Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘Times are good, Joe,’ said Harry. ‘Times are good.’

  ‘Thieves,’ said Mr Hewitt.

  His companion reached the top of the ladder and awkwardly stepped on deck. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Mr Hewitt, ‘this is my brother-in-law Frank Townsend.’ He turned to Harry. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘you’ve heard me speak of Frank. He’s Blanche’s younger brother, the one who’s in the sprinkler-system business. Or was. He’s retired now.’ He turned to me. ‘Blanche is my wife,’ he said. Then he turned to Mr Townsend. ‘Sit down, Frank,’ he said, ‘and get your breath.’ Mr Townsend sat down on a capstan. ‘Frank lives in Syracuse,’ continued Mr Hewitt. ‘He’s been down in Florida, and he’s driving back, and he’s spending a few days with us. Since he retired, he’s got interested in fishing. I told him the shadfishermen all along the Hudson are getting ready for shad season, and he’s never seen a shad barge, and I thought I’d bring him down here and show him one, and explain shadfishing to him.’

  Harry’s eyebrows rose. ‘Shadfishing hasn’t changed much through the years, Joe,’ he said, ‘but it’s been a long, long time since you lifted a net. Maybe you better let me do the explaining.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ said Mr Hewitt. ‘I was hoping you would.’

  ‘I’ll make it as brief as possible,’ said Harry, walking over to the edge of the deck. ‘Step over here, Mr Townsend, and look over the side. Do you see those poles lying down there in the mud? They’re shagbark-hickory poles, and they’re fifty to seventy feet long, and they’re the foundation of shadfishing; everything else depends on them. During shad season, we stick them up in the river in rows at right angles to the shore, and hitch our nets to them. When the season’s finished, we pull them up and bring them in here in the flats and bed them in the mud on both sides of our barges until we’re ready to use them again. They turn green down there, from the green slime, but that’s all right – the slime preserves them. As long as we keep them damp, they stay strong and supple and sound. If we let them dry out, they lose their strength and their give and start to rot.’

  Mr Townsend interrupted Harry. ‘How much do they cost you?’ he asked.

  ‘Shad is an expensive fish, Mr Townsend, not to speak of shad roe,’ Harry said, ‘and one of the reasons is it’s expensive to fish for. You can’t just pick up the phone and order a shad pole from a lumberyard. You have to hunt all over everywhere and find a farmer who has some full-grown hickory trees in his woods and is willing to sell some, and even then he might not have any that are tall enough and straight enough and strong enough and limber enough. I get mine from a farmer who owns some deep woods in Pennsylvania. When I need some new ones, I go out there – in the dead of winter, usually, a couple of months before shad season starts – and spend the whole day tramping around in his woods looking at his hickories. And I don’t just look at a tree – I study it from all sides and try to imagine how it would take the strain if it was one of a row of poles staked in the Hudson River holding up a shad net and the net was already heavy with fish and a full-moon tide was pushing against the net and bellying it out and adding more fish to it all the time. I study hundreds of them. Then I pick out the likeliest-looking ones and blaze them with an axe. The farmer cuts them down, and sends them up here on a trailer truck. Then I and a couple of men around the river go to work on them and peel their bark off and trim their knots off and smooth them down with adzes and drawknives and planes until there’s no splinters or rough spots on them anywhere that the net could catch on. Then we sharpen their butt ends, to make it easier to drive them into the river bottom. I pay the farmer eighteen to twenty dollars apiece for them. After the trucking charges are added to that, and the wages of the men who help me trim them, I figure they cost me between thirty-five and forty dollars apiece. You need at least forty of them for every row you fish. Tugboats are always blundering into them at night and passing right over them and bending them down until they crack in two, so you also have to have a supply of spares set aside. In other words, the damned things run into money.’

  Some young girls – there were perhaps a dozen of them, and they were eight or nine or maybe ten years old – had come down one of the paths from River Road, and now they were chasing each other around on the riverbank. They were as overexcited as blue jays, and their fierce, jubilant, fresh young voices filled the air.

  ‘School’s out,’ said Harry.

