In Rough Crossing: An Alaskan Fisherwoman’s Memoir, Rosemary McGuire describes her initiation and work as a crewmember on commercial fishing boats sailing from various ports along Alaska’s southwestern coast. At a time when women were rarely employed as deck hands aboard such vessels, her experience was both a rite of passage and an ordeal--often traumatic, occasionally sublime, and invariably humbling. The challenges posed by the heavy labor of setting buoys, casting nets, and harvesting “pots” (enormous fish traps) in the tempestuous waters of the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea were only compounded by the derisive attitudes and outright obstructionism of many male colleagues. McGuire’s book recounts her journey, from her first stint fishing for cod out of Homer, through her discouraging tenure on a “tender” (vessel that collects and transports fish from fishing boats to the canneries), and finally to the cutthroat waters of the fabled Bristol Bay. McGuire traces the trajectory of her relationship with Nate, a fisherman she met at a bar in Fairbanks, and she connects her hunger for adventure to her aversion to the confined existence of fishermen’s wives. Throughout the book, she provides insight into her acquisition of the technical proficiency and socialization that built her competence and self-confidence. Rough Crossing describes a way of life characterized by dangerous, brutally physical labor, where captains and crew members dream of the “million-fish opener” (107) that might bring them security or fortune, but spend most of their time struggling just to break even.
Memoirs often attract folklorists, anthropologists, and other academics for their ethnographic nuance, experiential detail, and the light they shed on processes of self-fashioning. Rough Crossing will appeal to scholars interested in occupational folklore and histories of gender, and readers will appreciate McGuire’s pointedly descriptive prose and her ability to evoke a sense of place.
Stories of sexual harassment, abuse, and the pervasive mistreatment of women in the workplace are at the forefront of today’s news; as such, this book strikes a timely, if unsettling chord. McGuire’s experiences in Alaska’s commercial fishing industry in the early 2000s reveal more of the same. She was disparaged by co-workers who were incredulous that a “girl” would be working alongside them. Other fishermen refused to partner with McGuire in jointly assigned duties, talked about women in objectifying terms, played cruel jokes on her, and blatantly shunned her presence. Her stories expose the ugly misogyny pervading this male-dominated industry.
Those interested in occupational folklore will find much to digest here. McGuire describes setting buoys, harvesting pots heavy with fish, casting nets in turbulent seas, and the embodied rhythm required to coil a line of rope whilst keeping pace with a motorized “block” (pot hauler). She recalls learning to bleed fish and clean octopus in a concise series of motions to ensure that, when removed, the animal’s organs remain encased in a clear membrane.
Nautical and fishing terms pepper McGuire’s prose. The power scow, the block, cutting bait, tendering, tallying on a line, the fo’c’sle, the winch drum, and dozens of other words and phrases materialize the specialized code of this subculture. The terms appear just as they were shouted at her--with urgency and typically without definition or clarification. While McGuire’s use of uncontextualized terminology may be frustrating to the reader at first, her technique appears intentional: she wields these terms now in a way that gives the reader a lived sense of her own confusion then. The danger of neglecting to assimilate the necessary vocabulary is thrown into sharp relief when a fellow crewmember repeatedly warns McGuire not to get caught in a “bight.” Her skipper admonishes, “I don’t ever want to see you on deck without that knife. If you get caught in a bight and go down with the pot you want to be able to cut yourself free” (12-13). Eventually it becomes clear to her that a bight is a loop of rope or line that could drag her into a watery grave.
McGuire deploys this highly localized vernacular to draw the contours of everyday life among Alaskan fishermen and women: the heavy drinking and coveted trips to town, the boredom between frenetic moments when boats jostle for position to harvest the thousands of pounds of salmon that could make or break a season or even a livelihood. Her writing pulls the reader into a vast, unfamiliar world, where even the names of boats--The Totem, Arctic Storm, the Shameless, and the Antagonizer--proclaim emplaced pride or bravado. McGuire crafts a sense of place and transports the reader into her lived reality. She handily conveys the claustrophobic nature of boat-living: “Inside, the cabin was dark and filthy. An oil stove burned near the door, gloves and socks hanging over it to dry. Beside it, a curtain, half-fallen from its hooks, exposed a toilet” (5). Yet she just as effectively conjures an atmosphere of utter freedom, where readers can almost inhale the “raw clean smell of far-from-land” (9).
This memoir is shot through with harrowing descriptions of life on the ocean. The frank outlines of human mortality materialize in deftly reconstructed scenes: “When the last breaker came, for a long moment we could see nothing but the green muscles of water as it mounted before and above us. It broke as it rose, and I saw, immediately, clearly, how the Shameless could roll under its crest, that the weight of the water could smash our windows and surge inside the cabin” (176). McGuire’s writing likewise crystalizes moments of true beauty and perplexity: “The sun broke out through strange pearlescent clouds, and the waves that towered over our stern were shot through with light. I could see the net inside the water and the fish in it” (123).
At the end of her book, McGuire admits, “I understood the watershed moments on that journey only once they were in the past” (180). Indeed, my only (minor) disappointment with this memoir is that one instance of urgency bleeds into the next. The one or two climactic events that put all others into perspective are difficult to identify. Readers need markers to discern a narrative arc and may find themselves wishing that McGuire had chosen to make more of those “watershed moments” in retrospect.
All the same, Rough Crossing is a fast, engrossing read. It rings of breathless excitement and confusion and pulls the reader forward into an icy world where “[s]trange names jangled like music . . . Egegik. Togiak. Bristol Bay” (28). Quite by accident, Rosemary McGuire found herself on the cusp of a new generation of commercial fisherwomen. Rough Crossing provides an experience-forward glimpse into the courage and specialized knowledge required to survive in that milieu. While this work has less historical context and analysis than would be expected in an ethnography, it is nevertheless a captivating snapshot of the lives of Alaskan fishermen . . . and women.
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[Review length: 1141 words • Review posted on April 12, 2018]