Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Calvin was born in 1953, my first year as a commercial fisherman, and Donnie in 1956, which was my last. Despite black mustache, glasses, and a short, solid, husky build, Donnie still looks boyish. Like many baymen, he quit fishing and took a job when he first got married, working as a butcher in East Hampton from 1974 to 1976; Tom Lester learned a trade setting tiles, Danny King worked for a few years in his family garage, Stuart Vorpahl is an expert welder. But Calvin, like most Posey Lesters—and most Havenses, too—has never done anything but fish. At Amagansett School, he was well known for staring away out the window toward the ocean beach whenever there was fishing weather. Like Richard, he quit school at sixteen and never looked back. No matter how bad the fishing gets, nor how poor he may be, he is probably too proud of his Posey heritage, and too stubborn, to give it up.

  Although they scallop and lift traps in season, Calvin, Wally, and Donnie regard themselves as haul-seiners. The Havenses feel much the same way, and these two crews will probably be the last ones on the beach.

  As the trucks drew closer, I helped Donnie Eames load the offshore wing into the dory. The hard mesh felt good in my hands, but Donnie had to show me how to lay this immense net that filled the big motor dory all the way forward to the outboard well. “Don’t know if we could pitchpole this dory even if we wanted to,” he commented, “not with the weight spread out like that. Last year me and Calvin went right up on end, on a big sea off Mecox; if we didn’t pitchpole her that day, don’t guess we ever will. When you was fishin, now, you had the whole net in the stern and no weight in the bow, and she could go right up and back over.”

  An older man tending the winch in the bed of the dory truck looked vaguely familiar, and Donnie asked me if I recognized Walter B. Bennett, whom I last recalled from the spring of ’55, when he was hauled out from beneath Frank’s pitchpoled dory. “Looked like a drowned rat, I did,” Walter Bennett said, “with all that ocean in my waders.” I asked him how long he was under that boat; it seemed to me it must have been three minutes. “Don’t guess I know,” he said. “Never checked my watch.”

  For a number of years Walter owned Brent’s Store, which was founded by his father, but in 1975 he had sold the store and gone back to the water, and now he watched as his son Wally freed the hitch and walked the line back down to the water to tie on again. “No, that ain’t somethin a man’s liable to forget,” he said at last. “Part of the trouble was another crew there helpin us go off, see if we could make it; some was pushin and some was pullin, waitin for a better slatch to go. Well, they never found it; we went off too slow. Richard was at the bow oars, and when we went up on end, I seen him dive out to the side; it’s narrow up there in the bow, but there was no chance to make it from the middle. So what I done, I just slid under the thwart, grabbed onto it when the boat fell over; never was knocked out or nothin, had a big air pocket, and I knew I was better off right there then tryin to swim up through that surf in waders. Figured she’d just wash ashore and I’d climb out, but I guess you fellas got to me first. Anyway, that was my second experience of somethin like that, and I decided then and there that that was the last time Walter B. Bennett ever went off in a dory.”

  The seiners agree that to go off through the surf under power is less dangerous than going off with oars, but nevertheless, as Calvin says, it “takes some practice. You oughta know what you’re doin if you’re gonna go through the ocean surf.”

  Sometimes it is necessary to wait twenty minutes for that one moment when the truck is backed down fast and straight into the wash and the brake hit hard so that the momentum of the heavy boat will carry it past the surf should the motor stall. In rough weather the boat often ships water as it slaps through the first wave, and requires bailing even when it does not come close to filling up or rolling over. Or sometimes the dory goes off safely, then has trouble getting in. Calvin recalls a day in the early seventies, a day of big seas after Hurricane Gerta, when the beach was steep and the waves reached almost to the foot of the dunes, and his dory overturned in the surf as it came ashore. “I just got wet,” Calvin says, “but Billy Robinson from Southampton there, he almost drowned.”

