Rough Waters: Alaska to Oregon

by Nancy Danielson Mendenhall

"Rough Waters: Alaska to Oregon, Small Fishermen's Battle" (2021) is an updated version of "Rough Waters: Our North Pacific Fishermen's Battle" (2015).

This updated version has the same content but includes a new title, ISBN and introduction. The author created a new edition to reflect disastrous disruptions to climate, North Pacific and Pacific Northwest coast ecology, and fisheries that have occurred since the old edition was published in 2015. The new edition remains in print.


"Rough Waters: Alaska to Oregon, Small Fishermen's Battle" is for the great numbers of people drawn to fish, fishing, fishermen and their communities. But beyond those always engaging topics is the worry today over our fisheries' sustainability. The warming of our oceans, the politics and management issues are part of the growing public concern. For coastal people, especially, and river lovers too, the changes can't be ignored.

Fishermen of the small-boat fleets (salmon, crab, halibut and cod, through nets, pots, troll and longlines are the ones particularly covered here) are the canaries in our giant watery coal mines. And they are always in competition with the industrial fleets and their lobbyists.The communities of the small-boat fleets are also at risk. Especially the youth are floundering--the ones who had planned to take over their folks' beloved livelihood. The transfer of permits and licenses to owners who never fish is evidence.

The plight of specific fishing families described here will be familiar to those who come from a small-farming background."Rough Waters" presents all this graphically through a blend of on-the-dock interviews, the author’s personal experience, historical photos and extensive research. It reveals the threats to a livelihood that for generations has been a huge part of the Northwest Coast mystique.

510 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Nancy Danielson Mendenhall is a long-time Alaskan with great love for its people and its incredible surroundings: the ocean, rivers, mountains, and tundra. Her love for rivers began with first memories as a child playing on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington. Her love of boats and fishing developed as a teenager on Puget Sound. She has commercial and subsistence fished in Alaska since 1963 and is still picking a set-net. All of those experiences are brought out in her books: one a short history of Nome, where she lives, one about the political and management survival battles of our commercial fishermen from Oregon to Alaska, and two books about life and issues for the people and the salmon on the mid-Columbia.
Mendenhall is a retired educator as well and is still involved for her grandchildren and community in life-long learning for all. That and the health of the natural environment and many of the social issues we face today are her focus when she writes. Her most recent book, fiction, is set at the mid-Columbia in the 1990s. The multicultural cast of characters is plunged into (still current) troubles--the shrinking Chinook salmon runs and the radioactive wastes seeping to the river from the defunct atomic plant at Hanford, and, of course, what these mean in today's world.

Books:

Storytellers at the Columbia River;

Rough Waters: Our North Pacific Small Fishermen's Battle;

Orchards of Eden: White Bluffs on the Columbia 1907-1943;

Beachlines: A Pocket History of Nome
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Raves for "Storytellers at the Columbia River":

"Given the growing global threat of climate change, the Trump administration’s undercutting of conservation and environmental protection laws, promotion of the fossil fuel and nuclear power industries, (this novel) is more than a simple work of entertaining and engaging fiction, it is a clarion call for the support of Native American rights with respect to the land and the waters and the wildlife and people that depend upon them. Especially and unreservedly recommended."
~ "Midwest Book Review"

“Intriguing. . . a compelling cast of characters in an amazing setting. . . wonderfully evocative writing about how globally significant events can affect the lives of everyday people.”
~ Steve Olson, author of The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age

“Inspiring. . . fascinating. . . This is a much larger story of what could happen anywhere, told in such a grounded, knowledgeable and appealing way that the readers’ hearts are won, and perhaps their political convictions too. A real gem.”
~ Dr. Evelyn Pinkerton, professor emeritus, Fraser Univ., B.C.

“A powerful and important story--in reality many stories. . . told through the concerns of the novel’s characters. . .”
~ Dr. Gerald W. McFarland, author of "A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West


“This book is brave, inspiring and beautiful!...a sterling tribute to the concept of community and communitarianism. How vital it is. How fragile it is. And hopefully how eternal it is. I truly admire Mendenhall's grit, determination, and courage..."

~ Dennis Brown, author of "Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery"


"'A strong voice for the power and importance of place...through a series of carefully constructed interlocking stories that connect the Hanford Reach's different cultures, generations, and (involved) countries. ... And in addition, it's a great read."

~ Jim Lichatowich, author of "Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery"

Reviews

[Nancy Mendenhall · Rating 5 out of 5]

(I am posting here two reviews for the original issue of "Rough Waters"):
Review 1 by Dennis Brown, author or award-winning Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery
*****
"For anyone interested in Pacific Coast fisheries, Nancy Mendenhall’s new book “Rough Waters” is hard to put down. Those not familiar with fisheries or fisheries politics, but interested in how neo-liberal economic policies are under-mining human societies all over the world, will also find this book a “must read”. 

