Yankin' and Liftin' Their Whole Lives: A Mississippi River Commerical Fisherman

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2001 by Hoberman, Michael

Yankin' and Liftin' Their Whole Lives: A Mississippi River Commercial Fisherman. Text and photographs by Richard Younker (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Pp. xv, 119. $49.95, Paper, $19.96)

"Oooh yeah," says commercial fisherman Junnie Putman, prefacing one of his memorable comments on the shrill hoot of an owl, or the taste of a smoked sturgeon, or the strictness of a local game-warden. Junnie Putman's words - both "harsh" and "tender" ones (xiii) - help to create the shifting textures of this lively and soulful book. Like the haunting faces of Putman and his relatives and friends which - in their rough-hewn expressiveness - enable Richard Younker to shape art out of documentary, Putman's own utterances, his "oooh yeah's" and his lanky descriptions of fishing, hunting and hard-drinking exploits, infuse this portrait of the lives of Mississippi River commercial fishermen with life force. Yankin' and Liftin' provides a sense of context; Younker's text delivers the appropriate cultural and historical background for the lives of the fishermen it chronicles. But a more powerful aspect of its appeal is, in my view, its striking acts of portraiture.

The book is in large part a visual and verbal depiction of one man. Junnie Putman is a heroic figure - courageous, tragic, humorous, knowledgeable and articulate. And Younker accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of revealing all that heroism without resorting to any sort of sentimentalizing or romanticizing tactics. Yankin' and Liftin' is a clear window. Its beauty lies in the apparent simplicity of its rendering. The book is journalistic in its narrational style, lyrical in its moments of insight and broadly conceived in its overall depiction of a livelihood and culture.

The book's sensitive interplay of modes and voices derives in part from the fact that the text is so sensibly organized. Following from Jerry Enzler's brief but serviceable Foreword, Younker's own text sandwiches a more or less journalistic account of the commercial fishermen's various netting and trapping methods between two more personally-oriented sections which speak about the author's relationship with his subjects. The fact that Younker and Putman grew to be close friends - Younker dedicates the book "To my dear friend Junnie Putman" - is not lost, is not a mere sidelight to the depiction. The two men's friendship - Younker's several years long immersion in the lives not only of Junnie but of his friends, family and fellow commercial fishermen - offers as firm a foundation as one might hope for in any work of cultural documentation.

Obviously, the friendship and immersion suggest a love affair of sorts, which might seem to preclude any kind of documentary objectivity or detachment. Indeed, in the final chapter, which describes Putman's 1997 death (from cancer, at the age of 70), readers can't help but feel that Junnie Putman's loss, from the author's standpoint, was akin to the loss of a parent. But the virtues of this engaged approach, as I see it, far outweigh the costs. To begin with, the fishermen themselves, at least as Younker describes them, don't for the most part take kindly to prying strangers. None but Younker, who earned their trust and respect by spending countless hours with them on the river, as well as in their homes and as a participant in their social gatherings, would have been able to attain such a degree of intimacy with these fishermen's lives. And the admiration speaks highly of Younker as well, who, as he puts it in his preface, was aware nonetheless of several "unbridgeable gap[s]" (xiv) between himself and Junnie Putman - his own urban origins vs. Putman's country background, his college education vs. Putman's and his fellow fishermen's having quit school after the 8th grade.

Younker studiously avoids imposing a heavy interpretative overlay, but, at the same time, in describing the history of his and Junnie Putman's relationship, as well as in briefly discussing the commercial enterprise along the mid-Mississippi, offers a suitably broad perspective which allows us to see Putman in context - Putman as man, Putman as avatar of commercial fisherman. Like many other oral historical accounts about fading livelihoods, Yankin' has a certain "last of a dying breed" tone to it. "Indeed," Younker remarks, "some December evenings when a bewhiskered Junnie Putman walked in off his trapline, a fur cap topping his six-foot-one-inch frame, a revolver hanging from his hip, I half expected Davy Crockett or Jim Bridger to come stomping in behind him, shaking off the cold" (xiii). The facts of the matter would certainly suggest that commercial fishing and trapping along the middle stretches of the Mississippi is being - or already has been - eclipsed. "See, what happened," says Eddie Putman, "is they used to have sixty-five [fish] markets in Chicago. But over the years it dwindled down to four or five" (5). People still eat fish, of course, but the remaining markets tend to buy from fish farms. An informant from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources provides this telling anecdote: "Now you've got restaurants in the Putman's hometown four blocks down the street from them that have their fish trucked in from Mississippi ponds six hundred miles away" (4).