Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  Stuart’s grandfather had come originally from Sayville, on the Great South Bay; his maternal grandfather4 was a swordfisherman who in 1950 built the first charter boat dock in Montauk harbor. Stuart Vorpahl, Sr., the founder of Stuart’s Seafood, was born, lived, and died on Oak Lane, Amagansett, across the Montauk Highway from Poseyville. He hauled seine in the spring and fall, hand-lined for sea bass and set winkle pots in summer, and went codfishing (and fur trapping), during the winter. In recent years, Stuart Jr. has built a big steel trap down at Napeague; he is also an East Hampton Town trustee.

  Stuart Vorpahl said that small “summer weakfish” had been so thick back in ’52 that their schools had extended all the way from Promised Land on the bay side around the Point and down the ocean beach to Fire Island, only to vanish almost entirely the next year. Not until 1974 did a few big weaks appear in his trap at Culloden Point. “Them weakfish tumbled, then the blowfish, and the next year there weren’t none at all! Now they’re comin back a little, and them bass will come back, too. It ain’t man that takes care of that, it’s Him up there!” Shouting, Stuart pointed at the ceiling, and the younger men in the audience grinned and looked down at their shoes. (Tom Lester admits with discomfort that his mother once begged him not to lift his eel-pots on Easter Sunday, and when he gave in to her, and lifted the next day instead, he was rewarded by a record haul of 1,100 pounds of eels that slithered out of his truck all the way home. For such rare blessings, the older generations in the fishing families can give credit to the Lord, but most of the younger people cannot do so.) “We can survive with Mother Nature’s laws,” Stuart Vorpahl continued. “We cannot survive with the laws of man, not laws like these!” This time the young fishermen cheered.

  When I ran into Stuart two weeks later, he seemed less bitter than bewildered. “I just don’t think those politicians realize what they have done,” he said.

  Doig acknowledged that the polluters of the Chesapeake had not been dealt with, and said that New York State’s pressure on its own industries was apparently the cause of the strong resurgence of the Hudson River bass. He also said that his department was in hopes that regulations might be changed in a few years, once the Chesapeake spawning population was reestablished. This brought a new groan from the fishermen, for most of whom “a few years” would be too late. Anyway, everyone knew that the Chesapeake stripers would never return until these bureaucrats mustered enough guts to demand the restoration of the bay. Until then, the only enforceable law would be a moratorium on possession or sale of striped bass in any state at any time. When someone mentioned the Rhode Island moratorium, it brought a despairing cheer from the whole audience.

  19.

  The Seine Crews:

  Autumn

  For the next two days, the surface of the sea was calm, but big rollers came in from a distant ocean storm, and no dory could go off through the surf. On Sunday, November 6—the last day that small bass could be taken legally for local sale—the Havens crew went down before daylight to the easternmost set, known as Umbrella Stand, where a beach pavilion had once stood in Montauk’s heyday. It was a beautiful clear windless morning, with autumn warmth in the early sun out of the ocean, and a deep red color in the beach plums on the cliffs, but the smooth rollers were too big for the dory, and the fishermen sat in their trucks and watched the surfcasters, shoulder to shoulder, drag big bluefish flopping from the sea. “Week ago today,” Benny Havens said, “right here, we had the biggest haul of bass we made this year. Know what it was? Maybe eight boxes! And them fellas there”—he pointed at a knot of surfcasters—“them ones that’s throwin back their bluefish cause they ain’t no money in ’em, they come over and told us we was destroyin the striped bass, it was goin extinct, just like the buffalo!”

  “Just like the buffalo!” Billy Havens said, disgusted. He described the time, back in the seventies, when they had taken the rig south right after the bass season to haul seine at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. “All the crews from up here went that first time, and we took over the whole stretch of beach; didn’t know we was doin it, you know, but we put them local boys right out of business. We done so good that the fella that run the packin house come down and told us that he wasn’t goin to take no more of our fish. Them Rebels had told him that if he did, they was goin to burn that packin house right to the ground, so we went home. But another year just this one crew went, us two and Lindy and Pete Kromer and our cousin John. And they kind of took to us at first, cause we helped ’em out, you know, and showed ’em things. But then we got 1,245 boxes in one set, and I guess that kind of changed their attitude.”

