by Sophie Moss
Ryan walked back to the helm where Jake stood with one hand resting on the wheel and the other flipping through the pages of his logbook. “Where are we heading today?”
Jake nodded toward the marshy shoreline in the distance. “We’ll check the traps off Nelson Point, then head up into the river and do some trotlining.”
“Sounds good,” Ryan said, reaching down to give Zoey a scratch behind the ears. Most watermen preferred to use one method over the other—traps or trotlining—but these outings were more for Taylor’s benefit, so she could learn all the ways a person could catch a source of food from these waters, both commercial and recreational. “Want me to start getting the crab pots ready?”
Jake nodded. “Bait’s in the cooler.”
Ryan made sure there was fresh bait in each of the traps, then worked on a few knots in the trotline. He was aware of Izzy watching him, her eyes tracking his every movement. He didn’t know why she was here, but he’d learned a long time ago not to try to make sense out of anything that happened during a full moon. It was still out there, a fading white disk retreating toward the western horizon.
As far as he was concerned, it couldn’t sink fast enough.
He didn’t want to think about what had happened the night before. He didn’t want to think about what he had seen and what he had heard. He wanted to put it behind him, as quickly as possible.
Jake eased up on the throttle. The water churned beneath them as the heavy boat slowed. Turning his back on the moon, Ryan grabbed two pairs of waterproof gloves out of a basket and tossed them to Izzy and Taylor. “Ready?”
Taylor stood, fitting the bulky gloves over her small hands and making her way over to her usual position behind the culling table.
“What do you want me to do?” Izzy asked.
Ryan motioned for her to follow him over to the side of the boat as Jake lined them up to drift along the line of buoys marking the pots he’d set the day before. “I’ll hook the traps and pull them up to the side of the boat. I want you to take them from me and empty them onto the tray so Taylor can cull them.”
“Okay,” she said, looking down into the shallow water a little apprehensively.
He dipped the hook in, grabbed the line attached to the first trap, and let the winch do the rest of the work. It came up alongside the boat dripping wet and filled with a half dozen crabs. “That’s right,” he said once she had a good grip on it. “Just pull it in, turn it over, and shake it over the table.”
Izzy gave it a shake, but the crabs wouldn’t budge.
“Harder,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to get them to fall out.”
Izzy shook the cage, hard, and jumped back as half of them fell out onto the table and the other half ended up on the floor. “Holy shit,” Izzy said as they skittered in every direction, their claws scraping over the fiberglass.
Taylor laughed, chasing after the runaways.
“Maybe not that hard,” Jake said, snagging one off the floor before it latched onto his shoelaces.
“Here comes the next one,” Ryan said, not giving her a chance to catch her breath.
Izzy grabbed the crab pot, pulled it into the boat, and shook it over the culling table. Only two managed to fall onto the floor this time.
Taylor reached for the one closest to her, and tossed it into a bushel basket. Izzy did the same.
“Not that one,” Taylor said, fishing it out. She turned it over so Izzy could see the dome-shaped apron on the underside of the shell. “This one’s a sook.” Taylor threw it overboard, then went off in search of the rest of the runaway crabs.
Izzy looked at Ryan, her expression bewildered.
“A sook is a female crab,” he explained, passing the next trap off to her. “All the females go back into the water this time of year, so they can keep breeding. We only keep the males—the jimmys. And they have to be at least five inches long, or they go back, too.” Ryan smiled as she peered at the crabs in the cage she was holding, trying to see the difference. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
And just as he suspected, it didn’t take her long. By the time they’d pulled up the rest of the cages and laid the freshly-baited traps, she seemed to have found her rhythm. It almost seemed like she might be enjoying herself. They headed up into the river as the fog slowly receded, revealing the calm, glassy surface beneath. They passed an occasional workboat now and then, but mostly they had the meandering waterway to themselves.
It was his favorite time to be out on the water, Ryan thought. Great Blue Herons stood like pale statues on fallen tree trunks, scanning the surface for fish. Families of ducks paddled beside muddy shorelines, leaving small ripples in their wake. Behind them, the marsh grasses rustled, teeming with life.
He never questioned Jake’s instincts on where to go to find the crabs. Like his father, Jake had been a waterman his entire life. He knew how to catch a source of food from these waters, the same way the Native Americans had centuries ago, when they’d had only their skills as hunters and gatherers to rely on to feed themselves. It was part of what had always made this area so special. Anyone, with a boat and some bait, could catch a meal for his family and make an honest living.
The methods and gear had improved a bit over the years, but it had always been more about earning the respect of these waters than anything else. You learned the habits of the fish, then figured out how to stay one step ahead of them. You learned how to work with the tides and the currents, how to adapt to the wind and the rain. You trusted that nature would always provide for you as you followed your catch up into the rivers and back out into the Bay from season to season.
“How long have you been doing this?” Izzy asked Jake, after they’d laid the lines down and were making their way back to the first one to run it.
“Since I was seventeen,” Jake said, effortlessly maneuvering the big workboat around the narrow tributary. “Been working these waters for almost forty years.”
“That’s a long time,” Izzy said.
