The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

AFTERWORD

“I’M SORRY the way I was when I first met you,” Ricky Shatford told me in a Gloucester bar not long ago. The book had been out for about three months, and the Shatford family—and Gloucester—had been rocked by a wave of publicity. Summer people were visiting Cape Pond Ice, tourists were booking rooms at the Crow’s Nest, the Shatfords were being stopped in the street. “You were writing about my baby brother and I couldn’t deal with it,” Ricky went on. “I told people I was going to kill you.”

The first time I’d ever gone into the Crow’s Nest, it had taken me half an hour to work up the nerve. It wasn’t the bar—I’d been in rough bars before—it was what I was going in there for. I was going in there to ask a woman about the death of her son. I wasn’t a fisherman, I wasn’t from Gloucester, and I wasn’t a journalist, at least by my own definition of the word. I was just a guy with a pen and paper and an idea for a book. I slid a steno pad under my belt against the small of my back, where it was hidden by my jacket. I put a tape recorder and a smaller notebook in my jeans pocket in case I needed them. Then I took a long breath and I got out of the car and walked across the street.

The front door was heavier than I expected, the room was darker, and there were a dozen men clutching beers in the indoor gloom. Every single one turned and looked at me when I walked in. I ignored their looks and walked across the room and sat down at the bar. Ethel came over, and after ordering a beer I told her that I was writing about dangerous jobs, particularly fishing, and that I wanted to talk to her. “I know you lost your son a couple of years ago,” I said. “I was living in Gloucester at the time, and I remember the storm. It must have been very hard for you. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.”

What I didn’t know was that there was a court case going on, and that Ethel’s first thought was that I was working undercover for Bob Brown’s insurance company. She wasn’t suing him, but whenever a boat goes down, there are always people asking questions, looking for an angle. Within weeks of the sinking, in fact, a couple of lawyers had slid into the Nest, trying to interest her in a lawsuit. They were so insistent that some of the boys at the bar felt compelled to help them leave.

Ethel was friendly with me, but guarded. She talked about watching the local news, waiting for word of the Andrea Gail. She talked about the memorial service, and how people had stuck by her after the tragedy. She bought me a beer, and gave me the names of other fishermen who might be able to help out. And then I walked back out of the bar. It was a warm day in early spring, snow lingering in the northern exposures and a rich, loamy smell that mixed with salt air off the ocean. Reefer rigs crawled down Main Street and pickup trucks pulled in and out of Rose’s parking lot, tires spraying gravel. The men in the trucks didn’t smile as they drove.

This isn’t exactly a town that begs to be written about, I remember thinking. These aren’t men who really want to be asked about their lives.

And to an extent, I was right. The guys in those pick-up trucks—and on barstools at the Crow’s Nest, and walking down Main Street in their deck boots and fishing gear—had no particular reason to talk to me. Men in working towns can nurture a harsh kind of pragmatism that weeds out sentimental acts, such as talking to writers, and it’s generally hard to coax them out of that. If I were a Gloucester native, or had worked as a fisherman, perhaps it would have been different.

But I wasn’t, and the only thing I had going in my favor—

other than the fact that Ethel seemed to like me, which counted for more than I realized—was that I worked as a freelance climber for tree companies. I was living on Cape Cod, but did occasional jobs in Boston, and often I’d combine trips into the city with research jaunts up to Gloucester. I’d walk into the Crow’s Nest at the end of the day, tired and dirty from a day of climbing, and settle onto a stool at the bar. “Look, I don’t know a thing about fishing,” I’d say. “So if you don’t tell me about it, I’m going to get it all wrong.”

That seemed to work; gradually, the fishermen started to talk. They told me about their grandfathers dory-fishing for cod on the Grand Banks. They told me about winter gales on Georges. They told me about getting thrown out of their house by their girlfriend for one reason or another, usually good ones. And they told me about the sea. “She’s a beautiful lady,” one guy said, jerking his thumb oceanward out the bar door, “but she’ll kill ya without a second thought.”

Usually the only thing I had in front of me during these conversations was a beer, though occasionally, if the conversation looked promising enough, and I’d established a good rapport with the guy, I’d pull the steno pad out from behind my jacket. Otherwise, I’d periodically excuse myself the men’s room, which—given the evening’s activities—was usually necessary anyway. There I’d scribble down a few stories and then I’d go back out into the bar. When I’d really become friendly with someone, such as Chris Cotter, I’d ask if I could interview them with a tape recorder, out of the bar, someplace where we could talk without being interrupted. Usually they said yes. One guy said yes, but tried to give me the slip while I was following him in my car through town. I finally tracked him down at the Green Tavern, and we ended up talking for three hours. And a few people—like Ricky Shatford—would have nothing to do with me at all.

Ricky was angry about his brother’s death, he told me later, and I was something to focus all that on. He didn’t like me writing about his family, and he didn’t like me writing about something I couldn’t know for sure. The Andrea Gail had been lost without a trace. Why not just let it lie there?

Unfortunately, Ricky was articulating exactly my own insecurities about the project. Every time I ventured into the Crow’s Nest, I felt like an intruder, and I’d had several excruciating dreams about the loss of the Andrea Gail. In one, I dreamed I’d drilled tiny holes in her hull before her last trip to see if she’d still float; and in another I dreamed I was in the wheelhouse with Billy Tyne as she went down. I didn’t have to die, though, because I was a journalist, and I just looked guiltily on as we plunged into the trough of another enormous wave. My God, you never really stopped to think how terrifying this must have been for those guys, I remember thinking. Those were six real men out there, not just names out of a newspaper. Don’t ever forget that.

