“You bring my son home to me,” her mother said to Cathy as she walked out the door. “Please, Cathy. Bring my Johnny home.”
“I will,” she vowed.
There are advantages to being married to a deputy sheriff, Tommy Patterson’s rank at the time. One of them is that the sheriff’s department has its own marine bureau, which was itself gearing up to respond in any way possible to the loss of local lobsterman Johnny Aldridge. The bureau gave Cathy and Jillian an escort, so the seventy-plus-mile drive, which usually takes at least an hour and a half, two hours if there’s traffic, took only fifty minutes. During the drive Cathy watched her cell phone light up with texts and phone messages. The word was out.
There was no way for it not to be. VHF radio channel 16 is the standard marine communication channel, its chatter accessible to all ships required to carry radio as well as to radio towers in numerous coastal areas. Anyone at a listening post knew what was going on. Police scanner buffs, amateur radio operators, anyone with a plugin on a computer could hear what was happening and pass the news along.
Tony Vincente didn’t hear the news from a computer or a VHF radio; he learned about Johnny in an urgent call from Johnny’s brother, Anthony, and he was the first person outside the family to get the news. That’s probably not surprising: Vincente has been a close friend of the whole family for a long time. Addie Aldridge babysat for Vincente’s daughters, and Johnny himself, ten years Tony’s junior, had worked for Vincente’s construction firm as a carpenter and foreman. The call came while Vincente was at work on a job, a place where, it is well known, he does not like to be disturbed by personal phone calls. At the end of this one he walked off the job and went to his office to try to get hold of himself.
Then Lucy Catalano walked in the door. A close friend of Johnny’s—the two had grown up together as neighbors in Oakdale—she had last spoken with him the evening before, phoning him at nine o’clock to announce that friends had arrived from Italy to spend their honeymoon in the States and were looking forward to seeing him. “I’m just pulling out of the slip,” Johnny told her from aboard the Anna Mary. “I’ll be back day after tomorrow and see all of you then.” That morning Lucy took her guests to the beach at Robert Moses State Park. She was just unfolding the beach chairs when her phone rang—another friend, who had heard it from Tony, telling her that Johnny was missing. The news was both unfathomable and numbing. Somehow the beach chairs got refolded. Lucy and the Italian honeymooners got back in the car. She drove through Oakdale, and when she passed Vincente’s office she pulled up to the curb, turned off the engine, and asked the honeymooners to wait. Tony was another link in the Johnny chain, and she felt the urge to see him.
Lucy walked in and saw Tony sobbing at his desk. She went over and embraced him, and the two of them hugged, weeping, for a long moment. Then he looked up at Lucy and said, “You know, our friend is not a strong swimmer.”
Lucy couldn’t take anymore. “I gotta go,” she said. She brought her guests home, went into the hairdressing salon she runs out of her home, and got to work. It was the only thing she could think of to do with herself. Fortunately, she had a fully booked schedule of appointments for that day, although half of them—mostly Johnny’s friends—had left messages canceling.
Meanwhile Tony Vincente picked himself up and went to the Aldridge house.
So did Steve D’Amico, who also got a call from Anthony. D’Amico had grown up across the street from the Aldridges—John and Addie Aldridge were “a second father and mother.” He had to be with them.
Others were gathering. A line of cars was parked along the street as neighbors and friends began to dribble in, then to pour in, until what Cathy Patterson would later measure as “half of Oakdale” was at the house at the end of Yale Avenue.
The other half, like Cathy, was on its way to Montauk.
Chapter 8
“Johnny Load Is Missing”
6:45 a.m.
Dead empty for most of the year, Montauk from June to September blossoms into Partytown, USA. Watch the crowds filing off the trains on a Friday evening in summer—unkindly locals have dubbed these conveyances “cattle cars”—or pouring out of jitneys from Manhattan and Brooklyn. They have arrived at what a reporter for the New York Times Fashion & Style section described in 2016 as “the former fishing village that’s now a summer playground.”* Forget the dismissive “former” for now—a playground it certainly is. Chic, glamorous, pricey, seductive, hot in any number of ways: that is Montauk in the summer, although if you needed just one word to describe the time and place, unarguably the word would be crowded.