  Donnie yelled to Calvin, who had come within hailing distance as the two trucks joined: “See them weakfish finnin?” And Calvin, tending the winch on the other truck, yelled back; there were weaks on his end, too. We jumped to the sand and ran down to the water to manage the bunt as it came into the surf. In the calm sea, the glistening bag, long as the truck, came ashore easily. Eighty pounds of speckled weaks were scattered among fifty cartons (about 3,500 pounds) of the big swift green-blue fish known to the sportsmen as gorilla blues; a solitary bass, near fifty pounds, stripes paling and head green with middle age, lay quiet among the bluefish, as if thinking over a mistake. For the rest of the season, the haul-seiners would do their best to avoid bluefish, which were not worth handling, and bit holes in the mesh.

  A trio of surfcasters, put-putting along the beach crest like huge boys on their fat-tired tricycles, glared resentfully at the big bluefish haul, which after all icing and shipping was deducted would probably be worth less than fifty dollars a man. Watching them pass, Donnie Eames said that the twenty-four-inch law would be ignored by most of the surfcasters whom the crews had talked with on the beach. “Hell, them guys say right out that all they’ll do is fillet off them illegal bass, take ’em home anyway. There’s no provision in this stupid law for filleted fish! And them boat fishermen will do the same—nothin to stop ’em! That law hurts us, cause we can’t ship fillets, but it ain’t gonna hurt the sports a single bit!”

  On November 3 Herbert Doig and Gordon Colvin of the Department of Environmental Conservation (D.E.C.) attempted to justify the bass law to a gathering of fishermen in Southampton Town Hall. Montauk assemblyman John Behan, who had fought the passage of the twenty-four-inch law, warned the bureaucrats that they were now “in bass country,” and Doig’s report on Governor Cuomo’s untested plan for a committee to assist the fishermen in adjusting to the “adverse impact” of the bass bill1 was met with hostile silence. The men were desperate, and in need of help, yet they clearly disliked risking their independence by accepting charity from people who—they felt—had done them wrong. Anyway, they were suspicious of committees, not to speak of bureaucrats. “These winters are hard around here,” a man said. “We ain’t got no regular paychecks like you people. We’re willin to go out when it’s cold and wet, but when the ice comes, ain’t nothin we can do.”

  Colvin, a pale, bespectacled young man in a mod haircut, chirped the good news that striped bass reproduction had been very promising this year in the Hudson, where an eighteen-inch minimum size was still permitted north of the George Washington Bridge. The men glared at him. Chesapeake reproduction, on the other hand, was the second lowest in thirty years. The situation down there was so desperate that Maryland and Virginia were promising once again to take strong action. Both states, lacking coastal fisheries, were proposing coastal legislation roughly equivalent to that passed in New York; they had also “formulated a compact” with Pennsylvania “to address important pollution and habitat protection problems of the Chesapeake,” without, however, giving up the right to continue fishing for fourteen-inch fish in Chesapeake waters. Since the baymen know that the small fish they are forbidden to keep are supposed to migrate southward, this political doubletalk brought a groan of cynicism and disgust. “If it was twenty-four inches everywhere, and no exceptions,” Richard Lester told me later, “maybe we could accept it. But here they have eighteen inches up in the Hudson and fourteen in the Chesapeake and twelve in Carolina and Delaware—it don’t make sense! When small bass show up in the market, who’s to say where them fish come from?” In his anger, Richard’s face was even ruddier than usual; he squinted. “A lot of ’em will come from here, I’ll tell you that.”

  When Colvin had completed his presentation, he asked the fishermen “to put aside your differences with the department … and assist us in developing the b
est possible data base … for management of striped bass.” Then he sat down, shuffling his papers. There was no applause. A cold, heavy stillness was broken at last by a cold and heavy voice that said, “We cooperated for years with [D.E.C. biologist] Byron Young, and you used that data to legislate against us. I guess you know you ain’t gonna get no hand from us.”

  Like Assemblyman Halpin, Colvin appeared astonished by the bitterness of these men. Avoiding their gaze, he frowned into his papers as if discovering something there that he had not seen before, while his smooth-talking superior, Herb Doig, struggled to defend on biological grounds a bass bill that the fishermen perceived as ignorant, political, and punitive. For example, the new Rhode Island law did not take effect until January 1, allowing the commercial men to finish out their season, whereas the New York law would go into effect on the day before Election Day to insure votes for the politicians who had sponsored it. Election Day came right at the start of the best month of the fall bass run, which trappers, gill-netters and haul-seiners alike had always counted on to make it through the long hard winter.

