Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Their Uncle Harold, called Harlin or Hollin by his mother and Happy by everybody else, was the brother closest in age to their own father. (“They called him Happy because he was happy-go-lucky, always good with children and everything,” Francis Lester explains.) Happy Lester was regarded as an alcoholic, and sometimes he exasperated his brothers; although she says Ted took good care of him, Jenny remembers her father yelling at him on the beach. Nevertheless, Happy did his work, and is remembered by the family with affection. Jenny says, “I thought a lot of him; he was a nice man.” Until his death in 1953 he lived with his mother in the old homestead across the highway. “What it was, nobody wanted him,” says Stewart, who like most Poseys is unflinchingly forthright. “Everybody thought my grandmother was dyin, and Uncle Happy was just scared that if she did, they was goin to put him away for good in a old-age home. That’s why he hung hisself, or choked hisself with a rope—typical fisherman! And my grandmother went on livin for another six years!”

  Charlie Lester had also died; the last of the six Posey Boys were Frank and Bill. Cap’n Frank and his wife, the former Sadie Eames, were “foinest koind,” as the fishermen say of anything that is good, but especially of anything worn that keeps on going. Cap’n Bill’s first wife had died in 1949, and a few years later Bill married Lottie Wood, whose older brother Jarvis is a full-time bayman, and whose younger brothers John and Dick have fooled with fishing all their lives (Dick Wood worked for a few years on Ted’s haul-seine crew) and still tend fish traps before going to work.

  John Wood, who keeps what he believes is the last cow in the former farm community of Springs, recalls attending East Hampton High School in the forties and being called “just a clam digger from Bonac.” In those days anyone from the Springs District was a clam digger. It was only when outside people moved to Bonac, and their kids came to East Hampton High School, that the name Bonacker came into general use. Native-born people of the outlying communities are sometimes identified as “bubbies,” a term used freely among themselves—“Bub” or “Bubby,” like “Cap” or “Cappy,” simply means “Friend.” But these terms are much disliked when carelessly applied by “people from away,” who tend to equate bubbies with Bonackers and have no clear understanding of either one.

  Strictly speaking, Bonacker describes any local person whose ancestors were born and bred in Accabonac, which has retained longer than most local communities the Elizabethan usages of the first settlers, including the old Dorsetshire inflection called the Bonac accent.1 (There are also old Kentish usages, such as the word “dreen” for drain—a stream, creek, or outlet—as in, “Thing of it is, ’at dreen’s terrible clugged up, ain’t no bait gittin in ner gittin out.”) As Bill Lester says, “You can always tell a Bonacker by the way he talks. Whether we don’t know how to talk or whether we talk better, I don’t know.”

  Poseys regard themselves as Bonackers, and increasingly the name is used to include not only those born in the Springs District but all natives of East Hampton and Amagansett. But Sally’s husband, who came here and attended school at an early age, can never be a Bonacker, having been born in Vermont, and it annoys Sally that the East Hampton High School athletic teams now call themselves “the Bonackers,” when three-fourths of the kids are outsiders who have no idea what the term means, and no acquaintance with a scallop dredge or clam rake, far less a haul-seine crew. No doubt because of exposure to outsiders, most young Bonackers of the present generation are losing the strong Bonac accent; this is most noticeable in girls (Stewart’s daughter Gail has almost none). What remains of the Bonac accent is perpetuated by the young men who give up school at an early age and work with older baymen on the water.

  As for Poseys, Lester daughters remain Poseys until they marry. Jenny says that her daughter is no Posey; even if she had a son who fished, he could not be a Posey unless his name was Lester. On the other hand, Stewart’s son Teddy would be a Posey even if he gave up fishing, and the same is true of their cousins’ sons, most of whom wish to be fishermen, despite the dark outlook for the future. “Really a Posey is through the boy. Girls kind of fade out, so there aren’t many Poseys left.” Among the original Posey Boys, Harry and Harold had no children, and Charlie had just one child, a daughter; Ted had one son, and only one of Bill’s four sons survived. But Frank’s five sons are all alive, and all of them are fishermen. Some of Frank’s grandsons are also fishermen, although whether fishing will survive is another matter.

