Salt in Our Blood

This is not the book that Michele Eder was planning to write when she decided, in December 2000, to chronicle the life of her commercial fishing family. Nor was there any reason that I should have picked up the book and reviewed it. Except for one small fact. In the summer of 2007, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Linnaeus' birth, a man who named the world's living things and bequeathed to all of us a common system of naming, I decided I would honor this great learner by learning every Latinate name of every living creature I could. This quest took me Reed College, where I had taught religion and humanities in the 1980s, to study the trees of Reed. While I was doing so, I came across two young silver maples, behind a cross-canyon dormitory, which had been planted in 2002 to honor the memory of a former Reed Student, Ben Eder. As I said in my posting from 9/3/07,

"I did some research on Ben, because I thought I might have known his family, and it turns out that I didn't--but I became introduced to a remarkable young man who attended Reed for two years (1998-2000) and who died in a boat mishap on the open sea in 2001 at age 21."

That is all it took. A few months later (on 10/20/07 to be exact) I received an email from Michele Eder, which I still cherish, part of which said:

"Occasionally, I “google” our son Ben’s name, to see if any other links referencing Ben appear. You can imagine my surprise to see yours, and I can’t begin to explain how it feels, to see that someone you have never even met has taken the time to mention, remember and honor your son. It just knocked the wind out of me, and I wanted you to know that our family greatly appreciates it."

I knew instinctively, upon receiving this email, that I was talking to a person of immense compassion, fierce devotion, sympathetic insight and powerful mind. I knew that our paths would cross again, but I thought it would be for something she mentioned at the end of her next email--a celebration at Reed when the silver maples became large enough to hang a hammock between them (the hammock being a favorite place for Ben to study/relax). Instead, the next contact was her informing me she had written a book. I eagerly requested that she send me a copy, and I now know, in greater detail, that my first insights about her were correct. Salt in our Blood is stirring memoir, arranged as a diary, detailing the lives of the Eder family both before and after tragedy entered their lives on December 11, 2001, the tragedy of which I only had the slightest inkling when walking throught the Reed campus on a hot late summer day in 2007.

Meeting Michele and the Family

Michele is no daughter of the Oregon coast. Her family hails from upstate NY, but like many people from those climes (including my own father a generation earlier), she decided to leave the potentially cloying closeness of family to venture West for law school in Portland in 1976. A legal job in Lincoln City, on the Oregon Coast, after law school brought her into the orbit of fisherman Bob Eder and his two young sons. They married in 1988 and, as Michele says it, she married the family and not simply Bob Eder. Newport OR, a remarkable little town on the Oregon coast, became their home. Bob had only recently settled in Newport, after engaging in a variety of fishing ventures for the dozen or so years previously after graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1973. Originally planning to be a poet, Bob became a highly successful commercial fisherman; originally planning to be a criminal defense lawyer, Michele has now shown herself an accomplished writer.

Life not only has a way of changing our seemingly most deeply cherished commitments; writing does, too. When Michele decided to launch her writing career in 2000, she thought she would simply narrate the events in the life of a fisherman's family. There were issues galore, and the first half of her book, detailing events and thoughts from Dec. 2000-Dec. 1, 2001, brings us into the heart of the politics of commerical fishing in Oregon, the difficulties with recruiting and keeping good crews, the dangers of this life, the joys of the sea and the pleasures and challenges of raising energetic teenage boys by a self-proclaimed "feminist" mom. Along the way we get insights into the lives and manners of each of the Eders: Bob, the ambitious, hard-working, careful, conscientious, successful, thoughtful fisherman; Michele, the multi-tasking, diligent, savvy, community-minded lawyer; Ben, the brilliant, eclectic, wanderlust-driven learner, and Dylan, the passionate, deeply-feeling, sea-loving younger brother. They were knit closely to each other, and they likewise were interwoven deeply into the fabric of a tightly-knit fishing community.

The Family Tragedy and the Book

By Nov. 2001 Michele had chronicled about 200 pages of this kind of life and thought that she had enough information for a book. Had she been able to secure a publisher and put out her book in that month, it would have been a creditable effort. But then, life overtook her and the entire Eder clan, and the result is that we have a book of incomparably deeper insight and passion, one that leaves the reader exhausted as well as teary-eyed, but one that is as full of human insight, compassion, righteous anger and realistic response to tragedy as I have seen in many a year.

Her life, and that of her family, would never be the same after after their 36 foot fishing boat, the Nesika, capsized about a mile off the Newport coast on Dec. 11, 2001, carrying to their deaths their son Ben Eder and three other commercial fishermen. That one event, emblazoned now on the family's heart more deeply than fingerprints are on our hands, became the focal or interpretive point for the second half of the book. In diary entries that range from the pointedly emotional to the drily analytical, especially when she is quoting Coast Guard reports or newspaper accounts, Michele takes us through the range of emotions that harried the family like Greek Furies over the next year. Her prose becomes uncommonly poignant as she describes the drenching rains in early 2002 that emphasized their loss (p. 316), the grief and anger of a confused Dylan as he confronted the death of his beloved brother (p. 270), the way that her husband's eyes were "devoid of life" (p. 269) in the months following Ben's death, her own waves of grief that washed in on her with the same ferocity as the waves strike the Oregon coast.

Especially wrenching were the images of imagined pain that Ben might have suffered as he was alone in what might have been an excruciatingly painful death (p. 400). She unashamedly talks about returning to Ben's room, his closed-up room, closed-up so she could preserve the scent of his presence as long as nature would allow (p. 351). She even tells us how she refused to cancel Ben's cell-phone subscription, even though it cost $40 per month, simply because she wanted to hear her son's voice on the other end of the line. The endless waves of grief which kept washing over the family made me cry too, mindful of the fact that I have two healthy children who are not too different in ages from Ben and Dylan Eder.

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