Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  But there were days in that first summer when the Merlin sat idle at the dock, and in August the price of bluefish was so low that hand-lining would not make us a day’s pay. Bass remained scarce in the dead of summer, and one morning when his boat was hauled out for repairs, we decided to show our friend Al Ceslow our secret striper spot on the ocean shore west of the Light.

  In the days before, there had been offshore storms, and the big smooth swells collapsing on the coast would make it difficult to work close to the rocks. We also knew that Cap’n Gus, widely regarded as the best striped bass fisherman ever to sail under the Light, had put three boats on those rocks in his twenty years of hard experience. And so we rode in as close as we dared on the backs of the broad waves, letting the lures coast in on the white wash. We were not close enough, and tried to edge in closer, keeping an eye out for the big freak sea that would break offshore and wash us onto the rock shore under the cliffs. Unlike the established boats, we were not booked solid a full year in advance, and the loss of the Merlin—we could not yet afford insurance—would mean the end of our careers as charter boatmen, apart from endangering our lives.

  The wave we feared rose up behind us, sucking the water off the inshore rocks, and as Al or John shouted, I spun the wheel and gave the Merlin her full throttle. With a heavy thud, our trusty boat struck into the midsection of a high, clear, cresting wave, and for one sickening moment, seemed to lose headway. Then the wave parted, two walls of green water rushed past the cockpit, over our heads, and the boat sprang up and outward, popping free. If we ever fished that spot again, I do not recall it.

  Hurricane Carol, on the last day of August 1954, blew so hard at Montauk that I ran the Merlin at eight knots in her slip in order to ease the pressure on her lines. At high water, only the spile tops on the town dock were visible above the flood, which carried loose boats and capsized hulks down toward the breakwater. In leaping from the stern to fetch more lines or lend a hand with another boat, one could only pray that the town dock was still there.

  The hurricane’s eye passed over about noon, in an eerie silver light and sulfurous pall. Then the winds struck in again, subsiding only as our fuel ran low in midafternoon. By evening we felt free to leave for home, but could not get there; the storm seas, surging through the dunes, had reopened the old strait in a new channel into Napeague Harbor, knocking down one of the radio towers that transmitted to the ships at sea. Until late that night, when the tide turned and the sea subsided, we were stranded on Montauk, which was once again an island.

  I was not sorry when the season was over and I ran my boat back west to Three Mile Harbor. To judge from the sour, contemptuous remarks that were traded back and forth on the radio-telephones, a lot of charter men were opportunists, out for an easy dollar that was not forthcoming. Almost all of us made good money between July 4 and Labor Day, but only the best boats in the fleet, with the longest lists of faithful customers (these were the charter captains we admired, the skilled and happy ones who loved to fish) could make it in the colder days of spring and autumn. The Merlin was not yet one of those boats, and we quit right after Labor Day, to make the most of the first weeks of the scallop season. It was a poor season that year, with so many scallops destroyed by Hurricane Carol.

  The Merlin’s summer in 1955 was busy and successful, but I ended my second year of chartering with the same feeling. I chartered because it paid for my boat and I made a living out of doors in the season between haul-seining and scalloping; I scalloped and hauled seine because I liked the work, and liked the company of the commercial fishermen, the baymen.

  9.

  Amagansett Winter

  The South Fork of Long Island is the windiest reach on the Atlantic coast, not excluding Hatteras, and 1954 must have been one of the windiest on record. Eleven days after Hurricane Carol came Hurricane Edna, but this time there was advance warning, and I ran the Merlin to the sheltered cove at the head of Three Mile Harbor. Here the main threat came from a large dilapidated craft hitched casually with old clothesline to the town bulkhead; but for the emergency lines set by other boatmen, she might have broken loose and done great damage. Perhaps she was meant to sink, since her hull was flooded—I assumed the petcocks had been opened. Held fast (and afloat) by a cobweb of spare lines, she wallowed lopsided on the surface, to the great consternation of her owner, whose pale face was seen several times during the storm, peering out from behind his windshield wipers, at a loss to understand why his plan to cash in on his insurance was a failure.

