Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  “How’s that for a nine-day haul?” Jimmy Lester said cheerfully. He nodded his head as if answering his own question. “Let’s take her out,” he said in a different voice. He had freed the netting from the stakes, and using the trawler boom, we winched it up on deck. “It don’t pay to fish no more this year,” said Sandy Vorpahl, one of the few women who goes out on the water all year-round. “With weather like this, all you can do is sit on shore and watch your net get tore to pieces.”

  The cold wind had increased, and the cold rain, and the Tern pounded upwind across Fort Pond Bay to Culloden Point. At Pell’s fish house, we iced and unloaded the carton of squid and hoisted the net into Jimmy’s truck; the skipjacks would be left on the dock for a friend’s lobster pots, and the odds and ends—eel, flounder, blackfish, a half bushel of squid—would be taken home.

  It was close to noon, and we went back to Poseyville to try Sandy’s pickled herring. While she made lunch, Jimmy showed me the fine sharpie he was building in the new shop by the old shed out back where his happy-go-lucky great-uncle, years ago, had hung himself, unable to bear the ringing in his head.

  Toward the end of Thanksgiving week, I stopped by Lazy Point, at the mouth of Napeague Harbor. In a stiff wind, Mickey Miller hauled his skiff onto its trailer, as the coot shooters in off Cartwright Shoals roared in behind him, washing the hard shore with their wake. “That storm finished me off,” he said. “Trap stakes layin around out there like matchsticks, and two of ’em broke clean off.” He laughed an odd laugh with no trace of mirth in it. “Told my wife this mornin that what was in them traps today would be our Christmas money.” He pointed at the pile of stakes and twisted net and laughed that laugh again. “Don’t look like much of a Christmas, I don’t guess.” Mickey thought he might go have a look at the southeast corner of Napeague Harbor, where this hard blow should have washed scallops ashore. “Got to do somethin, don’t I?” He yelled at his dog to get into the truck, then gazed at the broken stakes out of the window. “Well, I had some good years there,” he said. “Don’t want to go gettin spoiled or nothin.”

  Leaving the landing, he caught a length of Stuart Vorpahl’s trap net on his fender, and some netting was dragged down the road a way before he noticed. The frustrating episode seemed to stand for his whole season, and he slammed out of his truck, too disgusted and depressed to speak. We rolled the net back onto the grass, and he kept on going.

  On the day the bass law went into effect, Mickey had been so disheartened that he could not bring himself to lift his traps; his father had offered to do the job himself. “Must have been two thousand pounds of bass in that one trap,” Milt told me, “and at least one thousand pounds of ’em would have been keepers under the old law. Just heart-breakin. The rest of ’em was real little fish—one thousand pounds! That’s a lot of little fish! Billy Schultz, Brad Loewen, all the trappers have seen them fish, and the biologists go right on sayin they can’t be there. It’s like their information on bass numbers. Them people don’t know that bass move in paths, so they measure the bottom, measure fish by the square foot, like they measure clams. Why hell, they don’t even know how to measure clams! Maybe twenty years ago, used to take my dragger out of Shinnecock to them big beds of surf clams in the ocean. Used to set a buoy out in a good area and keep draggin right back to that buoy, cause clams set in layers, you know, the smallest ones deepest, and when the ground is softened up, caved in, the dredge picks up more on the second and third drag than it does the first time. Be up to your knees in clams on deck, sixteen–seventeen bushels a twelve-minute drag and up to three hundred bushels in a day. Sold ’em off to Howard Johnson’s and them places for fried clams, got a dollar a bushel, sometimes fifty cents.

  “Well, them biologists go out where I told ’em and they make a set and they get two clams. They’re off the set. Maybe ten feet away they would have loaded up, that’s the way clams are. And so they come up with figures showin X amount of clams per square foot, which don’t mean nothin. So I took ’em out there and showed ’em them clams, and they couldn’t believe it.”

