Adventures in Alaska
Reviewed by Kristin Kloberdanz
CONSUMER HEALTH INTERACTIVEWorking on the Edge
By Spike Walker
St. Martin's Press
Paperback 239 pp $13.95 Nights of Ice
By Spike Walker
Griffin Trade Paperback
Paperback 224 pp $12.95 
Thanks in part to the success of Sebastian Junger's bestseller, The Perfect Storm, the book market is awash in a veritable sea of fishing memoirs. These books recount personal tales of the grueling labor and the often brutal casualties commercial fishing involves. Fisherman Spike Walker actually published his memoir, Working on the Edge, in 1991, long before The Perfect Storm debuted in 1997. Working on the Edge is an excellent, exhilarating look at king crab fishing in Alaska, as is Walker's follow-up collection of fishing stories, Nights of Ice, published in 1997. Armed with only a phone number of a college friend and quixotic dreams of the sea, Walker headed to Alaska in 1978. He was 27, and for the next seven years, he toiled on crabbing boats, raking in thousands of dollars and accumulating a good number of harrowing stories of life on the Bering Sea. An adept storyteller, Walker writes of his adventures and mishaps as he hustled to find work on the various boats. "To the nose of the pragmatist visiting Cannery Row drifted grim waves of lung-stopping ammonia, the rotting smell of oozing cannery slime, and the unrelenting odors of iodine, kelp, and decomposing microorganisms," he writes, likening Alaska to California in the Gold Rush days. "Even though I sported an empty belly, those smells renewed my spirit, filled me with a sense of opportunity and adventure, and sent romantic notions jolting through me." Through interviews, Walker also recounts the tales of other fishermen (and the few women) who have lived to tell of vessels rolling over, crew members dragged overboard after becoming entangled in fishing lines, and shipwrecks on icy deserted Alaskan shores. Exhibiting a canny ability to recreate a scene, Walker effectively conveys the physical details as well as the emotional terror that comes with each story. In the first chapter, he describes the ordeal experienced by four crew members after their boat, the Master Carl, sank: "Most frightening of all, however, was the roar of unseen storm waves breaking as they approached from off in the darkness. Some waves collapsed directly down over them, flattening the raft and its occupants and tossing both about with an incomprehensible power and fury. Other waves passed beneath them, and then the crew of the Master Carl could feel themselves rising steeply, and falling sharply. It was like being blindfolded on a never-ending roller-coaster ride." While Walker likewise describes the beauty of the sea, the thrill of the money that can be made out on the water, and the sense of satisfaction that comes from working oneself to the bone, he does not shy away from the brutality of this gritty lifestyle. He and his colleagues were expected to work 24-hour (and longer) shifts in frigid temperatures before taking only a three-hour break to sleep. In addition to severe exhaustion, Walker suffered endless nausea from being rocked about on 25-foot waves, and the knuckles in his hands would swell up to the size of golf balls. Just as the reader begins to wonder why anyone in his right mind would do this job, the season mercifully comes to an end, and Walker gets his pile of money. Working on crab boats is a gamble -- another part of its allure -- because the fishing crew is paid a percentage of the catch. He then heads off to the rowdy bars to live it up and join the other fishing hands in romanticizing their voyages -- and soon he is longing to get back out there. In Nights of Ice, Walker's follow-up book, he captures the boomtown, gold-dust spirit of the Alaskan ports. Here, however, he is a journalist relaying fishing horror stories from friends and acquaintances -- men and women who have been battered about by the ocean countless times, surviving sinkings, floods, and crashes with aplomb. While this book lacks the narrative awe of his first memoir, he again introduces a cast of salty characters, workers with a sense of humor and backbones of iron. One such figure is the captain Joe Harlan, who was just angry enough about being trapped in a sinking ship that he broke his way out by imagining himself as a sea otter. As in his previous book, Walker's writing style does not descend to whining. He is matter-of-fact in describing the hardships, but manages to capture the magnetism of deep-sea fishing along with the wretchedness. Eventually, Walker himself grew tired of the unsavory characters, the smell of the fish, the offshore drug binges, and the never-ending seasickness. After ending his fishing career, Walker retired to Oregon, but he still returns every year to catch halibut. After all, he writes, it's an addiction -- and a way of life. -- Kristin Kloberdanz, M.A., a former associate editor for Consumer Health Interactive, is an editor at Book magazine in New York City.
Reviewed by C.E. McLaughlin, MD, a professor of sports medicine at the University of California at Berkeley.
Our reviewers are members of Consumer Health Interactive's medical advisory board.
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First published October 26, 2000
Last updated March 6, 2008
Copyright © 2000 Consumer Health Interactive
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