  Billy whistled, as if exhausted by the memory. “We was thirty-six hours nonstop on that one haul. A lot of them fish was eighty pounds or better, had to be, it took a man on both ends to heave ’em up into the truck. And they was full of roe; the roe was just runnin out of all them fish, I got sick of the smell of it. Them fish must be goin up into all them rivers! That is the home of bass down there, the home of bass! We landed two thousand boxes in three days. And not long after that them Rebels got the federal government to outlaw haul-seine rigs from out of state in the goddamn Carolina fishery.”

  We waited a couple of hours, watching the ocean, in the hope that the seas might diminish when the tide turned. “Had a lighter boat, now,” William Havens said, pointing at a narrow break in the wave pattern, “we could go off right in that little place there, scoot right through quick.” Though William does not complain except in a joking manner, one of his crewmen told me that he had been depressed all year by the poor fishing. The crew has made about one half of last year’s earnings, which were already the lowest in recent memory. Both bass and weakfish have been scarce this autumn, and a few days before the crews were notified not to ship any more bluefish to the market.

  Any day now, the small bass would start to show up in the nets, and no one knew just what would happen. William shook his head. “Brent Bennett told me yesterday that them small bass are just strikin in to his gill nets around Gardiners, but they ain’t goin to be no good to nobody.”

  Doug Kuntz, who has fished with the Havens crew for many years, repeated Stuart Vorpahl’s observation that the baymen were “walking around like dead men.” Speaking quietly, Doug said, “It’s true. The fishermen seem to have lost their spirit, all but Calvin; that guy is amazing. He just fishes hard day after day, just looks straight ahead, never lets it bother him, no matter what. Until two years ago, this crew was high hook on the beach, nobody near us, but it’s Calvin now, and even Calvin’s getting wired.

  “It’s not just the lack of fish, it’s all the pressure. The sportsmen and tourists crowding them off the beach, and the cost of living. Used to be that the farmers and fishermen were this whole town; now the town doesn’t care about ’em any more, all they care about is the goddamn resort economy. Benny has had to tell his kids that they’re going to have to find some other way to make a living, or else there’s no way they can even afford to live here. That’s a hell of a sad thing to have to say in a fishing family. Because the Havens and the Lesters are the main fishing families left, and Benny thinks that in ten years they’ll all be finished.”

  On Monday, November 7, the day the bass law went into effect, Pete Kromer’s crew seined 5,800 pounds of large bass at Hither Plains, one of the best hauls recorded in these failing years, and the Havens crew had 3,300 pounds not far to the eastward, at Umbrella Stand. These landings did not include the undersize bass scattered among big flopping cows of forty pounds or better. The Havenses had 500 pounds on Tuesday, November 8, and 980 pounds the following day, and this first—and last—good week of the bass season was spiced by the Election Day defeat of the bass bill’s sponsor, Patrick Halpin.

  Most of the crews culled their large bass out of piles of giant bluefish. With thousands upon thousands of attendant gulls, the blues were ranging everywhere along the beach, and the surfcasters caught as many as they wanted. I had a twelve and a fifteen-pounder on Electio
n Day, and took one still larger in a few minutes on the beach the following afternoon. In the market, the price on bluefish fell to ten cents a pound. As William Havens said, it was painful to see so many tons of bluefish dumped back into the surf when so many people in the country had to go hungry. “Ain’t that somethin, now, bein a fisherman and not wantin to catch such a good fish?” Although some blues, freed fast enough, survived the shock and beating of the nets, this species is much more volatile and less well-armored than the bass, which is designed for rocks and surf, and many of those returned into the water washed up again farther down the beach.

  Inevitably the sportsmen’s magazines decried the callousness and waste of this “dirty fishery.” Yet all American fisheries are dirty because so many edible species go to waste as trash fish—too bony or ugly to attract overprivileged consumers. Countless tons of fine protein are destroyed each year that would be precious anywhere else on earth, including Europe, and the waste is much more damaging to the commercial men than it is to the sportsmen, who rarely show much righteous indignation when dogfish and daylights and sea robins die in the nets.

