The Last Run by Todd Lewan

‘Victory awaits those who have everything in order?’ People call that luck. ‘Defeat is certain for those who have forgotten to take the necessary precautions in time?’ That is called bad luck.
— Ronald Amundson

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A group of down-in-the-mouth fishermen living in a gritty fishing town decide to take a boat out for a catch that will redeem them from financial ruin. The decision is questionable, and the weather don’t look too good, but these characters are desperate, and decide to take the risk. Sure enough, they end up stranded, bobbing up and down on massive waves, and the Coast Guard must send in helicopters to try to rescue them, which allows for many dramatic dangling-over-the-water sequences.

No, it’s not The Perfect Storm, and there’s no George Clooney involved. The Last Run is set in Sitka, Alaska, not Gloucester, Massachusetts, and in this case, the helicopters who come end up saving some of the fishermen, instead of losing them all. (I’m not wrecking anything for you here — Lewan tells you from the outset that three out of five fishermen make it — he just doesn’t tell you which ones.) Plotwise, that’s about all the difference.

So why should we give The Last Run a chance? The titles of the two books say it all. The Perfect Storm dealt in weather, almost in weather porn, describing lovingly the conditions that created the downfall of the Gloucester fishermen. The culture of Gloucester and of the men ran a close second as subject matter. The Last Run deals with a different kind of perfect storm — the emotional lives of the fishermen and of the Coast Guard heroes who save them.

The story mostly follows Bob Doyle, a lifelong loser who was dishonorably discharged from the Coast Guard after his marriage fell apart, and who is moping around Sitka drinking and living off of the kindness of strangers before he gets a job as a deck hand on the doomed ship, the La Conte. Bob is sympathetic in a kindly, train-wreck sort of a way, and you find yourself hoping beyond hope that he will emerge somewhat unscathed from the situation. The other men of the La Conte are no more savory: two ex-cons and another alcoholic are prominently featured in the narrative. Their life on-board the boat before the storm is rendered in full detail, including their petty hierarchies, their lavish dinners, even their nasty foot odors.

Lewan has clearly done his homework for this book. Reading passages like the one that comes right before the men abandon ship, which so carefully track the movements of the men, one wonders how long Lewan had to spend on these interviews to get a full picture. It must have been months, not hours: “He climbed the ladder, threw open the side door, grabbed the beacon and scuttled back down to the deck. The others were passing the rope, tying it around their waists, and handing it off to the next man. Hanlon was on one end. Bob Doyle got on the other. He looped it around his own waist, knotted it, slipped the end of the line through the top ring on the buoy float, made another knot and then handed it off to DeCapua.”

In other places, Lewan’s language is so deliciously oceany that it’s practically rotting with salt. I loved the passage describing a line of bait left in the water too long: “Only skeletons dangled from the hooks. There was not one shred of skin, not even cartilage. They did pull in one fish with some flesh on it, a four-foot halibut. It was pecked to pieces, though. Rotting. The eyes were gone.”

There’s something so dauntingly male about books like these, so Esquire at the bone. Is there a law that everybody who writes adventure stories must do like Hemingway and chop up sentences and plain-ify their prose? Characters in The Last Run are either identified by their first and last names or only by their surnames. There’s a heavy reliance on discussions of equipment. All of the protagonists are male, and there are few sympathetic female characters — Bob Doyle and the Coast Guard captain, Ted LeFeuvre, have both been abandoned by classic bitches, women who take their kids and leave them to eat TV dinners and/or drink whiskey in the wreckage of their ruined lives. This last seeming misogyny is, admittedly, not Lewan’s fault — he couldn’t help the facts, and one can’t blame him for grabbing onto what’s a great device for lining Doyle and LeFeuvre up against each other.

I only mention this maleness by way of illustrating how typical this book is of its genre, and how comforting it may be for some men to read. It’s also why I’m sure The Last Run will make Todd Lewan some money — money which I do not begrudge him in the slightest. The book is fast-paced and it is, in its own way, very moving.