Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  “This is God’s country!” Stewart says. “It’s nice out here! I’ve been up and down this coast from Maine to Florida, and this is the only place like this.” Stewart is worried about the decline of the fisheries as the pressure on them constantly increases, and also about such formerly abundant elements as good fresh water. “You talk to some of these old-timers, they used to go down about forty-five feet and get beautiful water; now they’re going deeper and deeper. Too many people, throwing out too much. In the summertime we had summer people, but after Labor Day they was gone. Now they don’t go, they stay and stay and stay, till Christmas, even, first of the year.”

  Like Milt Miller, Ben Havens, and many other fishermen, Stewart has moved away from Amagansett, where he can no longer afford a house, but he also disliked the contamination of soil, air, and water by farm poisons that, in his opinion, make it dangerous to live in farm communities. Today he lives in an oak woods development off the Three Mile Harbor road in a ranch house that I recognized on my first visit by the ship’s anchor that used to sit in front of Montauk Seafood, and also the boats, decrepit cars, tubs, fishing gear, nets, pots, and buoys that characterize all baymen’s yards on the South Fork.

  At forty-seven, Stewart is a powerful man with heavy arms and a hard belly whose face looks tougher than it is because of the scar on the left side of his mouth. “Dad was chasin me, and I fell in a wood pile, cedar stakes,” he explains with a wry grin. Ted’s children agree that when Ted was working the long haul-seiner’s day, sometimes four in the morning until eleven at night, and the kids woke him during his quick rests, he could “get ugly and get the belt out.” Yet despite the fights between the two, Stewart’s sisters feel that their father spoiled the only boy.

  Stewart was not spoiled, but he was confident. Having tried early and without success to tell his father how to do things, he made certain that any new men on the crew—and outsiders especially—deferred to his own superior experience; and sometimes this way of compensating for his youth came across as stubbornness and arrogance, especially out in the dory where his father could not yell at his mistakes. As the man setting the net, he was dory captain, and no one disputed him except the “captain’s captain,” as Stewart called him, the man in the long-billed cap and checked wool shirt waving his arms and yelling from the beach.

  One day of big rolling swells, with the net set and the dory headed back toward shore, Stewart realized he had left behind the gloves he needed to hold the jack line that would slow the dory and hold her stern into the seas as she entered the surf. “Hell, that’s nothin,” Stewart said, as if this was the way that he had planned it. Since there is no cleat on a dory—it would foul the net—he took a turn around his leg to snub the line, then jerked his stubborn chin toward the white beach that rose and disappeared again behind the wave crests.

  That day I was stroke oar and John Cole was in the bow.Watching Stewart’s set face and the seas looming behind him, John cleared his throat in comic alarm and I grinned an uneasy grin. Big swells lifted and fell beneath the dory as we pulled toward shore, all set to “put our back in it” to catch the first small wave, yet being careful not to move too fast in case the boat was picked up by a sea too big for us to handle. At the best of times, the man on the jack line needs strength to hold the dory on the back of the wave, behind the crest; not until this wave collapses does he ease off a little on the line so that the dory settles on the broken wave and coasts ashore. When the beach is flat, the trick is a lot easier. This day the tide was high and the beach was steep, and it seemed to the unhappy oarsmen that the seas were growing.

  The wave that finally caught us was too big; it lifted up our stern and pitched us forward. Stewart was strong, he did his best to haul us back bare-handed, but even with that dangerous turn around his leg, the yellow dory was too heavy; the line sizzled through the transom notch as she gathered speed. Our dory captain wore a strange expression. To this day, I can see the white scar standing out on his stiff face as the pain hit him, and the shrill warning cry from shore, like the voice of a far gull across the wind. Stewart, grunting, let go of the line—he had no choice—and the dory shot forward, stern rising to the sky as she cascaded wildly down the wave face.

  Yanking the oars in, we spun on our seats, prepared to jump. In the corner of my eye I saw Ted Lester, scuttling over the sand much faster than a man in waders was ever meant to run. Seeing that dory careen toward the steep beach, he knew just what was going to happen, and it did.

