Against the Tide : The Fate of the New England Fisherman

by Carey, Richard Adams

• ISBN13: 9780618056989
• ISBN10: 061805698X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-06-15
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1	(11)
Siegfried's Fabulous Horde	12	(34)
Ivy Day in the Committee Room	46	(29)
Not as Bad as They're Crying It to Be	75	(24)
The Ghost of Harry Hunt	99	(24)
Wampum	123	(17)
Piss and Vinegar	140	(6)
The Solace of Outward Objects	146	(9)
Terminator Run	155	(23)
Always Hopefully	178	(23)
A Sea of Troubles	201	(17)
Another Fire Drill	218	(26)
The True Atlantic House	244	(40)
In Cod We Trust	284	(36)
Men's Lives	320	(36)
Epilogue	356	(11)
Glossary	367	(2)
Notes	369	(7)
Bibiography	376	(4)
Acknowledgments	380