Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Perhaps because the increasing regulation of their life appears discriminatory, or because they accept no subsidy or welfare, or because they have fished here since the days when the only limits on a man were his own strength and ambition, many of these otherwise conservative, religious men feel entitled to ignore the laws imposed upon them by outsiders. Some take short lobsters or scrape the berries (roe) off female lobsters and toss them into the tank after the rest; some take bug scallops and short bass. Even in the days of the sixteen-inch limit, marked boxes of undersized fish were sometimes shipped to the Fulton Fish Market and shunted quickly into other trucks for illegal sale. Like their precious independence, their traditional freedom to come and go as they please and the traditional right to use anything in the natural world that they may need are hard to relinquish. “They ain’t controlled me yet!” one man assured me.

  When Mickey Miller mentioned how many bass he had released from his Hicks Island trap in the last week alone, a Montauk man said, “Wish that was me, bub! I’d know what to do with them small fish!” Convinced that the sportsmen are ignoring their own law, certain baymen will not hesitate to convey small bass into the markets, where they cannot be distinguished from fish caught elsewhere. Others, in gestures of protest that they themselves recognize as futile, are stuffing a few into their boots, or filleting them for use at home.

  Because these fish are now illegal, the fishing families are developing a new taste for bass, which most baymen dislike. Even before the passage of the bass bill, they ate it rarely, partly because of its high value, and Danny King’s wife, Marsha, says she has never tasted a striped bass in all her life. “Sea robin is better’n bass or bluefish both,” Calvin Lester says. “Striped bass is a big name, that’s all it is: I wouldn’t eat one of them goddamn things! I tried it several times, I just don’t care for it.” This prejudice against striped bass, with its flaky meat and delicate pale flavor, is partly accounted for by Bonac cookery. “They eat striped bass in these New York City restaurants a lot different than we cook it,” Donnie Eames admits. “We flour it up, throw it on the frying pan with some salt. They got all kinds of sauce and herbs and all this other shit on top of it, can’t taste the fish no more. A bluefish tastes like a fish. Them people don’t want something that tastes like a fish, they want something that tastes like a recipe.”

  “I was kind of young when you was on the beach,” Brent Bennett told me after the meeting. “About nine, I guess. But I was fishin even then. Soon’s I come home from school, first truck that come along—pfft!—I was gone!” Brent, who is Walter’s younger brother, is perhaps the most versatile fisherman out on the bay, and has taught his business to younger baymen such as Tom Knobel, one of numerous outsiders—Arnold Leo and Doug Kuntz are others—to whom the baymen have been hospitable since Ted Lester first welcomed outsiders to his crew back in the fifties. Brent said he had seen more small bass in his nets this year than at any other time in a decade, and that these fish would ordinarily account for more than half his income. “Weren’t for that law here in the middle of the season, it would have been a banner year for me, maybe a thousand pounds a day in them four nets. Now I’m settin out lobster pots, tryin to keep goin.”

  Brent has rigged his twenty-two-foot fiberglass skiff with the console and pot hauler on the port side, leaving plenty of deck space; it is now an efficient lobsterman as well as net boat. This winter he will build more lobster pots and repower his boat with a larger motor that will permit dragging and power seining. In the spring he will set a whole series of gill nets of different mesh sizes for mackerel, weakfish, and blues. With a variety of fishing gear, kept in good shape, he intends to be ready for anything that comes along. He also maintains an efficient scallop opening house, which he rents to other baymen. Like Calvin, he says he will never give up fishing. He intends to move from one fishery to another until he is driven off the water, because fishing is the only thing he wants to do.

  “The fisherman is very independent,” Brent’s brother Walter says. “If one of them left and went to work, he was never looked down upon because everybody knew he was goin to be back fishin eventually, it was just that he had had a bad spring or fall and he had to make ends meet and that’s all there was to it. But they knew eventually that he would be back. And pret’ near all the fishermen that were on the water came back.

  “My father was a fisherman and he started Brent’s Store. Up until then, he always worked on the water, and after that, when I bought the business from him, he went back to playin around the water. And I sold it in ’75 cause I went back to the water.