  During this storm, the tough old Vop-Vop was tied up across the cove, opposite the boatyard, where the heavy gales banged her remorselessly against the bulkhead. Because there was no way to protect her, Pete Scott suggested that I sink her, which I did. Two days later, we floated her again, she was undamaged, and my coot-shooting cronies George Rosen and Eddie George, who did boat engine work out of their garage at Olympic Heights, yanked her simple engine. Washed with fresh water and sprayed with oil, it was installed again, as good as new.

  We used the Vop for scalloping that autumn, and Pete used her at Montauk all that winter. On days of wind, she pulled the dredges well with her gaff-rigged sail; on other days, on the silver stillness of Lake Montauk, she seemed to be moved mysteriously by unseen powers. As on most auxiliary boats in the scallop fleet before “powerin” became permissible by law, her motor was just “tricklin over,” with an inner tube rigged over the exhaust pipe to carry sound away under the water. Knowing that these were hard months for the fishermen, the bay constable, Jack Conklin, rarely paid these boats’ peculiar progress much attention.

  When the scallop crop diminished in the local harbors, the haul-seine crews returned to the ocean beach. I was trying to get some writing done, and except to fill in here and there, I rarely went seining in the autumn, though I went gunning at every opportunity. On those golden-and-blue days, using canoes, we jumped teal and black duck from the coves of Georgica. We walked the glacial kettle holes in the warm October woods west of the old road between Sagaponack and Sag Harbor; when the weather turned to rain and wind, we set out decoys in Hog Creek and Accabonac. In colder weather we dug pits on Sammis Beach and on the sand spit leading out to Cedar Point, pass-shooting for golden-eye and the scoters, or coot, that crossed over from the harbors to Gardiners Bay. The best spots were claimed by hard-bitten old “swampers” down out of the woods with antique ten-gauge fowling pieces that shot nuts and bolts and belched out yellow smoke, George Rosen swore, and were capable of wild towering shots that brought the swift sea ducks down out of the clouds like missiles. As the season progressed and the birds flew higher, or veered away to fly over the channel between Cedar Point and Shelter Island, we trailered sharpies across the Northwest Woods to the landing at Alewive (pronounced “Elly”) Brook, where the first settlers at Northwest had their anchorage. George and Eddie and our friend Herb Latshaw from the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard and old Joe Ambrose from Soak Hide Road and other regulars would gather before light at the Elly Brook landing, and the flat-bottomed sharpie fleet would bang out across the chop to string the Cedar Point channel for coot and old squaw.

  One December day, when the black duck had grown scarce and wary, Pete Scott and I lugged waders and guns and shells and decoys in burlap bags from Skunks Hole on the east side of Napeague, where the road ended, to the ponds beyond the walking dunes, just west of Water Fence; it must have been an hour’s walk in hard wind and cold. At dusk, with red, stiff, frozen hands, we picked up the ice-glazed decoys from the ice-skimmed water and trudged back to Skunks Hole without having fired a shot at a single bird.

  Then the gunning season was over, and the long quiet winter set in. Even those city people who came out from New York for Thanksgiving or Christmas were gone until late spring; Main Street was empty. Lacking the stone hands of a fisherman, I was content once more to be a writer.

  One early winter day, in a cold twilight, John Cole and I stopped in Francis Lester’s yard, where Francis was emptyin
g fish from his ancient truck. In the old days, cod had been plentiful by November, coming in so close to the beach that at the end of the haul-seining season a few would appear among the bass, but now they were fewer and farther off the shore. That afternoon Francis had lifted his cod trawl in the ocean, and this cold, arduous, and dangerous work had rewarded him with just three cod, which he tossed in disgust across the yard; he was wet and cold, and maybe he’d box and ship them in the morning. But that night there was heavy snow, and in the morning he could not find the codfish. He forgot about them until late February or March, when their woebegone eyes and broken tails emerged after a thaw. In a forlorn gesture of protest and futility—though he could ill afford the waste of money—Francis boxed and shipped the half-rotted cod to the Fulton Fish Market. “B’god, boy,” he told John later, “got full price for ’em, too! Them people don’t give us nothin until fish is scarce, and then they’ll buy goddamn near anything!”

