In those days, eelgrass was widespread in Gardiners Bay, and the scallops so thick, according to Jarvie Wood, that a sloop could bail a boatload in a half day. In 1928 the eelgrass died off in a mysterious plague, and the bay scallop (and also the small coastal goose known as the brant) all but died with it. For some reason, the soft clam vanished, too. Eelgrass, scallops, and soft clams returned to the harbors in the early thirties, but the grass has yet to take hold again out in the bay. Decades later, juvenile scallops still appear as thick as ever on Jarvie’s trap stakes, but without the shelter of the grass, most seem to wash ashore or are otherwise lost.
Already in the thirties it was realized that there might be a limit to scallop numbers, which fluctuated a good deal from year to year, and in 1934 the town set a daily limit of five bushels. At present a daily limit of ten bushels per licensed bayman, fifteen per boat, is still in force in East Hampton Town waters.5
Not all baymen haul seine or lift gill nets and traps; these days, because “the clams are down,” there are probably a few who do not clam. But almost every able-bodied bayman will go scalloping, at least in the early weeks of a good season, when the daily limit may be harvested in two hours’ work. In most years the scallop is the major resource of the bayman, who pursues it from the soft days of Indian summer until the hard windy days of early spring, when the adult scallops begin to die. Usually his income is increased by his own family; his wife may sort scallops on the culling board, and many women in the fishing community are expert openers, or shuckers, separating the firm white “eye” (the adductor muscle that closes the two scallop-edged valves) from the colorful but unacceptable mantle and guts.
Most commercial men use the traditional fourteen-foot sharpie, which is the bayman’s all-purpose skiff (the so-called trap sharpie, used for lifting traps, is longer and wider). Until the mid-sixties, when the use of power was permitted, the scalloper anchored, drifted downwind perhaps two hundred feet, then hauled, or kedged, back up the running line, dragging a dredge and sometimes two behind. The scallop dredge, thirty inches across and weighing more than twenty pounds, is the same “Greenport sloop dredge” used at the turn of the century. Pronounced “drudge” (as in “hung new twoine on thim drudges, did ye?”), it may scrape up over fifty pounds of eelgrass, mud, water, rock, and shell that must be heaved onto a culling board before the scallops can be sorted.
Unlike more sedentary bivalves, the scallop lives only about eighteen months, and scallop seasons vary considerably, depending on weather conditions at the time of spawning as well as survival of the small “bug” scallops over their first winter. In 1953 the bugs had prospered, and in the first weeks of September the scallops were so thick that, using dip nets, we harvested our boat limit in a few hours’ pleasant work. Loading the crunching burlap sacks into John’s old greenish truck, we would cart them across Abraham’s Path (named for that Abraham Schellinger who built the first wharf out at Northwest in 1700) through the warm September woods of pitch pine and scrub oak to the scallop openers in Amagansett.
With windy weather, as Indian summer turned to fall, the scallops became scarce in shallow water. We turned to heavy labor with the dredges, dumping the wet loads of eelgrass and codium, or Sputnik weed,6 onto the culling board. The load was never twice the same. The elegant scallops, snapping their shells, were occasionally accompanied by an unwary flounder, together with an indiscriminate assortment of crabs, horsefoots, sand worms, glass shrimp, sea horses, sponges, whelks, stones, bottles, sneakers, dead shells, and—not uncommonly—a small clump of wild oysters.
Later that autumn, when the scallops thinned out inside the harbors, we went prospecting for virgin scallop beds as far away as Napeague, Montauk Lake, and Gardiners Island, putting in at Promised Land for our supplies. One day of late October, as we scalloped off the western shore of Gardiners Island, a cold front came in toward midday, with a stiff wind out of the northwest. Though heavily crusted with quarterdecks, or boat shells, the scallops on this rocky bottom were plentiful, and we were hurrying to complete our twenty-bushel boat limit and head home when the one-cylinder motor on my old boat conked out and would not revive. Hoisting the Vop’s patched gaff-rigged sail, we beat upwind toward the mainland.