  Doig’s biological report was hollow, and when he sat down, his D.E.C. statistics were excitedly disputed by Arnold Leo, secretary of the Baymen’s Association (the articulate Leo is a part-time baymen who came here from a career in New York City, and has since become an effective spokesman for the fisherman). Then Milt Miller rose to speak. “I been a poor man all my life,” Milt said quietly, “and I guess I’ll die a poor man, and I ain’t ashamed of it; I’m proud of it. I know my work and I know the water, and I forgot more about striped bass than most people will ever know, but none of you fellers come around and asked me nothin. If you did, you would know that the bays are full of little bass, real little ones, that never come up here from the Chesapeake. You don’t know where them fish come from, and there’s a hell of a lot else you don’t know, and until you do know what you’re doin, you got no business legislatin away our livelihood.”

  Last year (Milt told me as his son stood up) Mickey Miller had not caught one bass in his traps that would be legal under the new law. Composing himself, Mickey nodded to the other baymen, then said that he had come here to express his anger—“You people have reduced me to the shell of a man; I sometimes think I’m goin crazy”—but had decided to do his best to remain reasonable. “I started out with a scratch rake, and now I got four traps, and the last few years here I been doin good. But I depend on striped bass for 50 percent of my income—that’s about six hundred dollars,” he said, trying to smile, and the men laughed—“and the number of bass out in the bay that’s over twenty-four inches ain’t no more than a handful. You’re lettin ’em take small bass up the Hudson—why not us?” Looking strangely hunched up in his hooded parka, as if he had taken a chill in the hot room, this husky thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Korean War gazed around for a few moments as the baymen watched him—Ben and Billy Havens, Richard and Calvin Lester, Donnie Eames and Danny King, Stuart Vorpahl, and a number of older men to whose faces I could no longer attach a name. And I recalled what Mickey’s father had once said, one May afternoon back in the fifties, shouting over my shoulder from the bow oars as we pulled Ted Lester’s dory into the onshore wind, in a gray chop: “If my boy Mickey touches a fishin net, I’ll tan his hide!” But this was no time to remind Milt of that story.

  “I ain’t no public speaker as I guess you can see,” Mickey Miller was saying, “and I don’t mean to just speak about myself. I think I’m speakin for most of the men here in this room. But I grew up with striped bass, I lived with striped bass, and spendin nights out there on Gardiners Island, I learned how to think like a striped bass. I know my business, and I know there’s a lot of things that the biologists don’t know. I bet I released ten thousand little bass from my traps this year alone, and I had some in there weren’t no bigger than cigars! Are you tellin us that fish that size come from the Chesapeake? Well, we know that they ain’t, and the biologists know that, too. I called up Byron Young, told him to come down and have a look, because I was still tryin to cooperate with the D.E.C. And Byron says, ‘Hell, fish that size ain’t supposed to be here!’ Now, how come that ain’t in your reports?”

  (“Byron Young told us that he wasn’t going to take a position for the bass bill or against it, but it was pretty clear he was against it because he helped Tony Taormina work out the D.E.C.’s original rejection of the twenty-four-inch limit,” Arnold Leo of the Baymen’s Association told me. “Later we saw a letter he wrote to Doig, saying he fully endorsed the bill. I guess he had to keep his job. Cohalan, he was for us, too, and he also let us down at the last minute, just when we were sure the governor would veto the bill. The governor’s people told me they asked Cohalan whether he favored twenty-four or eighteen inches, and I guess he was running scared against Halpin and figured there were more votes for twenty-four. And Cuomo figured if the county supervisor endorsed the bill, he was safe politically himself, and so he signed it. So much for bureaucrats and politicians.”)

  “They say ignorance is bliss,” Mickey Miller continued. “Well, we hate to give up our livin for the sake of ignorance and politics. And that’s what I’m doin, losin my livin. I bought my first house just a few years back, I was sendin my daughters to college—how am I goin to pay the mortgage on that house? Or tell them kids I can’t afford tuition? I hate to say it, but I lose faith in my country, seein these things happen.”

