Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Standing beside Dan’s big steel dory with the American flag painted on the side, we received assurances from Peter Cohalan, Suffolk County Supervisor, whose job was being sought by the bass bill sponsor, that his sympathies were entirely with the baymen. But a month later, on June 25, the bass bill passed easily in the state senate, and Babylon Republican Owen Johnson, citing the rich tourist economy of the Hamptons, jeered at baymen King and Eames with the suggestion that fishermen put out of business by the bass bill could always find work “changing sheets in motel rooms”; as Eames said angrily, “They were just laughing at us.” The Babylon boys clearly smelled victory, and Cohalan lost heart when his opponent’s bill rode easily through the assembly. In July, while Governor Mario Cuomo wondered whether he dared veto a bill that (so his associates said) he recognized as unsound and discriminatory, Cohalan endorsed it after all, and this turnabout by the ranking politician in the baymen’s county gave Cuomo the political excuse that might be needed.

  For most of the summer the disheartened fishermen awaited the decision of the governor, who was said to be increasingly troubled by the barrage of letters opposing the bass bill that began to appear in his mailbox and in the newspapers. A New York Times editorial of July 27 pointed out that “the wiser course would be to make any law wait until 1985. The Federal Government is funding an emergency study of striped bass.12 It aims to determine what is happening to the bass population … and how best to increase it. By rushing to make life impossible for commercial fishermen on Long Island before the facts of bass life are fully known, the sports fishermen and their friends in the Legislature create the impression they are as interested in getting rid of rivals as they are in saving the bass.”

  But in the end, political expedience prevailed over the best opinion of those who knew most about striped bass, and on August 8, only hours before the deadline, Mario Cuomo signed the bass bill into law. In a two-page attempt to justify his decision, the governor cited “poor reproduction and intensive fishing.” There was no mention of the gross pollution in New York’s stretch of the Susquehanna or in the Hudson, far less in the Chesapeake Bay.

  Almost immediately the bill’s chief sponsors in the D.E.C. began backing away from the strong statements issued in support of the bill, and confessed doubt about long-term results. Gordon Colvin admitted there was no “gilt-edged guarantee” that it would help: “Nobody really knows,” he said, “what factors, man-made or natural, influence the spawning.”13 His superior, Herbert Doig, Assistant Commissioner of Natural Resources and a long-time ally of the sportsmen’s lobbies, claimed, “We never indicated this was a sure cure solution to the spawning problems in the Chesapeake Bay.” In short, the bass bill’s sponsors now acknowledged that even a ban on the taking of this species at any place at any time would not insure its eventual survival. Unless the state and federal agencies stood up to the industrialists and politicians, unless the streams and estuaries were restored, the great silver bass, like the Atlantic salmon and the shad, would vanish from the gray and silent rivers.

  In February 1984, the head biologists on the Emergency Striped Bass Research Study14 would report gingerly to Congress that chemical pollutants “may be” a factor in the destruction of eggs, larvae, and fingerlings of bass, and that fishing “may be” inhibiting reproduction. In effect, the federal biologists were still protesting that the causes of the bass decline were not well understood, and one had to agree that a relatively successful spawning in 1982 was hard to explain, since the cumulative pollution in the Chesapeake had not lessened.

  An explanation was soon forthcoming, however. Studies of the Chesapeake’s Choptank River, where only a decade ago a boat might pass “through ten to fifteen miles of breaking fish”15 had related poor bass reproduction to heavy spring rains, though no one was quite certain why this was so. Apparently the mystery had been solved by strong new evidence that the critical factor was acid rain (nitrogen and sulfur oxides produced by the burning of fossil fuels and transformed to acid rain by contact with moisture in the atmosphere), the impact of which has been well established by the death of innumerable lakes and forests of eastern North America and Europe.

