Down in Bristol Bay: High Tides, Hangovers, and Harrowing Experiences on Alaska's Last Frontier
"The frontier," writes Bob Durr, "has always been a peculiarly American obsession. In the early days it meant the possibility of a new start: if you were down on your luck ... you could head west into the unknown. But it was more than that, too...." The very existence of a frontier meant that there was a way out, an escape from the confines and corruption of civilized life.In 1963 at age 43, Durr decided to face his own obsession: a lifelong yearning for an existence "reduced to elementals" and a profound distaste for the comfortable life. He began an adventure that ultimately led him to abandon his tenured professorship at Syracuse University and move his family to southcentral Alaska, America's last frontier.Down in Bristol Baychronicles Durr's transformation from academic to frontiersman. Between 1964 and 1968, Durr left his family each spring and headed for Bristol Bay, Alaska, to establish himself as a commercial salmon fisherman--the best way "to earn a living consistent with my overriding wish to live in the woods"--no minor feat for a man with no training or experience in his new trade. But he soon found out that his survival in Bristol Bay was equally a matter of being accepted into the hard-drinking, sometimes dangerous, always outrageous clan of Lower-48 transplants and Alaska natives known around the Bay as D Inn Crowd.Durr has written an unapologetic, rollicking, late-life coming-of-age story full of boozy revelations, adventure, and narrowly-averted disasters (how to catch many fish and not sink the boat while knocking back staggering quantities of Jim Beam). Thankfully, his story isn't the usual fortysomething fling with the rough life. After all these years, Durr still lives in Alaska, in a log cabin he built by himself.--Svenja Soldovieri--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.