Already a hard gale was blowing; despite her deep keel, the boat was banging into white-capped waves. Halfway across the channel the pine mast broke off at the deck, and mast, boom, and canvas crashed upon our heads. Not saying much, we sorted out the mess as the wind carried us back toward Gardiners Island. (Years ago, an old-timer named Puff Dominy broke down off Lion Head Rock and drifted back east to Gardiners on this same course. Told to throw over the anchor, his retarded crewman cried, “No twing! No twing!” Impatient and uncomprehending, Puff hollered, “Let ’er go, goddamn it, ‘twing’ or no ‘twing’!” Thrown overboard with no “string” attached, Puff’s anchor disappeared forever, but “twing or no twing” has survived in local lore.)
Nearing the island, we threw over an anchor, but by the time the grapnel finally took hold, the Vop was scarcely two hundred yards offshore in Bostwick Bay, buffeted by wind and seas in the growing weather. It was midafternoon of a swift day of late autumn, and a cold sun was sinking fast, with no boat in sight, nothing but whitecaps and wind-blown gulls and long black ragged strings of cormorants beating across the wind toward the southwest. Not only was the boat wide open, but the hatch covers of the fish holds forming her deck were only three inches lower than the gunwales, which provided no shelter from the wind. On this north end of Gardiners Island, never inhabited, the view from the sea was as wild as it was three centuries before when the Algonkian people known as Montauks escorted Lion Gardiner to his New World home.
In 1676, by the Dongan Patent, Gardiners Island—roughly seven by three miles, or about 3,300 acres—had been deemed a manor, and it is, in fact, the last of the old English manors to remain in the same New World family to the present day. In the 1690s, Captain William Kidd, a minister’s son and retired sea captain pressed into service as a privateer by a syndicate that included the English governor of Massachusetts, was arrested in Boston and sent to England. There he was hanged for disputed reasons, among them, it is said, the protection of the reputations of those who had benefitted from his voyages, including the hard-living “Lord John” Gardiner, son of the incumbent Lord of the Manor, David Lion Gardiner, who had first welcomed Kidd to Gardiners Island. Captain Kidd’s only known treasure of gold dust, gold coin, jewelry and the like, retrieved from the pond behind the beach in Cherry Harbor off which we had been scalloping when the boat broke down, was turned over to the authorities by Lord John, who escaped unpunished. In 1728 the manor was commandeered for three days by real pirates, causing the family to look for safer lodgings in East Hampton Village. Since then, Gardiners Island has been occupied intermittently by the Gardiner family, which has often leased it to other people.
In the 1950s the island was still inhabited by an estimated five hundred pairs of ospreys, by far the largest colony of these striking fish hawks in North America and perhaps the world. High cliffs to the eastward (a source of clay for the early settlers) slope gradually to low fields in the west, with broad lowlands, salt marsh, ponds, and sand spits, north and south. Where we were anchored was the windward shore of the northern sand spit, in Bostwick (“Bostic” to the fishermen) Bay, where a bad August storm of 1879 had overturned a lobster boat out of New London, drowning two crewmen. Another storm in 1892 parted this sand spit, creating an islet out at the north point where a lighthouse had been built in 1855;7 the shoddily constructed building, weakened by storms, collapsed two years later, and the light was abandoned. During the Spanish-American War, a round structure called Fort Tyler was built upon this shored-up islet, part of a whole string of forts on Plum, Gull, and Fishers Islands designed to protect Long Island Sound from unfriendly gunboats.8 Since its abandonment in 1924, Fort Tyler has been much diminished by erosion and bombing practice, and is usually referred to as “the ruin.”
> Twilight had come, and a sharp autumn cold. To the north the old fort, in dark and gloomy silhouette on a cold sunset, rode like a ship in the running silver tide against the lightless islands and the far black line of the New England hills where the last light faded in the sky. Our young wives would not worry about us until after nightfall, so no help could be expected until next day.
Eight miles to the northeast lay Fishers Island, the easternmost point of Suffolk County, where I had spent most of my first fifteen summers;9 five miles to the southwest lay Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton, where I visited first in 1942. Now it was 1953, I was in my mid-twenties, and had moved permanently to the South Fork. Thus I had lived in Suffolk County all my life, on or about the edges of these waters; this wild and lonely place where our small boat washed up and down on the high chop lay at the very heart of my home country.