  At his father’s house in Three Mile Harbor a week later, Mickey was trying to decide whether to mend and reset his ravaged trap or wait until spring. Maybe he would build and set some flatfish fykes. “Tom Lester and Francis always set fykes, and they always talk poverty, too, but I notice they keep right on doin it.” Mickey managed a grin, jerking his thumb at his father, who was mending a gill net in the corner of his yard. “I’m tryin to get him to tell me what to do, so’s I can blame it on him if I make the wrong choice.”

  Milt glanced at his son, saying nothing, and remained silent a little while after Mickey had gone. Milt had moved here to Olympic Heights because the place “came with a little land. I like to spread out a little, too”—he gestured toward the yard and hillside filled with nets and fishing gear and decrepit boats—“but I ain’t doin so much any more; it’s really for him. He ain’t got room where he is now, and our kind of people can’t afford to buy no land around this town no more.” Milt reloaded his net needle from a spool of twine that he located under the chipped hull of a blue cabin boat. “Got this old boat here pretty cheap, but she needs a lot of work; guess I’ll get after her this winter. Course I could set in a rockin chair instead, maybe be dead in about two weeks.”

  The day was cold, and to my relief Milt said, “Let’s go inside.” In the sunny rooms, very spare and empty, he introduced me to his wife, Etta, before we sat down at the kitchen table, which Milt, obsessed by all the questions about bass, was soon thumping urgently with a thick finger.

  “The Chesapeake is the only place where striped bass have been really researched, and all the laws they recommend come out of that. The biologists claim the bass don’t leave the Chesapeake until it’s fourteen inches long. Well, my son’s been trappin about ten years, and in that time I’d say two-thirds of the bass caught in them traps have been under fourteen inches, thousands and thousands of them; I seen some no more’n about four inches, don’t go the length of my hand. Them little fellas never come up here from the Chesapeake, I’ll tell you that. And how about all them big cows with roe, show up here in spring? And that’s good roe, too, because [Dr. Robert] Valenti’s hatchery in Napeague raises fingerlings from it. Now where do them great big fish spawn? You never hear about big fish like that spawnin in them Chesapeake tributaries, nor in the Hudson, neither. In my opinion, there’s very few fish of that size ever goes back to the Chesapeake; I believe they winter off here in deep water.

  “It’s like that haul the Havenses made down in Carolina, biggest haul ever made anywhere on striped bass, far as we know. Saved 1,200 boxes, I think it was, and Carolina crews picked up another five–six hundred boxes from the same bunch, and practically all of ’em big fish, Benny says. And that dragger thirty–five–forty miles offshore on Diamond Shoal, picked up another record haul of them big ocean fish, forty thousand pounds. That’s three hundred miles south of the Chesapeake! What are them fish doin down there in late winter if the Chesapeake is where they go to spawn? And think of all the places them fish could be spawnin that’s never been properly researched—Rhode Island and Connecticut, up here in Peconic! In the old days there was bass in all them rivers, and they may be in some of ’em yet. But the main point is, the biologists don’t really know, and that law was passed anyway, and it’s unenforceable; anybody with a knife is going to take his striped bass fillets home. The only fair thing would be a federal law eliminating all taking and possession of bass anywhere. We can live with that if we have to; at least it’s fair.

  “When I was young, crews would haul all day and never get more than a couple hundred pounds of bass, and here in the bays we caught hardly any—just a straggler here and there. Back in the fifties, you remember, if we had one or two real big hauls in a season, we was doin good. By the late sixties, we was gettin seven to eight thousand pounds of keepers, sixteen inches or better, and at least that amount of smaller fish that we let go. You couldn’t be
lieve the amount of bass was around here in them years! The crews would go down day after day and bail ’em into the trucks. Why, them fellas never set at all unless they seen fish breakin out—we never had anythin like that!

  “Everythin’s changin on us, too fast to keep up with. Used to be you would watch the shadbush in the spring and know when the shad would come by when it bloomed; you can’t go by that stuff, not no more. Weakfish don’t go up bay no more the way they used to; there’s too much pollution, in my opinion. Used to have loads of spawn bunkers goin up into the bays in spring, and just floods of little bunkers comin back in fall; you don’t see them little bunkers no more, and I believe it was this damn pollution that put an end to the bunker fishery. Cherry Harbor used to be as clean as any place, cause we don’t have no industry or open sewage around here, but for the last twenty years or so it’s been gettin more and more condoms and plastics and crap, hung up all through the gill nets—well, that damned stuff’s comin from a long way off.