  In a good bass year, most of the fishermen take most of December to go gunning, pay attention to their families (“Your family comes before everything else,” Milt Miller says), and enjoy the holidays. Otherwise, until mid-March, the fisherman’s life is a hard, marginal existence, scouring the cold bays for scattered scallops, tonging clams from the stiff bottoms, seining whitebait in Georgica and Sagaponack Ponds, and in dead of winter probing for mudded eels with spears through the ice of the frozen harbors. The men are usually obliged to invest up to one third of their year’s income in equipment, and they work unpaid for weeks on end to prepare their battered gear. New nets are hung and old ones mended, boats caulked, beach trucks overhauled. Not until the February thaw, when the harbor seals vanished, would a few men set flounder fykes in sheltered waters; eelpots were scattered in the salt ponds in the month of March. Now boats were painted and trap stakes cut from tall white oak and hickory saplings, in wood lots that were harder to find each year. Until late April, when the traps were fishing, and the spring run appeared along the beach, the men had to “grind it” to scrape up a day’s pay, and only the most dedicated fishermen, supported by strong dedicated wives, were able to endure year after year.

  The winter stretched away without an end, and at the heart of it, even in storm, was this dead quiet, all the more so on white days of heavy snow. One Saturday night, escaping the pressure of a second novel, I got mixed up in a free-for-all in what was then the Elm Tree Tavern in Amagansett. In the tumult I went down, and an excited stranger I could not recall having offended, or met previously, was astride on my chest, getting in some licks, when he was picked up and thrown aside by a tall, rangy rescue party whom I recognized with gratitude as Lindy Havens. A man who had always enjoyed hard drink, Lindy resided in a room over the bar, and no doubt he had been attracted down by the sound of brawling. Perhaps he acted on a simple-hearted wish to join the action, but I like to think he helped me out because I was a member of Ted Lester’s crew, and therefore an honorary fisherman; and the fiercely independent fishermen, with their old trucks and autos and disreputable front yards, their hell-raising and their aversion to orderly hours, had to stick together.

  To the up-street solid citizenry of East Hampton, independence was no excuse for poverty. A black lady who cleaned our house informed my wife that my profession and the company I kept was a threat to her own standing in her community, which was based on a long ancestry in East Hampton; her middle-class clan had come long ago as slaves of the “first families.” The fishermen, also of first families, were quite aware that these established black people were often more prosperous than themselves, and the use of such terms as “nigger rich,” “nigger geese” (for cormorants), “niggerhead” (a winch), “nigger work,” or “good enough for niggers and Bonackers,” reflects their wry, laconic bitterness about their diminished standing in town.

  Ralph Carpentier, now the director of the excellent Marine Museum in Amagansett, is an “outsider” who fished with Ted Lester in the early sixties. One summer day Ted informed the crew that they were going to make the Napeague Station set, although they had been doing well farther east. His son Stewart was with the crew that day, and as they were hauling, Stewart suddenly stopped winching on his end, where he was working with Jimmy Reutershan. “Ted started hollering,” Ralph says, “and Stewart hollered back: a human body had turned up in the net! ‘Well, take him out,’ Ted yells, ‘and keep that net coming.’ But Stewart was really spooked and he yells at his father, ‘You take it out!’ So Ted says, ‘Come on, Ralph,’ and goes running down there, and sure enough, there’s this young guy in bathing trunks, covered with little black snails. He was all stiff with rigor mortis, hands pointing kind of funny at the wrists. Jimmy didn’t mind him much, but Stewart was green, he just wouldn’t go near him. I don’t blame Stewart for being spooked, I was spooked myself. So Ted grabs one end and I take the other and we set him aside, and Stewart is yelling at his father, ‘You made this set on purpose, you knew he was going to be here!’ Because this guy had drowned two days before at the State Park, and Ted had known about it. So we go back down to our end to finish the haul, and I asked Ted if what Stewart said was true, and he admitted it. ‘I knew he had to be along in this stretch somewhere. There was no other way them people were ever goin to get their son back. Why, hell, I’d do the same thing for a nigger.’ ”

  Though Ted notified the police after the haul, he advised Ralph to keep quiet about it; it wouldn’t be so good for business, having dead bodies in the nets. But a few days later, an interview with Captain Ted Lester appeared in the paper, telling all about it. “That’s the way Ted was,” Ralph remembers, laughing. “He was great and terrible at the same time; you loved him and hated him. I used to protest when he used that word ‘nigger’ but he’d just wave me off, like it wasn’t serious. Not that he was any worse than the other guys, they all have the same blind spot on the subject.”