One reason Montauk draws so many people is that its setting is unspeakably beautiful. True, it is dead flat. Although the nature preserve you ride through on your way to the town center and the Point boasts a peak elevation of 151 feet above sea level, for the most part you’re standing just at sea level. That is one reason the 110-foot-high lighthouse, perched on a headland known as Turtle Hill at an elevation of a mere 71 feet, stands out so prominently. In fact, however, sea level affords long and wonderful vistas—north across white sand beaches to the harbors and bays of Long Island Sound and, in a simple pivot, south across dunes to the open Atlantic. There are fresh ponds, lush woods and gardens, lanes of traditional gray-shingled houses, sunrise walks past bass fishermen surf-casting in the near dark, evening sunsets over the harbor with the yachts and sailboats and charter boats and working fishing vessels more or less at rest but rocking ever so gently on the lapping tide. Little wonder that the people who love Montauk love it so fiercely, and little wonder the visitors cannot stay away.
Not that anyone really knows the exact number of people who visit here between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the traditional beginning and end of “the season.” The Suffolk County Planning Commission claimed in 2015, as reported in the local Easthampton Star newspaper, that the number of people spending the night in the stretch of hamlets comprising the Hamptons and Montauk went from an estimated peak of 200,000 in 1990 to 262,000 in 2010.* That peak has almost surely been topped since then, as the appeal of the place as a pop-up summer resort has only increased, while new, online sites like Airbnb have augmented the possibilities for spending the night and have no doubt added unknown numbers to the total.
For a hamlet with an official population of not quite 4,000 and a population density of some 220 people per square mile, Montauk’s share of these peak numbers, even if they are only estimates, is staggering.
The first to arrive are almost invariably the summertime residents, homeowners of long standing, who show up at the first signs of spring to air out their shuttered houses, turn on the pump and water heater, and start their gardens. Montaukers in their way, they will spend the summer months mostly with each other, secure in their status as old Montauk hands who know their way around.
Then there are the renters, those looking for a week or a month or a few nights in a house or cabin or condo or efficiency apartment or whatever they can find. The official kick-off for finding one of these is Presidents’ Day in February, but the cognoscenti start even earlier—in many cases as far back as the previous November.
Montauk is rich in hotels as well—from luxury spa resorts at top prices down to cheap motels with paper-thin walls. All are booked virtually all season long.
So is the stretch of shore known as Gin Beach—so named not, as many suppose, because the bootleggers offloaded cases of the stuff here during Prohibition but rather because this was the spot where, as far back as 1665, cattle and sheep were enclosed in summer behind a gate or corral known as a gin. Today the beach plays host to what the locals call Tin Can Caravan, a mass of parked RVs and camper trailers that can stay for up to a week at a stretch—for way less money than in an inn or B&B or hotel or motel.
Owners, renters, campers, and everybody else arrives from somewhere farther west on the train or the jitney, where the partying often begins en route, or in cars or vans that on weekends inch the last fifty mile
s at a snail’s pace. They even arrive by helicopter—you can order one on an Uber-like app if you don’t have your own.
What do all these people do when they get to Montauk? Of course, they play in the ocean. They swim, they bodysurf, they surf and paddleboard off the famous Ditch Plains Beach. They sail. They charter boats and go out for a day of deep-sea fishing, and if they get a strike, they might take a selfie with their catch.
They eat. Celebrity chefs make their way here with the summer crowds, purveying a variety of creative cuisines. As of the 2016 season, for example, as reported in the New York Times, diners could feast on “vegan dishes inspired by Australian surf towns, like cantaloupe gazpacho with eggplant ‘bacon’ and borage.”*
They drink. They imbibe copious amounts of rosé and other wines, microbrews and Budweisers, liquor and cordials, and, famously, the Fireball Shot, consisting of a tossed-back shot of the famous whisky chased by a pint of hard cider.
They shop. In addition to the usual tourist sweatshirts and baseball caps, you can pay a fortune for a beach cover-up at any number of fashionable boutiques or at the summer outposts of trendy Manhattan chains.