  Several of the girls took up a position near the shore end of the footwalk to Harry’s barge. Two of them started turning a rope and singing a rope-jumping song, a third ran in and started jumping the rope, and the others got in line. The song began:

  ‘Mama, Mama,

  I am ill.

  Send for the doctor

  To give me a pill.

  Doctor, Doctor,

  Will I die?

  Yes, my child,

  And so will I—’

  Mr Hewitt looked at them gloomily. ‘They get louder every year,’ he said.

  ‘I like to hear them,’ said Harry. ‘It’s been sixty years since I was in school, but I know exactly how they feel. Now, Mr Townsend, to get back to shadfishing,’ he continued, ‘the first thing a man starting out as a shadfisherman has to have is a supply of poles, and the next thing he has to have is a row – that is, a place in the river where he can stake his poles year after year. In the old days, a man could pretty much decide for himself where his row should be, just so he didn’t get too close to another man’s row or get out in a ship channel or interfere with access to a pier. However, the shipping interests and the tugboat interests were always complaining that the shadfishermen acted as if they owned the river, and vice versa, so the Army Engineers finally stepped in. The Engineers have jurisdiction over all the navigable rivers in the country, insofar as the protection of navigation is concerned. About twenty years ago, just before World War Two, they went out and made a study of the Hudson from the standpoint of shadfishing versus navigation, and the outcome was they abolished some of the rows and left some right where they were and moved some and laid out a few new ones. Every year, they re-survey the rows, and some years they move or abolish one or two more. The best rows are in what’s called the lower river – the section from the mouth of the river, down at the Battery, to the east-and-west boundary line between New Jersey and New York, which is about twenty miles up. Now, all the way up to this point the north-and-south boundary line between the two states is the middle of the river, and it so happens that all this distance all the shad rows are in the half of the river that belongs to New Jersey – there can’t be any over in the New York half, because the main ship channel is in it. At present, there are fifty-five of these rows. The first row is off the big New York Central grain elevator in the railroad yards in Weehawken, about on a level with Sixtieth Street in Manhattan. It’s a short row, only five hundred feet across, and it’s entirely too near the ocean-liner traffic to suit me. Now and then, a big Cunarder or a Furness Line boat or a Swedish American Line boat will back out of one of the piers in the Fifties, and when she gets out in the river she’ll keep on backing to get in position to go down the channel, and her backwash will hit the first row and churn the net up and down and whip it against the poles and empty the fish out of it. Some days, the backwash of those boats can be felt practically all the way to Albany. The fifty-fifth row is off the village of Alpine, which is about on a level with Yonkers and just below the east-and-west boundary line. Up above this line, the whole river belongs to New York, and the New York shadfishermen take over. Some of them fish the same as we do, in rows, with nets hitched to poles, but most of them fish with nets that they drift from boats. Their rows aren’t as good as ours. One reason is, you’re bound to catch more fish if you have the first crack at them. And another reason is, the sooner shad are caught after they leave the sea – or, a plainer way of putting it, the less time they spend in the river water – the better they taste and the more they’re worth. The Engineers have the say-so as to where a row can be placed, b
ut the Conservation Department of the state in whose waters the row is located has the say-so as to who can fish it. The New Jersey rows don’t change hands very often; once a man gets one, he can renew his rights to it every year, and he generally holds on to it until he dies, and then it goes to whoever’s next on the waiting list. You don’t rent a row – what you do is, every year you take out a license for each row you fish, and a license costs twenty-five dollars. Most of the rows off Edgewater and Weehawken are very old. One of the Edgewater rows has been fished for at least a hundred and fifty years, and maybe a good while longer. A man named Bill Ingold fishes it now, but it’s still called the Truax row, after my grandfather, Isaac Truax, who fished it for many years. When my grandfather had it, it was called the Scott row, after the man who had it ahead of him. I’ve heard the name of the man who had it ahead of Scott and the name of the man who had it ahead of him, but they’ve faded out of my mind. I’ve got two rows in my name. They’re the first two rows north of the George Washington Bridge. They’re both twelve-hundred-foot rows, which is the length of most of the rows. The last few years, I’ve been fishing only one of them the whole season through. It’s the lower one. If you ever drive over the bridge on the westbound roadway during shad season, look up the river a little ways and you’ll see my poles.’