  In the flat coastal plain, in the swift runoff after heavy rainfall, the waters are poisoned in lethal “acid pulses,” intensified through chemical action as they draw from the bottom the aluminum and other toxins already present. In most years such rainstorms are frequent in April and May when bass are spawning in the streams and the millions of eggs and larvae are most vulnerable; the spring of 1982 was unusually dry. The new evidence suggests that lowland streams as far apart as the Rhode River in Maryland and the Annapolis River in Nova Scotia—and many poisoned water courses in between—have been destroyed as bass spawning grounds largely as a consequence of acid rain, which is also blamed for the serious decline of a half dozen anadromous perches and herrings, including the valuable American shad. The deep Hudson, where bass are increasing, has apparently been spared because its river limestones buffer the acid.16

  Meanwhile, the Chafee study endorsed the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s recommendation of a 55 percent reduction of the bass harvest in coastal states from Maine to North Carolina. Senator Chafee was in favor of a moratorium until a federal management plan could be put into effect, and his associate in the House, Claudine Snyder of Rhode Island, submitted a bill authorizing a three-year federal ban on the sale of bass at any place at any time. This bill was supported by Stripers Unlimited, Save Our Stripers, and various concerned individuals. A House bill submitted in late summer by Representative Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, authorizing a moratorium in any state not abiding by the 55 percent reduction, was passed in the early fall of 1984 and signed into law by the President in late October.

  On August 30, 1984, Governor Mario Cuomo would turn up in East Hampton at a reception for a congressional candidate who had endorsed a by-catch bill acceptable to the commercial men. I was talking with Bill Lester when the governor walked into the gathering, and I watched Cap’n Bill with admiration as he stepped right up to the startled politician, just as Ted might have done, ignoring the aides who tried to head him off. “I been a fisherman all my life,” Bill said, “and I know that twenty-four-inch bill is a bad bill.” He looked his man over. “Why, you know that’s a bad bill, governor, same as I do!” Cuomo, smiling, did not deny this, and after his speech took an hour to listen to the fishermen, who made it clear that what they wanted was fair treatment, not charity or welfare. The governor said that he assumed that few of the men voted, and that those who did would vote Republican; he was not interested in votes, he said, but what was right. He told the men that the bass bill decision the year before was the most difficult he had had to make among all the ten thousand-odd bills that he had signed. He promised to support a by-catch bill and to remain informed on the situation.

  A fortnight later the Maryland Tidewater Administration (part of the Department of Natural Resources), after years of ignoring the best judgment of its own frustrated biologists, gave in to increasing public pressure to restore the Chesapeake.17 Abandoning its long-time political commitment to the watermen, it announced that the striped bass had been designated a threatened species in Maryland, on the basis of an “alarmingly low” survival rate in the spring hatch, and that as of January 1985, this valuable fish would be fully protected by a moratorium that was expected to last for at least four years. (As one estuarine biologist remarked, “Maryland has taken a drastic step with the best of hopes, but we have no assurances it will work. Pollution in the bay may have gone too far.”)18 Since the Maryland bass population was all but gone, most sportsmen strongly supported the new ruling, which was bound to increase political pressure for similar legislation the whole length of the Atlantic Coast. Already the National Marine Fisheries Service was considering placing the bass under the Endangered Species Act, which would lead to a federal moratorium of indefinite length.

  Years ago, the Marine Fisheries Commission, which no
w supports the twenty-four-inch bill, listed four consequences of “social” legislation in the fisheries. The consequences of such legislation still apply:

  1. The legislation may damage one type of fishery without any measurable gain to the faction responsible for the legislation.

  2. The legislation may tend to be nullified—indeed its intended effect reversed—by the laws of other states.

  3. The fishes are unable to read the law books and therefore cannot comply with the legislation.

  4.It may result in needless waste—social, economic, and biological.

  Meanwhile the strong and ancient bass continued to wend its stolid way in and out of the estuaries and bays and north and south along the coasts, serenely at peace in its ability to fathom the hearts of its well-wishers, and secure in the dim intuition that, whatever Homo sapiens decides about his own destruction, Morone saxatilis, a much older and more tolerant species, will prevail.

  16.

  Summer of 1983:

  The Havens Crew

  In mid-July of 1983, returning to Amagansett to find out who was still fishing on the beach, I met Ben Havens at Stuart’s Market. We rode down to the Napeague stretch where Benny’s father, William Havens, and the rest of the Havens crew had already arrived with the dory and second truck. It was just past daybreak, and the daybreak set was best, but the ocean toiled with big thick seas from the day before. The men sat quietly in the truck cab staring out at the Atlantic, hoping the waves would subside enough to permit a haul. In summer the crews must make one or two sets early and get off the beach, to avoid excited protests from the tourists.

