Not just about the rise and decline of traditional sportfishing, screaming Penn reels, leaping wahoo and tail-walking marlin, "Hatteras Blues" should appeal widely for its social, economic and natural history of a place, and for its dramatic human stories. "Only connect," says one of the chapter epigraphs, and Tom Carlson connects deeply with a fast disappearing culture. Hatteras fishermen and villagers befriend the writer and eventually tell stories that are by turns tragic and comic. Carlson, who taught creative nonfiction and American literature for 32 years at the University of Memphis, clearly admires these people: "The Outer Banks have never been for the faint of heart or the dry of feet. ... The inhabitants ... didn't merely adapt to their environment; they became indistinguishable from it -- its moody, impetuous weather, its restless land, its willfulness, its stubborn insistence on beating the odds."
Until the late 1930s, only commercial fishing existed on the Carolina coast, but Ernal Foster had a hunch: If you build it, they will come. The "it" was the Albatross, a sportfishing boat made of juniper at a cost of, according to Ernal's specs, $805 -- his life savings. Family and neighbors thought he'd gone bonkers, but after scant seasons and the intervening war, photos of his record marlin, sailfish and tuna appeared in state newspapers. And customers hungry to fish the big blue water began queuing up for charters.
The jacket photo of this handsomely made and compellingly written book shows father and son in a wooden boat holding the ventral fin of a huge marlin hung from a gin pole by its tail, the bill almost as long as the boy, dock and fish houses in the background. We're looking at a working village that sits 40 miles out to sea on a 175-mile ribbon of endlessly shifting sand. Father and son are Ernal and Ernie Foster of the clan that helped make Hatteras Village "The Billfish Capital of the World." In this circa 1950s photo, Captain Foster gazes into a catch-and-release future where such "kill-and-hang bragfests" are no longer acceptable. The image, like others in the book, subtly introduces major themes of change and loss in the elegiac way of most period photos.
Another picture shows the threatened Albatross fleet (now owned by son Ernie): three nearly identical white siblings with flared bows, rounded sterns and candy-striped cane pole outriggers -- boats of a bygone design now less popular than "plastic" go-fast boats with air-conditioning, television, galleys and everything short of pool tables. Implicit is the question of how traditional fishermen like Ernie Foster can compete with wealthy owners who buy such boats for tax write-offs and hire off-island captains who don't pay for fuel and think nothing of running twin diesels wide open to be first at the bite. Add to the equation rocketing real estate prices, powerful developers, eyesore fish houses and deep-water access, and you realize another source of the blues: "commercial Darwnism at its unsurprising and banal best."
The book is also partly about Tom Carlson's blues. Hatteras Village reawakens memories of the New Jersey shore and his boyhood passion for fishing and the sea. Carlson finds much in common with Captain "Tall Bill" Van Druten, "six feet six inches and thin as a bulrush," one of the first skippers to take him on an offshore charter. Tall Bill coincidentally grew up on the Jersey shore and even went to Carlson's Corner, a waterfront eatery owned by the author's father.
More important, Tall Bill has just lost his wife of 33 years and is struggling with grief. Carlson's own wife of many years has a degenerative disease and not long to live. On another offshore trip, Ernie Foster confides to the author that he came home one day to an empty house; his wife had left with the children and filed for divorce -- a different form of death. Thus Carlson's book project, instead of being a distraction from impending loss, teaches him how to prepare, how to grieve with grace and dignity.
Carlson isn't a pantheist, but the fishermen of his boyhood taught him that "fishing could actually provide you with a way of looking at the world." One day he experiences the magical generosity of nature when Jake, an old salt, leads him to a pebble bed in shallows next to the pier and tells him to watch. Young Carlson sees nothing but the flash of shells and the shine of clacking pebbles until Jake teaches him about lateral current and "plucks a dime ... from the clattering expanse of retreating pebbles. Then a quarter."
Equally moving is a moment with Tall Bill when they spot humpback whales. Carlson experiences a sudden release from sorrow, what he calls -- echoing T.S. Eliot -- the "peace that passeth understanding." He doesn't say the gleaming black flukes are heaven-sent, but "It was not hard to believe that there was some kind of divinity glistening in this common miracle I'd just witnessed."
Carlson's prose is clean and unpretentious, often humorous, and on occasion turns to poetry as when, from offshore, he looks landward and sees "a turbulent sea mottled with foam and shards of chromium light reaching a long, steady brushstroke of sand topped with green," or when he observes sleepy gulls and pelicans atop white-streaked pilings: "The sea gulls stirred first. Then the pelicans heaved themselves into motion, like old athletes, creaked forward, their worn wings sculling the hot air."
Interesting stats periodically enliven our reading. We learn that Hatteras Village has 632 residents and 26 cemeteries; that close to a thousand ships have gone down off the Banks; that the hurricane of 1899 alone sank 50 ships; that more than 60 hurricanes have hit the Carolina coast since 1806; that wahoo hit a bait in excess of 50 mph; that Hatteras Inlet constantly moves to the south; that beaches above the inlet migrate westward at an amazing rate of five feet per year (the recent and costly rescue of the historic lighthouse is dramatic proof).
"Hatteras Blues" is a hybrid work of art that alternately reads like history, personal essay or "Walden," and is at its best a meditation on fishing the self and the world to find meaning amid flux. The book is not plotted but has a fine sense of structure and takes us through moments of wonder and sorrow, fear and comedy, to a triumph of the human spirit. It begins with a devastating hurricane in 1930 and ends in 2003 with Hurricane Isabel after which Hatteras villagers go to church, give thanks for being alive, and begin to rebuild.
When he is not fishing, Peter Makuck teaches English at East Carolina University and edits the journal "Tar Review Poetry."