  Donnie Eames, young vice-president of the Baymen’s Association, asked why the new law went into effect not only in the best part of the season, without letting the fishermen phase out, but also on a Monday, which cost them an additional half-week. There were no pickups by market trucks between Thursday night and Sunday, so that all fish caught in the three days before the deadline would be illegally “in possession” on November 7, which was Monday morning. “How come nobody thought of that, before this stupid law went through? How come nobody thought about us at all?” And a voice from the audience shouted out, “They weren’t thinkin about us, and they weren’t thinkin about bass, they were thinkin about votes on November 8!”

  (When I asked him why the department had imposed that arbitrary November 7 date, a D.E.C. man shrugged his shoulders and said, “Politics.” He was clearly sympathetic with the commercial men, and gave the impression that the wardens would not extend themselves to enforce the new law, which they perceive as essentially unenforceable. “One man is covering all the beaches and bays between Southampton and Montauk, and in the bays he has no boat; what’s he going to come up with?” Asked why Colvin had thrown out the department’s best judgment on the bass, as reflected in the opinions of Anthony Taormina and Byron Young, he shrugged again. “Years ago we had a commissioner who was really hammering hard on General Electric for all the PCBs it was pouring into the Hudson,2 and G.E. went to the governor and threatened to pull out of the state, taking all those jobs. The next thing you know that commissioner was gone, and the guy who replaced him had his orders; just hang out, look like you’re doing something. Well, these people we have now look like they’re doing something.” He shook his head. “Byron Young never believed this bill would do a damned thing for the bass, and said so, but I guess they told him to shut up and get into line.”)

  Tom Lester, who has traps in Northwest and Three Mile Harbor and also sets fykes for snapping turtle in fresh ponds and diamondback terrapin in the salt marshes, supported the statements of Mickey Miller and others that the twenty-four-inch limit would cripple the bay fishery. Tom is a big man with a big belly, and he demanded to know with a big growl if any bayman had ever laid eyes on a tagged Chesapeake bass? Although the tagging program was already in effect when Tom was born, in 1940, his question was met with a loud, violent “NO!”3

  Big Tom—besides his Cousin Albie, the only Round Swamp Lester (“We’re the originals,” he says) who fishes full-time—has strong feelings about such matters as pollution of the creeks by cesspools, road construction, and marinas; the plague of licenses
and permits that the men must apply for; the loss of rights-of-way to town waters such as Three Mile Harbor through the town’s own actions. “I think it’s a conspiracy, I don’t think the town wants us here,” he says. “Too much money in tourism. They build a lot of tennis courts—what local people ever use tennis courts?—but they won’t spend a little money for a right-of-way.” Asked if he would ever give up working on the water, he says gruffly, “Probably, if I didn’t have no arms or legs.”

  Like most baymen, Tom Lester sees a difference between “people who catch fish” and full-time fishermen, who obviously require something besides money. In certain years, certain fishermen did very well, but most years a lot of money and long hours were invested for a very uncertain return. (“Ever eat black duck for breakfast?” Tom says, recalling a hard winter when he and his family subsisted on wild fowl and flounder.) “However, I got nobody tellin me what to do, where to go, or how to do it; that’s what I like about fishin.” Though he fished with Francis for seven years, and enjoyed his Posey cousins, Tom never much liked seining on the beach: the constant bickering among men who had their own stubborn ideas about almost everything—Tom is no exception—persuaded him that he’d rather work alone. Stuart Vorpahl, Jr., another one-time seiner who is now a trapper, feels the same way: he speaks of “the peace of mind, and a real, real heavy sense of freedom. The only individuals I have to deal with are the gulls, and I don’t understand them, and they don’t understand me, and we get along fine.”

  “I’m Stuart Vorpahl, Jr., from Amagansett, and I’m bitter,” this man said as he stood up. “How come you people don’t go after Dupont Chemical and General Electric and Hercules? The mess down in the Chesapeake ain’t our problem, but we’re the ones payin for it.”