Ryan glanced up, surprised at the note of respect in her voice. It was the first time she’d seemed even remotely interested in anything, or anyone, on this island.
At almost sixty years old, Jake was a quiet, unassuming man who mostly kept to himself. The only reason Ryan knew him so well was because Jake’s daughter, Becca, was one of Ryan’s best friends.
“Who taught you?” Izzy asked.
“My father,” Jake said, nodding for Ryan to grab the line. “Same way his father taught him. And his father taught him before that.”
Ryan hooked the first trotline and fed it over the prop stick while Taylor held a dip net over the side of the boat, waiting for the first crab to surface.
“Did you ever think about doing anything else?” Izzy asked, moving over to stand beside Ryan to watch what was happening.
“Nope,” Jake said. “Never.”
Ryan let Taylor take the lead as she netted the crabs, pulling them into the boat and tossing them into a bushel basket while Jake maintained a slow, steady pace along the line.
“How many crabs can you catch in a day?” Izzy asked.
“Good day’s anywhere from fifteen to twenty bushels,” Jake said, fishing out an ice-cold soda from the cooler by his feet. “But most days aren’t that good.”
“No?” Izzy asked, glancing back at him.
“Harvests aren’t what they used to be,” Jake admitted, cracking open the can. “I catch about a third of what I used to catch when I started out.”
“A third?” Izzy asked, surprised.
Jake nodded. “Crab population’s declined a lot over the years.”
Izzy looked over at Ryan. He said nothing, wondering if the picture he’d painted on her first day at the farm was finally beginning to sink in. Maybe she’d needed this human connection to really understand how dire things were.
“It’s getting harder and harder to make ends meet,” Jake said matter-of-factly. “A lot of guys have given up—guys who’ve been out here longe
r than I have. But I could never walk away from this. It’s the only life I’ve ever known. It’s the only life I ever want to know.”
Izzy watched Taylor net a few more crabs, then looked at the man behind the wheel again. “Do you come out here every day?”
“Every day I’m allowed to,” Jake said. “The state regulates how often we can come out and how much we can catch.”
“What do you do in the winter?” Izzy asked.
“Work the oyster beds,” Jake said.
“With cages, like Ryan does?”
Jake shook his head.
“I hand tong for a couple months when the season opens, then switch over to dredging.”
“On the same boat?”
“Same boat,” Jake confirmed. “I rig it up differently for each season, depending on what I’m after. ’Course,” he added, taking a sip of his soda, “the oysters are in worse shape than the crabs.”
Izzy was quiet for a long time as they reached the end of the first trotline and Jake turned the boat around to repeat the process all over again with the second line. As soon as Ryan had slipped it over the stick and Taylor was poised to net the first crab, Izzy turned back to Jake. “Would you ever consider doing what Ryan and his father are doing?”
Jake shook his head slowly. “No.”
“Why not?”
Jake looked over at Ryan and the two men shared a long look. “It’s not what I want to do.”
Izzy looked back and forth between the two men, sensing the sudden tension between them.
Not wanting to put Jake in an awkward position, Ryan spoke up for the first time since Izzy had begun quizzing his friend. “Not everybody likes what my dad and I are doing.”
“What do you mean?” Izzy asked. “Why not?”
“Oysters are a pretty contentious subject in this state right now,” Ryan said, picking up a smaller crab Taylor had accidentally tossed into one of the baskets and throwing it overboard. “Everybody agrees we need to do something drastic to bring them back, but there’s a lot of debate about the best way to go about that. The idea of parsing the Bay into farms isn’t sitting well with a lot of watermen. They don’t want us chopping up the Bay, privatizing the water.”
“Would that happen?” Izzy asked.
“If the state approves too many aquaculture leases, some fear there could be a domino effect,” Ryan said. “A lot of watermen already feel there are too many restrictions on how much seafood they can catch, especially when it comes to oysters. More leases would further restrict their access to the water, and the few oyster bars that are left on the bottom.”
“The state loves to spend money on oyster restoration projects,” Jake said, shifting the course of the boat. “We’ve got one of the world’s biggest man-made oyster reefs about a mile north of here. It’s huge—over three hundred acres—and now they’re working on building two more.” He shook his head. “If the state wants to throw taxpayer dollars at something, they should focus on rehabilitating the wild oysters in the beds we can work instead of pouring more money into aquaculture and sanctuaries that we can’t touch.”
Izzy looked out at the water and Ryan wondered if she was beginning to see how controversial this was. Watermen, oyster farmers, environmentalists, politicians—they were all coming at it from a different direction, and arguably the watermen were the ones with the most at stake. But the Bay wouldn’t be able to sustain any of them if they didn’t start reversing the damage right now. These waters had to be saved, or everyone would fail.
“Look,” Jake said to Izzy as they neared the end of the second trotline. “I understand why Ryan’s father decided to make the jump over to aquaculture. The state’s got us so choked up with regulations we can barely scrape a living from these waters anymore. But even if I wanted to follow in his footsteps, I couldn’t afford to.”
