Nights Of Ice
Spike Walker
Fiction
206 Pages
copyright: 1999
The Bering Sea in January can be a mean place, as Walker (Working on the Edge,
1991) relates in this spine-tingling (if redundant) collection—particularly
when the winds clip by at 100 mph, the waves crest at 60 feet, the water
temperature is 38 degrees, it's nightime, and your boat is sinking.
Walker has no time for foreshadowing here, no time to develop mood or
characters. These are grab-you-by-the-throat, rip-snorting tales of disaster on
furious high seas and of the outrageous efforts made by both rescuers and those
in the drink to beat the odds for survival in the Bering's icy waters. There is
not much variation in these eight tales: In hellacious weather, a fishing
vessel founders. Sometimes it runs aground or overturns with the accumulated
weight of ice, or it just springs a leak. Then it all comes down to hypothermia
and how fast it steals your life. The rescues are thus all just in the nick of
time, and Walker plays them for all they're worth. But the lack of variety
here, combined with Walker's tendency to overdeploy stock sentences—"His terror
became resolve," and "He thought of his lovely young wife," and "This is the
end!"—robs the stories of their specific identities. What saves the best ones
is Walker's fastening on a
particular element: the godawful storms, known as williwaws, that boom out of
the coastal mountains, their impossible winds freighted with ice and snow
(vigorously described in the chapter "Chopper Rescue: Men in Peril"); or the
cheekiness of Tim White (in the chapter titled "The Face of an Angel"), who
stayed warm by working hard at being a badass.
It is said that America's most dangerous profession is commercial fishing on
Alaska's high seas. Even a quick dip into this collection will convince you of
that.
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