A Speck in the Sea

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A Speck in the Sea Page 11

by John Aldridge


  After his retirement from the service, Walter went to work at the Lighthouse on the Point, where he was daily aware of the tourists streaming to the Lost At Sea Memorial on which the name of Joey Hodnik’s father is permanently incised. But he also understood what the memorial means to the fishermen of Montauk who pass it every day, every trip out to sea and home again. For them the memorial is both palpable evidence of their community’s culture and heritage and an alarm bell telling them to remember the ever-present peril that’s out there beyond the Point. The peril is inevitable, and it is part, at least, of what holds their community together and gives Montauk its edge, a sharp fisherman’s intensity that residents say makes the place unlike any other.

  Singer-songwriter Nancy Atlas has thought a lot about that edge. The word itself doesn’t appear anywhere in the lyrics of her song, East End Run, which frames Montauk as the place you escape to when the world turns mad and you’re ready to leave it all behind, but the idea is there—that, by design, this place is far from the center, out on the margins, where, as Atlas says, more may be demanded of you.

  For one thing, living in Montauk is tougher than many places, which may be why the population of not-quite four thousand has shrunk consistently in the twenty-first century. Not just tougher to make a living because of the fishing regulations, but tougher in general. The weather is always a couple of degrees colder than in neighboring towns. The atmosphere is foggier. The shoreline craggier. Montauk is the first piece of land in the state to catch the sun’s rays in the morning—and the first to lose the light in the afternoon. First light is the early wake-up call to leave the harbor’s safety and go to work; last light means a long darkness.

  Then there’s that summer extravaganza when it’s easy to believe there really are a quarter of a million people passing through the hamlet, when the pop-up shops and eateries and cycling gyms rise up like dandelions in the spring, and the parties and celebrities down the road in the Hamptons outdo last summer’s parties and last year’s celebrities—year after year. Until suddenly, at summer’s end, all of that collapses. Montauk as an adjective stops meaning chic-and-upscale and goes back to meaning fishing-village-at-the-edge-of-the-earth—and if you have to ask what that feels like, you probably ought to go someplace else. The shift is profound. From sidewalks you cannot navigate because of the crowds and a clamor of noise that never dies, the town unwinds back to its not-quite four thousand residents, the Coast Guard station, the once-again-quiet Main Street where, on any given day, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of fellow citizens you pass.

  In fact, by November an almost-deadly quiet has taken hold, and all you’ve got is the people who live and work here year-round. They are the fishermen who keep going until January at least, then spend February and March with their boats drydocked so they can repair what needs repairing and be ready to go again in April.

  A visitor will have trouble finding a hotel or motel to stay in during the Montauk winter. The few restaurants not shuttered “for the season” limit their hours or are only open weekends or only serve dinner—no lunch. No one starves: there’s a modest-sized but well-stocked IGA supermarket that stays open late so you can do your shopping after work, while the 7-Eleven across the street never closes at all.

  Days are calm and unruffled. The few businesses that keep going year-round because the work they do is year-round nevertheless close their doors against the chill, and the shops are closed because the customers are gone. So are many of the business owners and shopkeepers. They have headed south—and why not? They’ve probably worked seven days a week, ten hours a day for months. They need a break. They want a change of scenery. They go where they can find some ease and space, where you don’t need a lot of clothes, where you don’t have to worry about the heating bill.

  George Watson closes up The Dock and heads south. Some of the fishermen do the same, Anthony Sosinski among them. On the first of January, when there’s no more fishing to be done, he and his father move down to St. John, the smallest of the US Virgin Islands and an island of which two-thirds is National Park—unspoiled and bound by law to stay that way. They’re there because John Sosinski always remembered a trip to St. John when he was in the Coast Guard, and in the days after his father’s stroke, Anthony promised him that “if you get better, we’ll go there every year.” And so they do, staying through March in a house built into a hillside and sitting atop a thirty-thousand-gallon cistern. There Anthony dabbles in guiding paddleboard trips, captaining charters on a small sailboat he owns, running dive trips in the clear turquoise water, even trying his hand at silk-screening T-shirts. Regularly he takes his father to the beach, sets the older man’s chair in ankle-deep surf, and together, father and son watch the butterflies, count the turtles, and keep their eyes peeled for possible dolphin sightings.

  For Anthony this three-month experience of what he calls “straight-up paradise” is “my sanity spot.” But despite that, he is always glad to get back to Montauk and the fisherman’s life he has never been able to stay away from. At the end of the time away he feels more than ready to exchange the clear turquoise of Coral Bay for the gray chill of Montauk, lazy days on the beach for heading out with Johnny in the Anna Mary, away from safety to the dangerous work of commercial fishing. And while the rest of us shudder with relief that somebody else wants to do such work on our behalf, for these two men and others like them it is the only thing they want to do in life.