Mendenhall’s book is consummately researched and broad in scope--as befitting social science of the highest order. Yet her narrative is rendered with such intimate sensitivity to people, places and things at the local level so as to evoke poetry. 

Mendenhall provides an encyclopedic overview of not only fisheries in her home state of Alaska, but also Washington, Oregon, New England and British Columbia. Throughout her book she weaves together the common problems facing small boat fish harvesters everywhere—including depleted fish stocks due to habitat degradation, the challenge of dealing with increasingly complicated management regulations, and the perils of declining incomes vis a vis increasing operating costs.

Above all, “Rough Waters” is a tour de force so far as exposing the insidious threat to small-boat fish harvesters and coastal communities posed by a world-wide governmental obsession with privatizing fish resources through Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ) or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ)—or “defined catch shares” as they euphemistically dubbed by the apostles neo-liberalism who promote them.

In the final chapters of the book Mendenhall offers a sobering, but realistic, appraisal of the daunting prospects facing small boat fish harvesters and the communities that depend upon them. Her analysis is a well thought out appeal for fish harvesters to empower themselves with greater technical knowledge and organization, when dealing with management agencies, as well as the need to build alliances with NGOs and the general public.

While Mendenhall’s criticism of the drive to economically redesign and privatize common property fisheries is not particularly new in fisheries literature, her first- hand experience with the fishery elevates her voice to an unique and compelling stature.

Mendenhall is at her very finest in describing her years as a troller in Southeast Alaska, way back in the 1970’s. To anyone who has ever fished commercially her stories will resonate to the deepest possible level. Moreover, her description of her present-day participation in the subsistence fishery, based out of Nome Alaska, is seminal in pointing the way for how both humans and wild creatures can sustainably co-exist in perpetuity. Her account of her own sons and their fishing adventures in small vessels in the wild expanse of Bering Sea makes for spellbinding reading.

Mendenhall exudes authenticity in the way she superbly describes the almost Will Rogers-like philosophical genius of her cousin George Morford, an Oregon troller with deep roots in the fishery. Morford’s life story in the fishery is subtly interspersed throughout the narrative, and he serves as a microcosm of the fate of fish harvesters all over the world. Both in the sense of the insidious and relentless victimization that small boat fish harvesters everywhere face because of ideology and misguided management systems, as well as for his undying sense of optimism, common to all fish harvesters. After decades of slowly being displaced from the Oregon troll fishery. Morford late in life rises phoenix –like and happily re-establishes himself as a troller out of Sitka, Alaska, 

It is through the viva voce of individuals like George Morford and many others, that Mendenhall is able to so thoroughly validate her overall thesis that fish harvesters are not the true threat to fish stocks the world over as commonly assumed. Indeed, she convincingly shows how commercial fish harvesters have become the unfortunate scapegoat victims of massive hydro-electric dams, bad forestry practices, industrial pollution, urban sprawl, over capitalized industrial fishing, to name but a few. In short, any one reading Nancy Mendenhall’s masterful account will never be able to naively look at the tragic enclosure the world’s fisheries commons in quite the same way.

~ Dennis Brown, author of award-winning Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon Fishery"Salmon Wars"

******
Review 2 by historian Dr. Gerald McFarland, author of A Scattered People; An American Family Moves West:

"Nancy Danielson Mendenhall's “Rough Waters” offers a comprehensive guide to critical issues related to the fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Alaska. Her wide-ranging account covers a variety of important topics, any one of which could have been a free-standing book. She presents a detailed history of the fishing industry's development from the late 1800s to the present, and she skillfully guides the reader through the vast labyrinth of federal and state regulatory commissions and laws that were established in response to competition among diverse groups for control of fishing rights: industrial factory-freezer fleets, recreational fishermen, owners of fish farms, ecologists, traditional Native subsistence fishermen, and, dearest to her heart and central to her narrative, small-boat fishermen and the family-based culture they represent. Writing from the perspective of her extended family's experience through four generations--grandparents, parents, her own generation, and that of her children--she incorporates vivid first-person accounts drawn from interviews that describe the attractions, physical challenges, and dangers of a way of life that is constantly under threat from the vagaries of weather, shifting fish populations, and bureaucratic capriciousness. Two substantial folio sections of photographs of small-boat fishermen at work are an attractive supplement to the book's text."

~ Dr. Gerald McFarland, author of A Scattered People; An American Family Moves West

[Dennis Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enter your review (optional)For any one interested in Pacific Coast fisheries, Nancy Mendenhall’s new book Rough Waters is hard to put down. Those not familiar with fisheries or fisheries politics, but interested in how neo-liberal economic policies are under-mining human societies all over the world, will also find this book a “must read”.

Mendenhall’s book is consummately researched and broad in scope--as befitting social science of the highest order. Yet her narrative is rendered with such intimate sensitivity to people, places and things at the local level so as to evoke poetry.