  “Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your station in life, so to speak. Though it was a lot of hard work, it was not a job, but somethin you were born with and brought up with. A job was somethin like drivin nails or rakin leaves. Like the old sayin goes, ‘If you have saltwater in your blood, there ain’t nothin you can do, you just gotta do it.’

  “When Grandpop [Cap’n Frank] was young, now, he used to make up a crew, and there would be a lot of people from up-street that have businesses today. They didn’t have saltwater in their blood, but they would fish for a while, cause fishin at that time was payin more than a carpenter would get. The fisherman and farmer were No. 1 and No. 2 on this end of the Island, and now they’re at the bottom of the heap, and your carpenters are gettin twenty-five dollars an hour, some of ’em, and your plumbers and masons. Everythin is bypassin us, and we’re still doin the same thing. It don’t look too good. It was a way of life, you know, it’s like the Indians handed it down to our ancestors and they handed it down through the generations, and all of a sudden we’re findin that we’re goin down the drain. It’s what they call progress.

  “My older son Wally, he’s into it now, and it’s a good life, no doubt, but there’s so much pressure bein put on, losin boat landins, losin water rights. And the federal government, or even the state, never helped the fishermen because they never asked for anything. They were always independent, and they always made it through.”

  “Every year you’re into fishin, you do better,” says Stewart Lester, who is as stubborn about staying on the water as his cousins. “You learn where to be, what time of year to be, and what the tide is doin, how hard the wind’s blowin, how much line to put out, and this and that; you just know the job, that’s all.… You can’t fight the water, you gotta learn to live with it. There’s a lot of guys don’t have no respect for it, try to fight it, and it only makes their work twice as hard.” (Jarvie Wood agrees: “It’s very unpredictable on the water. You think you know a lot but you don’t know nothin.”)

  “You’re your own boss, your own time, you go and come as you want—you’re independent. And that’s born and bred in me. I’ve tried about everythin there is—truck drivin, plowed snow, bulkhead work, carpenter’s helper, electrician’s helper, dug ditches and put in wells: when you’re young you like to try things. You ain’t makin too much money fishin, you got a bad year, so you go lookin around. But not no more. If I get jammed into a corner, I’ll do ’em, but otherwise not. As I said, I wasn’t my own boss, and it gets to be a grind, same thing every day. Fishin is never the same thing every day; you never know what’s goin to happen or what to expect or what you’re goin to find.”

  Like all baymen, Stewart is saddened by the change in quality that is overtaking the fishermen’s way of life. “I trailer my boat home all the time. You got so much tied up in it, you don’t want to leave it. I used to leave the drudges, the motors, and everything else in the boat, take the gas can out, the scallops out, and just anchor it off. Nobody ever touched it. Now they’ll jump into it, put a tank on it, take the whole rig; they won’t leave you nothin.” In recent years, as straight young oaks and hickories become harder to find, even trap stakes are regularly stolen.

  Another problem, since it often involves men they went to school with, is the competition with part-timers for lobsters and shellfish. “If a guy has the ambition, in one way I like to see him go down there and d
o it, cause I know he needs it,” Stewart says. “But it kinda hurts us, too. I know seven or eight guys right now that’s got jobs, makin a pretty good buck, and they go get their two–three bushels of clams a week, then when scallop season comes along, they’re gonna take two weeks vacation if not three, go out scallopin. It hurts because there’s so many of them. Used to be maybe sixty fishermen, commercial fishermen or baymen, in the first three weeks of scallopin, which is the best of it; there’d probably be sixty part-timers, too. But a couple years ago, I seen a hundred and sixty-eight boats in Napeague Harbor on openin day, and maybe a hundred and fifty guys with waders and tugs and baskets and scoop nets come over the beach banks.1 I never seen nothin like it in my life! Never! They figured roughly 1,800 to 2,000 bushels of scallops went out of that little Napeague harbor in one day, and the second day was pretty close to that, too.”