  Montauk is the right place for fishermen. However the wider world may see it, Montauk sees itself as a fishing town. Fishermen live here, work here, play here—their lives can be contained here. Johnny’s apartment, on the upper floor of a small, two-story building, is a stroll of five minutes’ duration—if that—to the Anna Mary’s dock. A thirty-second stroll gets him to the beach. In effect, he can pretty much reach out and touch what’s important to his life. Anthony lives a bit more inland in a low-slung house of traditional gray shingles with a garden out back where he and his father can grow everything from beans to zucchini, garlic to peppers to peas in summer. The house is a true classic: one of two hundred original Leisurama homes prefabricated and sold completely furnished by Macy’s department store in 1963 and 1964. The subject of a documentary film* and of an exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, the Leisurama houses originally sold for around $12,000; today the sale price of a single one of them can run many, many times that. Like many of the houses, Anthony’s has been tweaked and reshaped inside until it perfectly suits his needs. It’s his own, and from this comfortable perch he’s only a bike ride away from the dock. That ride is the way he likes to start his day.

  The days in Montauk move to a fisherman’s rhythm. If you’ve ever lived or even stayed any amount of time in a fishing port, you know that these are early towns, in which the predawn vroom-vroom putt-putt of boats heading out of the harbor becomes part of the soundtrack of your dreams. Work days can start well before that—as early as two or three in the morning, with boats being loaded and engines churning to life. Then comes the afternoon packing out when the catch is unloaded, weighed, iced, and sold, and then come the drinks that follow around the bar as the crews unwind.

  Fishermen set the tone of Montauk, and the fisherman’s ethos is what counts there. “We’re all a bunch of goofballs,” says fisherman Phil Baigent, a friend of both Anthony and Johnny. And it’s safe to say none of them are big on sentiment or letting your feelings hang out.

  But feelings rode high that Wednesday morning, July 24, when cell phones started pinging with text messages and vibrating with voicemails: Johnny Load has gone missing. He fell off the back of the Anna Mary, Little Anthony is looking for him, and the Coast Guard is on its way.

  Helen Battista is the quintessential friendly, engaging bartender, the kind of woman you immediately want to embrace and open up to. Ask any of the customers at Sammys, the popular dockside eatery and watering-hole where Helen works most days during the summer season, or ask any of her army of
friends. Helen is a particularly close friend of Johnny Aldridge, whom she claims to have known “forever,” and she got the message that he had gone overboard from her pal Ed in a text at 6:45 a.m. Ed was crewing for Breakaway charters that morning, and the trip was already well underway—until the radio distress call prompted the charter boat’s captain, Richard Etzel, to cancel the trip and turn around. “We’re going back in,” he announced to his clients and crew. Ed tapped out the message to Helen right away: Load fell off the boat last nite looking 4 him Fuck.

  Helen believes she actually got the message even earlier, at about 3:30 a.m., when she woke up—inexplicably and unaccountably—and could not fall asleep again. The text from Ed more than three hours later got her sitting bolt upright, feeling scared and alone. She didn’t dare text or call anyone else: at 6:45 in the morning she knew she didn’t want to spread rumors, and repeating the message only made it more true. Impelled by instinct, Helen dressed, leashed her dog, and walked down to the Montauk harbor just minutes away. Three fishermen and some other guys—Helen knew them all—were there, just hanging out, standing around. George Watson of The Dock was on the phone. “Whatever you have to do to get him back,” Helen heard him growl into the phone.

  “Is it true?” she asked the men standing there. “Have they found him?”

  It was true, and at that hour of the morning Johnny was nowhere near being found.

  The harbor became very busy very fast. Charter captains had already headed out with their paying customers aboard. Now, as the Breakaway’s Richard Etzel had done, they were bringing their boats back, dropping off their customers—“Sorry, we won’t be fishing today”—fueling up, and heading out again to look for Johnny. Guys hung around to make up crews for the boats going out.

  Helen hung around too. The way she saw it, “everybody was going out—everybody.” And that meant that “they were going to get him.” Pure and simple. She didn’t let herself think beyond that. They’re just going out to get Load, she kept telling herself. Until she had to be at work at eleven, this is where she would stay, watching the boats going out to get Load, secure in this space between The Dock and the jetty, between Watson’s angry concern and the sound of boats on a quest.

  Laurie Zapolski and Johnny Aldridge first crossed paths in 1994 and had been in and out of one another’s lives ever since—a relationship Laurie herself characterizes as “on and off, to say the least.” Yet the two of them have a long shared past. They attended the same middle school and high school, ran with the same crowd, came from a similar background, knew the same buzzwords. In a way they look like the proverbial opposites who should attract: Johnny dark and brooding and playing things close to the vest, Laurie a pretty blond with silky hair framing a cheerful, lively face and a dazzling smile. In reality both are strong-minded, sensible, appealingly grounded individuals. When they actually met, Johnny was in his early twenties, was nursing a broken heart—not uncommon for people in their early twenties—and was reluctant to the point of resistance to form a new commitment. Laurie managed to cut through that, and there followed a decades-long on-again-off-again relationship. Each of them dated others, pointed their lives in different directions, and followed their separate pursuits. But they always somehow “gravitated toward one another”—the strength of their connection, whatever it was, pulling them together no matter how far apart they traveled from one another.

  That summer of 2013 the relationship was off again. Johnny was dating a woman named Teresa, and Laurie was living miles from Montauk up-island, which is what East Enders call the suburbs to the west of Montauk, pursuing an advanced degree in education administration and working at the same time.

