Amazon.com: Down in Bristol Bay: High Tides, Hangovers, and Harrowing Experiences on Alaska's Last Frontier: R. A.; Durr, Bob Durr: Books

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"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 Bay chronicles 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

From Publishers Weekly
Durr was chasing more than sockeye salmon when, in 1968, he traded his professorship at Syracuse University for a life soaked in fish slime and whiskey aboard a commercial gill-netter in Bristol Bay, Alaska. His colleagues thought he'd gone off the deep end, but this affecting memoir tells of a search for a safe port "amid the storm of modern insanities" washing over a world cut off from its natural roots. In the Eskimos, Aleuts and Athabaska Indians of the north, Durr found "people whose forebears and culture glowed like a beacon in my mind, guiding me into the deep channels of our human nature." Durr is a Natty Bumppo for the flower-power era, a voluntary outcast from so-called civilization. Evoking the earnest soul-seeking of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Durr spins out a metaphysics of adventure in which life is lived as a kind of "sustained brinkmanship." Fueled by equal parts Walt Whitman and Jim Beam, the work occasionally evinces a Kerouacian lust for raw experience and the great outdoors. Yet Durr knows that his idealized version of unspoiled nature knocks hard against the alcoholic reality of Native Alaskans dispossessed of their traditional lifestyle. Amid burlesque sea tales and Dionysian escapades, the author ponders the fine line between mere shiftlessness and a Tao-like wisdom: "Was he just another wild and crazy guy, another loose cannon, or was he the real thing, a Zen lunatic, a man living zestfully on the frontier of life?" The question bobs like a buoy in Durr's mind, a nagging tether from which he can never cut free.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Down in Bristol Bay: High Tides, Hangovers, and Harrowing Experiences on Alaska's Last Frontier (Hardcover)

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