My Priceless Summer on a Maine Lobster Boat
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
To each their own!
Two actual conversations:
"So, Kevin, what do your parents do for a living?"
"Oh, you know, the usual... My dad's a neurosurgeon and my mom's an editor at the new york times."
---
"It's been a long eight weeks, Jimmy! Are you looking forward to seeing your parents?"
"Well... actually I'm heading to a six week music camp tomorrow."
We have a similar thing with the licensing. I inherited a limited entry permit from my father. It's like getting a taxi medallion in NYC. Being young and stupid I sold it to my best friend on zero percent interest and he paid me about 1% of the total price of the thing, then stopped paying. Never had the heart to chase him for it.
how does this work? you can tell whether a lobster is a "successful breeder" just on visual inspection?
Is it a bit romanticized? Perhaps. But, there are thousands of these small-scale "boutique" operations around the country in all sorts of industries. How quickly we've forgotten that this is how it used to be done.
I grew up in one of these sorts of tourism places. Just because some people make a living doing Actual Things(TM) doesn't mean that having a large portion of the economy be tourism related does not have negative effects for pretty much everyone.
>this is how a lot of our food makes it to our tables;
And someone dicking around fixing heavy equipment in the mud is how the table became your table but you don't see people romanticizing the timber industry because for the most part it isn't associated with tourism the way waterfront communities (and by extension, their industries) are.
The fishing industry exists as much to give the tourists something to look at so the captains' wives/friends/relatives can run successful restaurants and bars (and fish the tourists wallets) as it does to pull edible animals out of the water. On a community level this is all pretty soul crushing because your existence is predicated on your ability to basically put on a show for others (i.e. look quaint) but pretend that you're just this quaint naturally.
So, like all of Hollywood? : )
It seems like in your book, “putting on a show for others” is somehow a distasteful means of living. However, many people enjoy this lifestyle. Reinventing something as basic as fishing into an “experience” for tourists, most of who are likely city dwellers who would never get to experience this, seems like a win win to me, and honestly something we could get other industries involved in. You mention the timber industry... if there were places that would allow me to cut down trees with a chainsaw, I would actually be interested in that!
As more of human society urbanizes, we’re going to see a lot more demand for these “experiences”.
Look at what is popular on Youtube - 'mustie1' fixes junk with his hands in 30 minute videos for nearly 500k subscribers. 'Primitive Technology' replicate(d) societal development for 10.3M subscribers. Nobody is arguing that this work is hard. Sorry if the "theatre" of it bothers you, but I think it's a net societal benefit to help reconnect people back to "artisan" and "boutique" ways of living. We still need those people - think of tourism as a recruiting tool.
Meanwhile the work is hard, dirty and dangerous for the people who do this for a living in order to survive day to day. The author gets to go back to their well to do life on a family owned island while the fishermen continue to toil at sea.
> Originally from Connecticut, she worked one summer on a whale-watching boat in Bar Harbor, saw the lobstermen, and thought: I want to do that, that looks real.
And yes, the author does get to go back to her "well to do life", but she does not downplay the hardness, dirt or danger of this work.
Your position seems to suggest that you can't write about the sorts of things the author wanted to write about - the intersections between loneliness, isolation, community, friendship and work - unless you're not well-to-do and spend years or even a lifetime in a job.
I reject that perspective.
This year has all new problems though: Some people drove straight up from Florida and Texas then dropped by to chat within hours. What the bleeping bleep is wrong with you? Why are you here?!
Yes, the author is well-to-do, born to academic parents, through no fault of her own. What obligations does she have by virtue of that? Is the rule you propose that she should be prohibited from ever taking a blue collar job? Or only if she does so for a sufficiently long time?
Would the world or her perspective on it be improved if instead of spending her summer on a lobster boat she had spent it working at Starbucks?
Or is it just that she should be able to do these things but be prohibited from writing about them and sharing that? Would we be better off if we hadn't read this?
Sure, maybe she's viewing this through rose-colored glasses. But those are her glasses and that is her authentic perspective. Doesn't she have the right to experience it and share it? Or does one need to be born into a certain level of misery and poverty before they earn the right to write?
I think the world would be a much better place if everyone (or at least everyone in America) had to spend at least 6 months in a minimum wage customer service job. If that were the case you'd hope we'd have far less entitled customers abusing workers who don't deserve any such treatment.
This is not to say that a summer on a lobster ship is worthless, but your choice of example is poor - yes, I do honestly believe that a summer at Starbucks seeing people on their worst behavior could do more to shape perspective than a summer of manual labor in relative isolation.
Perhaps a better example would be her just lazing around her parents' houses.
it's a vaguely similar sort of problem with this type of article. the author probably didn't harm anyone by taking a quick stint on a fishing boat. I don't think writing and publishing the article harms anyone either. but at the same time it raises uncomfortable questions. would someone who makes their livelihood from fishing choose to write this sort of article? if they did, would they have an audience?
That's because what we do would genuinely be boring to watch in a tv show or movie. I can think of exactly one time in my 12ish year career where a co-worker actively fought a malicious actor, and that was more entertaining than anything.