  Ted Lester’s children were aware in school that fishermen were looked down upon in the community. When an up-streeter told her child not to play with Jenny any more, Jenny said, “You needn’t ought to worry!”2 They were also aware that in other days the fishermen had been respected, so long as they held on to some land. These days, the prosperous Parsons and Dominys, Osborns and Fithians, were no longer fishermen. The only wealthy fishing families left were Edwardses, and they, too, had expanded from the fisheries into other enterprises. With all their property, with all their big boats, docks, and gear, they had never been thought of as baymen. “The Edwardses bought land out here when it was cheap,” Jenny Syvertsen says. “They were high-class, they were up-streeters, they were educated. Doc Dave Edwards got to be educated, but his father [Cap’n Josh] was a fisherman. Other fishermen were considered a lower class of people, but not as poor as clammers.”

  The clam diggers often squatted on poor land near the harbor edges, especially at Lazy Point, Napeague, where they lived mostly in shanties “with the stove in the living room and a small bedroom to the side, and an outhouse.” By up-streeters (and by some outsiders, too) they were apt to be dismissed as seaside hillbillies, beset by shiftlessness and drink, but their worst offense in a comfortable community was chronic poverty.3

  To this day, among East Hampton’s middle-class, there lingers an idea of most Poseys and Bonackers as hidebound and procrastinating people, lacking ambition; very few of their townsmen understand what the fishermen bring to the community. Robert Vetault, a liberal up-streeter who worked in the town government during the sixties, says that most of his neighbors perceived the baymen (and especially those clam diggers who peddled clams and scallops from door to door) as “semicomic figures.” East Hampton, he says, became very snobbish when it turned into a resort in the 1890s; his own grandmother, leaving the Springs to live in East Hampton, “thought she was entering a whole new wonderful world.” Yet as late as World War II, most up-streeters were exceptionally provincial, still identifying with New England and suspicious of New York, still traveling to New Haven or New London for their shopping. There were scarcely any Jews in town, Catholics were identified as lower-class servants, and fishermen were totally disreputable. “I don’t think that the up-streeters ever understood what these fishermen go through, what it was like to cut holes in the ice and spear eels, to go out and tong when it was so cold that your fingers froze off. Most of the up-streeters had total ignorance of what was happening within ten miles of town.” Vetault understood that the fishermen were not inferior, far less semicomic, but “a whole different and fiercely proud and independent group, some of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever known. Milton Miller, Ted Lester typified that sort of fierceness.”

  After her marriage, Jenny moved up-Island for some years, returning now and then with her husband and child to visit. One day Sally pointed at her, demanding to know “How come that woman and that man and that kid come here all the time?” And Sally’s mother said, astonished, “That’s your sister!” Subsequently Jenny returned to Amagansett, and her husband fished for a year or two with Ted while getting himself established as a carpenter. By then the family’s life had changed. Using the money made from swordfish, Jenny says, Ted had gone into partnership with Frank Tillotson in Montauk Seafood. By the time Sally went to school, her father had bought Tillotson out. He was already prospering as a businessman, had joined the Masons and was attending Legion dances, and so, for Sally, the local prejudice against men without regular jobs was a lot less
marked.

  Young people of fishing families are much more likely to marry outsiders than to marry townspeople, and every one of the Lester children has done so. Their parents—and all the older generations—almost always married within the community. Over the decades the Posey Lesters have intermarried with almost all the baymen families except the Havenses, who first came to Bonac from Sag Harbor and Shelter Island at the turn of the century. Ted’s daughters remember Henry Havens as “a sweet old man,” and they also approved of his son Billy (now known as William, to distinguish him from his own son) who was often at Uncle Bill’s, across the street. “But some of William’s brothers, they sowed some wild oats! Lindy, Gump, and Fred raised hell since they was born, and the girls ain’t much better.”

