Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  The full-time fishermen, struggling to survive, had none of their land left to fall back on. An exception to the rule was Cap’n Ted, who seemed tired, yet more enterprising than ever. On the upper level of Montauk Seafood, near Charlie Lester’s old vegetable stand, the fish store run by Jenny Lester and her daughters was doing fine, and so was Lester’s Liquors, opposite Brent Bennett’s Store, which was now owned and operated by Walter Bennett. But I saw Ted rarely and never saw the other fishermen at all; I lived ten miles away to westward, and was traveling all over the world. I bought a small wood bass boat for the bays, and went clamming and scalloping for my own use and satisfaction out of Sag Harbor; in the fall there was surfcasting for bass and bluefish, as far east as Montauk Light and as far west as Shinnecock Inlet. One winter day with my young daughter Sara, I found a whale skull that emerged from beneath the dunes after a storm. Perhaps this creature had been a drift whale, like that dead humpback rising and falling in the sea under Gay Head, or perhaps it was killed from a small boat by the farmer-fishermen of other days.

  In 1958 the Army Corps of Engineers, at the instigation of a rich and influential summer resident who desired to shore up his dune house at Georgica at the public expense, had begun the construction of a series of ocean groins, or jetties, up to 750 feet long, to stabilize the unstable ocean beach. The vast enterprise failed to take into account the very strong set, or current, alongshore, and the sea carved huge scallops in the beach between these rock piles, which had no more place on the open Atlantic coast than that doomed fish pier that broke up at Napeague in 1881. Captain Frank Lester called the engineers “damned fools,” and all those with experience of the ocean beach agreed that the jetties had seriously worsened the great damage caused by the line storm4 of March 1961, with its violent northeasterly gales. The storm picked off some houses built on sand that had no business on the high dunes in the first place, and temporarily laid bare stretches of peat, scored by cart tracks and ox prints of colonial times, that had long since been covered over by the sands. The high dunes at Sagaponack where Bud Topping had a big green summer tent were washed away, and Southampton Town replaced the dunes with a large parking lot, trash cans, and toilets, together with a big poster picture of the politician who wished to take credit for all this progress.

  With the sudden rise in value of the land, the peaceful atmosphere of the South Fork began to change. The change developed like faraway massed clouds in the northern sky, the first iron weather of winter storm. Sagaponack was now the closest public beach to Sag Harbor, and traffic down its main street increased quickly. Within a few years the old Hildreth store expanded its services to accommodate the swelling tide of tourists, and the old village’s quiet days were over. A new rash of real estate speculators, entreating other newcomers to “share our heritage,” discovered Sagaponack, where the smaller local farms, unable to compete with the huge agribusiness in the West, or survive the growing tax on land inheritance, had begun to die. Even that oldest family farm in the United States was sold off by the squabbling heirs, with most of the money, it was said, gone to the lawyers.

  The wells and water table had been polluted by chemical pesticides and fertilizers that leached into the earth and were washed by rain into the creeks, where the stunned fish were scavenged by the ospreys. The DDT absorbed by the microorganisms and plankton, and concentrating in the fish tissues on which they fed, weakened the osprey eggs, which broke when incubated. The great fish hawks were once so common here that twenty-five or thirty at a time could be counted over Fort Pond Bay;5 by the early sixties the huge primitive nests on Gardiners and Cartwright Shoal stood empty. Within the decade, the osprey was so rare that I would call my children out to look when one passed over, for fear that this sighting might be the last. The blue crabs that used to run in streams out of every salt pond when the gut was opened to the sea, and the fiddler crabs, once so thick in the spartina grass of the tidal wetlands that the flow of claw-snapping brown creatures could be channeled into tubs for use as bait, were killed off by DDT in the aerial sprays. Filling, bulkheading, and pollution of the wetlands were eliminating marine life spawning grounds and the last resorts of the wild duck, and even the long strings of sea duck had been much diminished by massive oil spills in the coastal waters. The remnant flocks were harassed by speedboat shooters who cared more about noise than boats and birds, who chased the flocks as they labored off the water and did not bother to pick up what they blasted down.

