DOWN AT THE DOCKS

An elegiac portrait of an iconic place fallen on hard times and unlikely to rise again.

Travel writer Nugent (The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck, 1999, etc.) lived near the weather-beaten docks of New Bedford, Mass., for a couple of decades. Here, in the town famed for its role in the 19th-century whaling trade, the author chronicles his time among crusty old salts of today and the old landlubbers who love them. His dramatis personae make the sailors of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm look like Girl Scouts—including one often-soused fellow who spoils for a fight with the newcomer, “his breath a noxious mix of Marlboros, house rye, beer, and Slim Jims,” but who then becomes a valuable source of information about what goes on out there on the shoals and banks. Nearly everyone who figures in Nugent’s tale works hard for little pay, and their lot gets ever tougher as bits and pieces of the New England economy decline and fall. Nugent’s interlocutor attests, on top of all that, that the IRS is out to get him: “To date, he swears to Almighty God, he has been audited a million freakin’ times.” Higher up the chum chain, a New Bedford captain has to put all his earnings into equipment, legal fees, fuel and food for the crew. Yet, “urged on by a combination of greed and daring,” he keeps at it—and good thing, too, for anyone who enjoys scallops. Nugent looks deep into the past at the New Bedford men, and sometimes women, who have taken to the waves—some the legal way, some not—from the privateers of the Revolutionary War era to the cocaine and heroin smugglers of more recent times. Unfortunately, Nugent’s account makes clear that New Bedford, with its “PCB-laced muck” and tough customers, isn’t much of a place to live or make a living.

An incisive portrait that takes both place and people seriously, and that does them honor.