Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Bill smiled as he said this; he has the same cheerful spirit as his late brother. As he says, “We have eels, we have fish, we have clams, we have scallops; probably one eighth of what we eat comes out of the water. Eat a mess of fish, mess of scallops, save five–ten dollars. Them poor people in the city on Social Security ain’t got nothin to eat; they can’t go out on the water and get clams or eel, so I feel very sorry for them.

  “I had a very good life, a very good life. I have got into some awful, awful tight jams, but I come out of it; the good Lord was with me, I guess. Times we had plenty and times we were short, but it was a good, clean, healthy life, a beautiful life. I would do it all over again. Ninety-nine percent of it was workin for myself, that was the beauty of my life.”

  Returning from the telephone, Cap’n Bill resumed his train of thought. “Course fellers always jumped around from crew to crew, same way they do today, but I had pretty much the same crew for near twenty years, from the time you was fishin with Ted until early seventies. We just got along the best of any of ’em. I was head man, I guess, but if one of the crew suggested somethin, I always went along, agreed with it, we tried it out, and if it didn’t work, why, we went back. That way, you know, everybody’s happy. Then we broke up, you know, fellers had their own family, wanted their own crew, and I was gettin old; I was stumblin around out there, and had to stop. My boy Calvin was fishin with me, and he took over the rig about ten years ago. But he took me along with him, y’know, right up until year before last, when I was eighty-two.”

  (“He knows what he’s doin,” Calvin says shortly, in a way that suggests that the same can’t be said of everybody on the beach.)

  Old Bill gazed fondly at the photograph on the wall. “Oh he’s a worker, that boy is, he don’t let up; goin eighteen hours a day. But with fishin the way it is, I worry that there ain’t no place for him to go. Probably end up poor as me, don’t you think so?”

  Bill sat with both big hands flat on the table. “Gettin old, y’know; I ain’t so cocky as I was. All my brothers gone, only my sister Catherine still alive, and she’s over there in the hospital after a fall. You remember Charles, I guess?” I nodded: old Charlie Lester was no longer a fisherman in the early fifties, but he was often around Ted’s yard, keeping track of what was going on. “Charles was wiser’n the rest of us, got into raisin vegetables and chickens, had a little market and done all right, too. Course my brother Harry and my brother Harold died before your time—both su’cides. One day Harold told us he was hearin this loud roarin in his head, couldn’t get it out, and not long after that he hung himself, over there in that shed behind the old homestead.”

  Out of respect for the dead, it seemed, Bill referred to Charlie, Happy, and Kenny as Charles, Harold, and Kenneth; only Ted was Ted. Thinking about Happy, he gave a sigh, as if still wondering if there hadn’t been something that the family might have done. “Sold off the old homestead after Mother died, they took it over west, far as Bridgehampton. Too much hardship there, just wanted to be rid of it. There was a great big elm out in the front; that come down, too. Nothin left over there now but a couple of small buildins. My grandson James—that’s Billy’s boy, sets traps down Montauk—he’s livin there now.

  “Ted’s place was sold off, too, a few years back. Ted had done good, you know, opened Montauk Seafood, then the fish store, then that liquor store out here on the highway.Even had a little house down there in Florida. But him and Jenny was livin too hard, got in with them middle-class people, what we call the rich, and tried to live harder yet; that’s why they died so young, in my opinion. And after they died, their kids was fightin over their property, and most of what Ted put together went to the lawyers. Stewart sold that good wood boat, the Posey, got him a tin one, one of them steel hulls that rusts out quick; used that for lobsterin, but then the lobsters dropped out and he had to sell her. I guess that fella’s pret’ near back down to nothin. House sold off out of the family, both them shops closed down, nothin but weeds and junk in that big yard over there where we used to spread our nets when you was with us.

  “Oh yes, everythin keeps changin. In Pop’s day, they used to knit up their own nets, in wintertime; then come store-bought cotton nettin, which was kind of tender, and after that come linen twine, that was some strong! But we went over to that plastic, what they call nylon, you know, and right away after that somebody thought to put a motor in the dory. Nets got to be three times the size they were, and dories are so big today that a man can’t row ’em.”