On this cold rough October evening, hunched knee to knee in a cramped anchor cuddy, we ate raw scallops from the upright burlap bags that hunched like refugees on deck, and listened to the waves slap on the hull; if the anchor dragged during the night, our small wood boat would wash ashore on Gardiners Island. It was already gunning season, and we wanted no night dealings with Charlie Raynor, the caretaker and dangerous enemy of enterprising young gunners such as ourselves who would sneak ashore at the south end while out coot shooting around Cartwright Shoals and be reasonably sure of snagging a few pheasants along the airstrip. Raynor’s reputation as a man who would shoot first and talk afterward saved him a lot of trouble on the job. Especially in the hunting season, he made no distinctions between castaways and trespassers, and anyway he lived too far off to be of help.
At daylight the cold wind from the northwest had not diminished, and there were no signs of boats or sail. All Gardiners Bay was tossed in a white chop, crossed by the strings of cormorants, the hurrying scoters and solitary loons, the wind-tilted gulls, hard wings reflecting a wild light that pierced the metallic clouds.
Toward midmorning a Coast Guard plane came over; when we waved our arms, the plane went away, and still there were no boats on the rough horizons.
In early afternoon a black fishing boat appeared. Its hardy skipper was Fanny Gardiner Collins of Three Mile Harbor, a member of the island clan and avid fisherwoman who knew much more about Gardiners Island and its waters than her wealthy kinsmen. Fanny took us in tow and hauled us back to Three Mile Harbor.
In November, when the scallops became scarce, I helped out now and then on a small haul-seine rig led by Jimmy Reutershan, who came from a local “up-street” family of nonfishermen, and had John Cole and Pete Scott as his steady crew. The rig consisted of Jimmy’s Land Rover, small dory, and small seine, and it stuck pretty close to a stretch of beach near the old Georgica Coast Guard Station.10 On those bright cold autumn days, with sharp sand blowing, the silver ocean, sparkling and clear, seemed empty; we were beginners, and we made one dry haul after another, standing around the limp and forlorn bag as if puzzling out an oracle. On one such morning Jimmy drew an ancient black banana from the seat box on the Land Rover and offered it upright, with his wry tough smile, to his weary crew. “Have a banana,” Jimmy said, “lightly flecked with brown.”
6. Poseyville
and Captain Ted
In the spring of 1954, I joined the ocean haul-seine crew led by Ted Lester who lived in Amagansett on a short street through the scrub oak woods known as Cross Highway. The obscure street was an extension of Abraham’s Path, connecting the Montauk Highway with the old Indian trails back of the dunes that are now called Further Lane and Skimhampton Road. This community of small houses and big work yards full of dories and beach vehicles and nets spread out to dry was known locally as Poseyville, or Fish Gut Alley, and most of its inhabitants were known as Poseys. It is the Posey Lester clan in Amagansett that Milt Miller has called “the backbone of what fishin is still left today.”
Of the original six sons of Nathan Lester, the eldest, Harry, and the second youngest, Harold, or Happy, had died in recent years, while Charlie (who liked to recall the fresh swordfish he once found on the beach in front of the fashionable Maidstone Club) had retired from the water and was raising vegetables and chickens for his small store near Ted’s house; the other three, Frank, Bill, and Ted, each ran a haul-seine crew.
In 1954, bony-faced Frank Lester, calm and smiling, was already in his mid-sixties, and shared the leadership of his family crew with his son Francis; because of his ever-present pipe, he was known affectionately as Cap’n Smoker. His brother Bill, a decade younger and still strong and vigorous (I remember him as a big silver-haired handsome man in black shirt and black waders), had the best equipment and a veteran crew that was usually “high hook” (largest landings of fish) in a given season. Ted Lester, ten years younger than Bill, intensely curious and energetic, was the most innovative fisherman, and the most ambitious; he sold frozen bait (bunker chum and squid) to the charter boats and bait shops and shipped fish to New York from his Montauk Seafood, a fish-packing and storage house that was used by the Posey haul-seine crews in an effort to hold back shipments of fish until the Fulton Fish Market would offer a fair price. Whether they liked it or not—for even among his brothers, he was controversial—Ted Lester was the spokesman for the fishermen, not only in their running battles with the market but in their defense against sport-fishing groups, which had renewed a long war of attrition against the commercial men in an effort to prohibit the netting of striped bass.
