Summer at Graveyard Point – In a seemingly abandoned corner of Bristol Bay, a new economic model emerges and a family adapts
Last summer, after all the other fishermen had home at the end of the Bristol Bay salmon season, Corey Arnold stuck around Graveyard Point. A photographer and commercial fisherman, Arnold described the scene at the old cannery as eerie and empty. When the people went home, grizzly bears showed up, a sure sign that it was time for Arnold to leave. The bears just added to the run down, barren feel of Graveyard Point, the abandoned salmon cannery that serves as home base for about 120 fishermen for six short weeks each summer. They spend six long weeks catching hundreds of sockeye, or red, salmon near the banks. Read the rest here 16:48
A very nice video and slide show about family and community fishing:
What the academic population dynamicists don’t bother finding out about are the qualities of fellowship, integrity, and the gentle caring for each other, the environment, and the fish, qualities which are so beautifully presented in this article.
The fish population scientists and regulators don’t seem to have a computer model, or any data points for the sense of heritage and identity of place and occupation that …are common to so many small fishing communities.
These are qualities that can afford a sense of well-being or “the quiet security of a heart fortified within itself” (a quote from “I Ching, Ancient Book of Changes” page 225, Wilhelm Baynes translation) that are so often alien to many land-based, it’s-all-about-profit type careers.