by Carl Safina
Whereupon I declare the fish the winner. It never gave up, never gave in, never stopped playing by its own rules. On its side, gasping now in inch-deep water, it shows me its black-dot pupil, its purpled cheek, and that swollen, sexual slope of shoulder. Its pea green, black-flecked back blends to rosy flanks, all under a fine crosshatch of dark-edged scales.
I pull the hook, and the fish shoots back through the looking glass.
I watch the current flowing and the many fish holding at the confluence. Perhaps they are waiting for the flooding tide to give them a shove up into the tributary. These fish are very much on the march, with miles to go before they spawn and then to death surrender. But right now, death is the very last thing on their minds.
* * *
Trouble with bears is often about mutual surprises. It’s easy to get absorbed in something at the water’s edge, especially when you’ve skidded down a steep gravel bank on a bear trail to watch fish. A friend of mine once hooked a salmon, got momentarily distracted, and when he refocused on the fish at the end of his line, it was in a bear’s mouth. I keep telling myself that driving a car is more dangerous than standing here. But the danger of an unseen predator, in unfamiliar terrain—in its terrain—is more visceral and electric than knowing one risks a fender bender.
This region’s combination of modernity and the primordial, facilitated by having enough room for people, seems ideal. We can’t create this elsewhere, but we can value and retain it here. And we can take the lesson of it to any place where there’s still contested space. Open space is never “unpopulated”; it’s the room that people need, to keep the world and themselves intact.
Here among bear trails and pungent poop, I don’t want trouble. Acknowledged, if I’d stayed on the boat, I’d be safer. For that matter, I’d be safer if I never left home. But we want to go places; we want to live. To live is to bear some risks—and to live here is to risk some bears.
* * *
Ravens croak and dong in the dark surround of forest, eagles whistle and chitter regal proclamations. The stream sings. An occasional salmon splashes. But the silence here is so big and enveloping and resonant that it casts a tone into the air, the way a silent room can have a tone. This place has a sky tone, a world tone, the music of the spheres.
I want to see another bear, but not just for a thrill. The animals don’t seek thrills. They get more than their share, daily. When everything was real, thrills were cheap and attention was the price of living. Wild things pay attention. They try to avoid trouble, but they don’t shirk life.
I try to avoid trouble, too. But the wild raises a level of alertness that feels alive inside me. It puts the bird back into my chest. What I really want, as always: a genuine moment, a shared glance, connection.
People came into a world like this, rich, natural, but not without danger. The prospects for real trouble here are low, but the prospects for feeling alive are guaranteed. Many people are shadowed most dangerously by beasts of their own imaginations. Being here is real. That’s why this silence, coiled and charged, speaks volumes. Too often, we let fake things stalk us. Accept no substitutes for real experience, real friends, true love, and real bears. Either you set the bar high and keep striving or you create a danger greater than any Griz sneaking up on you: letting real life sneak away.
JULY
A false calm ensues. Lazy Point has some of its laziest days. The fishing slumps as we slide into sultry weather. Kenzie lies in patches of shade, her red tongue dangling. At the beaches, parents in folding chairs chat while keeping an eye on kids in the water.
But the birds always have their burners lit. The Ospreys’ chicks, too big to brood, are sitting up in their great nests wearing speckled plumage. They’re often dissatisfied with their parents’ performance; I’ve frequently heard them calling for more food as I’ve walked past. But they don’t know how good they’ve had it. It’s been a good year for food and for chick survival, and it’s looking like the salt-pond pair will fledge all three of their young. This morning the chicks are already full. And when Mom lands in the nest with another Bluefish, the already well-fed chicks accept her gentle beakful of sashimi almost diffidently.
Tern chicks are getting chunky and feathered out, and will soon start flying. I wish them a long life. And on a trip to the post office, I get confirmation that long life is possible. A letter informs me that just a week ago on the terns’ main nesting ground, Great Gull Island, about ten miles north of Lazy Point, my old friend and colleague Helen Hays captured a tern I leg-tagged as a chick—get this—twenty-five years ago. And it’s still a hardworking parent. When I search the Web for the U.S. Bird Banding Laboratory’s longevity records, it turns out the listed record is twenty-five years. Quite a feat of survival. All those years living in every kind of weather, with no cover or shelter. All those long-distance migrations between here and South America. All those fish caught, all those mates, those broods raised—. This deepens the mystique of all the terns I see, and the secrets they carry of the vistas they’ve known.