  “I’ve seen bluefish come and go in my lifetime, and striped bass, too. The bluefish is a wild fish and a hardy fish, and because he don’t go up in them dirty rivers, he’ll survive where the striped bass will go down. All the fish around here come and go in cycles, and years back, you could anticipate the cycles, but today, with the pollution the way it is, you can’t be so sure that a fish that’s gone will ever come back at all.

  “Because of them surfcasters, there’s too much attention bein paid to the haul-seiners and their effect on fish. Back in the late sixties, when the bass was at their height, Ted and Stewart had that nice Maine boat, called her the Posey, and Ted designed a trawl net for Stewart that would fish close inshore. Kenny Edwards had the same idea, and them fellas done good; nobody ever dragged so close before that time. Well, ever since, the draggers been takin more bass than the haul-seiners, and nobody never says a thing about it. By the time the draggers bring them bass ashore, they’re all packed up, they’re not layin in the back of a truck for them sports to see. And them big bass have always been out there, way offshore, in my opinion. Nobody talks about it because any fisherman is goin to keep somethin like that secret. I don’t know if them big foreign ships were takin ’em, nor how many, but we do know they weren’t throwin no fish away. All them boats that you see out there today, they’re reapin the ocean dry.”

  21.

  The Winter Ocean

  December 2 was a cold clear windless morning, with bright stars. For the first time this autumn, the temperature had fallen below freezing. With the last stretch of bad weather in late November, Jens Lester, Pete Kromer, and Danny King had left the beach; the Havens and Calvin Lester crews were the last ones left. At Brent’s Store in Amagansett, Walter Bennett turned up at 6 A.M. for coffee, and Calvin, rolling up with the dory a few minutes later, told him that they would be heading west for Flying Point, in Water Mill, where a few medium bass had appeared the week before.

  At William Havens’s house, on Abraham’s Path, Ann Havens was bandaging her husband’s thumb, splayed to the bone while shucking chowder clams the previous day. “Told him to go to the doctor, but he wouldn’t; just like a little boy!” Mrs. Havens was angered by the editorial in the Long Island Fisherman, which expressed disdain for haul-seining as a “dirty fishery.” “Them people always get everythin wrong! Had a picture of our crew there, longside a picture of Calvin’s dogfish on the beach! Anyways, why don’t they know it don’t do no good to throw most of them fish back? It ain’t the haul-seiners’ fault nobody wants ’em! Last week my men here shipped 309 pounds of bluefish. Know what we got back, after payin the shippin? Eleven-fifty! Eleven dollars and fifty cents for three hundred and nine pounds of good bluefish! Does that seem fair to you?”

  I shook my head, feeling outraged myself. In a local restaurant that week, a friend had ordered bluefish, paying precisely eleven-fifty for less than a half pound, or more than seven hundred times as much as the men who caught it were receiving. The Havenses knew that those bluefish that brought them three pennies a pound did not go to waste, that the markets and restaurants did fine while the men who supplied the fish went into debt, and this knowledge intensified their sense of futility and bitterness. Already the draggermen were anticipating the same treatment; they were getting a good price for early whiting, but within a few weeks, when the whiting came in thick, the price would drop quickly to three cents a pound, which would scarcely be enough to pay for fuel.

  We went down to Napeague just as the sun came up on a calm wintry sea. In this season whales are sometimes seen from shore, and the white flash of diving gannets, harassing the fish schools heading south, but this morning the sea was entirely empty, a gray waste extending without a mark to the horizon. The clouds of bait had disappeared, and the bird legions; the rush of storm seas had subsided to a soft whisper in the shining shallows. On the tide line were thin windrows of dead sand fleas, killed by the first frost of coming winter. (Whiting are sometimes gathered on the beach as “frost fish” because they chase bait into the shallows and are transfixed by the frozen air.)

