Cherryfield, Maine --  The 36-hour dash from Gaza to the wilds of Bristol Bay, Alaska, literally half a world apart, is a fitting analogy to the gulf that separates Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from Americans, and others, seeking their fortunes in the red gold of sockeye salmon.

Gazans and Israelis who believe, especially after President Obama’s Cairo speech, that they are, and will remain, the center of all attention, should sit with the fishermen, factory workers, truck drivers and dock workers of Bristol bay.

En route, from the inside of one aluminum capsule of a westward-hurtling airliner to the inside of another, the world takes a startling leap, from the haute couture of the world of Air France, so elegantly depicted in the airline magazine, to the rugged world depicted in the Air Alaska magazine.  It’s the change from the elegant mink draped over the bare shoulders and nearly revealed bosom of a fashionable Parisienne to the story of the bearded, rough-dressed guy, a half a world away, who actually went out and trapped and skinned that mink.

It’s a difference that’s beyond the reason of many people in the Middle East, but the equivalent in magnitude to the difference in focus between Americans and Middle Easterners -- a difference that may well play a major role in whether President Obama can sustain his efforts toward Middle East peace in the face of so many other foreign and domestic challenges. 

Aboard the tenders (mother ships that service and receive the catch of the salmon fishing boats), in the handful of bars and restaurants, and in the fish factory break-rooms, the lower-48 Americans, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Russians, Native Alaskans and others from a host of nations and regions know there’s a Middle East out there somewhere, but in the day-to-day effort to earn a living here, it’s not even on their maps. 

And, when they are away from the tumult of this six-week, once-a-year rush for the fish, Israel and the Occupied Territories are, at best, on a map of the vaguest character, one that centuries ago would have shown dragons at its outer reaches.  They’re far more worried about the dragons close to home: the collapsed global economy that has left the salmon market vulnerable, the price of fuel, and whether they will have jobs to return to for the remaining ten months of the year, whether ashore or on fishing boats elsewhere.  They have, after all, already trekked literally thousands of miles for these jobs because of lack of opportunity at home.

In Bristol Bay, all life focuses on the fish and the tides.  Day and night, let alone foreign policy, have little meaning when it’s dark (sort of) for only three or four hours between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.  What counts are the runs of fish, which move and snake across the huge expanse of Bristol Bay, from vast open water to river inlets, and making sure that, as the tides falls, you’re in deep enough water to remain afloat and keep fishing.  My watch, broken on the first day at sea, is, for now, no loss, since the clock means little in this world.

This is the gold rush at sea.  Fishing boat crews work to exhaustion, grab a cat nap between haulbacks of their size-regulated 900-foot-long gill nets, and resume fishing, knowing that from first gun to last, the year’s fishing comes down to what happens in this six weeks.  Factory crews stand ready to process fish on the high tide, day or night, when the tenders can approach the piers to unload.  Truck drivers roll at all hours to either the upriver container pier with loads of frozen or canned fish that go out to the world via barge, or to the airport at King Salmon with loads of fresh fish to go out by air.  There’s no place else to go, since no roads connect Naknek to the rest of the world. 

Even the commercial airliners of Alaska Air are typically cargo-passenger combinations, constantly feeding fresh salmon exports to the multi-nation fleet of Boeing 747 cargo aircraft that I saw on the tarmac in Anchorage on the way through.

Naknek is truly a frontier town of plywood buildings surrounded by the endless, windblown scrub and alders of upper Bristol Bay.  The flat shorelines visible from sea reveal only a single substantial rise, that of Johnson Hill, to the south, to serve as a navigation point of reference.  Alaska brown bears wander the shoreline, travel eons-old paths between the housing trailers of fish factory encampments, and wander through the boatyard where we work on F/V Redman.

Apart from the almost uniformly neat and neatly dressed young women who work in some of the fish factories, it seems, sometimes at least, as if Naknek is populated entirely by a legion of young, grizzled, often begrimed, hooded-sweatshirt-wearing young men heading to or from their boats and local bars.  And every one of them has heard of the rumored fishing captain and his lucky crew who landed 400,000 pounds of salmon at the iced-fish-bonus price of 95 cents a pound.  It’s out there, constantly visible to them in the tender loads of hundreds of thousands of pounds of fresh sockeye and other salmon that get landed with every high tide.

More common, though, is the fishing season that brings a reward better than the hourly wages back home, and then gets eaten up by air tickets, the sky-high cost of everything in Naknek, and on occasion, the final tab at the King Ko bar next to the airport departure area.  There, a pretty blond in a modestly cut but somehow exceptionally clingy dress and a visored cap can help you while away the time with a once-frozen pizza and two beers for $47, plus tip.

At the end of the season, some crews have made money, and some have gone broke, bedeviled by mechanical breakdown or other failure that kept them out of commission when the fish were running.

There are those in support roles who may have once been fishermen, until, like “Fergie,” a gracious and friendly fish-camp-based mechanic, the cam shaft went to pieces on their boat engine at the height of the season, leaving them broke and unable to recover financially.

Or the modern viking-twin whose engine went this year on July 4, costing him the entire season.

In place around those fishermen and other successful or failed gold-rushers, in the tiny islands of the restaurants and supply shops and the public library, are the people who live here year round.  There’s Kirsten, our lovely, almost sultry waitress at the Naknek Hotel Restaurant who moved here permanently four years ago and takes our order sitting tightly -- and pleasantly -- thigh-to-thigh with your correspondent.

There’s the welcoming lady at the little one-story library who remembers my full name -- from among scores of visitors -- from my single, minutes-long visit a week ago when I signed in to use the library’s wireless Internet connection.

And the young lady behind the counter at the Ace Hardware who remembers me from my single previous store visit as “Dave’s dad,” and comments on how hard Dave has worked to try to salvage the season after his own engine breakdown.

We are a world away -- perhaps a universe away -- from the Middle East and its endless problems, but, as with my Gazan friends, the welcome is warm, and the departure, for a homeward bound traveler, bittersweet.