Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Most men quit Ted because he was such a relentless driver, not because he was dishonest; as his son says with mixed pride and exasperation, “He went through ’em all.” When there was fit weather to go off, we made two early morning sets and at least two more in the afternoon; a lone fish in the net would inspire Ted to go out after its brothers, whereas most crews would give up and go home. Only the hard-core fishermen and inspired amateurs were willing to work this way on bad days as well as good, especially in the fifties, when most days were bad.

  In the spring of 1955, at dawn on a rough April day, we were heading east from Napeague Lane in search of a set. “No weather today, boys,” Ted kept saying. “Wind’s pickin up out of the east’rd.” But the whole crew had bills to pay, and so we went looking for a stretch of surf where we could launch the yellow dory. Cap’n Frank’s crew was even hungrier; we saw the black lumps of four trucks in silhouette on the beach at Hither Plains, where another crew was helping Frank go off. In the ocean distance, the black figures were up to their chests in the white surf, which twisted the dory as the wash rushed high onto the beach. Then, too slowly, the boat drew away. She took a buffet—the white spray shot up, and she staggered. It seemed certain that the next wave would break right into her. She kept moving, and rose slowly on the wave face. But she had lost too much momentum, and the wave was too big, and the bow kept rising on the gray daybreak sky, the dory poised for a long awful moment, cocked on end. Then the wave, breaking, hurled her over backward.

  Ted had already smelled disaster; the silver truck was howling down the beach, burning its gears. A minute later, we were out on the dead run into the sea, hauling at the net. Ding-Ding (Frank’s son Harry) had been thrown clear, but the two other men were missing. They might have been struck by the crashing dory or caught under the net, which was unwinding in long tentacles along the beach with the set to westward, perhaps dragging stunned men in waders beneath the surface.

  Then a dark shape rolled out from beneath the dory, disappeared, popped up again; he was seized and dragged ashore. It was Richard, who had left Ted’s crew to go back fishing with his father. In the tumult, trying to keep our footing, trying not to get entangled or go under, we might easily have failed to notice him.

  Fear for the third man was rising like panic when someone thought to look beneath the dory. The man who turned up, scared but unhurt, was Cap’n Frank’s grandson, Walter Bennett, who swore that day that never again would he go off in a dory.

  On most fair weather days just after noon, the warm air rising from the fields is replaced by cold air off the ocean. The wind backs around and comes onshore behind short choppy seas out of the southwest. The cold surface water retards spring growth (which is two weeks behind the foliage on the bay side) and causes the dense fogs of June as the air warms. In fall, the process is reversed, as the ocean’s gathered heat extends the blue and golden warmth of Indian summer.

  That spring of 1955, I knew my job and I enjoyed it. Lying back on the damp nets stacked in the dory after the early morning sets, trundling along the bright white sand in the soft spring light, enjoying the spring breath of the fertile loam that came all the way down to the back of the dunes and blew out over the clean beach—the springtime filled me with well-being despite my drowsiness, despite sore hands, despite the prospect of a long hard day that, if we were lucky, would end long after dark in the cold freezer of Montauk Seafood, hosing down and packing and icing bass.

  As a seasonal fisherman, I could afford to romanticize this life, to indulge myself in wondering why a veteran bayman such as Milt Miller would inveigh so vehemently against his lifelong occupation. (Not that this habit was confined to Milt. As an old saying goes, “I’m gonna put this goddamn oar over my shoulder and head west, and the first sonofabitch asks me what it is, that’s where I stick it in the ground and settle.”) Like most baymen, Milt was a skilled carpenter, boatbuilder, and jack-of-all-trades who could easily have set up his own shop or found well-paid work in the construction industry; no law but his own had told him to be a fisherman. But as he said, it was “in his blood,” there was nothing to be done about it.