Mendenhall provides an encyclopedic overview of not only fisheries in her home sate of Alaska, but also Washington , Oregon, New England and British Columbia. Throughout her book she weaves together the common problems facing small boat fish harvesters everywhere—including depleted fish stocks due to habitat degradation, the challenge of dealing with increasingly complicated management regulations, and the perils of declining incomes vis a vis increasing operating costs.
Above all, Rough Waters, is a tour de force so far as exposing the insidious threat to small boat fish harvesters and coastal communities posed by a world wide governmental obsession with privatizing fish resources through Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ) or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ)—or “defined catch shares” as they euphemistically dubbed by the apostles neo-liberalism who promote them.
In the final chapters of the book Mendenhall offers a sobering, but realistic, appraisal of the daunting prospects facing small boat fish harvesters and the communities that depend upon them. Her analysis is a well thought out appeal for fish harvesters to empower themselves with greater technical knowledge and organization, when dealing with management agencies, as well as the need to build alliances with NGOs and the general public.

While Mendenhall’s criticism of the drive to economically redesign and privatize common property fisheries is not particularly new in fisheries literature, her first hand experience with the fishery elevates her voice to an unique and compelling stature.
Mendenhall is at her very finest in describing her years as a troller in Southeast Alaska, way back in the 1970’s. To any one who has ever fished commercially her stories will resonate to the deepest possible level. Moreover, her description of her present day participation in the subsistence fishery, based out of Nome Alaska, is seminal in pointing the way for how both humans and wild creatures can sustainably co-exist in perpetuity. Her account of her own sons and their fishing adventures in small vessels in the wild expanse of Bering Sea makes for spell binding reading.
Mendenhall exudes authenticity in the way she superbly describes the almost Will Rogers-like philosophical genius of her cousin George Morford, an Oregon troller with deep roots in the fishery. Morford’s life story in the fishery is subtly interspersed throughout the narrative, and he serves as a microcosm of the fate of fish harvesters all over the world. Both in the sense of the insidious and relentless victimization that small boat fish harvesters everywhere face because of ideology and misguided management systems, as well as for his undying sense of optimism, common to all fish harvesters. After decades of slowly being displaced from the Oregon troll fishery. Morford ,late in life, rises phoenix –like and happily re-establishes himself as a troller out of Sitka , Alaska,

It is through the viva voce of individuals like George Morford , and many others, that Mendenhall is able to so thoroughly validate her overall thesis that fish harvesters are not the true threat to fish stocks the world over as commonly assumed. Indeed, she convincingly shows how commercial fish harvesters have become the unfortunate scapegoat victims of massive hydro-electric dams, bad forestry practices, industrial pollution, urban sprawl, over capitalized industrial fishing, to name but a few. In short, any one reading Nancy Mendenhall’s masterful account will never be able to naively look at the tragic enclosure the world’s fisheries commons in quite the same way

[Lesley Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Praise from 5 other readers about "Rough Waters":

"Impassioned, broadly researched... Mendenhall plumbs today’s fraught seascape. . . " ~ Boston Globe

“Personal and poignant. . . an intimate look at what small-scale fishermen have been up against.”
~ "Fishermen's Voice"; Paul MolyneauxPaul Molyneaux (author of "Doryman's Reflection: A Fisherman's LifeThe Doryman's Reflection: A Fisherman's Life")

"Spellbinding...a tour de force...a masterful account (of the). . . tragic enclosure of the world's fisheries.”
~ Dennis Brown, author of the bestselling "Salmon Wars: The Battle for the West Coast Salmon FisherySalmon Wars"

“A definitive review. . . exhaustively researched. . . while always relating her findings back to the independent and small-boat fisherman." ~ Hakai Magazine; Alan Haig-Brown (author of "Still Fishin': The BC Fishing Industry RevisitedStill Fishin': The BC fishing Industry")

“Fantastic. . . important. . . I am so glad these kinds of perspectives and voices are having a chance to get in print.”
~ Margaret Willson, author of Seawomen of Iceland: Survival on the Edge"Seawomen of Iceland"

[Gerald McFarland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy Danielson Mendenhall's Rough Waters offers a comprehensive guide to critical issues related to the fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Alaska. Her wide-ranging account covers a variety of important topics, any one of which could have been a free-standing book. She presents a detailed history of the fishing industry's development from the late 1800s to the present, and she skillfully guides the reader through the vast labyrinth of federal and state regulatory commissions and laws that were established in response to competition among diverse groups for control of fishing rights: industrial factory-freezer fleets, recreational fishermen, owners of fish farms, ecologists, traditional Native subsistence fishermen, and, dearest to her heart and central to her narrative, small-boat fishermen and the family-based culture they represent. Writing from the perspective of her extended family's experience through four generations--grandparents, parents, her own generation, and that of her children--she incorporates vivid first-person accounts drawn from interviews that describe the attractions, physical challenges, and dangers of a way of life that is constantly under threat from the vagaries of weather, shifting fish populations, and bureaucratic capriciousness. Two substantial folio sections of photographs of small-boat fishermen at work are an attractive supplement to the book's text.