  Cap’n Bill was concerned about the harvest of swordfish seventy miles offshore, in the abrupt temperature differential where warm eddies from the Gulf Stream met cold water at the edge of the continental shelf. These days most swordfish are long-lined in deep water by baited hooks about sixty feet apart; sometimes this trawl line is thirty-five miles long. Fifty years ago, swordfish, like cod, came close inshore off the ocean beach; Bill’s nephew, Johnnie Erickson, remembers taking a swordfish “in eight fathoms, and another one next day in twelve, both of ’em right in sight of the Montauk office buildins. Them days you might hit one anywhere southwest of the Point.” Since then, the inshore dragging fleet has driven them off into deeper water, all the way to the fifty-fathom line.

  Like all commercial species, swordfish vary in abundance from year to year. Despite increasing pressure, the best swordfish year on record was said to be 1982, when Bill saw one long-liner come in with decks awash due to the weight of 350 swordfish. But nine out of ten of the fish caught, he said, were “pups” of sixty pounds or less; how long could the fish sustain that harvest? Anyway, the taste of fish dead on the hook was poor compared to those harpooned and bled aboard the boat; it was a waste. He had also heard that Japanese tuna long-liners were killing swordfish right and left; the speed of the retrieval gear ripped their mouths apart, leaving them prey to sharks and starvation. Yet the commercial men were apprehensive about the proposal of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Council to halt swordfishing on the East Coast for an unspecified period, because of the decline in average size of the fish landed; species by species, it appeared, the baymen were being regulated out of business. After thirty years, the bass bill had gone through, and Bill feared that fluke and weakfish would be next. Offshore, yellowtail and squid were both declining, even as the number of boats increased.

  “What do you think happened to them bass?” Cap’n Bill demanded, after a silence while he thought about the swordfish. And when I said I thought that the main cause was pollution of their spawning grounds, he nodded doubtfully, sitting dead still, both palms still flat on the kitchen table. Earlier this year the weakfish had turned up in the traps “all sores and pink-eyed and bulged out; them fish must have got into some of them chemical dumps, migratin up here, cause a month later they was comin in clear again. But there’s somethin besides pollution is gettin to them bass, and I think it’s bluefish. For the past thirty years, I guess, there’s been so many that now they’re eatin on themselves; you dress most of these bluefish out, you find small bluefish, and maybe they’re eatin up them small bass, too.

  “Thing of it is, there’s no price on ’em no more. Fishermen see a bunch of bluefish, they don’t bother to set on ’em, and if they get into the nets, they pull the string on ’em, just let ’em go. Why, dogfish is worth more than bluefish, or mackerel, either! Used to leave them dogfish on the beach, long with daylights and skates; now dressed dogs get twenty-five cents a pound! They give us ten cents for bluefish today, when Harry and Frank and Charles and me used to get fifty cents back in the twenties! Never believe that, would ya? And these people payin six dollars a pound for striped bass, which is hardly fit to eat—poorest fish there is! Now they’re puttin through this law, twenty-four inches; can’t catch small bass no more, all we can catch now are big spawners. Should be just the other way! It’s them big fish should be protected!”

  Like all of the older fishermen, who have seen almost every species come and go, Bill Lester believes that the bass are
going to come back, just as they always have. All sea creatures came in cycles, when one was up the other was down, but the body of fish remained about the same, and this was true long before anyone had thought about pollution. “Scallops disappeared entirely, didn’t they, piss clams right with ’em, never thought we’d see another one, and not so long ago, neither: 1927, maybe ’28. Course that may seem a good while back to you. Bluefish, weakfish, bottle fish—why, they all dropped out for years during my lifetime, makin room for somethin else to come in strong. I won’t see it, but if you live long enough, you’ll see them bass come back thick as they ever was.