This is true of most jobs, present and past. Ever see a soldier or warrior with a sword strapped on their back and draw it out to do battle? Yeah, thats not a thing. It looks cool, but is physically impossible to do smoothly or single handedly with all but the shortest of swords.
Similar things can be said of archers, peasants, gypsies, police, journalists, etc.
While I am on a rant, the term "bohemian" when used for artistic hippy types is blatantly racist, and we have ignorant young French aristocrats to thank for it, but nobody actually cares.
Would a fisherman write such an article? No, because the article was about a transformative experience which defied expectations. A fisherman who has done naught else is not likely to have the same experience, but that doesnt change what the author did experience.
I don't see what is uncomfortable about that at all. /end long winded meandering rant that probably missed the point
A more direct one would be if some liberal arts major did a coding bootcamp and wrote about their experience. I wouldn't be morally offended that they shared their small window into programming with the world. Sure, it would be limited in many ways and colored by their own biases. But the latter makes it more interesting.
I already know what programming is like for "real" programmers. Seeing what programming is like for someone outside of that tribe is actually pretty interesting.
But I guess, that's also called, "just working on a boat". I'm sure they'd love the free labor. And you'd go crazy at not being able to return for an extra week if the catch was going good (or really badly) I suppose.
I also wonder just what aspects of what she wrote about you consider "normal". Maine has a small population, there are very few fishermen working today. What are the elements here that are "just normal life for a lot(most?) people" ?
Fishing is one of the absolute most ancient forms of tradecraft, dating back 10's of thousands of years and basically universal in the human condition.
There is a port in Nice, France, for small boats (it's a natural harbour) and a fish market there a few times a week that that has been going on, fairly uninterrupted for thousands of years. Literally you buy buy fish on the same terms as Phoenicians and Greeks before the Roman Empire.
The livelihoods surrounding most of these trades, and frankly most 'working people' is extremely common and normative, and could hardly be Romanticized by anyone but a fairly small (but growing) group of people living in modernist bubbles, almost detached from the entire history of 'common culture'.
The writing is nice, but the perspective of the alien observer, an 'outsider' to what would otherwise be be literally normative life for regular people, is almost a little eerie.
But hardly any human beings at all (as a percentage of the population, certainly) now take part in this activity.
Growing food was once the preoccupation of almost every human being alive - in the USA it now employs around 1% of the population, and most people have almost no understanding of how to grow food at all (and certainly could not farm, evne if they have a small garden).
The working activities described in the essay has almost no relationship with normal life for the vast majority of people living in industrialized countries around the world.
Of course - my point is that these are very common, old, normative activities, the type of which most people are around quite a lot. It could have been carpentry.
People 'work for the summer' on 'these types of jobs' all the time, there's generally not a lot to write about.
I don't what you mean by "around quite a lot" ... I suspect that very few people have been within 100' of any carpentry for their entire lives.
Working for the summer in jobs like this is mostly the preserve of college students, and only a small fraction of them at that - most will do very different kinds of summer jobs, if they do them at all (there's lots of evidence that those kinds of summer jobs are now taken by adults already in the workforce).
Maybe you live in a more rural area that has lots of this sort of work available and lots of people doing it. As far as I know, that is unusual, and not "normative" for most of the population.
There's normally a lot to write about no matter how "normative" or even mundane one's life is. It's not about the activities per se, but about how you reflect on them and connect them with other aspects of living. A classic example would be a book like "House" by Tracey Kidder, which documents in huge detail and considerable philosophical diversions a process that I suspect you would claim happens so frequently and repetitively that it's not worth writing about. Millions of people disagreed with you.
Of course they are.
They're just regular jobs.
If you live near the ocean, there are people who fish, if you live inland, there are people who farm - and the myriad of various related activities. And a million mundane things in between. And no, they're definitely not the 'providence of college kids'.
Having grown up around 'house builders', no, I don't really think there's that much philosophical insight in that activity either, but for those who don't have any of those skill and want to try it out, I'm sure it would be an interesting exercise.
Again, I repeat that agriculture in our society employs about 1% of the population. Even those who live in rural America (as I do these days) don't pick up farming by osmosis. Most people who live even in rural America do not farm, or work on a farm. They are just not that familiar with this kind of work (which is partly the cause and partly the result of the reality that most farm workers in the US now are migrant labor from latin american countries).
I don't know who else does "summer jobs" anymore if it's not college kids. Maybe ski/surf bums filling in the off months? We can probably count the number of them, and its likely less than a mid-size American city in total.
Sounds like you might want to read "House". Tracey Kidder pulled the same magic in "Soul of a New Machine", the now-classic book about the engineering of an (old) new computer. "House" is an amazingly deep meditation of the design and construction of modern American family home. Or maybe just read "Fine Homebuilding" for a while - not so heavy on the philosophy but hints of it here and there.
I just can't really get it into my head what country you're talking about. I travel all over the USA (just did 4500 miles) and this land in which fishing, farming and carpentry are the jobs that most people do is invisible to me.
remember David Foster Wallace? "Consider the Lobster"?
Here's a reminder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZOl7C_vDI