Against the Tide

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. This is the world of the independent fisherman, who lives by his wits on the ocean's unpredictable bounty. It's a world of arcane folkways and expert knowledge, of calculated risk and Yankee self-reliance, of freedom won daily through solitary, backbreaking work. It's a way of life deep in the American grain - enduring, yet imperiled by indifferent forces of change. Haunted by the numbers of family fishermen who have lately been forced to abandon the profession, Richard Adams Carey spent a year among a handful of men who stubbornly refuse to do so: Brian Gibbons, an eloquent, largely self-taught lobsterman; Carl Johnston, a mate on a Chatham dragger; Dan Howes, a clammer on Cape Cod Bay; and Mike Russo, a long-liner for cod and other groundfish. Working alongside these men, Carey hauled traps and seeded clam beds, learning their work and why they do it. He tells of their luck on the water, of the winds and tides that toy with their boats and their lives, of the currents of history and the squalls of fisheries politics that continuously threaten to swamp their livelihoods. And he tells of their humor and their hope, renewed with every plentiful catch and every small victory in a fisheries council boardroom.