* * *
Countervailing tides of life and time move in. The sun sets a little farther south each day, shortening the days even before summer seems to “peak.” Likewise, even before mid-July, even while our local terns are still feeding their chicks, even as ocean temperatures continue warming, even before some of the warm-water fishes like Mahimahi and Yellowfin Tuna have arrived from the south for summer, the tide of migration has begun to turn.
Shorebirds that have bred in the Arctic are already southbound. Already perhaps a thousand (or two) miles south of where they raised their broods, they fly right past those local terns that are still carrying fish to chicks in nests. The Piping Plovers that have nested here lose their exclusivity, as Sanderlings back from high-latitude tundra resume a local presence, augmented by little bands of Semipalmated Sandpipers. On the bay and the Sound, dowitchers and tiny Least Sandpipers become briefly familiar, and a smattering of Spotted Sandpipers move through, easily recognized by that inexplicable body-bobbing gait. My globe-traveling companions the Ruddy Turnstones are filtering back from the far north, now, too. As I once resented back-to-school ads, I resent these early migrants for fast-forwarding my ever-accelerating sense of summer.
There is much more to it, of course. As always, they bring the exotic to the local. And there is the glorious energy of such tiny lives lived so large that to complete a year they require two continents.
The ringing, wilderness-evoking call of one or more Greater Yellowlegs is often the first thing that alerts me to those birds overhead as they sail past us on the way from central Canada to Central and South America. That call always strikes me as melancholy, as though it’s somehow a remembrance of more crowded skies. Of the shorebirds I’ve mentioned seeing in little flocks and dribs and drabs here and there, early colonists of Nantucket—about eighty miles east of Lazy Point—described flocks so massive they appeared like smoke rising from horizon to horizon. It was said that the storm of wings drowned out the sound of surf.
A few people still alive remember fathers or grandfathers who shot shorebirds commercially for the markets of New York and Boston and other cities. They leveled flocks of almost unimaginable quantities, and no one has seen such numbers since. Of the Eskimo Curlew, once called “Cloud of Wonder” by Natives for their overwhelming abundance, as late as 1966 an old Inuk Native remembered, “They came suddenly, and fell upon us like heavy snow.… In my father’s time they were so many on the tundra it was like clouds of mosquitoes.” Shot relentlessly during migration, they were nearly gone by 1900. But they managed to hang on, and in 1963, on Barbados, one final confirmed Eskimo Curlew was shot. The Long-billed Curlew, now vanishingly rare, was once an abundant East Coast migrant that “decoyed readily … and the cries of a wounded bird would attract others which would circle until they too were killed.” Wrote one sportsman in 1906, “The strong desire of shorebirds to succor any one of their kind which has been wounded is a fortunate thing indeed
since it enables even a tyro hunter to kill as big a bag as he might wish.” Hudsonian Curlews (Whimbrels) and Hudsonian Godwits were shot by the hundreds; individual hunters sometimes killed a thousand in a morning, often for sport. In the 1600s Samuel de Champlain described one spot along the St. Lawrence River having “such great numbers of plovers, curlews, snipes, woodcock and other kinds that there have been days when three or four sportsmen would kill more than three hundred dozen.” He said, “I and a few others passed the time” hunting shorebirds, “of which more than twenty thousand were killed.” An early trick: fire your harquebus at the ground next to the birds and the spraying sand and gravel could take out more of them than the shot itself. According to one Jesuit chronicler, one such well-placed shot could kill three hundred birds. (The skeptical, like me, perhaps simply can’t envision flocks of such density. But numerous people writing after shotguns came into use repeatedly commented that even firing overhead could fell between fifty and one hundred birds at once.)
