Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  In early spring I had visited Bill Lester, who shook his head over the loss of four young draggermen in the wild storm of March 29 that had raised winds up to eighty miles an hour and ocean waves thirty feet in height. The whole community had responded to the tragedy. Almost everyone knew at least one of the families, just as a much smaller community a half century before had known the stricken family of young Nat Edwards. The dragger Windblown, long-lining for tilefish south of Block Island, “was a steel boat, y’know, she wasn’t but four years old. But she had a plywood pilot house, and they found that pilot house way off to the westward. Must have blew off, or a big sea struck it, and once that happened, they was done. Them boys was on their way in from the east canyon,2 and when I first heard about it, I reckoned that boat went down under the Light. But now they tell me a dragger3 tore up his nets on a new fast that wasn’t there before, off to the south’ard; the hull must have drifted some, but we think that’s her.” The Windblown’s last radio report had indicated a location about twelve miles southeast of the Point, and any boatman who has ever crossed that reach of ledge and current in rough weather could testify to its twisting rips and big freak seas. Discussing the Windblown after the April baymen’s meeting, Stewart Lester rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, remembering his days of ocean lobstering, and describing how close he had once come to being overwhelmed by a huge following sea before he could spin his wheel and turn back into it.

  By April 16, 1984, when the spring bass season opened, the wild weather of early spring had not abated; for several days after, it remained too rough to permit a haul. Of the six rigs on the beach last fall, only three were ready, and not one had the same crew as five months before. A woman had telephoned Calvin Lester to say she had heard that his crew was through with ocean haul-seining and that the rig might be for sale; Calvin and Donnie Eames, who own the rig, were still angry ten days later.

  Jens Lester and Francis, discouraged by the fall season, were still fyking and eeling in the ponds and bays; they would not bother to scrape up a crew until a few fish came along. Danny King had lost his long-time partner, Bill Leland, who was cutting cordwood with his brother, and Pete Kromer’s crew of old-timers had dissolved. Lindy Havens and Don Eames, Sr., had joined the Havens crew in place of Billy and Young Fred, who had worked all winter on the draggers and figured that it made more sense to stay there. Doug Kuntz’s place had also been filled. When I went to Amagansett toward the end of April to see how things were going, Lindy and Don were still trying to show the new man how to work efficiently. “Take it easy, bub, don’t go learnin so fast!” Lindy was hollering. “Don’t want to learn too much too fast, you know!”

  This new crewman was Eddie Trufanoff, who had come to Bonac after high school from up-Island in the area of Massapequa. “E.T.,” as he was popularly known, was a good carpenter and mechanic who liked to hang around the fishermen, shrugging off in an amiable way the abuse and hard teasing he sometimes received for his chronic incompetence on the beach. He was also one of Lindy’s drinking partners, and he had been drunk that September day in Sagaponack when he accompanied the fishermen to picket Assemblyman Halpin. I remembered him now as the skinny young guy with untended straw hair, reddish stubble, and loose grin who waved a beer can as he reeled down Bridge Lane, hollering some anti-Semitic jibe against Halpin’s hosts. “Ain’t even a fisherman,” somebody said, knowing that this episode, which appeared in the papers, would do nothing to help the baymen’s cause. Nevertheless, the fishermen accepted him. Lindy, especially, liked E.T., if only for the fun that he provided. One day on the beach I asked E.T. how he was doing, and he looked at me warily before he said, “Not much.”

  Watching his new crewman wander around, William Havens shook his head. “Ain’t got his bearins yet, and don’t look like he will, do it? But can’t get nobody else, and you can’t blame ’em. Get some fish along, men’ll show up fast enough, but so far it don’t look so good, no, no.”

  William looped his line around the sand-shined winch, taking a strain; the line shivered, and the first hank of net bobbed up the beach. Picking up the free end of the line, Benny went down to tie on again, as William said, “Just can’t get fellas you can count on no more, you know that, Pete? Soon’s the fishin falls off, they take off, too, and even while they’re here, they ain’t much good. Bill and Ted, now, they never would put up with crew like that. Course they knew there were always men that could replace ’em. Remember how Ted used to unload the bag? Firin them fish back up onto the beach, usin both hands, like a dog diggin sand? One day there he had a fella was usin just one hand to pick up fish, had the other hand stuck in his pocket. And Ted got so excited he said, ‘Get your goddamn pants out of your pocket!’ Really tore into him, you know, and we never seen that fella on the beach again.”

  Captain Joshua (Jack) Edwards, attended by his dog, came down the beach using his cane. He is seventy-five and has recently had open-heart surgery, but like all the Edwards family, he is doughty. Casting off Benny’s tie-on hitch when William slacked up on the line, he carried the bitter end down toward the surf. “Goin to tie on for us, Jack?” Benny Havens said, taking the line, and Cap’n Jack said shortly, “Sure. Why not?”

  Jack’s cousin Dick, younger brother of Nat, who drowned back in ’33, runs one of the draggers in the fleet of twenty or more boats that were visible this morning off the ocean beach. His brother Kenneth, who was Nat’s partner on that April day, was still sailing his dragger out of Montauk in 1976, when he died of a heart attack while working as winter caretaker on Gardiners Island. The youngest brother, Norman, now sailing out of Cameron, Louisiana, was working his last season as a bunker captain. After nearly a century, the era of Edwards bunker captains was near its end.