And they make noise. On Friday the singles arrive, and after a week cooped up in office buildings in the steamy city, they are really, really ready to release their inhibitions and extend the range of the possible when it comes to their definition of fun. On occasion the all-night noise that results has generated contention and confrontation between residents and partyers, and that has become an issue in local politics. But the singles still come, and the parties go on.
That is Montauk in the summer. It’s the Montauk you read about, the Montauk of lavish, A-list parties where you can spot celebrities like Alec Baldwin, Billy Joel, Steven Spielberg, and Taylor Swift. It is the Montauk everybody knows, the high-end world that gossip columnists have probed and social commentators have analyzed.
But it is not the real Montauk. Not even in summer. The real Montauk is about the fishing. It always was.
The town took its name from the Montaukett people who were the area’s first inhabitants. They subsisted on what they fished and exchanged quahog clamshells as currency. Local historians think their hunting proficiency extended to trailing and killing whales from their dugout canoes, and it is certain that they made use of every bit of the animal, burning the whale oil in yet more clamshells. The Montaukett may even have taught whaling to European settlers when they arrived.
The place has been a fishing village ever since, and fishing is still the engine of the Montauk economy. The place is home to the largest commercial and recreational fishing fleet in New York state, one of the largest on the Eastern seaboard—and this despite the fact that the small commercial operations like that of the Anna Mary, long a mainstay of the economy, have been decimated by the regulations and quotas Johnny and Anthony and others complain about. Many of the fishermen who survived the regulations and limits did so by doubling up as sport-fishing operations, running those charter trips in summer for the tourists who want to tussle with bluefish, blackfish, striped bass, porgies, tuna, fluke. The claim that Montauk has more world saltwater fishing records than any other port remains unchallenged.
Locals like to say that when you get to Montauk, you’ve reached The End. That’s literally true. You’ve reached the easternmost point of Long Island, which, at 118 miles in length, is the longest and largest island in the contiguous United States. Running northeastward from New York Harbor and the city itself, Long Island on the map really does look like a fish swimming nose-first into the mainland, with a split tail in the east where Peconic Bay cuts the island into north and south peninsular forks. The south fork juts out farther than the north, and its East End is The End.
On this unlikely protrusion of dead-flat land sticking out from the indentation of the eastern seaboard, unlikely things have happened. The schooner La Amistad came ashore here in 1839, and the mutineers aboard, ethnic Mende men and women plucked from Africa to be sold in Caribbean slave markets, would take their case all the way to the Supreme Court to win their freedom, which they did.
During Prohibition Montauk was indeed a drop-off point for rum runners to stash their contraband, and in World War II almost the whole of the East End became a military base, its buildings disguised to look from above like a New England seaside village. Apparently non-New-England Montauk as it appeared at the time didn’t quite fit the picture the military was after.
The lighthouse, standing on that headland at the easternmost end of Montauk Point, is a white tower with a distinctive red band. Unlike so many things that have assumed the description, it really is “iconic”—an essential part of the picture that is featured endlessly in logos, on postcards, and in selfies, sketches, drawings, paintings, and advertisements. A national historic landmark, it was commissioned by President George Washington in 1792, opened for business in 1796, and in one form or another has been there ever since.
For good reason. The piece of ocean the lighthouse overlooks is a dangerous spot. Here, where the deep Atlantic meets the mainland, below the windblown dunes where only beach grass grows, the rocky reefs and dangerous shoals are utterly exposed. When the waves roll against the tide, they rise up like towers and turn the inshore rip currents white with foam. More than one ship has foundered here, with the loss of all aboard. So once out of the narrow gate of the snug, closely protected Montauk Harbor, those heading out to sea—like Johnny and Anthony and their colleagues—know they are facing a rough and potentially dangerous ride around the Point before they can reach their own fishing grounds and their traps. In case they forget, there’s an eight-foot, twenty-six-hundred-pound bronze statue of a fisherman standing atop a seven-foot-high block of granite at the lighthouse. It is a memorial, inscribed with the names of East End fishermen lost at sea—120 so far.