  For a few years I resumed coot shooting at Cedar Point with Alvin and Bud Topping, Cliff Foster, and Ed Hildreth, but as rapidly as the fast plastic boats increased, the birds declined. A few years later, despite some memorable shoots at Sagaponack Pond, I gave up all gunning for good. Occasionally in fall I drove over to Northwest, past white pine woods and hoary orchards and the old fields of the early settlers with their fallen wells and shadowy foundations, to the Alewive Brook landing where our sharpies were once launched for Cedar Point. Here I harvested scallops washed ashore in a northwest blow or forked up a truckload of bleached eelgrass for the garden from the windrows on the quiet stretch of shore known as Kirk’s Beach.6 In winter I went clamming from this shore, stopping every little while to blow on my red hands and watch the strings of coot and old squaw beating north over the chop toward Cedar Point.

  One fair October afternoon I was surfcasting in autumn solitude at Mecox, where the gut had just been opened to the sea. The ocean was sparkling and mild, in a mild sun. A thud on my line was the first sign of what turned out to be a school of medium bass, and I had three fine stripers on the beach when Bobby Lester’s Southampton seine crew came along and set around me. Bobby was Cap’n Frank’s third son; I knew him by the resemblance to his brothers, the pale blue eyes in the hawk-nosed ruddy face. The trailer was backed down at high speed into the wash, the man at the truck wheel hit the brakes, and the big dory shot straight off its rollers through the surf and kept on going. This was the first dory I ever saw that was powered by an outboard motor, which was kept clear of the net in a well toward the bow. The old cotton nets, once six hundred fathoms long, had been replaced by nylon nets three times that length; instead of turning east a hundred yards out, this dory, larger than any I remembered, was going way offshore back of the bar.

  On other days I saw the rigs from Amagansett, but except for Bill Lester’s steady crew—I recognized his son Billy Lester, and the long-faced Havens boys, and Dom-Dom Grace—few of the faces seemed familiar; I felt like a stranger, and I kept my distance. The dark bulk of beach trucks in the pearly mist was reassuring, it was good to know that the haul-seiners were still there, yet my heart was struck each time I saw them by a pang of loss. I missed those fishing years much more than I cared to admit. I enjoyed my work and was making a good living, and I came and went, as independent as any fisherman, yet book royalties and magazine fees had no reality when compared to a day’s pay earned out of doors. I missed the dawn light and the sunrise, the suspense of every haul, the calloused hands; I missed the smell and feel of boats and I missed the water. Also I missed the rough humor and old stories of such great events as the time that Lindy Havens and another fisherman, the late Edward (Peebo) Raynor, who lived out back of Cap’n Posey’s house, got their car stuck while jacking deer in the Hither Hills. Having bent his shotgun barrel trying to lever out the car—“Hell, that don’t mean nothin!” Peebo said—he hacksawed it off short and kept right on going.

  In 1966 I sailed on a commercial Cayman schooner on a green turtle fishing voyage to the Miskito Cays off Nicaragua, and in 1969 I was writer-diver on an oceanic expedition to the Indian Ocean and Australia that obtained the first undersea film (Blue Water, White Death) of the great white shark. But here at home, living just ten miles west of Amagansett, I had lost track of “all thim Poseys.” One early spring I bailed a truckload of minnows trapped in Sagg Pond dreen to spread upon my vegetable garden, and another year I bought his whitebait seine from Bobby Tillotson, thinking to fish it by myself down on
Sagg Pond; the seine lies untouched on the shed rafters with my old clam tongs, harpoon, and outriggers, and some balsawood black duck decoys from my gunning days. My scallop dredges had been “barried” some years ago and never returned, the big tuna rod that had bested that flying porgy was missing, too, and so was the old fighting chair that we mounted for the epic voyage of the Shinnecock chiefs to Rosie’s Hole, off the New England shore.

  Promised Land had closed down in 1968, and the big bunker steamers and swift seine boats, working the menhaden schools off the ocean beach, passed by no longer. Long-range factory stern trawlers from Europe and Japan, often visible on the ocean skyline, were fishing the continental shelf, increasing pressure on the open ocean species even as the fish themselves declined. Overfished by the long-liners (a long line is a trawl, up to sixteen miles long, set in deep water, usually along the deep sea canyons), the bluefin tuna so abundant in the fifties had been drastically depleted, necessitating strict quotas, and long-lined swordfish seemed certain to follow. Meanwhile, the expanding dragger fleet worked much closer to shore, roiling the water brown inside the bar.