  The truth is, Stewart Lester says, his father was less prejudiced than other Poseys. According to Stewart, the resentment of blacks occurred in the Depression, when many women in the fishing families, his grandmother included, “had to work for rich people—that’s all there was.” Mary Lavinia Lester was convinced that blacks were taking all these jobs, and proving their inferiority by working for less than a fair wage. Although race prejudice in the local community—by no means confined to fishermen—has much diminished, these views still prevail among certain members of the present generations. As usual, one group of poor was being set against another. As Stewart points out, there was also strong prejudice against Irish house servants, or “potrasslers,” and Milt Miller says that the first Italian families who settled the east end of Amagansett didn’t fare much better.1

  When pale spring came and the ospreys reappeared, and black-backed flounders nosed along the harbor bottoms, tracing the bloodworms and orange mussel baits on the rusty hooks of old chafed men in rowboats, I slapped copper paint on the Merlin’s hull at the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard. When the shadblow bloomed and the spring life in the sea brought strong fertile odors to the ocean wind, I got out my black waders once again, my long-billed swordfish cap and dark blue parka with its sweet smell of ancient fish gurry, and went on south across Abraham’s Path to Poseyville. “Better try ’em, ain’t we, boys?” Cap’n Ted would say, looking up briefly from mending net to squint at us. And I realized that watching those blunt weather-glazed hands slipping that net needle through the twine with such speed and deftness was one of the great many small pleasures of life on the beach that I took for granted. (Ted taught us some basic cutting and mending for emergency repair—three-leggers, laggers, zagging and the like—though not the goring and other skills required for big tears caused by hang-ups and sharks.) Across the broad littered yard toward Francis’s house, the big silver beach truck was waiting. We turned the dory right side up and slid her up onto her trailer, then loaded the net that Ted had spread to dry on the new grass. “Get started early in the mornin, now, you fellers can tell them pretty wives of yours”—Ted’s nud
ge and wink were boyish and naive—“you’ll be back home time for a matinée, ain’t that right, Johnnie?”

  Ted was innocent and generous-spirited, and also sly and sharp-eyed as a gull; he had worked hard to make Montauk Seafood a good business and had not stopped there. On the floor above the freezer, he opened a retail seafood shop, run by Jenny Lester and her daughters, and in the sixties he would use the proceeds from these enterprises to open Lester’s Liquors out on the highway. Among all the baymen I knew personally, this man alone had accumulated money. Baymen are exceptionally conservative, wary of change, and perhaps it was Ted’s transgression of a favorite saying that “No one has ever come across a rich fisherman” that was not forgiven.

  It was often suggested, for example, that Ted Lester cut corners in sharing receipts from the Fulton Market. (No fisherman ever works on salary, which is one reason why these doggedly independent men do not speak of themselves as “working,” far less “taking a job.” Income from the catch is divided into shares, one for the rig and one for each man on the crew.) “I quit Ted because he never whacked up fair with his crew,” one man told me. “That’s how come he took on people from away. Don’t know if you knew it or not, but you fellas was gettin a half share all them years you fished with Ted, and he done the same thing to the rest of us, so after a while he couldn’t get no Poseys to go with him. Old Ted! But we had some fun in them days, ain’t that right?” Yet we knew just how many boxes we had packed, and Ted always showed us the receipts that came back with the checks a few days later. Almost all the best fishermen now on the beach had worked with Ted at one time or another, which they would not have done if he had cheated them; and fairly or not, the man quoted above had the same reputation he ascribed to Ted, and sometimes had trouble finding men to fish with him.