But Bruce’s first day of lobstering with his father turned out to be lucrative enough to warrant a second day, and after that a third. As autumn settled over the island the days aboard his father’s boat became weeks. At the helm was Warren, his dad, and on the stern was the name of his other parent—Mother Ann. Bruce stuffed bait bags with chopped herring. He plugged the lobsters’ thumbs with wooden pegs to immobilize their claws so they wouldn’t rip each other apart in the barrel. He coiled rope. He hefted the heavy wooden traps. And he observed his father at work.
Some of Warren’s white-and-yellow buoys followed the shoreline like a string of popcorn. Warren knew just how close he could get to the rocks without endangering the boat, and he showed Bruce how to line up landmarks and steer clear.
Some of Warren’s buoys bobbed in ninety feet of water, running in a line east to west half a mile from the island. Unwritten rules along most of the Maine coast governed just how far a fisherman could go before he was setting traps in someone else’s territory. Bruce watched where his father went and memorized the landmarks that would keep him close to home.
Come November, Warren and Bruce were hauling traps in water twenty fathoms deep—120 feet—a mile south of the island in open sea. It was cold, especially when the breeze picked up and blew spray in Bruce’s face.
“Okay, son, where are we now?” Warren asked, bent over a tangle in the rope.
Bruce, his hands numb, glanced up to see which of the mountains of Mount Desert Island loomed over the lighthouse on Baker Island, half a mile southeast of Little Cranberry. Depending on how far to the east or west the Mother Ann was positioned, the lighthouse would line up with a different hill.
“Cadillac,” Bruce answered.
Cadillac Mountain, like the automobile of the same name, honored the first European settler in these parts. In 1688 a small-town French lawyer swindled a land grant to Mount Desert Island from the Canadian governor. He invented the aristocratic title “sieur de Cadillac” for himself and lorded it over the uninhabited island with his new bride for a summer. Bored, he soon retreated inland to found a trading post called Detroit. The Cadillac car still bears his fake coat of arms on its hood. The lobstermen of Little Cranberry had put Cadillac’s legacy to their own use. Like the other hills of Mount Desert, his mountain rising from the sea was a map to the treasures under the waves.
In a more literal sense too, Warren and Bruce were fishing on Cadillac Mountain—or at least on pieces of it—and that was what made these waters hospitable for lobsters. Starting a few million years ago, sheets of ice had rolled down from the Arctic for eighty thousand years at a stretch, interrupted by brief warm spells of ten thousand or twenty thousand years. During the most recent ice age the glaciers had scraped up stone from all over Maine and carried it south, carving away at the pink granite of Mount Desert Island on the way. The glaciers had pressed on for another three hundred miles before grinding to a halt, encrusting the Gulf of Maine and the continental shelf in ice as far south as Long Island.
When the glaciers melted fourteen thousand years ago they unveiled the sensuously sculpted hills and valleys that now constitute Acadia National Park. The glaciers also left behind vast fields of debris—boulders, cobble, pebbles, and gravel. Glacial runoff sorted the finer sediments into beds of sand or muddy silt between ledges of hard rock. Sea levels rose, filling in the convoluted coastline and creating islands, bays, inlets, and in the middle of Mount Desert, the only true fjord on the east coast of the North American continent. Underwater, this terrain of rocks and sediment became the perfect habitat for lobsters. It was an intricate rangeland that Bruce would have to learn by charts, depth sounders, compass points, and intuition rather than by sight. The more he thought about it, the more this seemed a task that might warrant a lifetime.
Bruce’s great-great-great-grandfather Henry Fernald had settled on the island next door, Great Cranberry. But with a paucity of women there, his three sons had rowed the half mile across the water to Little Cranberry in search of mates. They wooed local girls, married, and settled on the smaller island. When they’d had enough of home life they jumped in their dories and went to sea.
