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Down in Bristol Bay : High Tides, Hangovers, and Harrowing Experiences on Alaska's Last Frontier
Down in Bristol Bay High Tides Hangovers and Harrowing Experiences on Alaska's Last Frontier Author:Bob Durr Dr. Robert Allen Durr, literary scholar and award-winning author, one-time rising star in the East Coast academic world, former confidant to legendary writer H. L. Mencken, was the youngest person to be named full professor at Syracuse University. Then he gave it all up and went searching for paradise. He found it in Alaska. Dissatisfied with ac... more »ademia, the world of words and nervous egos, and convinced that truth, beauty, and goodness could still be found in the wild, Bob Durr set about taking the first step to get there--moving himself and his family to the last frontier, a remote region of Alaska. In 1964 he bought a boat and journeyed to Bristol Bay in hopes of becoming a commercial salmon fisherman and earning a living. He became the friend and partner of a wild man named Gene Pope, in whom he saw "alive and in person, the real thing: the authentic frontiersman." The wilderness had now assumed a human shape. And with Pope, Durr entered a world of adventure and a new dimension of mind in his effort to "prove up" as a fisherman and an Alaskan. Down in Bristol Bay catapults the reader into this last frontier and onto a sea of storms and dangers, madcap bars and drinking parties, amid the camaraderie of some rugged Alaskans, mostly native fishermen, known as D Inn Crowd. It chronicles a hard life, but not without songs and ballads, misadventures and follies, occasionally of burlesque proportions, on land as well as at sea. Combining elements of Jon Krakaur's Into the Wild, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, John McPhee's Coming Into the Country, and even Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bob Durr's Down in Bristol Bay is a powerful and raucous memoir of a man who abandoned the safe world of academia for the Alaskan wilderness to find his own kind of primal sanity.« less