That article struck a chord with me as I grew up in a small village in the north of Scotland that was dominated by one industry - fishing. Most of my male ancestors for ~300 years had some connection with fishing and an alarming number died in accidents.
At high school we had one teacher who had a simple way of attempting to motivate kids - his room was at the top of the school building and had a splendid view out over the Moray Firth - he'd simply look out the window and comment on how rough the weather was - everyone knew what he meant.
When I was at University one of my school friends suggested I come away with him on the trawler he worked on for ~5 days - just to experience it. I lasted about 3 days before pretty much having to retire to my bunk with a mixture of sea-sickness, fatigue and quite a bit of fear (one of the crew helpfully pointed out the likelihood of escaping from the cabin where the berths were if the boat went down). It was cold and, to me, amazingly rough - which everyone thought was hilarious as it was the middle of July and they used to fish year round.
Fishing is such a relief from the world, it really is. I've never fully understood why it of all things had such a powerful draw and effect. As a kid it kept me away from the things that tend to trouble you as a kid. Deep in the woods on a river bank, digging through the stones to see what's hatching, tying knots, whittling while your bobber whirls in an eddy. It's an escape.
As an adult I've turned to spearfishing as well. It's an even more immersive escape, loaded with all of its own techniques, tricks, wonders, surprises, and challenges. Getting in the wetsuit is a hassle but no worse than hooking up a boat and getting it in the water. Really, once you spend your first comfortable moments 10-20 meters under water you might wish you never had to come out.
I've always thoroughly enjoyed reading about the satisfaction and joy others get from fishing as well. I guess it's a mix of vicarious experience and a sense of belonging or familiarity.
As for the unemployment... I don't envy anyone for having time away from work due to not having work. It's the worst, and hard to handle if you have a family when it happens. As a developer I've been incredibly fortunate due to work being so readily available, but 2 brief layoffs are probably the most stressful work related experiences I've had. It just feels terrible.
I really love fishing. It has become something like a tradition for the guy-part of my family to go on a fishing trip every year and spend some weekends at a nearby river.
Fishing taught me many valuable lessons in my childhood and youth. I remember countless hours of fixing my rod after casting into a tree, days without even having something nibbeling when all you want is finally catching a fish and of course loosing a fish right before you get it out of the water (some of these memories are still painful today). But all that didn't matter when you finally caught that huge beast.
Early on I learned the value of patience and delayed satisfaction, how to manage anger and defeats, and using trial and error to solve problems (not catching enough fish). It also gave me a perspective on what it really means to eat animals. When you kill and evicerate your first catch, meat stops being something you just buy at the super market.
Just like the way fishing stories become more embellished over time and retelling, I think the author recalls fondly experiences that he remembered as being dangerous (but in reality may not have been) that left a positive impact on the way he approaches life.
I also think we as a society have become too protective of children. The ones that are protected from everything that could possibly hurt them usually grow up not having the curiosity and gall to put themselves in uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations.
There's a great horror novel called The Fisherman by John Langan that heavily involves fishing and the catharthic solitude it can bring, even (or especially) in times of tragedy or stress. I highly recommend it, but besides that, this piece reinforces to me that the author of The Fisherman was conveying some wider and real truth in that. Coupled with beautiful scenery and good weather, fishing can become transcendental somehow.
My grandfather was a fisherman. Had a massive heart attack that killed him at 60. I barely met him. Years of hard work, exposure to the elements, the ever-present stress of the next catch, family worries and a general life of subsistence were not kind to him.
He was "lucky" he died too, if he survived he would've faced a disabled life in a place with no health care or general services beyond basic. That was the life on the remote seaside.
His wife and kids though surely would have liked to be left with some more than the fishing tools, boat and shack...
As a young child I went mackerel fishing on a small boat in Shetland with my father and a local he knew.
The man steered the boat with one had in the water, until he announced we were near a shoal of mackerel - he said he could feel the grease of their bodies in the sea water.
We threw some lines in and sure enough we caught plenty of fish for dinner.
Really agree with the author's point that there is something fulfilling about inconvenience and struggling.
After I started fishing in my spare time, I've had really good days where the fish are hammering my lures and I'm catching them every 10 minutes. Those days always start out well, but towards the end it's almost boring since I know they'll end up biting and there's no sense of accomplishment.