From their boats the Fernalds had lowered lines weighted with a chunk of lead. A clank when it hit bottom meant rock, a thud meant sand, and nothing meant mud. They marked off the depth in fathoms and rowed around feeling where the rock went, then gave each underwater feature a name honoring its shape, characteristics, or the man who found it: Bull Ground, Moose Ground, Mussel Ridge, Tide Hole, Smith’s Shoal, Poag’s Piece, or George Hen’s Reef—the last named by Bruce’s great-great-great-uncle George Henry. And in the spring they returned to set their traps.
Lobster traps were a newfangled technology when Bruce’s ancestors started using them. Lobsters had been caught by various methods for a long time before that. European explorers dragged up Maine’s greenish brown lobsters from shallow water with hooks. The animals looked familiar because European waters were home to the American lobster’s nearly identical twin, the bluish black Homarus gammarus. Although the two species have evolved separate colors of camouflage, both turn red when boiled in the pot. During cooking, protein molecules in the shell bend into shapes that absorb different wavelengths of light and end up reflecting red.
These two species also share something akin to a secret undergarment of the brightest blue. If extricated, proteins from the shell of the mostly black Homarus gammarus can be grown into brilliant blue crystals, and every so often a specimen of the mostly brown Homarus americanus undergoes a rare genetic mutation that unveils its stunning inner indigo. American lobsters that don’t get enough calcium in their diets can fade from brown to blue too, but of a less vibrant hue. Genetic mutations of yellow, white, calico, and even red also turn up in living lobsters, and very occasionally one is caught that is half-and-half—the line down the middle of its back as straight as a ruler.
It was from the European Homarus gammarus that the name “lobster” originated. The Old English version of the word, “loppestre,” is probably related to loppe, meaning spider. But the original derivation likely goes back to the Latin locusta. Pliny the Elder, writing in his Natural History during the first century AD, observed that when a lobster was surprised, it seemed to “disappear with a single leap or bound as a locust or grasshopper might do,” and so he used the term locustæ—locusts of the sea. With the lobster’s obvious resemblance to an insect, the name stuck. Until the English word was standardized, writers used spellings as various as “lapstar” and “lopystre” to refer to the crustacean.
Historians of New England often note that early settlers considered lobster a kind of junk food that was fit only for swine, servants, and prisoners. These claims may be exaggerated. But storms could blow lobsters onto beaches by the hundreds, making them a convenient source of feed or fertilizer for coastal farms, and most scholars agree that lobster was generally considered a low-class dish for human consumption. After their first winter in Plymouth, a group of Pilgrims on an expedition to what is now Boston Harbor gladly helped themselves to fresh lobsters that had been piled on the beach by Native Americans. By the following year, however, the leader of the Pilgrims, William Bradford, reported shame at having to serve lobster in lieu of more respectable fare.
By the seventeenth century, the word “lobster” had even developed a derogatory usage in speech—calling someone a lobster was like calling him a rascal. One English source from 1609 gives an example: “you whorson Lobster.” During the American revolution, the word was a put-down for British redcoats, and in American slang of the late 1800s it was used to call someone a dupe or a fool.
Despite these connotations, fishermen along the New England coast ate lobster, though primarily out of economic necessity—the fish they caught were too valuable at the market to consume, while lobster was nearly worthless. Gradually the lobster’s status improved, and its meat became desirable fare for well-off urbanites. By the early nineteenth century, American fisher
men were catching lobsters commercially with a type of net hanging from an iron hoop and shaped like a cauldron—one origin of the term “pot,” still used today to refer to a trap. Traps of wood and twine were far more efficient than nets and caught on in New England in the 1840s.
For Bruce Fernald’s forefathers, building twenty or thirty traps could take all winter. The men hauled spruce from the forest and sawed it into sills, then stripped green branches and soaked them in a round washtub to make the arched bows that gave the traps their curved tops. The women who had been foolish enough to marry these men sat by the stove knitting mesh funnels and bait bags from twine. Then the men boiled vats of coal tar and cooked the twine to fortify it against decomposition. While the tar was hot they measured lengths of rope made from Manila hemp or sisal plants and cooked them too.