  Weakfish and kingfish, fluke and bottle fish, had vanished, whereas striped bass and bluefish were abundant; despite the doom cries of the sportsmen, the numbers of striped bass had continued to grow. In 1968 Bill Lester’s crew made the biggest haul ever recorded on the South Fork, and bass landings in 1973 were the highest ever. The next year the striped bass began a long decline, but demand for these fish kept the price so high that the diminishing fishery maintained its value. Nevertheless, the seine crews dwindled, one by one. Beach ordinances (as well as the bass decline) forced Bobby Lester off the beach, down in Southampton; as Bob Tillotson grew older and the bass harder to find, the farmers’ haul-seine crew in Sagaponack disbanded, too. Frank Lester, injured, had long since retired, Bill Lester’s strong crew had broken up, and although he fished intermittently until 1970, Cap’n Ted had sold his rig some years before.

  “They are all gone now, the Indians and the whalers, the Indian whalers, the part-Indians, the part-whalers, the farmer-fishermen … the narrow insular men and women who lived and bred for two and a half centuries in a backwater-corner of the United States, yet sometimes knew Canton or the Sandwich Islands better than they knew New York,” wrote Captain Josh Edwards’s great-grandson7 in 1978. There was truth in this, but the statement seemed premature; a few still knew about the old traditions.

  One day in December 1964, Stuart Vorpahl, Jr., codfishing with Dominick Grace seven miles offshore near the Mecox sea buoy, felt swells begin to rise beneath the dory and headed for shore. (This was Captain Clint Edward’s old dory in which Milt Miller had been so sick fifty years before. “She was cedar with hackmatack8 wood knees, from Nova Scotia,” Stuart says. “All I had to do was put a new stern into her; the old one was nail-sick from two hundred Posey nails. That old girl’s there back of the fish market yet today.”) It was snowing hard by the time they neared the coast, the winter day was already growing dark, and Stuart could not make out the landing road or see the truck that he would need to haul the dory out of the surf where he came ashore; if he landed farther down the beach, he might lose the dory. Therefore he was happy to see headlights, shining out to sea from the landing at Beach Lane. The lights were a beacon from Elisha Osborn, an old fisherman-farmer of the Wainscott whaling clan. Like many old surfmen, Cap’n Lisha had the habit of driving down and gazing at the ocean. Coming upon Stuart’s truck and trailer, he had known at once that a cod fisherman might be in trouble, trying to regain the shore on a darkening day.

  13.

  Poseys and Bonackers

  Someone had told me that Cap’n Ted had not been well, and I meant to go see him. Not long afterward, in August 1973, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Soon I left on a journey to Asia, and neglected to call on Jenny Lester when I got back. A few years later I apologized, and she cleared the air immediately. “Oh hell Pete! You’re just like me!” said small, big-hearted Jen in that gravel voice she had acquired in decades of chain-smoking and shouting. “Got all them good intentions, y’know, and never get around to ’em!” Jenny herself died of kidney and liver failure in June 1979. “What they died of,” their son Stewart says, “was plain hard work.”

  Theodore Roosevelt Lester and Jenny Mayes Bennett, both born in 1908, met each other first at age thirteen while out picking blueberries on Montauk. At that time Ted had already quit school to become a fisherman, helping his older brothers support their parents. He met Jenny again three years later at one of the home dances described earlier by bayman Jarvie Wood. “Used to hire a horse and hay wagon, two—three dollars for the night; that was the way we went courtin the girls,” Bill Lester says.

  After their marriage, in 1926, Ted and Jenny lived on Abraham’s Path, north of the highway, in a three-room cottage with a wood stove. Jenny Bennett’s grandmother Mayes had been raised in the old settlement out at Northwest, and her people were mostly carpenters and farmers (plumbers and electricians were as yet unheard of) but Jenny was as energetic as her husband and threw herself wholeheartedly into the fishermen’s life. “Mom could hang nets, mend a hole if she had to, but not as good as Dad or my grandfather,” says her daughter Jenny, born in 1927, who still remembers the World War II days on the beach when the dory was moved from the landing road down to the sea on rollers, and she helped her father haul his small seine by hand.