  I was starting my jump when the bow stem struck the sand, and the breaking wave pitchpoled the dory in a violent forward somersault. John and Stewart, bow and stern, were flung aside into the wash, but I was catapulted straight ahead onto the sand. That boat was coming down out of the sky as I tried to roll out to one side: Ted arrived at the last instant to squat and catch and hold the falling stern. He was already shrieking at poor Stewart as I scrambled free.

  Hearing us talk of that bad day, Madge Lester called out from the other room, “Stewart was always a devil; he still is.” Her husband cocked his head in the Posey way and grunted. “Burned right through my waders, that line did. I still got notches on my leg where I tried to hold it.”

  Madge Lester is one of the lucky baymen’s wives who love the water. Nowadays a number of women go out on the boats, even crew on draggers, but this is recent. Tom Lester’s mother, Ruth, back in the fifties, was the first woman to crew regularly to help her husband, and received a good deal of foul language and abuse (“You left your dishes in the sink?”) before winning the men’s respect; she later became the first woman to run for bay constable (the second was Gail Lester, and both lost). Ruth Lester was also a conservation-minded town trustee who fought the developers’ road that closed off the north entrance to Bonac Creek. Tom’s wife, Cathy, who also loves the water, is active in the fight to save Northwest Harbor, “the finest scallop ground on the East Coast,” and she, too, has recently become a town official.

  Jarvie Wood’s wife, on the other hand, does not go fishing (“She don’t even want to go down to the shore,” Jarvie says), but despite a loss of income, she went along with her husband’s need to give up their store and return to the water. Ann Havens (wife of William) and the late Kathi Lester (wife of Jimmy, Cap’n Bill’s grandson) were leaders in the Baymen’s Ladies Auxiliary, which organized benefits and other events and put out an excellent public relations newsletter in the mid-seventies.

  To some fishermen, such as Fred Havens, women are Jonahs, and until one day when Francis Lester invited her along, Fred would not permit his wife, Carol, on the beach during the haul-seining. Fred, who is Stewart Lester’s age, left the water to try mowing, carpentry, even highway work to support his new family, becoming “very quiet and withdrawn,” says Carol, until her father, who hated to see his son-in-law work on the road, told his daughter that her husband was a fisherman and belonged on the water. She said she was afraid they’d starve, and he told her to go out and get a job, which Carol did. These days most fishermen’s wives must go to work if the family is to survive as a fishing family.

  Carol Havens, who still works to make ends meet, is philosophical. She believes that a fisherman’s wife must accept being a single parent during the fishing season, that she must be as independent as her husband, and learn to lead two wholly separate lives. Fishing, she says, “is not a livelihood but a way of living, because we live different than everybody else.”

  My own last season—1956—was a good year on the beach, but in 1957, Stewart says, he made just $2,200 haul-seining, and a good deal less than that in 1958. “Didn’t catch nothin. Made just one good haul in that whole year, and the damned market dropped the price on us overnight from fifty cents to eight cents a pound!” Stewart shook his head, disgusted still: “That was my last year on the beach.” That winter Stewart and his father, with Milt Miller and Ted’s nephew Johnnie Erickson, went codfishing with Elisha Ammon on the Russell S, setting their trawls east of Shagwong Reef on the last of t
he ebb and lifting them after the slack tides, on the first of the flood. Because of bad currents and strong tides, setting cod trawls on these grounds was tricky work, but they benefited from a strong and experienced crew. They landed about six thousand pounds a day, Stewart recalls, which split six ways—there was one share for the boat—worked out to about three hundred dollars a man.

  By 1960 the codfish had declined, but Stewart crewed again on the Russell S, dragging on the Backside for yellowtail flounder. That spring he bought an old twenty-seven-foot lobster boat, and that summer he tended three hundred pots southwest of the Point. Then, in 1963, Stewart acquired the forty-foot Driftwood, which he used for dragging. The spring run of fluke, or summer flounder5—as much as two thousand pounds a day for ten days or two weeks—was very profitable; he dragged on the Backside, half a mile to three miles off the coast. In early June he removed the dragging gear, loaded up his lobster pots, and set them about three miles southwest of the Point, in from sixty to ninety feet of water.