  Considering his son’s future as a fisherman, Stewart just shrugged. “It’s really up to Teddy, you know, it’s whatever he wants to do. The way fishin is goin around here, I just don’t know. It could get tougher—could get more licenses, more this and that. It ain’t like it was ten–fifteen years ago when for a thousand dollars, twelve hundred, a guy could come out and go clammin, go scallopin. If they live home, get their gear built up while they’re younger, and have it to start out with, that’s one thing; otherwise, you’re talkin five thousand dollars—boat, motor, gear—just to start out.” These costs do not include a truck, far less a heavy-duty truck for beach use, or a haul-seine rig. A good truck that is well maintained may be shot after five years on the beach, and even less if it is used to launch the dory; a full haul-seine rig—two beach trucks, trailer, net, and dory—would cost much more than any one fisherman could afford, and anyway, it would be a poor investment. Only in the best of years does the rig’s share make any real money. Because of increasing restrictions and poor fishing, a worn-out rig will probably not be replaced, and ocean haul-seining may come to an end when a rig can no longer be patched together from other fishermen’s backyards.

  “You gotta be versatile, you gotta get into everythin at certain times, as the season changes. You’ve gotta be a clam digger for two–three months and a scalloper for three–four months, you go on a dragger or go trawlin codfish, settin winkle pots, pin-hookin porgies.” The problem is that, to be versatile, at least twice as much gear is required, at an ever-increasing price.

  “All those years ago we did a lot better than we do today,” Jarvie Wood says. “It was more peaceful on the water. You’d go out there and go to work, and it was peaceful, got nobody botherin you. But nowadays you go out there, and if you’re doin anythin, you got plenty of company. Watch out for boats, watch out for everythin, just like on the land. In order for a man to make a livin on the water now, he has got to keep goin every day, every minute, one thing to another.”

  20.

  The Trappers:

  Fort Pond Bay

  On Saturday, November 19, the gorged bluefish suddenly departed. The day before they had been everywhere along the beach, and the day after they were gone, leaving behind dark shadows of packed sand eels in the ocean. On the blowing sand, exhausted gulls blinked flat, hard eyes as they shifted position on the beach crest, feathers smoothed by the east wind. On Sunday the last charter boat quit for the season, and on Monday there was storm.

  For most of Thanksgiving week there was no weather to haul. In their wives’ old cars, to save a little gas, the men drove in groups to the beach landings and stared at the huge Atlantic, the wind spume and diminished flocks of gulls. Under those gray relentless seas, the bass companies that had congregated at Montauk from summer grounds along the New England coast would be moving southwest and offshore, taking the last hopes for the season with them.

  Sunday morning, November 27, was clear, near windless, with black trees etched on the cold daybreak sun; the winds and rains of the days before had stripped the limbs of the last leaves of autumn. Sipping coffee at Brent’s Store, Ben Havens told me there was still no weather to go off; westerly winds had knocked the seas down but now there was too much current from the west. “We’ve made just four sets in the last three weeks, and the wind’s supposed to go southeast again tomorrow.” He shrugged. “Guess we’ll keep tryin ’em till the first snow. That’s always been the last day of the season.” Most of the crews had already left the beach, discouraged not only by the weather but by swarms of dogfish, which had replaced the bluefish as a plague.

  That morning I went on down to Montauk with Jimmy Lester and Sandy Vorpahl to lift their traps in Fort Pond Bay, but the wind picked up before we cleared the dock, bringing a hard chop to Block Island Sound, and we went instead to Salivar’s for coffee. Sandy is Danny King’s sister, married formerly to Billy Vorpahl, who runs Stuart’s Seafood; her young son Wayne helps out sometimes on Danny’s crew. The King family comes from an area of Springs still known as Kingstown, near Copeces1 Lane, which was granted to it centuries ago when an ancestral King married a Gardiner. “You can always tell them people by their wide feet,” Jimmy said, teasing her. “Need feet like that to get around them Bonac swamps.” The son of the late Billy Lester and grandson of Captain Bill, Jimmy lives on the north side of the highway, behind the site of the old Lester homestead.

  Jimmy had fished with his great-uncle Ted in Ted’s last years on the beach; he disliked haul-seining. “Never liked that sand, you know, never liked the way it got into everything.” For some years he went dragging with Captain Norman Edwards and with Lewis Lester, who ran the Edwards boat when its owner was running bunker steamers out of Virginia. “Lewis could navigate that boat just with the compass, never mind the fog; he never come to trust all the modern equipment, like radar and depth finders, automatic pilot, never wanted to try it out or even look at it. Got by all right without it, and a good fisherman, too. But he was nervous, worse than Ted and worse than Francis, and them two could never sit still; Lewis wouldn’t let nobody touch the wheel of that boat, not on a clear day in a dead calm.”