  In spring the net is set from east to west, insuring a hard row into the onshore wind each afternoon, and Milt, behind me at the bow oars, would curse into my ear with every heave. “My boy Mickey ever touches a fishin net, I’ll tan his hide! Worked like a donkey all my life and here I am, still workin like a donkey, cause I don’t know nothin! Not one bit better off than when I started!” Milt would row some, get his breath, and start all over. “Boy, this life here is just one big mess, in case you ain’t found that out yet! Best thing Mickey could do would be read up a little, get a job as a psycho-analyst, you know, like that loony I run into over here the other day. What you do, you lay down there on a couch and earn you a day’s pay in a hour, just listenin to rich people belly-achin! You and Johnny got a education, Pete, how come you ain’t psycho-analyzin? Pay you better than bassin, I’ll tell you that!” Milt would be winking slyly at Stewart Lester in the stern, I could read it in the grin on Stewart’s face, but he was serious, too: he was fighting to make sense of a hard life.

  Milt said that in the early thirties, when he had fished Captain Gabe Edwards’s set nets on a share basis, both bass and bluefish had been very scarce. “Cap’n Gabe used to talk about acres of bluefish back in the old days, and who was I to disbelieve a captain and deacon of the church who never was known to tell anything but the truth? But if we got four or five bluefish out of eight or ten set nets, we thought we were lucky.” He stuck out his left thumb to show the scar. “That was done by a bluefish when I was just a kid. He was slippin out of the net, and because he was so rare, y’know, I wasn’t goin to let him go; stuck my hand down quick, right into his mouth, and when I flung him, them teeth opened me up right to the bone.”

  In 1934—he remembers the year because of the intense cold that winter, the last winter in memory when the salt water froze solid on Gardiners Bay, permitting walking expeditions from Fireplace to Gardiners Island—Milt had hauled seine with his cousin Elisha Ammon “down around Mecox,” where his father was caretaker of the Mecox lifeboat station. Their rig was a Model T ford with oversized tires and a platform for a small boat, and the small net was hauled by a winch built by Elisha from parts of an old potato digger, turned by the drive shaft at the front end of the car. So far as Milt knows, this was the first winch ever used for hauling on the beach. “And Model T’s were the first real beach vehicles,” he remembers. “Before that they’d row down the beach to where they spotted fish, set net and haul, and bury the catch up in the sand, pickin ’em up later with the dory; then they’d row ’em back and hand-barrow ’em up to the roads at the beach landin.”

  Elisha Ammon, born in Springs in 1911, had spent most of his life out on Montauk, where he can recall killing five deer in a day for winter meat. His grandfather, born at sea and landing at Sag Harbor when what was then known as “the Port” was a port of entry, became a crewman on “the bony boats”—the early steamers fishing for the bony fish, menhaden. Later he worked on the traps and draggers for the Jake Wells and Parsons fish companies on Fort Pond Bay. Elisha’s father had done the same, and Elisha did it, too; as he says himself, “I was never brang up to do anything else.” With his Uncle Royce, he ran a string of 750 lobster pots, using dabs (daylight flounder) for bait, and for two years he worked in the Parsons garage to save up money before he got “brave enough to buy a boat”; it was here that he assembled the prototype winch used for hauling seine with the Model T at Mecox.

  Elisha became a successful draggerman and swordfisherman, which meant that he was mostly away from home. “You’d just say ‘Good-bye’ when you leave and ‘Here I am’ when you get back. I’d never say when I was getting back; better just to say, You’ll see me when I get home. Get up three o’clock, get home ten, eleven; children never even knew who I was until they was twelve-fourteen years old.” Like many fishermen’s sons in recent decades, Elisha’s s
on quit fishing to become a carpenter when he got married, and although Elisha understands this, he is wistful. “Might still have a boat today,” he says, “if he just stayed with me.”

  When he was fishing with Elisha, Milt had already married Etta Midgett, and in 1934 he moved to her home state of North Carolina. But his wife missed East Hampton, where her uncle and father2 had already established themselves as fishermen, and after three or four months the Millers returned to the South Fork. It was now the Depression, the fishing families were selling off land that they had held for generations, and even the Gardiners were forced to get rid of most of their property on Three Mile Harbor; they gave the present commercial dock site to the Town rather than let it go for tax sale. “Times was so hard,” Milt sighs today, “that what I done was row at night from Bonac Creek across to Gardiners and around to the east shore and sneak across the beach into Great Pond when there was no moon and scratch up maybe four bushel of clams, then lug them four bushel back over the beach out to my sharpie. And I couldn’t afford them nice wire baskets, I used wood produce baskets with sharp wire handles, nearly cut my hands off. Then I’d row all the way back, and a couple of times I damn near swamped, comin around out of the lee at Cartwright Shoal. And when I was done, I got fifty cents a bushel for them clams, and was glad to have it; I had kids cryin at home, and I had no choice.