The buoys they carved from tree trunks, each man painting his floats a signature color. Just before they set a trap they loaded it with beach stones so it would sink; after a week or two the wood would be waterlogged enough that they could remove some of the rocks. And then on a good day each man piled as many traps as he could into a dory, rowed out to where he thought the lobsters were, and threw the traps overboard. When he hauled a trap back up and found lobsters in it, he noted its location and reminded himself to lie about it when he returned to the island.
For a hundred years the Fernalds mostly set their traps on rocky bottom, where they believed the lobsters liked to hide. Occasionally a storm would churn up the sea and drag the wooden traps to new locations, often off the rocks and into mud valleys several miles away. After the storm the Fernalds would head out in their boats to search for their gear. When they found a trap they were relieved, whether it contained lobsters or not. Still, as the years passed, the lobstermen began to notice an odd phenomenon. Sometimes the traps they retrieved from the mud seemed to contain more lobsters than the traps that had stayed on the rocks. Perhaps the animals had been frightened into the muddy valleys by the raging currents of the storm.
By the time Bruce Fernald was fishing with his father, a new theory had developed. Perhaps the lobsters used the rocks for hiding, but the mud for migrating. It was a theory Bruce grew increasingly eager to put into practice for himself.
Jack Merrill’s family lived in suburban Massachusetts. His parents brought him to Little Cranberry Island before he was a year old, and Jack spent his boyhood summers entranced by the island’s rocky beaches, its stands of spruce, and the scent of salt in the air. One day he eagerly accepted an invitation from an old-timer to go lobstering. At 6:00 A.M. the young Jack nearly lost his breakfast walking past the bins of rancid bait on the wharf. But staring straight ahead, he held his breath and made it aboard the old wooden boat and out onto the sparkling sea.
“Nature has a way of separating the men from the boys,” the old-timer said, pouring himself coffee from a thermos and soaking up the sunrise.
For Jack, the end of each summer on Little Cranberry, and the subsequent reversion to suburban life, was torturous. He vowed to make something of his affection for Maine’s craggy coast and wide-open ocean. His ancestors on his father’s side had come from Maine, and his great-grandfather had been a governor of the state. As he neared adulthood, Jack grew certain that he wanted to return to these family roots.
This dream nearly became the death of him. Jack taught marine ecology for several summers at an outdoor adventure camp in Maine. Once, he and a group of campers were sailing a pair of thirty-foot open boats out of Hurricane Island when an October gale whipped up enormous waves. Both boats were swept out to sea. Jack and his fellow sailors rode the storm through the night, bailing to stay afloat. The gale subsided and in the morning the Coast Guard found them, chilled and exhausted. Jack figured that if he could survive that, he could survive commercial fishing.
By the age of twenty-one, Jack was back on Little Cranberry Island and ready for a job as sternman with Warren Fernald. During his first week aboard the Mother Ann, Jack stood by with a can of claw plugs when each trap broke the surface. Often the traps were loaded with lobsters flapping their tails. Warren would open the trap and reach among the snapping pincers. He tossed most of the animals overboard without a second glance. Several he kept only long enough to slap a brass ruler on their backs before throwing them back into the water too.
The trap would be empty and Jack would have yet to change the bait. He would hurry to unwind the spent bag and hang a fresh bundle of herring in the trap. Warren would tie the door shut and shove the trap overboard. After an hour of this routine Jack would steal a glance in the barrel of keepers. More often than not, he could still see the bottom of the barrel. Warren threw more lobsters overboard with each trap he hauled.
“This is nuts,” Jack said under his breath. Another trap came over the rail, full of shiny lobsters that would go back into the sea.
“Too bad we can’t just keep all these,” Jack muttered.
Warren thought for a minute.
“You want to be a lobsterman?” Warren asked.
“I don’t know. Yeah, maybe.”
“You want to keep on lobstering after you start?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, you can’t catch everything and expect it to continue,” Warren said, turning the brass ruler over in his hands. The ruler, which lobstermen called the “gauge,” enforced a minimum-size law that had been in effect in Maine since 1895. “Throw back more than you catch and, why, there’s always going to be something there tomorrow.”