  Jens and Francis’s crew was the only one that had not had at least one good catch of bass, and on Thursday morning it was first to arrive on the Montauk set in front of Gurney’s Inn, where Calvin had had good fishing all that week. (“We’re not competin,” Danny King says, “but if one guy catches fish in one spot for a couple of days, another crew will say, ‘Well, they’re not goin to have that set tomorrow morning, we’re gonna be there.’ ”) Autumn fogs under the crescent moon of the night before had been a sign of a change in weather, and by dawn the wind had shifted to the eastward. The crews hurried to make a haul before the sea became too rough to set.

  No crew that morning had more than a few bass in the nets, and Francis was discouraged. “No matter where we go,” he said, “we can’t seem to get it right.” He started to pick blues from the net, wandered away, then picked briefly somewhere else, as if too disheartened to work systematically. There was no hurry anyway, since with blues everywhere, and the longshore current accumulating with the east wind, none of the crews would make a second set. He called to the younger men to save a few blues for local sale, to pay for gas, but they continued skittering the fish in the general direction of the sea, and Francis shrugged. “They’re just sick and tired of havin these things chew hell out of the net, sick of havin to ice ’em and pack ’em up and ship ’em and not get nothin for it but more net-mendin. In all my life I never seen so many big bluefish, not as late as this, and looks like we’re stuck with ’em, too, long as the ocean stays so warm.”

  Down the beach to the eastward another crew was finishing a haul, and driving past I recognized the man standing in the truck bed, on the ocean sky, as Lindy Havens. He had a gray mustache and long gray sideburns, but otherwise he was the same tall, rangy, and good-looking man with big hands and big ears who had once vowed to throw his congressman into the surf.

  As I approached, Lindy’s glance looked dim and guarded, without the humor I remembered, and when I said, “Don’t guess you know me,” he turned back to the winch, saying, “Don’t guess I do.” But when another man yelled across the wind, “Where you been, bub? Ain’t seen you around in years!” Lindy turned back for a better look. Reminded of that disastrous haul back in 1954, when all those fish had poured out of Ted’s bunt, he nodded somberly. “I remember that day, all right. Don’t forget a thing like that. I seen one other bunch like that, fishin with Bill around ’68, only that day we saved most of ’em, must have landed pretty close to four hundred boxes. They ain’t beat that yet, not around here. And even that was nothin like we seen in ’73, down in Carolina—thirty-eight truckloads! Thought we’d never get off the beach, it was a nightmare! Caught too many, that’s what we done. Didn’t mean to, but we caught too many. With all them fish, there was no price on ’em, and that one haul, more than anything else, got outside crews kept out of Carolina. All we done was teach them fellas how to fish. They never had no waders and no winches, not even a bag in the goddamn net! Used to run down into the water, try to gaff those fish up on the beach!”

  The other crewman, Milton (Minny) George, was observing me carefully, trying to place where he had seen me a quarter century before. Finally he said, “Didn’t you work one year over there t’the seine house at Promised Land?” When I shook my head, he said, “Could swear I seen you there. Ain’t you the one had that old double-ender, that one still had the bark on the double hull?” Pleased to run into someone who recalled the Vop-Vop, I told him that sometimes while out scalloping, she had put into Promised Land for fuel. “Thought that was you,” Minny said, very pleased, too; he is celebrated among the fishermen for his strong memory, and so is his mother, who was born around the turn of the century and still loves to eat bunkers (“Sweet but bony,” as one fisherman says. “Takes quite a while to pick ’em bones out. That’s why we say, when a feller is late, Where you been, bub? Home eatin bunkers?”).