  The quiet men stared out at the dead ocean; its very emptiness seemed somehow ominous. The autumn storms had carved the beach away, making it narrow and difficult to work. The rain-soaked sand no longer drained well or packed down, and in the half-frozen mush, the trucks were balky. “Don’t know if we should set at all, with all them dogfish,” William said after a while, still gazing off into the empty distance. “Goddamn dogs! You get a mess of them things gilled from one end of your net to the other, take you all day to get it straightened out!” Most fish move offshore as the sun rises, and Benny thought they ought to wait a little before setting, despite the risk that any bass would move off, too. Over the CB radio from Flying Point came word that Calvin’s crew, for fear of dogs, was also waiting. For the past two weeks, the dogfish had plagued the draggers and net fishermen up and down the coast.

  “Hell,” Billy Havens said, in sudden restlessness. “This season’s over. Let’s make our set and get it done with, get off this damn beach.” He backed the dory trailer down toward the water’s edge, and Ben climbed up into the boat and started up the motor; Doug Kuntz, still half-asleep, would set the net. Through the cab window, Billy hollered, “Ready?” He backed the trailer fast into the water, then slammed on the brake, and the dory shot off the roller, coasting easily through the surf, and moved rapidly offshore as Doug tossed over a big coil of line that made a loud slap on the surface.

  The dory turned away toward the southeastward. Soon it was silhouetted on the sun. Young Fred Havens hitched the line to William’s truck, then got into Ben’s old Dodge with Billy and headed eastward to where the dory would come ashore. “How come they tossed that whole coil into the water?” William complained. “No sense in that; could have left most of it ashore. And they turned off east too soon …” He stopped fretting and shook his head. “Gettin nervous, I guess. Everbody on the beach is nervous, noticed that? Guess we don’t know what’s to become of us. That one crew Old Bill had, I guess we was together near to fifteen years, and I don’t recall no snappin and snarlin, not like this.” When I reared back a little, raising my eyebrows, William grinned. “Well, we done some yellin, buntin up, I guess, to let off steam. Remember Ted jumpin around like a jack rabbit when the bunt come in? Seems to me we had more fun in them years. The crews always helped each other out—now you can’t count on it.” He grumbled about this CB radio that had recently come into use; one time he had spotted fish and sent word back to Benny’s truck, only to have another crew come flying in and make the set ahead of them. “Other day here, one gang got loaded up with dogs, and we helped pick ’em out, thought nothin about it; next day was us got loaded up, and they come along, looked at the mess that we was in, and took off to westward.”

  William laughed, remembering a day that Ted’s old Model A had gotten sanded here at Napeague, and before he could dig it out again, his brother Bill had come along and took the set. “Course Ted got pretty good at
that hisself, but that day he was hollerin some, yes, yes. Well, Bill went right ahead. He got one fish!” William shook his head. “Don’t think I could do that—just ain’t worth it. But there’s a couple of ’em would do that yet today.”

  William climbed onto the truck bed as Doug Kuntz came back down the beach and took the jack line to the water’s edge to tie on. Asked if he would be a fisherman if he had it to do all over again, William said quickly and bitterly, “Not if I knew how it was goin to be in these last years.” He shrugged, looping the sandy rope around the winch and taking a strain. “Hell, I don’t know, Pete. Probably too stupid to do anythin different.”

  All of the long-time fishermen say this in one way or another, and one way or another they believe it. But it’s also a way of declaring something that, most of the time, they are too shy to say out loud: that they are fishermen because their fathers and their grandfathers were fishermen, it’s “in their blood,” there’s nothing to be done about it; that this is not only their livelihood but their way of life—this is where they belong—and that they will stay on the water as long as they can put food on the family table. This year, for the first time in their long memory, their independence has been seriously threatened by a law rammed through by well-organized outsiders who have lined up all the bureaucrats and politicians, who have no true sense of this ocean land or its fish and sea and weather, or any real need for the extra money that they make on striped bass. “My brother Orie,” William was saying, “that lives over there by Hampton Bays, he’s the only one had the brains to get out of fishin, but he never done no better’n the rest of us.”