But the days where the fish aren't biting and I have to switch out lures, tie different rigs, and search for the fish make it much more rewarding when I do catch one.
If you've ever fished for a living, the argument seems ludicrous.
Fishing can be treacherous work. You might get rich with a big haul or die when the whether turns bad.
There are many factors, enviromental pollution, ecosystem changing, etc. It's not unusual for these small local fishermen to have very very bad years. And it's not just small outfits that hit tough times, do some research on the tuna industry and decline in tuna population.
Reality doesn't always go along with our cozy zen story. We haven't even mentioned the fact that turning your hobby into a job is quite often a very bad idea.
I'm a marine biologist, often when we fish it is in some difficult circumstances due to species or habitat of interest. A quote passed down from one of my academic great grandparents (that was probably in a discussion about the futility of it all) is that you definitely aren't going to catch any fucking fish if you aren't fishing.
I grew up fishing in a family that loves fishing, boating, and being near the water in general. I fished prolifically every day after school in a small stream a few kilometers from my house until I was 13 years old. I quit when one day I went out by myself (like I usually did) and within a few minutes I caught a pike. My first. I landed it to remove the hook from its mouth and that's when it wriggled violently in my hands, piercing my right hand thumb in the fleshy bit with the hook that was still attached to its mouth.
At first, the hook wasn't too deep into my flesh, but the pike kept wriggling, and within seconds it came out the other side of my thumb, right through the thumbnail. I don't think I've ever felt such pain at that age. I was bleeding all over the grass, crying and panicking with this slowly dying fish attached to my hand. Reluctantly, but knowing I had to do so, I found a dagger in my tackle box and cut off the fish's head. It didn't go well and the creature died a horrible death as I cut its head off with my weak left hand, trying to ignore the pain in my right. But it was finally dead.
My hand started hurting a lot. So much, in fact, that I couldn't pack up my things and ride my bike back home, so I sat down hoping that someone would come by to help me out. The pike's head still dangled from my thumb. Eventually a kid about my own age saw me (crying my eyes out) and his mother drove me home. A few hours later, I was in the doctor's office and with some local anesthetic, he cut the barbed part of the hook off and slid the rest of it out the way it entered. He thought the whole situation was kind of funny.
The kid's mom who had driven me back home had wrapped up the pike in a newspaper and given it to my parents who promptly threw it in the garbage since it was covered in my blood and badly mangled from my botched up knife work.
I didn't fish again until two years ago (I was 32) when I thought I'd try it again for old times' sake. I caught a fish pretty early on. It was a tiny little bass with this enormous hook of my lure poking through its upper lip. I felt like crap. If this creature felt the way that I must have felt, I couldn't continue fishing. I sold my gear on Craigslist for cheap just to get it out the house and said goodbye to it forever.
"I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator"
Having spent a week on a trawler in the North Sea (and coming from a family where most of my males ancestors for ~300 years were fishermen) I can emphatically state that I like having a job on dry land.
It is incredibly hard work, uncomfortable, risky and unpleasant in just about every way possible.
> I must be weird. I find fishing, sunning on the beach, sitting in a lawn chair, etc., extremely dull, and last about 5 minutes at it.
I'm the same way, but for fishing it depends on the type of fishing. Bait/lure fishing I tire of quickly. But fly fishing was vastly different, at least the one time I did it. It seemed a bit more technical and required more focus and finesse.
I'd be curious to see how this trend holds up among the various blue-collar careers. My parents were commercial fishermen and they wanted me to get as far away from fishing as possible.
"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.
At high school we had one teacher who had a simple way of attempting to motivate kids - his room was at the top of the school building and had a splendid view out over the Moray Firth - he'd simply look out the window and comment on how rough the weather was - everyone knew what he meant.
When I was at University one of my school friends suggested I come away with him on the trawler he worked on for ~5 days - just to experience it. I lasted about 3 days before pretty much having to retire to my bunk with a mixture of sea-sickness, fatigue and quite a bit of fear (one of the crew helpfully pointed out the likelihood of escaping from the cabin where the berths were if the boat went down). It was cold and, to me, amazingly rough - which everyone thought was hilarious as it was the middle of July and they used to fish year round.
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