A quick stocky man with a stiff brush of hair that stood straight up from his forehead, giving him an expression of surprise, Theodore Roosevelt Lester (born in a rock-ribbed Republican county in 1908) was always in a rush and often shouting, for want of a better way to let off steam. I met him first on a wet May morning in the 4 A.M. darkness of his yard as he hurried to start up his ancient silver truck, a former weapons carrier of World War II. The truck’s hood had rusted out and fallen by the wayside, and because it had rained hard all night, the wiring was sodden. Ted Lester swore as he dumped gasoline on his engine and set it on fire.
The big silver truck, once the blaze was smothered, gave a shudder and exploded into life. Seeing my thunderstruck expression, Ted winked and said, “There’s a lot of shit built into them things, bub, and the more you kick out of ’em, the less is left in there to kick you back.” Ted’s language—and Bill’s and Frank’s, too—was actually a lot less rough than that of the younger fishermen, and if one of his daughters, who listened to blue speech all day as the seine crews came and went to the freezer under the house, said so much as “damn,” Ted would chase her right across the yard, yelling in the same strong language that the girls were forbidden to use, “By the Jesus, Vinnie [or Gloria or Ruth Ann], I hear any more of them damn words …!”
Years before, chased in this manner by his father, Ted’s son Stewart had fallen in a woodpile, driving a hole through his cheek that survived as a permanent scar to the left of his mouth. The only son in a household of five daughters, nineteen-year-old Stewart was already contesting Ted’s ideas on how things should be done. As strong, tough, and stubborn as four sons wrapped into one, he yelled back fiercely at his father until he went fishing on his own about five years later.
Jenny Bennett Lester, as lively and talkative as her husband, gave us peanut butter toast and coffee, as she would do each morning of good fishing weather for the next two months. It was still dark when we went down the back steps, hauled on stiff black bulky waders, squashed onto the hard front seat of the silver truck with its sweet smell of rotted fish scales, and rode down Indian Wells Highway to the ocean. Stewart followed in a Model A Ford with a winch mounted in front; this ancient and indestructible vehicle, replaced the following year by a Jeep pickup, was the last “A” that ever worked on the ocean beach. At the beach landing, Ted yanked his gears into four-wheel drive, stepped on the pedal that he called the “exhilarator,” and headed east along the beach in the first light. Besides Stewart, John Cole, and me, Ted’s steady crew th
at spring was brash young Richard, youngest son of his brother Frank; Richard’s brother Lewis, Milt Miller, and Pete Scott were among the men who filled in here and there on Ted’s five-man crew.
On my first haul, at sunrise that May morning, we loaded up two truckloads of bass, and our shares on this haul came close to two hundred dollars—a very good week’s pay in the early fifties. In our excitement, it was clear to John and me that commercial fishing was the path to fortune, but in the next two weeks, rising at 3 A.M. and fishing hard whenever the weather permitted, we scarcely made enough to pay for gas. Then the weather improved, we made money again, packing and icing fish until 10 at night, staggering out again five hours later, hands hot and swollen from fish spines and twine cuts and razor slashes from the sharp gill covers of big thrashing bass seized out of the bag by the eye sockets and tail and lugged up the beach to the trucks; sometimes I would be home after a half day’s work by 8 in the morning. But on such days I would breakfast on butterfish, or shad roe fresh out of the ocean (Cap’n Ted declared that shad roe was disgusting, apart from being worth too much to be eaten by the likes of us). If the fish were in, and Ted wanted to rush back to the beach, Jenny Lester might send us off with a bellyful of her bluefish-and-pancakes.
On most days shortly after noon we would be back on the broad beach that stretched away westward for nearly one hundred miles, riding along on top of the nets in the dory’s stern, washed by strong sea smells and new air of Atlantic springtime, on the winter-washed white quartz sand tinted red by feldspar and garnet. Here and there Ted would stop the truck, as if searching for fish sign, gazing out to sea under his long-billed Montauk swordfisherman’s cap, the collar of his black-and-white wool shirt turned up in the cool wind, gnarled swollen-looking fisherman’s hands clasped on his chest under his waders.
Men's Lives Page 7