  Sally recalls her early days hanging around down at the packing room when the haul-seine crews came in with fish. “With Daddy’s own crew I could go down there when they were packing out, cause he would tell them to watch their language, but Uncle Bill had a crew and he had a lot of the Havenses on it, and there was young Lindy and young Gump, and they were flopping it around, and Daddy used to shoo me out. When two big trucks got in there side by side, it was no place for a child anyway.”

  Although two other Amagansett fish markets had been established in the fifties—Stuart’s Seafood, run by Stuart Vorpahl, Sr., at his place on Oak Lane, and Scotty’s Market, established on Schellinger Lane by Cap’n Frank’s brother-in-law, Scotty Eames—Montauk seafood continued to do well, and Jenny’s fish shop expanded to include such Bonac specialties as deviled clams, clam chowder, and clam pie. Next came homemade potato salad, coleslaw, cakes, and fresh fruit pies (the favorite was strawberry-rhubarb), frozen in season and stored with the bait fish in the room below. In 1967 Ted opened a liquor store out on the highway. “You could buy a whole meal,” remembers Jenny, who with most of her sisters worked in their mother’s store, “then go down the street to Lester’s Liquors. Daddy had quite a monopoly, we did quite, quite well!”

  Despite snide nicknames such as Cap’n Seagull, no one who ever worked with Ted denied that this fiercely energetic man was a skilled fisherman. Alone among the crew captains, he traveled to Albany each year to defend their way of life from the threat of the recurrent bass bills (in the early years he was accompanied by Ellis Tuthill, whose family had been in the forefront of this fight since 1924). He also became the main spokesman for the fishermen against the groins, or jetties, on the ocean beach. Later in life, when he went to Florida in winter, he spent most of his time with local fishermen, thereby looking for small tricks of the trade that fishermen at home might put to use. Because of his eager curiosity about life, Ted was one of the few fishermen on the beach who would take the trouble to send away for identification any strange species of fish that turned up in the nets, proving to the biologists that stray bonefish and other tropical species wandered northward in the summer Gulf Stream.

  “Ted put me onto erosion control,” Robert Vetault says.“His views were instinctive, based on generations of observation. The baymen couldn’t explain it in terms of forces and all the rest, they just knew if you put something in the water that interrupted the flow, a certain scouring action is bound to happen; I’ve been hostile to groins and jetties ever since. With Ted’s help, and the help of fishermen who were by then really getting organized, we wrote some legislation that kept other legislation from happening, we did our bit to keep the striped bass bill out of Albany.”

  At the time I left the beach, in the mid-fifties, the conflict between seiners and surfcasters was still increasing. One year Bill Lester was “down Montauk, dragging Shagwong Point, and I left my net back up on the hill, and evidently some of them playboys or whatever you might call ’em cut my bag off my net. And they had different things they tried, you know. Stay awake all night thinkin about ways they can hurt the fishermen. They catch one hundred to us one, and they don’t want us to catch that one.” In 1959 the haul-seiners agreed to cede the anglers the whole Point, from Shagwong all the way around to Ditch Plains, down near Montauk Village, with the understanding that the anglers would not go to Albany again with a new bass bill. They have never forgotten that the sportsmen went to Albany the very next winter, and they have mistrusted them ever since.4

  In the same period Ted Lester was involved in a conflict between the haul-seiners and the Montauk Boatmen’s Association. The charter men wanted restrictions on the scuba divers, who were tying up whole stretches of good bass and bluefish ground around the Point. The baymen—with long memories of the days when private oyster companies, gaining control of public grounds, all but ended oystering in open waters (“Ain’t that terrible what they done to us?” Bill Lester says) and leery of aquaculture projects ever since—resisted any restriction on freedom of access, fearing that the netters might be next. The situation, complicated by the fact that the Indian land acquired by the Bensons did not come under the town ordinances, was finally solved when the divers agreed to avoid the Elbow, from Rocky Point south around the Light to the cove called Frisbees on the ocean shore.