Before 1850 on Cape Cod, just a hundred miles or so from Lazy Point, migrating Red Knots, an observer wrote, “would collect in exceedingly large numbers, estimates of which were useless … as they rose up in clouds.” On the mudflats at night, pairs of men, “one carrying a lighted lantern [to dazzle them], the other to seize the birds, bite their necks, and put them in a bag,” killed them by the barrelfuls. “One hardly dares to estimate their numbers,” another observer wrote of smaller sandpipers, Piping Plovers and Sanderlings. Weighing just an ounce or two, “they were delicious eating.” Dunlins came in flocks, according to Arthur Cleveland Bent, like “a large cloud of thick smoke … a very grand and interesting appearance.… As the showers of their companions fall, the whole [flock] often alight, till the sportsman is completely satiated with destruction.” Of dowitchers, “Immense numbers were shot.… They have decreased very fast … and we now see them singly or in bunches not exceeding 10 or 12.” Dr. Bent described yellowlegs as “absurdly tame” and so small that “many lives must be sacrificed to make a decent bag,” but added, “gunning is not so much about … filling up the larder, but an excuse for getting out to enjoy the beauties of nature and the ways of its wild creatures.” Wrote gentleman sportsman James A. Pringle, “I had no mercy on them and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed might never be seen again.” (It apparently never occurred to him that a snipe once shot would never be seen again, either.) Between 1867 and 1887, he scrupulously recorded killing 69,087 Wilson’s Snipe. In the 1920s Dr. Alexander Wetmore, visiting Argentina, described “migrant flocks, many of whose members offered sad evidence of inhospitable treatment … in the shape of broken or missing legs.” Gunners shot them there, too. John James Audubon bore witness to migrating northbound Golden Plovers near New Orleans in 1821: “I several times saw a flock of a hundred or more reduced to a miserable remnant of five or six.… This sport was continued all day, and at sunset when I left … a man near where I was seated had killed 63 dozens.… And supposing each [gunner] to have shot only 20 dozens, 48,000 golden plovers would have fallen there that day.” As late as the summer of 1863, Edward Forbush wrote, Eskimo Curlews and Golden Plovers descended on Nantucket “in such numbers as to darken the sun,” and were shot by the thousands. Here on Long Island in the 1860s, Robert Roosevelt described how thousands of Golden Plovers would “rise with a sounding roar, to which the united reports of our four barrels savagely respond.”
When the flocks no longer came, some sportsmen said it had nothing to do with them; the birds had been scared away by the sounds of railroad engines. Arthur Cleveland Bent lamented the passing of abundance: “Those were glorious days we used to spend on Cape Cod … in the good old days when there were shorebirds to shoot, and we were allowed to shoot them.… It is a pity that the delightful days of bay-bird shooting … had to be restricted.” Bent was at least honest about the “ruthless slaughter that has squandered our previous wealth of wild-life.”
But why haven’t they all returned in the century since they’ve been protected from shooting in the United States and Canada? Shooting continues throughout Central and South America, and for some birds, the beaches have people and dogs and it’s hard for them to get the time to feed or a moment’s rest. For others, farms have taken the marshes and plains where they nested or wintered.
Today, at Lazy Point, I hear a lot of noise from Willets and American Oystercatchers. Though our Willet was by 1900 “destined to disappear,” it regained the East Coast in the mid-1900s and is now again common, including in the marshes right around here. The oystercatcher, “an easy mark to the spring gunners,” is back, too, at least where the birds are not constantly disturbed by boaters and displaced by beach homes. Fortunately, there’s room and respite for them here, on the sandy islands around Lazy Point.
* * *
The moon is two days past new, and the moon-aligned currents remain strong. Fish respond to tides and I respond to fish, so I budget my time to the tidal rhythm. Therefore: tonight is better for fishing than for working late.
With me is a friend I’ve known since I was ten years old. I have invited no one else. At forty-two, he’s been struck by cancer, battling for his life. But tonight Matt just wants to catch his first “keeper” Striped Bass. The weather is good, the tide’s right. Still, fishing is fishing; I’m not wholly in control.
Matt is a highly accomplished jazz musician. He was a true child prodigy. But like most jazz players in a non-jazz era, Matt’s been compelled to take a lot of modestly paying commercial work. Now that his body is at war with itself, he hasn’t worked in months. Struggling with the mortgage and the usual expenses of a family with a young child, he and his wife, who teaches kindergarten, are selling their house to raise cash for their debts. They’ll be renting a smaller space. Next week his colleagues are planning to hold a benefit for him, twenty dollars at the door. Yet I’m pleased to see that he has sprung for a new rod and reel. As I pilot the boat out of the harbor, he fusses with and rearranges his lures like a kid, in high spirits. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a happier person. He’s right here, right now.
