The Avid Reader
617 Second Street
Davis, CA 95616
Tel: (530)758-4040
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The Avid Reader at the Tower
1600 Broadway
Sacramento, CA 95818
Tel: (916) 441-4400
Fax: (916) 443-1345
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By all accounts, Henry Seine should have packed it in long ago, certainly before he started scanning marine distress channels for fun. But sixteen-hour days spent hauling heavy cargo aboard tugs and icebreakers along the frozen arctic offshore (not to mention smoking copious amounts of Cannabis indica) can warp a man’s sense of reality. Desperate for real human contact, he tunes the sideband radio to 2182 kHz (twenty-one eighty-two kilohertz), the international distress channel, in the vague hope of finding someone he can save.
Soon, though, even the paycheck that fattens his wallet each season isn’t enough to fix his interest. Seine journeys south, but weathers a capsizing that leaves his fellow crewmen dead. Unable to break from his old habits, and haunted by the ghosts of dead shipmates, he flies north for another season. One day, idly monitoring 2182, Seine catches a fading distress call from somewhere out in the circumpolar twilight. A scientist named Louis Moneymaker is trapped alone on an ice floe that threatens to melt beneath his feet. Cobbling together a motley rescue team–the frostbitten Wolf, a six-foot-eight Russian known as Big Man, a tattooed Eskimo nicknamed the Buff, and an intrepid, dark-eyed sailor named Julia–Seine travels farther north than he’s ever gone, determined to save Moneymaker and exorcise his demons in one grand sweep.
2182 kHz combines the white-knuckle adventure of The Perfect Storm with the dark humor and deadpan wit of Chuck Palahniuk to create an absorbing tale of search-and-rescue. David Masiel introduces us to a compelling antihero who is only one step away from either destruction or salvation.
David Masiel was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in Richmond, where he used to sit at an old Formica table and listen to his grandfather’s stories of rogues, riverboats, sailors, and the sea. He has worked as a golf instructor, a maintenance man, an English teacher, and an oilfield laborer. For ten years he worked as a merchant seaman on oceangoing tugboats and icebreakers from Seattle to Barter Island, Alaska. During that time he earned an M.A. in creative writing from the University of California at Davis. He now lives in Davis, California, with his wife and their two children.
“2182 kHz manages the considerable trick of summoning the ghosts of Conrad and Heller and doing them both proud. Raunchily funny and deadly serious, David Masiel charts the profound and the ludicrous and reveals them to be neighboring territories.” -Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest
“I’m a devoted reader of boat sagas, sea adventures, and accounts of solo sailings and sinkings and feats of solo crossing. 2182 kHz is in the tradition of the greatest of them: laconic, gripping, thoughtful, and tough. A wonderful book.”
-Diane Johnson, author of Le Mariage and Le Divorce
“This is a novel about real people in a world as hostile and unforgiving as one of Jupiter’s moons. The book is filled with startling and fascinating detail about oceangoing tugs and their crews who work the frozen, at times almost hallucinogenic, arctic seas. The crews are real people-as strange, complex, anti-social and obsessed as you’d expect in such a place, yet not one of them is, finally, unlikable. Even the sons-of-bitches have heart and courage. This is one hell of a story, each sentence skillfully crafted with love for this harsh world and the respect to tell it right. I loved this book.”
-Kent Anderson, author of Sympathy for the Devil and Night Dogs
