"The Big Wide Open" is by Graham Deacon.

This week’s books

“Nightmare on the Scottie” by Stephen D. Orsini

Basalt Books – 158 pp – $18.95

“The Big Wide Open” by Graham Deacon

Palmetto Publishing – 148 pp – $16.99

Coming of age just ain’t what it used to be – at least that’s what readers might surmise after immersing themselves in two new books that detail the hair-raising escapades of fellows who had been young in the 1960s and 1970s.

In “Nightmare on the Scottie,” Anacortes, Washington, author Stephen D. Orsini relates what happened during Christmas break of his senior year in college. It was 1969 and he and a friend had signed up to crew on a brand-new king crabber. First, it needed to be delivered from an Alabama shipyard, where it had been built, to Seattle.

Both Orsini and his pal Jack had held summer jobs in Northwest commercial fisheries, so they were familiar with working at sea – but they figured this would be like getting paid to take a tropical cruise.

A voyage through the Panama Canal wouldn’t involve the actual rigors of fishing, and weather in the Caribbean should be a lot different from what they’d experienced in the North Pacific. They thought they’d hit the jackpot.

But that was before they’d arrived and met the free-wheeling fellow who was going to serve as captain of their vessel. Dean drank hard, partied late and was more concerned about the pattern on the new sheets for his bunk than he was about attending to details like the new boat’s sea trials. His quieter sidekick, Henry, was coming along as the engineer.

Orsini and Jack began to have concerns. Dean wasn’t taking his job seriously and Henry didn’t seem to be completely focused on learning the engine room particulars. Their start was delayed by days and when they finally launched the Scottie, it was into a massive mid-winter storm in the Caribbean.

The captain and engineer’s incompetence quickly became apparent. So did unseaworthy aspects of the Scottie’s construction. Orsini and Jack found themselves fighting to keep the vessel afloat and themselves alive as they endured heavy seas and systems failures.

“Nightmare on the Scottie” is a nail-biter as the author replays the dangers and miscalculations and sometimes downright ridiculous predicaments that characterized that fraught maiden voyage.

Astoria writer Graham Deacon sticks to land, but as a young fellow in the mid-1970s he also encountered adventures aplenty when he hopped freight cars and hitchhiked around the West.

In “The Big Wide Open,” Deacon’s engaging fictionalized account of life as a rolling stone, 20-year-old Feynman sets out to get a job in the Wyoming oilfields.

He soon discovers that the boom is mostly over and the locals are leery of a guy named Feynman. He explains that he’s named after the physicist who worked on the atomic bomb: “So that’s the deal, badass name.”

Feynman ends up on a steel gang laying rail. He meets colorful characters in railroad cars, bar fights and fishing streams. “The Big Wide Open” has both sorrow and wry humor. Sparks of magical realism are a nice bonus.