This is what’s called quality time. But what does that slippery Q-word really mean? Like “love,” “quality” seems a poorly charted term, too inexact for safe travel and precise landings. My boat’s GPS can get me home in fog; language, however, still seems to sail in the Bronze Age, with a lookout in the crow’s nest. A little linguistic miscalculation, and you’re at dangerous risk of running aground on internal shoals or intimate harbors.
I look at the slouching red sun. It’s three miles to the place I have in mind. The tide is already flowing hard, the way we need it to. Matt’s got his mind set on a keeper of twenty-eight inches. I’m aiming to connect him with a much larger fish—a quality fish. But what is quality?
* * *
The GPS shows when I’ve reached my location. Agreed, it’s an unfair advantage. One of many. We’re about a mile offshore. I cruise a third of a mile farther into the tide, past where I want to start fishing. We need to bait up, and the tide is running fast. Underwater ridges deflect the currents, creating surface boils and lines of standing waves that will buck like black stallions after dark.
The Striped Bass’s rise from depletion to abundance over the last twenty years is a triumph of fisheries management. Now, crazily, the bait—live eels purchased at the marina—presents a greater moral dilemma than the target catch. Because of overfishing, pollution, and dams, eel numbers are down as much as 99 percent from fifty years ago. And, they’re caught in traps using horseshoe crabs for bait. Life is complicated enough without ethically challenging bait. Tonight I’m trading standards for expediency, a classic slippery slope: I’ve brought eels because they work like magic as bait for the biggest kind of bass. For catching big fish, they’re high-quality bait. For your conscience, low-quality.
I inspect the knots to make sure they’re neat and snug. Anything that looks “good enough” isn’t. I sharpen each hook. I check the leaders, find a nic
k in one, shorten it to eliminate that weak spot.
I pierce two eels, and we stream them overboard. The sinkers strike bottom about forty feet down, telegraphing a little thud up the line. We set the reels’ drag brakes. The tide sweeps our boat and our bait along.
This is a place of big fish and big water. The tide turns the near-shore ocean into a miles-wide river of streaming current. Fish position themselves along the ridges of long-drowned hills and behind boulders, hunkered down out of the full blast of the tidal wind, poised to ambush prey that gets swept up and over those ridgetops. Now two of those prey items carry our hooks.
The last glow of sundown dims away. Stars appear in the east. Night encloses us. The ocean seems to enlarge. When you’re adrift at night, imagination and perception merge. They have to. You can’t see as well, as far, as deep. You tie knots by muscle memory, and you operate your reel mostly by feel. Your boat drifts, your thoughts drift. You sense the sweep of tide and water, and the boat gets rocked in the turbulence just past each undersea ridgeline and boulder field. You visualize the fish stemming the dark current, gathering starlight with their special eyes, and scanning upward for vulnerable silhouettes. You, too, are looking up, searching constellations, dreaming. You feel again how flexible and expansive your mind can be when it’s working right. And you slip your leash to explore the vast vault of sky and great interior spaces.
Because the boat is drifting fast, the sinker is constantly bouncing over rocks and mussel beds. So everything feels lively the whole time. People who’ve never done this before have difficulty getting used to all the little pulls and pauses as the tide sweeps their line along the rough bottom. They always ask how they’ll know if they get a bite. I tell them, Don’t worry—you’ll know.
All the while, I’m hoping my line gets arrested by a heavy fish. These fish come up on prey and in a lightning motion flare their gill covers and pop open their jaws; food simply gets sucked in. If that sucked-in prey happens to be your bait, you’ll feel a sharp thump, a pause, and then a heavy surge as the fish turns and its weight comes against the line. But if a fish inhales the bait and realizes things don’t feel right, it will eject it in a hurry. So you need to give a fish enough time to engulf, and hook it before it ejects. Elapsed time: under two seconds. Beginners with no feel for this can catch fish, but they miss a lot of strikes.