  On Monday the wind had gone to the southeast, and the bay calmed, but by daybreak, when we left Montauk Harbor on Jimmy’s small blue dragger Tern, the weather was backing around to the northeast, with rain and cold. It looked and felt like the first day of winter. Small Bonaparte’s gulls, which turn up at this season—“Call them ones crap gulls,” Jimmy said, “I don’t know why”—were dipping outside the Montauk breakwater. Long strings of the black sea ducks known as coot beat across Block Island Sound toward the high eastern cliffs of Gardiners Island, and the oak woods on Culloden Point were a dark somber brown beneath the restless skies. “First time in nine days there’s been weather to lift,” Jimmy said, picking up his trap skiff from a spile off the western shore of Fort Pond Bay. The old sharpie was low in the water, half-full of rain.

  Big black-backed gulls, late cormorants, and a solitary loon abandoned the trap reluctantly as the Tern drew near. The square of dark water between the stakes was dark and silent, giving off an ominous suspense. Though most large creatures burst right through the trap, large sharks occasionally remain, and seals as well. Tom Lester, lifting the mesh, was once pulled overboard by a panicked sea turtle, and in the fifties his father, Randolph Lester, and Duane Miller took a drowned three-ton whale, sixteen feet long, from what was left of a trap out at Northwest. Hundreds of people came to see it, and Dr. Dave Edwards, who once attempted to harpoon a pair of porpoises that strayed into Three Mile Harbor, tried to put a tent around the whale and charge admission.

  “Ever see so many strings and ropes?” Sandy Vorpahl said, as I tried to help without getting in the way. “Don’t it make you wonder who thought up this rig in the first place? Jimmy says the design of these traps ain’t hardly changed in hundreds and hundreds of years; there’s only this one way that it fishes best.” Nevertheless Jimmy was working on a new funnel design to deter crabs, which sometimes invaded in discouraging numbers.

  “In 1983, we had a real good year on squid and butterfish, got c
lean hauls that year, could shovel ’em right up into the cartons,” Jimmy said. “The last few years we haven’t caught too many bass in Fort Pond Bay, but we always have caught bass here. In 1984, in fact, if we were allowed to keep bass over 16 inches, we would have had one of our best years.”

  The northeast wind held the Tern against the trap posts, and in the sharpie Jimmy circled the pound, lifting the netting as a few brown disks—small skates and daylights—rose to the surface. Through the water’s roil moved the black dorsals of skipjack herring, the pale tail fins of the backward-scooting squid. A dogfish appeared and sank away again, then a small striped bass. “Another shortie,” Jimmy said. “Ain’t seen one money fish yet.” As the net rose toward the surface, more and more fish appeared, until finally all poured together in a flapping, skittering brown-silver mass. Among the fish crawled a few lobsters, together with rock and spider crabs—both are good eating—and also hermit crabs, lodged tight in the big round silver shells of moon snails.

  Jimmy bailed the catch onto the deck, using a long-poled wide-mouthed dip net that was hoisted over the Tern’s side by winch and pulley. Most of the fish were herring of four species—skipjacks, alewives, blueback herring, a few coppery bunkers—none of which were worth the cost of shipping, though all are very good when cooked and pickled. The skates and daylights, the sea robins, angler fish, and “dogs” were not worth bothering with, and the butterfish, flounder, eel, blackfish, mackerel, and mullet were too few to ship. What was left was a carton of squid and some small striped bass, twenty-five or thirty of them, which a few weeks before would have been worth three hundred dollars; not a single bass was big enough to keep. Unlike some of the fish, they were fresh caught; bass rarely remain in a pound trap more than a few hours before finding their way out. Jimmy said, “Toss ’em,” and I scooped them up and eased them over the side, hoping he did not feel obliged to be law-abiding just because I was there. The bass were quick and solid in my hands, and watching the beautiful silver creatures strike the surface and dart into the depths, I felt exhilarated, as if setting free the last bass in the world.