  The Posey Lesters, young Jenny recalls, were basically religious, though unlike up-street Presbyterians such as the Edwardses, they were apt to take the Lord’s name in vain and went to church mostly in the winter. The rest of the time, her father would say, “Well, the Lord give me that good weather to go fishin, and I had to go; if the Lord didn’t want me to go fishin on Sunday, He’d have had it rainin.” Sometimes in later years, young Jenny recalls, the minister would visit Montauk Seafood and offer to pray, and Ted would say, “Well, okay, so long as you don’t mind doing it on the fish boxes.” And the wary crews would sit down on the fish boxes while the minister prayed for good health, good weather, and plenty of good fish. The older men, at least, are still religious; most of the families attend church on Sundays, and the men do their best to avoid bad language in the household.

  Because of their long and irregular hours, the baymen have small opportunity for social visits. In Ted’s family, an annual Fourth of July picnic was celebrated with the Bennetts, while Thanksgiving and Christmas were usually spent with Grandmother Lester and Harold (Happy) at the old homestead across the highway. They did not see much of other Posey families, though five of the six Posey Boys lived within a quarter mile of one another. Frank, Bill, and Ted were ten years apart in age, and all had large families of their own to see to.

  Besides Jenny and Stewart (born in 1935), there were four younger daughters in the family—Ruth Ann (after her mother’s sister Ruth, who married a fisherman, Elmer Fenelon), Gloria, Lavinia (named for Cap’n Nathan’s wife, Mary Lavinia, and much like her grandmother in grouchy temperament, so say her sisters) and Stephanie, called Sally, born in 1951. Sal was three when I first went fishing with her father, and was much underfoot as her mother struggled to expand the seafood shop. Eventually the shop occupied the whole top floor of the packing house and freezer, which was built like a potato storage barn into the bank north of the house.

  Of all the children, only Jenny is old enough to remember Nathan Lester, who died in 1937, when she was ten; she recalls a big, broad-shouldered man with no belly and “white white” hair, mustache, and whiskers. “I can see him setting there on his little stool, mendin net for the men to go fishin, cause he couldn’t do much fishin no more, he was too old and his legs wasn’t very good. He’d call my mother and say, ‘Jenny, I got no puff.’ And she’d say, ‘What’s the matter, Pop? Where’s your tobacco?’ She would hunt up a dime, warning him not to give it away to his grandchildren for candy, which he always did unless she went for the tobacco herself. ‘Okay Jennie!’ When he came back, she’d ask why he
didn’t have any tobacco in his pipe, and he’d say, ‘Oh, I saw the kids!’ ”

  Sally remembers her grandfather from family stories. “He always had his high water pants on: in other words, he couldn’t get pants long enough, tightened his suspenders too much, I think. Had those funny shoes that came up high, and his socks showed: high-boots shoes and high water pants!” She also speaks of the flower in his buttonhole, which led to the name Cap’n Posey and came to distinguish these ’Gansett Lesters from the Pantigo and Round Swamp Lesters, very few of whom still fish today. (According to Stewart’s daughter Gail, young Nathan Lester was wearing a flower given to him by his sweetheart when his boat capsized in the surf; he won the name Posey Lester because the flower was still flying when he came ashore.)

  “Grandma Lester was a crotchety old thing, you threw a hat in before you walked into her kitchen,” Jenny says. “One day somebody come to her house asking for Mr. Posey, and she said that nobody by that name lived there, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Lester.’ That’s how Grandma found out he was called that, and to the day she died, she didn’t like it.”

  “She thought it was degrading,” Sally says. “People back in those days were very proud, there was etiquette and proper ways of talking. Today everything is so lax, really. In them days you had so much love for your husband that anything he does, he could never do wrong. I know that my own husband, nothing he could do would be no sin to me because I worship the ground he walks on, and that’s the way I feel about him today. And my grandmother did, too. And that extends to family. You argue with your own, but if an outsider comes in.…”

  Jenny scarcely recalls her Uncle Harry, who hung himself in May 1951. The reason for the eldest brother’s suicide is unclear, but it is felt that the trouble might have started when he moved away to “the other end of town,” a disruption that was blamed upon his wife. (“Henpecked was his sickness,” Jenny says. “She mentally disturbed him.”) But her brother Stewart, who remembers Harry as a man handy at everything, and a superb carver of weather vanes, believes that his uncle was “happy enough; he killed himself because he was crazy with pain with what we call Posey disease, a lot of little strokes. Got so he couldn’t drive no more, and that’s no good; lost his independence, and he couldn’t handle that. My old man died of the same disease, at the same age, in his early sixties. He had got pretty heavy after he got sick and left the beach, and he went from two-forty to fifty-eight pounds in just three months.”