As if to punctuate his point, later in the string of traps Warren turned a female lobster on her back and showed her to Jack. Glued to the underside of her tail were thousands of pine green eggs. Warren reached for his fish knife and cut a quarter-inch triangle out of the lobster’s tail flipper, then slid her back into the sea. He had just marked her as a breeder by bestowing her with a “V-notch,” so-called because the triangular cut was shaped like a V. If caught again, the lobster would be illegal to sell whether she was carrying eggs or not.
Jack was getting used to the idea of returning “shorts,” “eggers,” and “V-notchers” to the sea when a trap came over the rail containing a mammoth lobster that could have crushed a man’s wrist in its claws.
“Now, that’s a handsome fellow,” Warren said, noting the more muscular claws and narrower tail that indicated a male. Females have wider tails to accommodate their eggs.
With a couple of skillful tugs Warren extracted the creature and held it up for admiration. Then he dropped the lobster overboard with a splash. Jack leaned over the rail and glimpsed the animal pulsing its tail and retreating into the depths.
“Too big,” Warren said. In addition to a minimum size, his brass ruler delineated a maximum size, another law that Maine had pioneered, in 1933.
“The oversize lobsters are our brood stock,” Warren explained. “We protect the big males so they can mate with the big V-notched females that produce the eggs.”
Warren hauled up another trap and found a female without eggs. But close examination revealed the remnant of a nick in her tail.
“A notcher that’s shed her old shell,” Warren said, showing the lobster to Jack. “You almost can’t make out the notch anymore.” Warren cut her a new notch before tossing her overboard.
He wasn’t just trying to repopulate the waters around Little Cranberry with lobsters. By now Warren and Ann had six children. Their sons were joining the ranks of the island’s lobstermen, and Warren had taught them how to protect lobster eggs just as he was teaching Jack. If Jack’s interest took root, there might be another lobsterman living on the island, one more steward for Little Cranberry’s female lobsters.
Jack stuffed another bag with bait. He looked up from the tub of putrid herring and gazed at the sparkling waves lapping at the edge of the island. Warren’s lessons on lobster fertility had sparked in him a new appreciation for the possibilities of procreation.
“There’s a future here,” Jack whispered.
2
Honey Holes
Pa’s Pride was a creaky little boat. Bruce Fernald nudged her throttle to speed up the hydraulic trap-hauler and prayed she’d hold together. The boat had been Warren’s when Bruce was a boy. A year had passed since Bruce had returned to Little Cranberry Island from the navy, and he supposed it was appropriate that now, as the eldest son, he was the boat’s captain. But mostly the name Pa’s Pride reminded Bruce that he was twenty-three years old and six thousand dollars in debt. No one was going to be proud of him if he didn’t start catching some lobsters.
Just trying to keep Pa’s Pride in one piece was hard enough. A storm had bombarded the harbor with screaming winds, and Pa’s Pride had broken loose from her mooring. She’d banged up against the wharf, and Bruce had smashed open a dock window in the attempt to jump aboard and save her. For fear of being pulverized between the boat’s hull and the wharf pilings, he’d given up and waited for her to slip ashore instead. With help from Jack Merrill and several other lobstermen, Bruce had dragged Pa’s Pride up the beach with an old backhoe.
Saving the boat would have been pointless, though, if Bruce’s traps came up empty. Bruce had dropped these traps overboard a week ago. He’d watched the stylus on the old-fashioned Fathometer burn a squiggly line onto a rolling sheet of paper like a lie detector. If the Fathometer told the truth, then the traps should have sunk into a muddy canyon. Bruce had gambled that lobsters would be migrating through it on their way offshore.
Outwitting the lobsters was only part of the battle. A good-natured competition simmered between Bruce and two of his younger brothers. Mark Fernald and Dan Fernald were the kind of island boys who looked naked without a lobster trap in their hands. When Mark was but a baby, his first encounter with lobsters had been life-threatening. When the lobsters Warren had brought home for dinner started to boil, steam wafted around the kitchen. Mark screamed and stopped breathing, his throat constricted by swelling. He suffered from a rare allergic reaction to proteins in lobster muscle and would never taste a lobster in his life.
The Secret Life of Lobsters Page 3