  The lobster fishery, which began in the late 1700s, still extends from Long Island north to Nova Scotia, and while lobsters are intermittently plentiful along the coast—they fell off sharply in the 1920s—increasing pressure has moved the main fishery offshore to the submarine canyons south of Georges Bank. Lobstermen are supposed to release juveniles6 and also egg-bearing females, but many take “shorts” for black market sale and scrape the “berries” off the bellies of the females, tossing them into the well after the rest. A lobsterman whom I saw do this in the early sixties shook his head at my plea for conservation and just laughed.

  Lobstering was profitable until mid-October, Stewart says, when some of the pots were taken out “before the real bad blows. Along in the middle of November, first of December it’s getting rugged, an awful lot of nor’westers and a lot of blows. I’d lost a hundred and fifty, two hundred pots, just trying to fish half my gang; just couldn’t find the buoys, and no time out there, no fuel left, to spend looking. So then we’d rig up some long-line gear, try tilefishing, maybe two trips a month is all we’d get for January. And February, mid-February through March, six or seven weeks, we’d get a spring run of codfish in 120–180 foot of water, maybe an hour from the Point. Meanwhile you’d be working on your lobster gear, and the first week of April you take the first load of pots offshore, forty pots to a trawl. Had to check ’em every four—five days, and I was fishing almost eight hundred, so we’d haul about half every other day and get ready in between.”

  For a while, Stewart unloaded so many lobsters—1,500 to 2,500 pounds a day—that the same sort of people who prey upon the haul-seiners on the beach would come up to him on the dock and ask for one, ignoring all the hard work and risk represented by each lobster. At last he would take a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, saying, “Here, I may as well give you this.” Nevertheless, he made very good money, declaring about $45,000 a year; he bought a new car and new truck, and also his new ranch house in the woods.

  In 1968 Ted and Stewart commissioned the pretty forty-three-foot Posey, built in Camden, Maine, but that same year the lobstering fell off, and for the next two years the Posey was limited to dragging. Ted rigged a trawl that would work inside the bar, and as these were great years for striped bass, she did very well. “Used to knock down surfcasters, that’s how close I was,” Stewart says. “Put her high and dry twice.” Like most draggers, the Posey carried a harpoon stand, and Stewart would take from three to eight swordfish a year on the runs back and forth from Montauk Point. In 1970 he set 580 lobster pots at the sixty-fathom line, almost halfway to the edge of the continental shelf, but two years later he was still losing; not only were the lobsters scarce but many were soft-shelled, and died in transit. Stewart sold the Posey with regret and bought a big fifty-nine-foot steel boat that made twenty knots and cut the return trip from six hours to three. “First year we done all right, but the second, the lobsters started dropping off bad, and we moved off as far as 120 fathoms. I hung on for the next three years and that was the end of it—forget it!”

  Nearly broke, Stewart sold his boat and quit the lobster business; he gave up ocean fishing and went back to the bay. Today he is content with an open boat and outboard motor. With part-time help from his son Teddy, he tends two traps at Water Fence, east of Napeague, goes clamming and scalloping, and runs a scallop-opening shop here at his house.

  In my scalloping days, the openers gathered at a long outdoor table under the trees, in a kind of community event like a house raising or corn husking. In the thick of the gossip and laughter, the shells flew, and an eye was separated each few seconds from an organic tangle that the novice might take half a minute to unravel. Like so many small freedoms of East End life, from burning leaves to sleeping on the beach, opening scallops on outdoor tables under the oaks has now been regulated out of existence by busy bureaucrats. Scallops today must be opened indoors, under certified conditions; even the old wood-handled knives have been replaced by hygienic plastic implements. Yet opening remains an exhilarating social event, a lot of fun, according to Madge Lester. Madge believes that the skilled twist of the wrist in speedy work comes easier to women, and speaks in awe of Henry Havens’s granddaughter, Carol Nation, who has drastically speeded the usual technique (Pop the top shell off, go back to the hinge and scoop the gut up and over the top of the adductor muscle, or eye, clean the top shell on the way forward and flip it off, finish removing gut, cut eye, and flip it into the container); this inspired woman holds two scallops at once, flicking the eyes free without troubling the guts. Some openers “cut” a gallon an hour, at a present rate of nearly ten dollars a gallon, which, added to the bayman’s own time, labor, and overhead, accounts for the high price of bay scallops.7 (Similarly, the high price of flounder fillets—pronounced fill-its—is accounted for by labor and lost poundage: 1.5 pounds of fluke, 2–2.5 of black-backed flounder, and 3 of yellowtail are required for a pound of flatfish fillet, and a good filleter may take a year to learn the job.)