  “Now yellowtail, they’re out there in twenty-thirty fathom, not shallow and not deep, just that one depth, and when they start in to fall off, the draggers go over to sea scallops for five years, and the yellowtail come back; that’s happened three—four times in my own life. Salmon disappeared, but now maybe they’re comin back a little; was forty or fifty caught in the traps last year. Anchovies showed up around here in ’74; never seen ’em before, and we ain’t seen ’em since. What’s all this got to do with overfishin?” Bill Lester shook his head, disgusted. “Bet them biologists can’t tell us what happened to the shovel-nose shark;2 don’t never hear about ’em no more, and they used to be thick here. And the puffin pig!3 Called it the puffin pig cause of the sound it made; used to show up in the wintertime, get snarled up in our codfish gear. Kind of plump, up to sixty pounds, shape of a tuna but tail like a porpoise if I remember it right; open one up, put your hand in, it was hot! Used to see one or two a day back in the thirties, but now I ain’t heard of one for years; even the Museum [American Museum of Natural History] ain’t got none, from what I hear. But they got that ribbon fish4 we caught one time, very pretty silver thing. Roney Marasca, you remember him, he took it up there; probably up there yet today, with Roney’s name on it!”

  In October I went over to Fishers Island, where I helped my brother with his harvest of young oysters being shipped out to Nantucket and Cape Cod. As a marine biologist and lifelong surfcaster, Carey supported a federal moratorium on striped bass everywhere; he hoped that taking the bass away from a million sportsmen would bring the necessary political pressure on state and federal agencies to clean up the rivers. My own feeling was that a moratorium, encouraging the illusion that something was being done, might dissipate that pressure; unless accompanied by the very expensive restoration of bass habitat, the moratorium would be indefinite. But certainly it was the one clean way to eliminate the inequities of patchwork legislation, state by state.

  On October 18, surfcasting at daybreak into a hard east wind and rain, I hooked a bluefish close to fifteen pounds that took out line against the white-capped current surging around the eastern point. The silver fish leapt out of the sea, shaking its red gills in the early light. In its guts, when I filleted it, was a whole angler fish, ten inches long, and seeing this unappetizing morsel, I thought about what Cap’n Bill had said about bluefish eating small striped bass.

  A striped bass taken that same morning was a five-pounder, just under the new twenty-four-inch limit that would go into effect a fortnight later. The fish hit the lure close in to the white lace around the rocks, and as its thick tail swirled in the wave, I saw the greenish silver of the dorsal, then the broken stripes. This was probably the last bass I would ever keep; a year later my brother and I tagged and released every bass we caught.

  That day the air turned colder, and the sky cleared. Fishing from the same rock, in late afternoon, I watched the cormorants and gulls hurrying and diving at the bait churned up by the swift ranging schools of bluefish off Wicapesset Reef. A flight of crows that headed out across the rough bright sea toward far fire-colored woods between Stonington, Connecticut, and Watch Hill, Rhode Island, was a sign of winter. In the clear light I could see far eastward up the Rhode Island coast toward Rosie’s Hole, where the Merlin had brought those Shinnecock chiefs in quest of giant tuna. But the bluefish did not come inshore, and no bass whirled from the surging tide to slap my lure.

  Earlier in the month, the Rhode Island legislature had passed a three-year moratorium on the taking of striped bass in Rhode Island waters. This legislation was pushed through, not by the sportsmen, but by the commercial fishing representatives on the state Marine Fisheries Council. The commercial men realized that New York’s passage of the twenty-four-inch law would redouble the sportsmen’s pressure in Rhode Island, where the gill net and ocean pound trap fisheries depend entirely on small bass. Sick and tired of harassment, they elected to protect the bass from these self-styled conservationists who took nine-tenths of all striped bass landed in the state. Inevitably, Rhode Island’s action inspired discussion of a similar moratorium in New York State, where the fishermen were discussing drastic action.

  18.

  Baymen and Bureaucrats:

  Southampton

  Throughout October, the haul-seining remained poor, and on the first of November Jens Lester brought his young crew west to Sagaponack. The crew had finished a sparse haul and was loading the net when I went up to inspect the blue steel dory that had sunk a few weeks earlier out on the bar and to pay my respects to the last of the old-time fishermen on this crew.

  Francis Lester, born in 1909, the year the mysterious oarfish, or doplodocous, appeared in a Montauk trap, is Frank Lester’s oldest son, and a contemporary of his late Uncle Ted. Like his father and grandfather (and his son and grandson) he has been a fisherman all his life.

