In Gloucester, a local storm made good

by Ellen Barry

It had to happen. In Gloucester, where Sebastian Junger's nonfiction bestseller The Perfect Storm is set, the enterprising son-in-law of a local librarian has actually taken to renting out his copy. Rumor has it that The Perfect Storm single-handedly put one local bookstore in the black. You can walk into a bar in Gloucester and ask if anyone is reading the book and people will respond with page numbers.

"My husband is not a book reader," says Adrienne Verga, wife of State Representative Tony Verga, in a tone of amazement. "This one, I think he read in four sittings."

As Junger gets used to his number two spot on the New York Times bestseller list, Gloucester is getting used to the attention. Calls are beginning to come in to the Chamber of Commerce from out of state, with tourists asking to book rooms above the Crow's Nest, the bar where The Perfect Storm opens. Before the book, the Crow's Nest was not high on the chamber's list of recommendations. "I wouldn't even park my car in front of that place," says one chamber employee.

And inside the bar, which is still tended by Ethel Shatford -- who lost her son Bobby in the famous gale, and is a central figure in the book -- the reverberations are the strongest. People come in from across the country, lugging the book that recounts in horrifying detail the drowning death of her son, and ask if she is the Ethel Shatford.

"I still don't know what to think about the whole thing," says Shatford. "It's dredged up things we had stopped thinking about years ago."

For all that, in the Crow's Nest -- as everywhere in Gloucester -- the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Everyone has a little bone to pick with the book; Mary Anne Shatford's friends say she wouldn't drink in the morning (page 8), and the Crow's Nest is on Main Street, not Rogers (page 6). Ethel Shatford says she never considered suing the owner of the boat that went down (page 216). People in town still retain their own opinion about who was to blame for the sinking of the Andrea Gail. But most of the errors were, as Ethel Shatford puts it, "diddly-do." Although the New York Observer may have labeled the book "awash in error," the local verdict is that Junger's book captured the fishing life as no book has captured it before.

"The true test is probably the fishermen and their reaction," says Chris Rooney, who crewed on the swordfishing fleet for years and was interviewed extensively for the book. "He put it so that even if you were a pig farmer from Ohio, you could understand."

The fishermen, especially, are hoping for something beyond the Perfect Storm pilgrims -- namely, an increased respect for the profession. What with environmental regulations, and safety regulations, and catastrophically declining ground-fish stocks, Gloucester fishermen feel that they've lost the national status they once had. Many people are saying that The Perfect Storm brought that back, in part because of Junger's clear admiration for the fishermen.

"I have to figure that he spent some time with them. He caught 'em. He caught the spirit of them," says Representative Verga, whose family fished for 60 years and who decided early on to pursue a career on land.

"The sea has its romanticism, but there's another side. There was a movie -- The Beautiful, Cruel Sea," Verga says. "I love the sea. Hardly ever on it."

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.