He made a minor adjustment on the throttle. “You’ve got to buy the seed, the cages, the equipment, the land. You’ve got to factor in a budget for marketing, legal fees, permits, labor. It takes almost two years from the time you plant your first crop to even think about making a profit. Most of the guys who are getting into this are college graduates, people with backgrounds in finance, people who’ve already had some success with a conventional career and want to try something different. Most watermen don’t have that kind of money lying around.”
Izzy looked at Ryan. “Where’d your father get the money to start his farm?”
Uncomfortable, Ryan looked away. He felt a wet nose nudge his hand, and he fished a piece of jerky out of his pocket, slipping it to his dog. When he glanced up again, he saw the moment the realization dawned in Izzy’s eyes and knew she was finally beginning to put two and two together.
Nine
It wasn’t his father, Izzy realized. It was Ryan. He was the one who had taken on the risk. He was the reason his father had started the farm. He was the bridge between the two worlds—the solitary waterman tradition that ran in his blood, and a future, which relied on science, expensive equipment, and growing seafood in cages.
She felt the workboat begin another one of its slow-motion turns, and she imagined that it was Ryan behind the wheel. It was so easy to picture him there, with only his dog and the sunrise for company. It had taken her less than an hour on the water to see that this was where his heart was, that this was where he belonged.
She understood, now, what he had been trying to tell her the other day—that there was a culture here that was sacred, a way of life that was worth saving.
Maybe the idea of farmed shellfish wasn’t as romantic as harvesting wild oysters, but it was a step in the right direction, wasn’t it?
Jake evened out the course of the boat. “The state’s been subsidizing a loan program to try to get watermen to make the transition for a few years now, but the money only covers a portion of the start-up costs. And it’s a loan, so you’ve got to pay it back. What if I’m no good at oyster farming? What if I kill half my crop in the first year? What if I can’t find anybody to buy my oysters? I don’t have the stomach to take on that kind of risk.”
Izzy watched Jake reach for his soda, his calloused fingers wrapping around a can that was already beginning to sweat in the heat. “Would you ever consider working for another oyster farmer as an employee?”
Jake shook his head. “I’m not interested in being on someone else’s payroll.”
“Even if it meant a steady paycheck?” Izzy asked.
“I’ve been my own boss for almost forty years,” Jake said, lifting the can to lips that were cracked from decades of working in the sun. “I’d rather take my chances with the way things are than let somebody else call the shots.”
It was one thing to have a stranger calling the shots, Izzy thought. But family was different. How many men, like Jake, would be the last generation to carry on this legacy, simply because they had no one to pass it to? She thought of all the kids who would leave this area for college and never come back. Most of them would have seen the writing on the wall long ago.
Looking at Ryan, she thought about everything he’d accomplished in the years he’d been away. With his credentials, he could have gone anywhere. But he’d chosen to come back here. To invest in this island. To invest in his family. She watched him dip his own net into the river to snag a crab off the line that Taylor had missed—his movements so quietly tuned to the water and the boat. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d planned to do for her own family?
Her decision to join the Army at eighteen had been as much for her grandmother as for herself. Her mother had already passed away by then, but the enlistment bonus had provided her with enough money to invest in a small house for her grandmother in Baltimore. Izzy had only planned to serve in the military for twenty years—just long enough to qualify for retirement benefits. Then, with a comfortable pension at thirty-eight, she would return to Baltimore, where she and her grandmother would open a traditional Oaxacan-style restaurant.
It had been a shared dream that
the two of them had been working toward for years. Enlisting in the Army had been the first step. The military had offered security, stability—a steady income that her family could rely on for the first time in their lives. It had meant that they would never have to go back to working in the fields.
When she’d lost her grandmother to cancer three years ago, it had only made Izzy that much more determined to keep their shared dream alive. She had vowed to honor her grandmother’s memory by carrying on the Rivera legacy in the only way she knew how.
Gazing down at her hands, she thought of the long line of Rivera cooks who’d come before her, and how that legacy would die with her now.
“Want to give it a shot?” Ryan asked.
Izzy looked up to see him holding the net out to her. There was compassion in his eyes, like he’d known she’d gone somewhere in her mind she hadn’t wanted to go. He moved over, making space for her to join him at the side of the boat. She grasped the handle—the same way she had with Kade’s hand the night before—accepting the olive branch.
“Just follow Taylor’s lead,” Ryan said.
Taylor netted the next two, then stepped back so Izzy could take her position.
Izzy watched the first wriggling crustacean appear beneath the murky waters, clinging onto the bait attached to the line.
“Try to grab it right before it surfaces,” Taylor said from beside her.
Izzy reached down, scooped it off the trotline, and added it to the basket with the others.
“See?” Taylor said, smiling up at her. “Piece of cake.”
The child’s joy was so infectious that Izzy couldn’t help smiling back at her. Behind her, Ryan maintained his post by snagging any crabs off the line that she missed. Izzy couldn’t help noticing how he let Taylor take on the role of instructor. His management style at the farm throughout the past week had been similar, in the way he’d patiently explained each task, then stepped back to let whoever he’d put in charge take the reins. He’d been quick to dole out praise and give credit wherever it was due, but he’d never asked anyone to boost his own ego.