The one encouraging dream I had was in 1994, when I wrote a magazine article about the Andrea Gail. Most people in Gloucester liked the article, but there were the inevitable dissenting voices, and they traumatized me for months. The idea that you could do as good and thorough a job as possible and still leave people angry at you, shook some long-held illusion about journalism. In the dream I was walking along a deserted beach, and a figure strode towards me down the dunes. It was Bobby Shatford, and he walked up to me and stuck his hand. “So, you’re Sebastian Junger,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you. I liked your article.”

“Thanks, Bobby,” I said. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

We’d never loosened our grip, and we just stood there, holding hands. Down the beach, the rest of the Shatford family was having a cook-out. I was headed there, but Bobby couldn’t come. He had to stay away.

When I finally talked to Ricky, it seemed as close as I was going to get to shaking Bobby Shatford’s hand. Ricky was a fisherman, he was Bobby’s older brother, and he’d wanted to kill me. Those are tough hurdles to clear. One summer night in a Gloucester bar, though, we got to talking, and he told me what it was like to lose his younger brother. To me, Ricky had always been the scary older brother who careened around town looking for trouble; now here he was, telling me about the most painful thing in his life. It wasn’t an easy thing to listen to.

“When we were kids we were a real close family,” says Ricky. “Me and Bobby and Rusty slept in the same bed together. Bobby worked down at the wharf, Bob Brown built the Miss Penny and Looper was running it and I remember one time we were down at Rosie’s doing the last-minute preparations and on the way out I yelled to Bobby on the State Fish Pier, HEY BRO! That trip we hit one of the first storms I ever encountered in my life, it was ’83 and we were crazy, it was December on the southeast part of Georges and the water was still warm, the Rush was right next to us and they lost every window they had. We gave them our loran to get back home.”

A few years later Ricky went down to Florida to run a shark-fishing boat—“I was a highliner back then,” he says, “I was damn pretty good with shark.” When Bobby and his wife split up, Ricky invited him down to Florida to fish and got him a job on another boat. At one point the captain didn’t show up for a trip, so the owner handed the boat over to Bobby. Ricky and Bobby fished side by side for a while, making a lot of money, and then Bobby ran into his own trouble and wound up back in Gloucester. “I always thought it was safer to go fishing on the Grand Banks for thirty days than stay on land for thirty days,” says Ricky. “Bobby and I had some brawls down in Florida, just me against him. We had a club and Bobby and I just destroyed the place—tables, chairs, people.”

From Florida Ricky went on to Hawaii. There was a lot of swordfishing in the Pacific, and Ricky was given a state-of-the-art ninety-foot boat and two salaried Filipino crew. In September, 1991, he called up the Crow’s Nest and asked to speak to Bobby. Bro, he said, I got this big beautiful boat, why don’t you come out and fish with me?

The owner had even offered to pay Bobby’s plane ticket. Bobby declined. “He said he was really in love with this chick,” says Ricky. “So I said, ‘Alright, I love you, bro,’ and he said, ‘I love you too.’ And that was the last thing we said to each other.”

A month later Ricky got the news. He was two days out of Hawaii with all his gear in the water, and he called up the High Seas operator to make contact by satellite phone with the boat’s owner, who was fishing off Samoa. The operator told Ricky there was “stand-by traffic” for him—a call waiting to be patched through—and then she connected Ricky to his boss. The boss said that Bob Brown had been leaving messages on his assistant’s answering machine in California. Uh-oh, Ricky thought, stand-by traffic, a message from Bob Brown… something’s happened to Bobby.

Sure enough, the stand-by call was from his sister, Mary Anne. Ricky, I love you, she started off, and then she said that Bobby’s boat was missing. “I just figured they were gone,” says Ricky. “So I went outside and told my crew, I said, ‘My brother’s boat is missing and I think we’re just gonna haul the line and go in.’ I hauled with tears in my eyes, I was bullshit with God for something like that happening. We got in and got drunk and then I just flew home.”

At the memorial service Ricky saw people he hadn’t seen in twenty years—friends from grade school, old fishing buddies, mothers from the neighborhood. He stayed in Gloucester a couple of weeks and then went right back out to Hawaii, knocking two windows out of the wheelhouse during a storm on the first trip out. All he could think about was how his mother would feel if she lost two sons instead of just one, and he decided to cut down on his risks. He would go to the Grand Banks no later than October, and even October would be subject to Ethel’s approval. “You’ll have a choice in the matter,” he told her. Still, risk was a difficult thing to avoid, and he even found himself seeking it from time to time. After a few more years in Hawaii he moved back to Gloucester with his wife and started fishing with a man whose father had been lost at sea. The two of them, he said, did crazy things on the boat, fishing late in the season through really severe weather.

“We felt untouchable,” was how he explained it. “We felt like there was no way that God could do that to the same families twice.”

By the time I talked with Ricky, the book had—against all expectations—become a bestseller, and I was spending a lot of time in Gloucester, staying at the Crow’s Nest, showing media people around a town. It was an odd feeling: I remembered Gloucester as a grey, rocky town where I supported myself doing treework and wondering, at age thirty, exactly where my life was going. Now here I was, giving television interviews from the Nest while the regulars tried to ignore the lights and keep drinking their beer. When people said I’d put Gloucester on the map, I replied that it was more like Gloucester had put me on the map. There were any number of people—Chris, Ethel, local fishermen—without whom I could not have written this book. Had they not lived the lives they did, and agreed to talk with me about them, the book would not exist. In that sense, I’m indebted to them; in that sense, the book is as much their work as mine. Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to. They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.

NEW YORK CITY

January 11, 1998