  Mr Townsend had grown tired of standing, and he sat back down on the capstan.

  ‘Sometime in the latter half of March,’ continued Harry, ‘I and three or four men that I swap labor with get together and move this barge up the river. They help me move mine, I help them move theirs; they help me stake my poles, I help them stake theirs. We tie the barge to a launch owned by one of the men and tow her up on the tide, and take her to a point beside the riverbank half a mile or so above the bridge, where she’ll be convenient to both my rows. We run a hawser from that capstan you’re sitting on to a tree on the bank and draw her up close to the bank, with the bow facing the bank, and then we anchor her with three anchors – port, starboard, and stern. She stays there for the duration of shad season. Then we get out on the bank and put up a rack to mend nets on and a gallows to hang a set of scales on. The land along there is owned by the Palisades Interstate Park, and a shadfisherman pays rent for the space he uses on the riverbank on the basis of how many rows he fishes – the rate is two hundred dollars a row for the season. Then we go back to the flats and start snaking my poles out of the mud and loading them on a peculiar-looking kind of craft called a double boat. A double boat consists of two forty-foot scows connected together side by side but with a narrow space left in between them. It resembles a raft, as much as it resembles anything. When we get it loaded, we tow it up the river on the tide, the same as we towed the barge, and then we start staking the poles. Until a few years ago, this was a job shadfishermen dreaded. We’d anchor the double boat over the place we wanted the pole to go, and we’d stand the pole up in the narrow in-between space I mentioned, to keep it steady. Then we’d lash a crosspiece on the pole, and two men, the heavier the better, would climb up and stand on the crosspiece and hold on to the pole and bend their knees and make a kind of jumping motion, keeping time with each other, until they drove the butt end of the pole into the river bottom. Sometimes they’d have to jump for hours to get a pole down far enough. Sometimes more weight would be needed and two more men would get up on the cross-piece. The two on the inside would hold on to the pole and the two on the outside would hold on to the two on the inside, and they’d jump and grunt and jump and grunt, and it was a strange sight to watch, particularly to people watching it from shore who didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on out there. Shad poles are spaced from twenty-five to thirty feet apart, and you have to put down from forty-one to forty-nine poles on a twelve-hundred-foot row, counting the outside poles, so you can just imagine the jumping we used to have to do. Nowadays, it’s much simpler. We have a winch sitting on a platform in the middle of the double boat, and we simply stand the pole in place and put a short length of chain around it up toward its upper end and hook a cable from the winch onto the chain, and the winch exerts a powerful downward pull on the chain and forces the butt end of the pole into the bottom.

  ‘By the last week in March, the shad barges are in place all along the Hudson and the shad poles are up. There’s a number of old retired or half-retired sea cooks and tugboat cooks in Edgewater and Weehawken, and they come out of retirement around this time and take jobs as cooks on shad barges. They work on the same barges year after year. As soon as the cooks get situated in the galleys, the shadfishermen start living aboard. Around the same time, men start showing up in Edgewater who haven’t been seen in town since last shad season. You need highly skilled fishermen to handle shad nets, and for many years there hasn’t been enough local help to go around, so every spring fishermen from other places come and take the jobs. A shadfisherman generally hires from two to five of them for each row he fishes, and pays them a hundred or so a week and bunk and board. Most of them are Norwegians or Swedes. Some come from little ports down in South Jersey, such as Atlantic Highlands, Port Monmouth, Keyport, Point Pleasant, and Wildwood. In other seasons, they do lobstering or pound-fishing, or go out on draggers or scallopers. Some come from a small dragger fleet that works out of Mill Basin, in Brooklyn. Some come from Fulton Market – old fishermen who work as fillet cutters and go back to fishing only during shad season. Some don’t come from any particular place, but roam all over. One man didn’t show up in Edgewater year before last, the best man with a shad net I ever saw, and last year he did show up, and I asked him where he’d been. “I worked my way home on a tanker to see my sister,” he said, and by “home” he meant some port in Norway, “and then I worked on a Norwegian sealer that hunted harp seals along the coast of Labrador, and then I worked my way back here on a tanker, and then I worked awhile in the shrimp fleet in Galveston, Texas, and the last few months I worked on a bait-clam dredge in Sheepshead Bay.” They know how to do almost any kind of commercial fishing – and if they don’t they can pick it up between breakfast and lunch and do it better by supper than the ones who taught them. When they come aboard a barge, all they ever have with them is an old suitcase in one hand and an old sea bag slung over one shoulder that they carry their boots and oilskins in, and they seldom say much about themselves. In times past, there were quite a few rummies among them, real old thirty-second-degree rummies, but the rummies seem to have dropped by the wayside. Oh, there’s a few left.