  “After I quit the beach,” Stewart says, “my dad took on Pete Kromer, who married one of Francis’s daughters. Milt Miller, Jimmy Reutershan, Jens Lester, Benny Havens, Dick Wood, J.P. Fenelon—that’s my Aunt Ruth’s son—hell, just about everyone fished with my dad at one time or another, though most of ’em didn’t last too long. Long about ’62, they went over to outboards, Uncle Bill or Bobby Lester in Southampton was probably first. Old-timers was suspicious, of course, said them motors would scare the fish off to deep water, but in a year or two, why, everybody had ’em. And with that power, they began usin a lot more net, three times the size, they were goin way out back of the bar, and so the dories had to be five or six foot longer, too.

  “But it seems like they got lazy or somethin, in them years after the motors come—never fished hard no more, not the way we done. One year before my dad sold the rig, he got sick there, had a fish bone in his hand or somethin, asked me to run the rig for him. That day down off Hither Plains, it was a little sea runnin but not too bad, not with the motor, but them fellas just didn’t want to go, so I got disgusted, cause we could see the bass, right close inshore. I said, Well, shit, if we ain’t goin bassin, I’m goin home. No, no, they said, wait a little while, sea might go down a little. So J.P. Fenelon goes along a little way, lookin for a better place to set, drives right by as many bass as you ever seen in your whole life, right in the surf, and never even notices. I know that Uncle Bill is into fish back to the west’rd, had 280 boxes that same mornin, and I’m goin crazy here, because they’re still not interested; I’m in charge of the rig but there’s nothin I can do. So I drive straight off the beach and go on home, tell the old man he ought to fire that whole gang, and that was the last time in my life I ever went haul-seinin.

  “In the sixties, everything got complicated—withholding tax, unemployment insurance, liability, licenses, I don’t know what—and it just didn’t pay for one man to own the rig, so eventually Pete Kromer bought in. Today one man may be captain, but the
rig is owned by two or three; one guy owns the net and a truck, another the dory, and so on. Anyway, the crews started catching bass again about 1960, and it just seemed to get better and better. My dad fished with Pete Kromer right up until he got sick, about 1970.”

  Despite his famous fights with “the captain’s captain,” Stewart is proud of his father to this day. A portrait of Ted by a summer artist is prominent on his living room wall, and he keeps a large file of Ted Lester documents and photographs. Like his sister Jenny, Stewart feels that Ted was worn out by his own energy. “My dad was one of those guys so fired up most of the time that he never really stopped to take a rest. Even when he got sick, you know, still had to jump into the car every damn mornin, run down and make sure that ocean was still there.”

  14.

  The East Hampton

  Town Baymen’s Association

  On a September day four or five years ago, coming ashore at Montauk Lake from a day’s fishing, I saw a familiar figure in black waders unloading scallops from his battered sharpie. Milt Miller’s stiff black brush was silvered now, and he was heavier, but he cocked his head and grinned in a certain way, and I recognized him the same instant he recognized me. Milt set down his burlap sack with a solid crunch that brought back in an instant those scallop seasons of a quarter century before and came stomping across the shallow water to shake hands. “B’god, bub, I thought that was you! How you been doin?” And we just stood there for awhile, shaking our heads and grinning, glad to meet again without having or needing very much to say; the twenty-five years in between seemed unimportant. We asked after the men we knew in common, and inevitably arrived at Pete Scott’s death.