  “Independence costs you a lot of money,” he told me quietly. “I starved myself to death for independence when I could have made good money at a trade. You ever seen anybody yet get fired from fishin? No, no! You’re just glad to find somebody stupid enough to go fishin with you.”

  10.

  Sportsmen

  and Politicians

  Every year since 1951, a bill designed to curtail or eliminate the net fishery of striped bass had been submitted to the New York State Legislature, accompanied by a great amount of paper-waving, fist-shaking, and shouting, and a pervasive outrage not unlike the crackling sputter of a basket of blue crabs. These perennial “bass bills” were the violent concern of the thousands of New York anglers who were said to support them and the few hundred commercial fishermen who were opposed; they also concerned marine biologists and conservationists, most of whom had never endorsed such legislation, first because, despite strenuous claims that these bills were conservation measures, the real benefits to the bass itself were not apparent, and second because their one consistent feature had been dogged insistence that the recreational fisherman be permitted to sell his catch on the commercial market, in direct competition with a handful of men who still earn a hard livelihood from the sea. From the start, these anglers had been encouraged by their allies in Massachusetts, which prohibited netting in 1945, yet remained one of the leading states in commercial landings of striped bass; all Massachusetts fish sold on the market are caught on hook and line.

  On February 29, 1956, I went to Albany with a delegation of commercial men led by Captain Ted Lester of Amagansett to attend the Joint Public Hearing on Striped Bass Legislation; we were there to fight the latest bass bill, known as the Hook-and-Line Amendment, which proposed to follow Massachusetts’s lead in reserving the capture (and sale) of the species to those who fished with rod and reel, thereby eliminating the commercial netters at a single blow. With self-serving statistics and conservation propaganda, the sportsmen’s lobbies were establishing sly tactics that would harass the netters for the next twenty-five years.

  The New York State Assembly chamber, ornate and heavy in the style of a cathedral, was brightened that day by the cold bright light of winter afternoon in the high windows. The small group of commercial men, squashed into one wedge of benches far around to the Speaker’s left, seemed almost excluded from the chamber by a noisy crowd of anglers, who were passing about a stuffed striped bass for the edification of the Conservation Committee. After five years of debate, the legislators showed small interest in this plastic fish, and the bass, a large browning specimen with a stricken gaze, was probably more helpful to the delegates from the bird and garden clubs, who otherwise might not have known what manner of beast they had been mustered to defend.

  Observing the horseplay from their corner, the baymen spoke little among themselves. They did not feel comfortable in sports jackets, much less in the assembly, and with their livelihood on the line, they did not share the jocularity of these “sports” who were so anxious to put them out of business. For the most part, they fidgeted in silence, like children instructed not to speak in church. Staring upward and about at the vast stone monument to their state taxes that enclosed them, they waited grimly for the business to proceed.

  Shortly after 2 P.M., the Speaker (Leo Lawrence) called the hearing to order. Welcoming the delegates on behalf of his committee, he expressed the hope that this year things might go more peaceably than in the past. He then introduced various personages in the legislature, the Conservation Department, and the Sportsmen’s Council, Marine District of New York, an organization of one hundred or more fishing clubs that coordinated the anglers’ political lobbies. Finally he introduced the secretary of the Long Island Fishermen’s Association (Nick Griek), an urbane, sad-eyed, soft-spoken man whose crestfallen air at the very mention of the Hook-and-Line Amendment conveyed deep sorrow that such rank hypocrisy could be presented as a conservation measure to the honest lawmakers of New York State.

  Presently the sportsmen and their affiliates rose one by one to identify themselves, and to read off the names of their fishing clubs and kindred organizations, all of which had organized behind a lobbying outfit called the Sportsmen’s Council, and all of which pledged undying support to the high principles of the Hook-and-Line Amendment. The idea was to confront the legislators with a whole army of earnest voters whose main concern in life was the rescue of Morone saxatilis.