  Another veteran, Don Eames, Sr., was on the far wing with Pete Kromer, who had bought Ted Lester’s rig back in the sixties; this crew was the most experienced on the beach. A man loading the net looked familiar, too, and when Minny spoke to him, I recognized Lindy’s old partner, Dominick Grace. Dom-Dom had lost some teeth and looked his age, but he yelled at Lindy as peevishly as ever as the bunt came into the surf—“Goddamn it, Lindy, pull her in, don’t you see the other side? You’re runnin ’at goddamn winch too slow again!” Minny George winked gleefully, and I laughed. Lindy and Dom had always hollered at each other, and as in the old days, the abuse served to ease the suspense of bunting up, and was ignored. But the bag held another haul of useless bluefish; there were seven or eight bass altogether. “That weather’s got to change, clear out them bluefish, fore we do any good at all,” Minny said.

  On November 17, at the first monthly Baymen’s Association meeting after the bass bill had been enforced, the fishermen stood with caps in hand and hands on hearts, pledging “allegiance to the flag and to one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In an old-fashioned way, without waving the flag, the baymen are very patriotic, and many are conscientious citizens; they work in the volunteer fire department and maintain a volunteer lifeboat service—the Dory Rescue Squad—at their own expense. In recent weeks they had turned down an offer of financial help from an outside friend, fearing the money’s allocation might cause trouble; not long thereafter they pitched in generously to help a bayman whose son required prolonged care in the hospital. In this time of hardship, the sight of these men lined up facing the flag gave me a funny tingling around the temples.

  President Danny King was absent, and Vice-President Donnie Eames presided, with Secretary Arnold Leo doing most of the talking. A number of topics were discussed, including the news that the Hudson River bass were officially edible because of lower residues of PCBs found in the flesh; however, a commercial bass season in the Hudson, would not be opened for at least another year. Also discussed was the death the night before of the popular bay constable, Jack Conklin (already constable when I was on the beach); the associate membership of Jeff Eames, aged fifteen (“Better fisherman than his father!” Calvin Lester hooted as Herb Eames, Jr., grinned); the use by the Coast Guard Auxiliary of docking space at the Commercial Dock in Three Mile Harbor, which might interfere with sand eel seining. “Goddamn it,” Richard Lester shouted, “What is this horseshit? What are you guys arguing about? Them people is savin lives and property! You’re broke down out there on the bay, you ain’t goin to be worryin none about no dock space, nor sand eelin, neither!” As other people shouted back (“You’d be the first to holler, Richard!”) Richard nudged me comically, rolling his eyes. “Guess I’ve had my say for tonight,” he said.

  These days Richard is “baitin” (seining silverside minnows, called spearing, or whitebait) in Georgica Pond, and “gettin by all right, I guess; long as I get by, I’m happy.” But he hesitated—“Got to put bread on the t
able”—before putting his dollar in the raffle, half of which goes for the potato chips, soda pop, and beer after the meeting and the other half to the winner. Richard won. “First thing that come out right in months,” he muttered, returning to his seat with his twelve dollars. “My luck must be changin.” A few days later he injured his back while serving as a volunteer fireman and was laid up for the rest of the year.

  Some proposed bass bill amendments were discussed, and everyone got serious. A uniform eighteen-inch limit for New York State was probably too sensible to be accepted, and so was a summer moratorium on resident bass. The prospects for a hundred-pound daily allowance of small bass taken while netting other fish might be much better, since the federal government had approved such “by-catches” in other fisheries. But no one contested Tom Knobel’s opinion that no amendment would work unless the D.E.C. endorsed it, which for the moment seemed very unlikely, and the meeting ended on a discouraged note. This fall, many part-time fishermen, such as Jarvie Wood’s younger brothers Dick and John, had not even bothered to put traps in. Under the twenty-four-inch law, it did not seem worth it.

  Drinking a beer after the meeting, a new man on one of the haul-seining crews had mentioned that someone had been calling up and bothering his wife. One of his fellow crewmen said, “Hell, I don’t never bother to call, I just go over there to your house and let her have it.” Another said, “Wish you’d fix that back step, bub; fella could hurt hisself,” and somebody else said, “Yeah, that back door light, too.” The new man had laughed easily, without protest; he understood that this teasing was a way of telling him he was accepted. And I had laughed, too, though the tone bothered me. There had always been rough teasing on the crews, but the teasing these days seemed much more aggressive, with an undertone of anger and frustration.