  “I remember Pete,” William Havens said, sticking his hand out of the window of his red pickup, “but I don’t guess he remembers me, now do ya?” Although we had not met in twenty-seven years, I recalled Billy Havens as a handsome, private, quiet man not much like his hell-raising and boisterous brothers. In the late fifties, when the bass were scarce, he had left the beach to hang menhaden nets in the seine house at Promised Land; he returned to haul-seining when the bass came back strong in the early sixties, joining his brothers Gump and Lindy on Bill Lester’s crew. He was later a founder of the Baymen’s Association. “Never used to fish in summer then, remember, Pete? Just six weeks in spring and six weeks in the fall.”

  The first William Havens came from Rhode Island to Shelter Island in the seventeenth century, and his clan would acquire considerable property in North Haven and Sag Harbor. On Shelter Island, the James Havens house (1743) is now a historical monument, and on North Haven (where the family had a British land grant), the beautiful northwest region of the island, called the Stock Farm, was once Havens farmland. The Sag Harbor Havenses were shipbuilders and whalers, and Benny says that in the Revolutionary War a Havens whaleboat helped sink a British battleship in Long Island Sound.

  In the 1890s William’s grandfather settled in the Springs, and since that time almost all the men in this East Hampton branch of the family have been baymen. His father, William Henry Havens, moved to Amagansett in the twenties, and fished on the beach for many years with all three crews of the Posey Lesters; I remembered him as an enormous strong old man with a gentle face who used to fill in now and then on Bill Lester’s crew. Henry used to say it was bad luck to whistle while fishing, which would brew a storm, and other fishermen seem to agree, since one never hears whistling on the beach. (Some fishermen won’t shave during a poor stretch of fishing: “If we can’t catch nothin, we can’t afford no razor blade.”) The Havens house on the old Montauk Highway at the east end of Amagansett overlooked the ocean, and according to Benny, who liked to keep him company, the old man in his final years—he died in 1965—would sit with a long brass spyglass up in the scuttlehole1 when his sons set gill nets or cod trawls off the shore.

  All five of Henry Havens’s sons—William, Sidney (Lindy), Orie (Hipboots), Floyd (Gump), and Fred—have been fishermen at one time or another. Fred, Lindy, and William are still fishing—Lindy lives in the old Havens house—and William’s sons Ben and Billy and Fred’s son Fred fish on this crew.

  As a teen-ager in the early sixties, Benny Havens had gone haul-seining with Ted Lester, like his father before him, and his grandfather, too. He had also helped Cap’n Frank set his old sturgeon nets, and he recalls how excited he was by his first experience with big whiptail rays and sharks. While in high school, Benny fished mostly with Milt Miller, gill-netting and power-seining in the bay, but the adventure of surf fishing had already hooked him, and Milt was angry when Benny rejoined Ted’s crew after finishing school in 1964. “Spent a lot of time teachin me, I guess,” Benny says. He was very upset a few weeks later when Milt blinded himself in his right eye in an accident off Cartwright Shoal, where he was found lying in his boat by Jimmy Reutershan. “You always think if you was there, that might not have happened.”

  Talking of Ted reminded Benny and his father of all the patches in that old yellow dory. “Ted there, he’d just wrap something around a hole and keep right on goin; never had much use for nothin new,” said William, laughing. “I recall one time there, he got hung up, tore a V-piece right out of his net, lost four hundred boxes. Most fellas would be out of business two—three days, but not Ted. He was a good net man, Ted was, and he run right home, found some old nettin in the rafters and hung her in there. Goddamn it, them Poseys caught some fish with them old rags! You wouldn’t believe it! Ted was back on the beach and got a hundred more boxes that same day. Oh yes, he was a live wire, Ted was, a real piss-cutter.”

  Benny says he “enjoyed fishin with Ted, cause I always worked on Ted’s end once the net was set. He would work the inshore end [where the dory is launched], and I went back down there when the dory came ashore. He worked me hard, but I never let him bother me: I thought a lot of Ted, you know. I pulled the truck ahead, jumped out, pulled the net out of the sand, tied on, ran the line up and down, and he would just stand up there hollerin, tendin the winch.”