  The call about Johnny’s disappearance came from Tony Vincente, and it came to Laurie in her office early in the morning. Tony was an old friend and had been the guitarist in a band she used to sing with, but she had never heard anything like the way he sounded on the phone, and what he told her made her feel as if an intruder had entered her home and knocked her down. The news was too outlandish, unexpected, impossible. For a moment she felt rooted to her chair, unable to move.

  Then something impelled her to search online and find a navigation chart for Montauk, as if by looking at the numbers, noting the ocean depth, and seeing the shapes of underwater topographic features she might be able to comprehend what had happened, where Johnny might be if he were still alive, what he might be going through, what he was thinking. She recalled that the last time they had been “on”—a particularly intense phase of their relationship—she had gone out on the Anna Mary with him and Anthony to watch them at work. Everything about their entire operation was so tightly controlled and worked so smoothly that the only possible cause she could think of for Johnny to have gone overboard was that something had hit him over the head.

  Nothing about it made any sense. I have to go to Montauk, she decided. She said as much out loud to her coworkers as she left the office, went home, packed a bag, called to reserve a room, and drove—in what she admits was a quasi-hysterical and probably somewhat distracted state—to The End. She was aware that Johnny had a girlfriend right now, and although that meant she really couldn’t seek out the Aldridge family but would instead have to keep to the shadows, she nevertheless texted Cathy to say she was on the spot if anything was needed.

  The morning was wearing on. Laurie headed for The Dock.

  Like drums in the jungle, the news of Johnny’s disappearance spread through the fishing community, and one after another that day, professional fishermen and sport fishermen alike turned their work days into searches for John Aldridge. There were charter operators who tumbled their paying customers back onto the harbor dock, with apologies, so they could confine themselves to searching, while others, already at sea, shifted course and changed the content of the day’s work. The concern stretched as far as the tugboat fleet in New York harbor, where former Montauk draggerman Tom “Boog” Powell, onetime captain of the Wanderlust on which Johnny had worked, alerted tugs heading for the shipping lanes near Montauk to keep an eye out.

  A party of shark hunters on Frank Braddick’s forty-three-foot sport fisherman, Hurry Up, had just caught the mako they came for when Braddick heard Anthony’s radio plea to any and all fishing vessels. That’s when Braddick announced to his paying customers that they would now be trolling for tuna, although what he meant was that they would be trolling for John Aldridge—about thirty-five miles south of Montauk, looking to the west, the direction in which Braddick figured the drift would have taken him. The paying customers may never have known they were really fishing that day for a man lost at sea.

  Paul Stern was another fishing professional out working that day, hired as a guide for a guy who wanted to catch a tuna—namely, music icon Jimmy Buffett. Summertime often finds the creator of “Margaritaville” and his yacht, the Last Mango, in Long Island waters, where he and Stern have fished together in the past. They were just getting underway that morning when Stern and Last Mango captain Vinnie La Sorsa heard the radio distress call about Johnny. The Last Mango is a fast boat, and Stern knew a fast boat could be useful. Would Buffett help? He told Stern, “Let’s do whatever we have to do on this.”

  Dan Stavola had a fast boat too. Stavola is no fisherman. He’s a contractor, but he is also a passionate Montauk guy who has been around boats and fishermen forever, and he knew Aldridge and Sosinski well. In fact, he and Anthony had once worked together, and neither of them is shy about saying that the relationship had not been smooth. That didn’t matter now. When Stavola tuned into VHF, what mattered was the bereft tone in Anthony’s voice calling for help. I have a boat that flies, he thought. Let me see what I can do.

  The boat that flies was the Cat in the Hat, a fifty-foot sport-fishing boat whose tower offered spotters a high, wide view of the water, and whose engine could do more than thirty knots an hour. Dan enlisted the help of Danny Lennox, Eddy Eurell, and Donny Ball, whose own boat, the Jen-Lissa, is docked just opposite the Anna Mar
y. The Cat in the Hat got underway a little before 10 a.m., urged by Anthony to head east, down to “the 500 line.” They were there in less than an hour, and even Anthony was momentarily surprised. “I forgot how fast you go,” he told Stavola over the radio. Dan captained the boat while Lennox, Eurell, and Ball—two of them on the top tower, one a single story up on the bridge—scanned the sea in all directions. But hour after hour they saw nothing.

  For the Viking Fleet’s Steven Forsberg, Wednesday was to have been a day off, one he had planned to spend with his wife and five-year-old son fishing off one of the fleet’s small boats. Forsberg’s grandfather had founded Viking, the charter fishing outfit both Anthony and Johnny had worked for when they were in their teens and twenties. Forsberg’s father ran the business next, and now Steven runs it, along with his older son, Steven Jr., and his nephew, Carl. But when he heard the news about Johnny, Forsberg got hold of both of them: “We gotta go,” he told them. He readied the sixty-five-footer instead of the small boat, and within forty-five minutes of getting the message—he thinks somewhere around 10:00 a.m.—his crew of five, one of them a five-year-old boy, was heading out and around the Point.

 

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