FROM THE NETS OF A
SALMON FISHERMAN
Doubleday, 1973
On Indian reservations in the states in the 50s and early 60s there was no national culture in evidence. No TV there, or anywhere really, no radio, and no town or village social life. On the Papago we drove to the copper mining town of Ajo every Saturday for groceries and mail. I had three fields of endeavor: taking long excursions on foot, rock hunting and exploring; school work and a little gardening; and reading. The voluminous reading led to writing. I would write stories, all to be reread and thrown away in the following year. Kid stuff. But when I got my GED in Alakanuk on the lower Yukon and subsequently went off to college in Fairbanks, I had my latest writing effort with me. Assigned with the rest of the class of my freshman English course to write a story, I just dolled out one of the chapters of the novel I already had in the bag.
Good move. It got me into the university writer’s workshop and ultimately became From The Nets of a Salmon Fisherman, accepted and published by Doubleday.
FIRST PARAGRAPH
This is not a story of protest, not an expose’. It is a story about fishermen. A few of the men in this story are now dead, and it is only four years since I pulled my last net out of the Bering Sea. Of the dead, two white men died of heart attacks and the Eskimos fell out of their skiffs and drowned. Soon, perhaps, the Eskimos will start dying of heart attacks. All the things in this book are more or less true as I remember them. But then I am not responsible for my memory. The fish I caught years ago are a lot bigger now.
BUCKET
McRoy and Blackburn, 1985
Teaching in the bush, inventiveness in a situation with limited resources was critical. My mother discovered a way to do art that was unknown then, and now is impossible because technology has made the materials unavailable. It turned out that the color on old style carbon paper was a wax-based ink, and you could transfer the color to other objects with a household iron because the heat would melt the wax. Using this technique she illustrated a little manuscript that had been lying around for some years, and the combination became the children’s’ story, Bucket.
FIRST PARAGRAPH
Once there was a little town stretched out above a long crescent beach. Berry bogs and meadows tumbled down from rocky hills and ran grassy fingers into the spaces between buildings in the town. A couple of town lengths down the beach the sand and water both washed up against cliffs that rose out of the sea to a high lookout hill. Old ravens did hammer-head stalls and wing-overs in updrafts above the bluffs. In summer a sea breeze kept all the mosquitoes inland. It ruffled and tumbled the grass and flashes of light coursed through the meadows when the grass stems turned their silvery undersides to the sun.
COLORS OF THE MORNING SKY
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McRoy and Blackburn, 2018
In 1977 I acquired a full keel sail boat hull that had never been finished and modified it to be a hip-pocket long liner, complete with tankable hold for ice slush capable of 3000 lbs of product. It was a “paid vacation” scale fishery and I went on several trips a year with it for 40 years. My son got his apprenticeship in the marine world on the Dusky Rock. Over those years I acquired a mental library of images of all sorts--weather, fish, crew, friendships, the local Southeast Alaska dock culture, a lifetime cross section of Alaska. “Colors. . “ is an emphatically adult novella in which I indulged those images and adventures, with some genuine Juneau history thrown in for background.
I wanted illustrations because there is so much visual imagery of Southeast waters and conditions. I was getting nowhere when a mutual friend introduced me to Lue Isaac. We were in business from the first day.
FIRST PARAGRPH
Call me The Captain. I was a village kid. My ethnicity is a little unclear, touch of Aleut or Athabascan maybe. It’s too much to hope for something noble and dangerous like Apache. I’m probably just a German. Well, for that matter, as far as dangerous is concerned, try 55 million dead in six years starting in 1938. That rather puts the Apaches in the shade.
WAITING FOR THE WEATHER
Where Colors of The Morning Sky was whimsical fiction, Waiting For The Weather is a serious shot at the events and history of a lifetime, embedded in the history of the times and the state of Alaska. It is something like 40% personal, 60% national and state history. As an accident of my trades, work offshore, and dumb luck, I rubbed shoulders with most of the headline events since statehood, to include the 1964 earthquake and the Exxon oil spill.
A few chapters are devoted to my parents. They came out of the great depression and the second world war and their lives reflect a lot of American issues. They wrestled with the challenges of teaching in villages and knew that the BIA system was not serving the indigenous kids as well as it could have. My father created what was known as the Eek art program which basically was known nationally in education circles. A piece on Eek art was to have appeared in Life Magazine but it turned out to be scheduled for an issue after the magazine folded. The manuscript contains some 30 color plates of student art from those years from three different schools.
FIRST PARAGRAPH
One early spring I was given a glimpse of things as they had been during all the centuries before––dawn on the Lower Yukon River at the center of a bowl of sky darkened by wild geese rising. They were spring geese in full clamor, pushing the edge of the weather, pushing their luck. The ponds were full of needle ice and old wet snow slugged the willow breaks. The flocks were concentrated on the sand beaches for miles along the lower Yukon and they rose in clouds with the morning mist to see what another day's thaw would bring.