Anthony Sosinski is well acquainted with that memorial. In fact, he feels a particular connection with it. In March 1993 Anthony was working for a one-armed codfish captain named Pete on a boat called the Some Pair. Pete’s limitation meant that he needed someone strong aboard to haul the gear, and wiry Anthony, corded with muscles, fit the bill. The two were on their way to head out on a scheduled trip when they made an early-morning stop to drop off a life raft for a friend of Pete’s, a young fisherman named Joe Hodnik, who had just bought a longline boat for cod fishing and was about to take it on its maiden voyage with his friend and colleague Ed Sabo. Anthony and Pete stopped at Hodnik’s home and wished Hodnik well—Anthony remembers taking care to keep his voice down because Hodnik’s baby son, not yet a year old, was asleep at the time—then headed out to sea. Hodnik and Sabo did the same.
The Some Pair was off Block Island, and it was Anthony’s turn to keep watch during the nighttime drifting when, at about 2:00 a.m., there came a distress call from Joe Hodnik shouting for Pete, giving out his Loran coordinates, and screaming, literally, that he was sinking. Another boat, the Provider, also heard the call and managed to send out the first distress alert to the US Coast Guard and to broadcast Hodnik’s coordinates. By the time Anthony and Pete on the Some Pair got to the spot, a Coast Guard helicopter was circling overhead. Anthony remembers how its brilliant searchlight lit up the pitch-black ocean. The Some Pair pulled over to where the deck box, empty now, was floating in the water. They also found a boot and a toothbrush. The boat had gone down quickly, and neither Joe Hodnik, twenty-six years old, nor young Ed Sabo was ever found. Anthony is certain he was the last human to hear Hodnik scream for help.
The loss of Joe Hodnik and Ed Sabo galvanized the Montauk fishing community to form the Lost At Sea Memorial Committee in 1994, and when the memorial was dedicated in 1999, the little boy Anthony hadn’t wanted to wake up was there, eight years old by then, to read his father’s name in the three-tiered base of the monument.
The sinking, the deaths, and the ringing memory of Joe’s final plea in Anthony’s ears did something else: they prompted Anthony to quit fishing altogether. No more! he decided. He
hung up his fisherman’s skins and his heavy fisherman’s boots, gathered his wife and child, and fled to Pennsylvania—far away from the sea and fish and everything having to do with either. He came back after a while, but not to Montauk and in no way to go out on the water; instead, he settled in Southampton and stayed away from boats. He made use of his professional expertise by going to work for the local King Kullen supermarket as a fish salesman—let somebody else go out there and risk their lives every day. He joined the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International, and decided he had made the smartest move of his life.
But he couldn’t stay away. Not from fishing and not from Montauk. And after nine months ashore and stuck indoors selling fish, he was back in the East End and back at sea.
What is telling about this is what it says about the hold the life of a fisherman can exert on an individual. Part of that hold surely is the protectively encompassing embrace of the Montauk fishing community—with all the support it offers and all the solidarity it lets its members feel. No doubt every profession or job is a fraternity—machinists, teachers, lawyers, construction workers, even bankers, for all anyone knows. They are fraternities of people who are fluent in a particular work-related jargon and who depend equally on a shared self-interest. The band of brothers that is the Montauk fishing community is that and more—a collective way of life that the community senses is under siege, such that everyone in the community has everyone else’s back to the max. It’s no accident and no surprise, for example, that little Joey Hodnik is today what his father before him was—a commercial fisherman—and an integral part of the Montauk fishing community.
Nor do you have to be a fisherman to be part of the community. George Watson, who runs The Dock, is no fisherman. Neither are the bartenders at Liar’s, another “headquarters” of the fishing community. Cathy Patterson isn’t a commercial fisherman either—nor is her husband Tommy, nor do they live in Montauk. Yet all are part of the Montauk fishing community. So is Jason Walter, the Coast Guard officer in charge of station Montauk at the time of the search for Johnny Aldridge. Two years later Walter retired from the service after a twenty-one-year career, and although he had spent only the last four of those years in Montauk, he and his family stayed on. This was home. Walter by this time knew virtually all the captains of all the fishing vessels, both sport and commercial, and he was to all of them a known quantity as well, a man who understood their struggles and their way of life, a man who had consistently gone above and beyond to help them and serve their interests. That Jason Walter, born and raised in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, was a brother in the fishing community was universally understood and accepted by every member of that community.
A Speck in the Sea Page 10