  The Speaker had earlier announced that all speakers on both sides, in any number, would be limited to five minutes apiece, and the anglers elected to turn over their collective time to a Howie Fink of Montauk, whose smile of greeting faded quickly as he got at the meat of his dissertation. At what one must suppose was the top of his voice, Mr. Fink portrayed the migration of unsuspecting Chesapeake stripers, venturing north along the coast until, in all innocence, they fell afoul of the treacherous shores of eastern Long Island. “There,” cried Fink, red in the face, so outraged was he by his own revelations, “up pops the DEVIL!”—he whirled to stab a big thick finger at the small diabolical delegation in the corner—“and MASSACRES those fish!” Describing such infernal machines as the beach truck, seine, and dory, Fink invited the assembled politicians to contemplate the sad fate of those voters—hotel and motel keepers, restaurateurs, garage owners, tackle shop operators, tavern keepers, and liquor store owners—who were being forsaken by the empty-handed anglers, and the suffering caused by the seiners’ unholy greed. In effect, he accused the fishermen of cruelty to the rich, since the victims were far more prosperous than their oppressors.

  The baymen stared at Mr. Fink in sincere astonishment, then laughed, and their amusement was shared uneasily by some of Fink’s own cohorts, who looked taken aback by the vehemence of their champion and no doubt feared that his violent speech would come back to haunt them.

  When Fink had subsided, the Speaker turned over the floor to the bill’s opponents. The first of these, a young surf caster, said he was ashamed of his fellow anglers, who were being selfish, since there were plenty of bass to go around. He ignored Fink’s address, and so did the Suffolk County Supervisor (Stewart Topping); representing the region whose small businesses would theoretically benefit the most by the legislation, the supervisor had come to Albany to state that Suffolk County was squarely behind the netters. Nick Griek, nodding sadly at Mr. Fink, sighed as he rose, “Up pops the Devil,” and stood there smiling diabolically until the laughter had subsided; then he coldly dissected the true purposes of the “phony sports” and “commercial sportsmen” who wished to have the sale of bass all to themselves. A fish trucker (Rodman Pell),
who was familiar with Fink’s sales slips, said that Mr. Fink was cleaning up as a commercial sportsman; in his opinion, Mr. Fink’s Montauk residence had been constructed at the expense of the striped bass. The mayor of Greenport (Otis Burke) pointed out that the year-round economy of a fishing town depended a great deal upon the commercial men, whose welfare was at least as important, from a municipal point of view, as that of the seasonal anglers. A manufacturer of fish boxes (Jack Scheres) called the New York State pressure on the striper insignificant by comparison to the commercial landings in Maryland and Virginia, and a spokesman for the Fulton Fish Market (Joe Monani) denounced the bass bill as a dishonest conservation measure. A representative of the Wholesale Fish Producers and Dealers (Bob Johnson) reminded the committee that a great number of jobs—drivers, packers, countermen and the like—were dependent on the commercial men, and Captain Ted Lester wondered aloud why Mr. Fink, a self-proclaimed expert on the commercial bass fishery and a resident of the seining area, was unaware that two beach trucks were invariably used and not one, as he had stated.

  When the sporting faction had recovered its wind, a number of protesting voices asked to be heard. The Speaker limited the right of rebuttal to just one, a delegate from a Long Island fishing club not affiliated with the Sportsmen’s Council. This young man, speaking for “true” sportsmen, said that the anglers of his acquaintance had no interest in profiting from their catch, and did not feel that the right to do so had any business in the Hook-and-Line Amendment: they supported the bill because, as serious students of conservation, they had concluded that the haul-seiners were “decimating” the bass. (This conclusion spoke poorly for the conservation studies of his club, but his misgivings about the sportsmen’s right to sell their catch while denying that right to the netters were shared by many other anglers, the great majority of whom do not catch fish in commercial quantities and would not consider themselves sportsmen if they did.) In conclusion, Perry B. Duryea of Montauk, minority leader and lobster dealer, who would lead the political opposition to the bass bills for many years to come, extolled the heritage of the East End baymen and their right to continue in their traditional livelihood.