A review by liralen
Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska by Leslie Leyland Fields
4.0
It was a family business that stretched back decades, but Fields's entry to commercial salmon fishing was incidental: she married a fisherman, and thus she became one. Surviving the Island of Grace is her chronicle through her own first years of being a wife and salmon fisher.
What's so interesting about the book, I think, is the contrast. Or rather, the contrasts. Fishing is hard physical labour, but the characters populating Fields's world are not uneducated; in the off season, they teach piano and Greek and English and Latin, live in cities, travel the world. In fact, says Fields, I was not afraid of slumming around the world, but this represented everything I feared: living in a small town, like the ones I grew up in; knowing everyone, losing privacy and anonymity (315). She loves her isolated summer life even as she struggles with it.
Fields also writes extensively about her childhood, filling in a number of important pieces for me. Before she went into any depth there, I'd been viewing her move to fishing as about as far as she could get from her upbringing—I'd assumed, I guess, that her family background was full of academics and upper-middle-class comfort and so on and so forth. Not so. To the outside world, it might have looked that way, but theirs was a constant, constant struggle to keep in the black. Much of that struggle was achieved through physical labour: buying a house, renovating it, selling it, buying another house. Months and months without heat. It's not the same kind of work as salmon fishing, of course (speaking of which: I could have used a bit more detail on the fishing itself, because I couldn't always work out what was going on when; or why they sometimes had to finish before, say, 9:00; or how many people were on a given boat), but it was a sort of preparation. (A complicated one—there's an intricate dance of Fields trying to prove herself, and struggling with being wife/mother/worker...a hard balance to find, and maintain.)
But when I chose all of this back in 1977, I did not know what I was choosing. I looked off now and saw a glacier to the east, the mountains hovering over the bay, their ridges sawing the air; I could almost hear distant rivers foaming to the wife gray Straits. It was as wild and clean and vast a place as when I first had come, but I hadn't known how or what to measure then. What if I hadn't come? I try to see who I could have been had I stayed in New Hampshire, but I can't see anything clearly, only the girl that used to be there: She is still not pretty; she is crying—no, she has decided she will no longer cry. Her face is blurred, but I know what she is looking for—wholeness and freedom. I came here with Duncan at twenty, certain I had found it in him and in this clean, cold ocean and green mountain island. I know now that what I was looking for is not something that can be found, not in a place or a person—it must be made, and it is made out of whatever is around you, whatever is given to you. (329)
What's so interesting about the book, I think, is the contrast. Or rather, the contrasts. Fishing is hard physical labour, but the characters populating Fields's world are not uneducated; in the off season, they teach piano and Greek and English and Latin, live in cities, travel the world. In fact, says Fields, I was not afraid of slumming around the world, but this represented everything I feared: living in a small town, like the ones I grew up in; knowing everyone, losing privacy and anonymity (315). She loves her isolated summer life even as she struggles with it.
Fields also writes extensively about her childhood, filling in a number of important pieces for me. Before she went into any depth there, I'd been viewing her move to fishing as about as far as she could get from her upbringing—I'd assumed, I guess, that her family background was full of academics and upper-middle-class comfort and so on and so forth. Not so. To the outside world, it might have looked that way, but theirs was a constant, constant struggle to keep in the black. Much of that struggle was achieved through physical labour: buying a house, renovating it, selling it, buying another house. Months and months without heat. It's not the same kind of work as salmon fishing, of course (speaking of which: I could have used a bit more detail on the fishing itself, because I couldn't always work out what was going on when; or why they sometimes had to finish before, say, 9:00; or how many people were on a given boat), but it was a sort of preparation. (A complicated one—there's an intricate dance of Fields trying to prove herself, and struggling with being wife/mother/worker...a hard balance to find, and maintain.)
But when I chose all of this back in 1977, I did not know what I was choosing. I looked off now and saw a glacier to the east, the mountains hovering over the bay, their ridges sawing the air; I could almost hear distant rivers foaming to the wife gray Straits. It was as wild and clean and vast a place as when I first had come, but I hadn't known how or what to measure then. What if I hadn't come? I try to see who I could have been had I stayed in New Hampshire, but I can't see anything clearly, only the girl that used to be there: She is still not pretty; she is crying—no, she has decided she will no longer cry. Her face is blurred, but I know what she is looking for—wholeness and freedom. I came here with Duncan at twenty, certain I had found it in him and in this clean, cold ocean and green mountain island. I know now that what I was looking for is not something that can be found, not in a place or a person—it must be made, and it is made out of whatever is around you, whatever is given to you. (329)