishers to market their goods in the Lower 48, the province of large-scale food distributors and of the "pale imitation that packages well." Reading this lovely book may well make you hungry--and not a little envious of Lord, who seems to have found a little corner of paradise in the backwoods of the far north.

About the Author:

Nancy Lord's previous books include Survival, a short-story collection. She lives in Homer, Alaska, where she writes, fishes commercially, and promotes marine conservation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Island Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1559635258
• ISBN 13: 9781559635257
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 279