  Francis and Ted had often fished together as young boys; they had “a little dory” and a couple of trawls, and were “pretty rugged.” Francis remembers a winter morning when they tried to beat the men’s crews out to the cod grounds. Picking up old discarded baits from the men’s trawls, they went off through the surf in too much of a hurry, took a big winter sea into the boat, and were soaked through. “It’s a wonder we didn’t sink, but we grabbed a bucket and started bailin as hard as we could, and we tried her again.” One cod they took that morning on their old rotten bait was so enormous, recalls Francis, that the two boys, struggling together, could barely haul it up over the gunwales.

  In later years, Francis went codfishing with his father from Thanksgiving to mid-April, went dragging with his uncle, Old John Erickson, out of Montauk, in the spring, went swordfishing in summer, and harvested clams and scallops in between. During the Depression, he bought his father’s farming acre and built the house where he still lives today. There was poor fishing during the Depression, and no bass at all, and in the late thirties he was reduced to working on the road construction crews for six or eight dollars a day. “Last job I was ever on,” Francis declares. Hearing that his brother Harry and his brother-in-law Brent Bennett were making one hundred dollars a day hand-lining sea bass out of Shinnecock, he went back to the water, and despite hard times, has been there ever since.

  At seventy-four, Francis seemed as wiry, wry, and worried as ever, but today there was no sign at all of the laconic sense of humor for which he is well known. He looked a lot older, and his quiet, sad-faced manner somehow reminded me of his father, whom he resembles in other ways as well. “Always has a young boy with him, teachin him, just like Old Frank used to do,” one fisherman says. “Francis has that same good way with kids. Course, all them Poseys was pretty good at gettin somethin for nothin; never had to pay those kids too much, you know.”

  This morning there were just four bass in the old net, which was torn all along the wings, under the cork line. Kneeling among the sand crabs and squashed jellyfish and daylights, the herring and some snapper blues that the discouraged crew had not bothered to pick up, Francis looked hunched and a little frail as he mended net, his bony hand following the net needle in graceful loops through the chafed twine. The younger men yelled at him to hurry up (his grandson Mitchell calls him Poppy), although not one of them could mend net the way he could. In the years of bass prosperity, many young men joined the crews who have never learned how to mend net at all.

 
Francis ignored them. “With all this warm weather, we didn’t do nothin on the bass all this past month,” he told me, “and next week here, they’re gonna put us out of business. Maybe we should do what them Rhode Island fellas done, put an end to the bass fishery entirely. That would give them sports something to think about, I guess, make ’em take responsibility for what they’re doin. Ain’t no bass to speak of anyway, not no big ones. And maybe by the time them fish come back, we can work out somethin reasonable for everybody.” He cocked his head, looking up at me, sensing my doubt. “Oh, they’ll be back, all right. When I was a young feller, y’know, there weren’t hardly no bass at all, we never bothered to set for ’em in spring and only once in a great while in the fall. I never really seen no bass until the forties; after that, they come back strong for thirty years. So I guess them fish’ll be back this time, too.”

  November 2 was a warm, sad, golden day, with the ocean silver, calm, and shining. Thousands of gulls had gathered from along the coast, for the sea was shimmering with sand eels in unimaginable millions, forming dark shadows in the blue. This bait was penned by the huge bluefish schools moving west along the beach in the last days before the ocean chilled enough to slow the golden-eyed swift squadrons and turn their armies off the shore toward deeper water.

  Calvin Lester’s crew had made a set west of Town Line Road, in Wainscott. In October this crew’s best day for bass had been eight hundred pounds, caught in three sets; they had landed scarcely that amount in the fortnight since. But the price of bluefish had gone up a little, and weakfish were still high, and the men shouted when blues and weaks turned up early in the wings. A few fish were seen finning on the calm surface as the orange bag buoy drew closer to the beach.

  Though Calvin is—technically—its only Posey, this is unmistakably a Posey crew. Calvin’s partner, Donnie Eames, is his fourth cousin. Donnie’s mother and Calvin’s wife’s mother are sisters; Donnie’s wife and young Wally Bennett’s wife are also sisters, and Wally is closely related to both Donnie and Calvin. These three are the crew’s steady members, and usually the other crewmen are relations, too.