  After two years on the beach, Benny went into the service; by the time he returned, Ted had sold his rig. Benny fished with Francis Lester for a year before starting a new crew with his Uncle Fred, Bill Leland, and Danny King (whose father, Virgil King, was another veteran of the Ted Lester crews). They fished hard and did well, but he and Danny could not agree on methods. “Once you’ve fished long enough and you get good at it, well, I don’t know about ‘good,’ but you always think you can fish better than someone else. So you start tellin guys on the crew what to do, and they get arguin, and one guy will quit, start his own crew and that’s how it’s been goin.” When Bill Lester’s crew broke up in the early seventies, William and Lindy joined Benny’s new crew, and he and his father have worked together ever since.

  Bill Lester’s rig had been taken over and a new crew formed by his son Calvin, and Bill helped Calvin out for a few seasons, but the day of the old Posey Boys was over. The rig once run by Cap’n Frank, then his son Francis, passed along to Francis’s son Jens, who was several years older than his Uncle Calvin. Both had fished with Ted for a few years, and they fished together for a while in the early seventies. “When Ted got sick there, Stewart didn’t want his father’s rig,” William explained. “He was already draggin and lobsterin. So Ted sold it to Pete Kromer, who still has it. Lindy’s fishin some with that crew now.”

  “Not long after Ted quit the beach,” Ben told me when his father was out of earshot, “Lindy and Dom-Dom [Dominick Grace] decided that Cap’n Bill was gettin too old for this work—well, they were wrong. Why hell, it must have been ’68, when the bass was at its height, Bill and his crew hit 367 boxes right down here to Hither Plains!” Benny Havens pointed. “And Ted’s crew come along and got one hundred boxes more from the same bunch. That was September 1968, because I was with Francis, and we had been fishin every day on that same set, but that day we stayed home: it was Francis’s birthday! Francis ain’t never goin to forget that birthday! Bill’s haul was the record around here, and it still is. That crew was Old Bill and my da
d there, Lindy, Gump, and Dom-Dom, probably the best crew was ever on this beach. Anyway, Bill’s crew started in to fightin amongst themselves once Bill was gone, and the drinkin caught up with Lindy, and finally that crew broke up for good.”

  Ben Havens and his father (“We used to fight like cats and dogs, just like Ted and Stewart”) have been fishing together now for fifteen years and get on well, running the crew from opposite ends of the beach. Although Benny put this rig together, he respects his father’s long experience and regards him as the leader of the crew. He did not work well with his younger brother Nick, who eventually left the beach to work on the draggers, but gets on fine with his brother Billy and young cousin Fred who, with Doug Kuntz, made up the present crew.

  The Havens, Calvin Lester, and Danny King crews, with their big dories, are the strongest crews left on the beach. Jens and Francis, with a smaller rig, haul seine less regularly, spending more time over on the bay. “Pete Kromer has a big rig, too, but the guys on that crew now are older, and they don’t fish that hard,” Benny Havens says. “The older you get, the leerier you get with the ocean. The young guys will fish harder weather, but eventually it will get you, the boat will roll over or something. I don’t think you should be out there if you’re scared. I’ve been leery of it myself a lot of times when it’s a heavy sea. You want everything workin for you, you know; if you break one shear pin in the surf, you’re done. Them big heavy motor dories, solid full of net, you just can’t row ’em; you can hold them, maybe, if you get back of the surf, but it’s almost impossible to row ’em. Nineteen eighty, I broke a shear pin, and my brother Nick made it to shore to get another, but I watched him pretty nearly drown, tryin to swim back; he was in too much of a rush, got tired out, and Sammy Merritt had to go in after him.” (Stuart Vorpahl, Jr., haul-seining with his father and his brother Billy in the mid-sixties, was going off in the dory when the motor stalled, the pull-cord broke, and the dory filled up and rolled over; the sand roil filled his waders as he washed along, he could not find his footing, and might have drowned if Tommy Bennett had not caught up with him and grabbed him by the hair.)