  ‘Every year, on one of the last days in March or one of the first days in April, the shad start coming in from the sea. They enter the mouth of the harbor, at Sandy Hook, and straggle around awhile in the Lower Bay, and then they go through the Narrows and cross the Upper Bay and enter the mouth of the Hudson and head for their spawning grounds. There are several of these grounds. The main one begins eighty miles up the river, up around Kingston, and extends to Coxsackie – a distance of twenty-five miles. This stretch of the river has a great many sandbars in it, and creek mouths and shallow coves and bays. As a rule, shad are four years old when they make their first trip in, and they keep on coming in once every year until their number is up. You can take a scale off a shad and look at the scars on it and tell how many times the shad has spawned, and every season we see quite a few who managed to escape our nets as many as five or six times and go up and spawn before they finally got caught, not to speak of the fact that they managed to keep from being eaten by some other fish all those years. Roe shad average around three and a half to four pounds, and bucks average around two and a half to three. The roes are always heavier. Once in a while, we see a seven-pound roe, or an eight-pounder, or a nine-pounder. I caught one once that weighted thirteen and a half pounds.’

  ‘Just think how many fish she must’ve spawned in her time,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘If it had been me that caught her, I’d’ve patted her on the back and put her back in.’

  ‘A commercial fisherman is supposed to catch fish, Mr Townsend, not put them back in,
’ Harry said. ‘Anyway, as a matter of fact, I killed her getting her loose from the net. The shad won’t come into the river until the temperature of the river water reaches forty degrees or thereabouts, and that’s what we watch for. Day after day, when the water starts approaching this temperature, we go out just before every flood tide and hang a short net called a jitney in the spaces between several poles toward the far end of the row. This is a trial net. The shad may start trickling in, only three or four showing up on each tide, and continue that way for days, or avalanches of them may start coming in all at once, but as soon as we find the first ones in the trial net, however many there are, even if there’s only one, we go to work in earnest. Just before the next flood tide begins, I and two or three of the hired fishermen take a regular-sized net out to the row in a shad boat. A shad boat is fifteen to twenty feet long and high and sharp in the bow and low and square and roomy in the stern. It has a well in its bottom, up forward, in which to sit an outboard motor – although you can row it if you want to – and it’s unusually maneuverable. We have the net piled up in the stern, and we work our way across the downriver side of the row, and go from pole to pole, feeding the net out and letting the bottom of it sink and tying the top of it to the poles. It’s like putting up a fence, only it’s an underwater fence. Where my row is, the water ranges in depth from twenty to thirty feet, and I use a net that’s twenty feet deep. The net has iron rings sewed every few feet along the bottom of it to weight it down and hold it down. In addition, on each end of it, to anchor it, we tie a stone called a dropstone. Several blocks north of here, there’s a ravine running down from River Road to the riverbank. In the middle of the ravine is a brook, and beside the brook is an old abandoned wagon road all grown over with willow trees and sumac and sassafras and honeysuckle and poison ivy. Years ago, the main business of Edgewater was cutting paving blocks for New York City, and wagons carrying loads of these blocks to a dock on the riverbank used to come down this road. It was a rocky road, and you can still see ruts that the wheel rims wore in the rocks. Through the years, a good many paving blocks bounced off the wagons and fell in the brook, and the drivers were too lazy to pick them up, and that’s where we get our dropstones. If we lose one in the river, we go up with a crowbar and root around in the mud and tree roots and rusty tin cans in the bed of the brook and dig out another one. Some of us have a notion the blocks are lucky. I wouldn’t think of using any other kind of dropstone.