  As Amagansett became fashionable in the late fifties, this outgoing dory fisherman and his lively family were an easily accessible element of local color, and Ted was sought out in his store and on the beach by such movie stars as Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe, to name only those celebrated visitors best remembered by his children. “Daddy just never treated anybody any different,” Sally says. “Everybody was his friend, you know? He didn’t make any big fuss over them, and they used to love it, they used to come down to the beach just to talk to him! Just to talk!” But his older, more conservative brothers thought that Ted and Jenny were leading a fast life as they grew prosperous, and drinking too much with their rich customers; it was concluded that Ted’s illness had somehow been brought on by unhealthy exposure to outside influences.

  “He was never really a big man like people remember him before he died,” says Jenny, who like her sister Vinnie would fill in now and then with the crews on the beach. “He was always a very thin man, you know. My grandmother used to say to my mother, ‘Jenny, I don’t know, Ted’s not a very well man.’ He was a strong man in his own way, but the beach killed him. Starting at twelve years old, working straight through, just wore his body out.

  “They used to always ride the beach, and he would say, ‘I guess we better stop here, boys, and have a look.’ Gas was way up, and they couldn’t keep riding. So after they sit there two or three hours, the men said, ‘Well, Ted, you better go home.’ And he said, ‘You ain’t goin home. You want to go home, you go home, and I’ll get a new gang. I’m sitting. I smell some fish out there.’

  “The guys today have it darn easy; they don’t work now like my father worked, they ride around. Fishing is fishing when you go on that beach and fish, not going down fly-by-nights.”

  Ted sold the liquor store in 1971, after a dispute with the son-in-law who kept its books. He died in 1973, and for the next two years his daughter ran the seafood shop, which his wife then leased to a fishermen’s co-op. Eventually the co-op failed, and four years after Jenny’s death in 1971, the whole place was sold off to the developers.

  Both Jenny and Sally miss the fun and banter of waiting on the summer people and giggling at some of what they saw. They also miss the fish shop atmosphere, including filleting and dressing fish, and in recent years have been happy to open scallops in a small shop that their brother Stewart has set up in his garage near Three Mile Harbor.

  Much more than their parents and grandparents, who took it for granted, the younger Lesters are aware of the fragility of this ocean land. “The east end of Long Island is beautiful because of what we have here,” Jenny Syvertsen says, “the fish and scallops and clams, the land that people could come out and see. But what’s it going to be like ten years from now? It’s going! Your regular fisherman is going to go, which is a sin. These people from the city are coming out here and pushing us right out. They say it’s so beautiful, they want it, and they’
re pushing us right out. It’s never going to be stopped.”

  “You’re here every year, and you see this goin up and that goin up, and you don’t really notice,” says her cousin Calvin, who is Bill Lester’s son by his second marriage. “But say you wasn’t here for two years, three years, you come back and look, you’d say, Jesus Christ, where the hell am I at!”

  Since the fish factory closed, land values have soared at Napeague, and Beach Hampton, a development in the barrier dunes at the east end of Amagansett, is spreading eastward all the way to Hither Hills. “I hadn’t gone down on the Napeague stretch at night in a year or two. The condos and motels, I was appalled!” Sally exclaims. “Holy shit! Lights after lights after lights!” Her Uncle Frank had said that he would be “tickled pink” by a good hurricane, and she agrees. “I’ve been praying for a hurricane for two years; I want one so darn bad it isn’t funny! The 1938 hurricane would straighten this town right about out straight. Cause there will be no more Beach Hampton, no more of those hotels along the stretch. Look at Westhampton Beach, all that erosion, all those people: you cannot build on top of dunes! And the farming industry on Long Island is almost shot, right in the backseat, because these poor farmers, they can’t afford the taxes. What do the people in New York City think they’re gonna eat if they keep pushing? The fishermen don’t have anything. They can’t tax the water on us, but if they could tax that water on us, they would.”