"Barometer's Shadow" is set in the days when Tony's Bar had strippers and steak around the clock, shrimp flooded local canneries every July and record crab catches made Kodiak a boomtown.

"It was much, much different then," Kaufman said after reacquainting himself with a Kodiak that has lost some of its isolated, small-town feel but none of its rainy weather.

"It's life-affirming to be back and see it again," he said. "There are still canneries on Shelikof and guys unloading at the bars. That will probably never change as long as there are fish in the sea."

After moving back to Ohio, he found that the breathtaking scenery, boomtown excitement, interesting characters and practical jokers he knew in Kodiak stuck with him.

"It was really special. Everything from Kodiak is burned into my mind," he said. "I've never forgotten the people I worked with. I met some fascinating people."

For the first half of the book, protagonist Billy McCord suffers through life as an operating room technician in an Ohio hospital staffed by negligent, stoned doctors (not to say that he isn't stoned as well).

Kaufman said he remembers how moving to Alaska seemed like an escape from the chaos of the Vietnam War turmoil, and for others, an escape from failed marriages and failed businesses.

Mostly, once arriving in Kodiak, McCord makes friends with whom he works, fishes on the Buskin River (in the shadow of Barometer Mountain), drinks at hopping local pubs and, above all, complains about the lack of single women in town. There's also the occasional stabbing.

"Every day in the bars on all of Shelikof Street, guys would run to the windows at 4 in the afternoon, pressed against the windows like so many puppies to ogle the women coming off cannery shifts," he said.

"There just seemed to be a real shortage of available women, and it was very funny," he said, noting that most of his friends were single, desperate men.

"There's a lot of unwritten stories about ordinary-type people," he said. "They fill 98 percent of the world and have interesting things happen to them too."

In this excerpt, a sourdough gives McCord some advice that is representative of the way the author writes about Alaska throughout the book: "A flatlander, huh? Well, this is Alaska, and there's about sixty-five things waiting to kill you each day. Go into the woods, there's bears, fall in the water, there's the cold. Go out of town to Pasagshak in the winter and have your car break down -- that's it. This country will kill you quick and easy or long and slow if it wants it that way. Happens every day. It's not you; it's the country. It kills. Don't forget that."

Kaufman said cannery hands and Coast Guardsmen drummed into his skull the importance of respecting nature and the water and "the ways you can get yourself in trouble."

But Alaska can be beautiful too. Barometer Mountain becomes a symbol of change and a silent witness to McCord's transcendent experience communing with nature.

The 205-page paperback would probably score an "R" rating were it a movie. Besides drug use, there's also sex, violence, cursing and racism illustrative of the time period. The influence of Kaufman's favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is apparent in the symbolism, crispness and course of the book.

As his next project, Kaufman plans a historical novel set in Skagway or a collection of short stories. However, he hasn't closed the door on another novel in the saga of McCord's Alaska adventure.

Former Kodiak cannery worker Peter Kaufman wrote a semi-autobio-graphical novel, "Barometer's Shadow," set in the days when Tony's Bar had strippers and steak around the clock, shrimp flooded local canneries every July and record crab catches made Kodiak a boomtown. Kaufman began writing the story on a typewriter in the Kodiak College library when he lived there in 1973 and '74.

This is cache, read story here