  Leaving the beach, I ran into Cap’n Bill, who had driven his old green pickup down to the beach landing. “How’d them boys make out this morning?” He shook his head at the bad news that Danny had three bass and Benny none. It seemed to me that one problem was all those draggers; in addition to the local fleet, Massachusetts boats drawn to the freezer ships had been joined by others from Virginia and the Carolinas, and so many boats roiling the bottom might drive the fish offshore. “No, no,” said Cap’n Bill. “I don’t believe it. Cold spring, y’know, kept them fish off; one of these days they’ll be comin in thick as they ever was.” Bill gets more optimistic every day. Haul-seining with Calvin a few years ago, he used to say, “Ought to be seein one or two by now!” almost as soon as the jacks were in the surf.

  23.

  Bluefish Summer

  In the first days of May came changing weather, with big gray-green silver seas breaking in a misty sunlight on the bar and dark rain squalls and thunder-heads in every quarter. I drove my pickup down the beach to Georgica, where Jens Lester had fykes and eelpots in the pond. Georgica (named originally for Jeorg-kee, an Indian whaler employed by Jacob Schellinger “to go to sea and kill whales”1) is one of the long coastal ponds behind the beach—Sagaponack and Mecox are others—where the seaward flow of a freshwater stream had been sealed off by sand built up by the westerly set of the ocean current. In the fifties, shooting ducks on Georgica’s eastern shore, our favored method was to slip quietly up its long creeks in a canoe and pass-shoot the teal, wood duck, black duck, and mallard that would swim up to the head of the dreen before jumping up and flying back out over the canoe toward the open water.

  Greater yellowlegs whistled from across the pond, migrant sandpipers flew restlessly along the margins, and strings of spring cormorant, arrived from the south, were hurrying offshore to unseen fish sign in the ocean. The ocean beach had been scoured clean of litter by the fierce line storm on March 29 that had drowned the four young fishermen off Montauk, and the violent erosion of the dunes had exposed the small Wainscott beach club to the sea. The ill-conceived jetty east of the gut, jammed in by the Army Corps of Engineers, had been overwhelmed by sand within a few years of its construction, while the ocean had cut away the dunes behind it.
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  We launched an old boat from the west shore of the pond, and Jens tended the outboard while John Beckwith hoisted the keg-sized pots and dumped the eels into a garbage can, baited each pot with a chunk of horsefoot—“Females catch three times better than males; eels like them eggs”—and slid the pot back over the side. The horsefoot or horseshoe crab, an ancient creature—not a crab at all—occurs today on the west side of the Atlantic and also in the East Indies, halfway around the world, and nowhere in between; it has blue blood with important medicinal properties, black roe like caviar, and vulnerability to pollution of the wetlands, to judge from the fact that in recent years it is much diminished.

  Jens’ boat—an abandoned gunning punt—leaked very freely, and as our cargo increased, I was bailing steadily to keep the operation afloat. Some of the large pots, almost full, were rolling with live eels, while others, far back up in the coves where the water was warmer and spring algae were coating the wire mesh, had but two or three. One perch fyke contained an immense snapping turtle, and another turtle surfaced not far off, its dark head poking from the water like a rotten stick. These “torrops”—a local delicacy in the old days, stored live in slops barrels—are trapped and sent to market live in oil drums, but only a few baymen such as Tom Lester care to handle them. “You want to fish for them goddamn things, you let me know the day before, so I can be doin somethin else,” says John Beckwith, a draggerman who goes trapping in winter for muskrat, raccoon, and fox. His grandfather, Gene Beckwith, a well-known draggerman out of Montauk,2 died of a ruptured appendix suffered offshore while harpooning a swordfish, and his father, Paul, like so many fishermen in the region, had gone ocean haul-seining briefly with Ted Lester.

  Jens himself had fished with Ted in the early sixties, and laughed in recollection of the time that Stewart had come back to the beach to fill in for a missing crewman, then argued so violently with his father that he finally abandoned the whole set and drove one of the trucks away over the dunes. “He come back, though,” Jens remembered. After his apprenticeship with Ted, Jens went lobstering for three years. Eventually he joined his father’s beach crew, in an informal family fishing partnership that has lasted to the present day.

  Jens’s thirty pots produced at least three hundred pounds of slimy bronze-yellow fish, which writhed to the top of two big plastic garbage cans, in a strange white foam. Three fykes in the cove off Baiting Hollow Road3 produced a hundred pounds of big white perch, with a few alewives. “We’re doin pretty good in Georgica, so we don’t talk about it,” Jens said. “My Uncle Harry has some pots up at the other end, he’s the only one eelin besides me, and he don’t talk too much about it neither.”

  Late in the year, I ran into Harry Lester at the Marine Museum in Amagansett, where he was celebrating the Baymen’s Association Christmas party with his cousin Johnnie Erickson. Harry did not recall me from thirty years before, and when Johnnie said that I now lived in Sagaponack, he expressed vague resentment of outside people taking all the land. “How many generations you been here, bub?” Harry demanded, losing interest in his own question before I could answer. Although he had done all right this year, he talked poor out of old instinct, and congratulated me on my escape from fishing.

  “Ol’ Ding-Ding!” said another cousin, Donnie Eames, slapping Harry on the back. “Got to strap it to his leg, he does! Sonofabitch got enough there for all of us!” Harry is easy-going and good-natured, but he may be weary of his nickname after all these years; contemplating Donnie, the blue Posey eyes under the cap focused briefly in the ruddy unshaven face.

  Waving his beer can, Harry Lester gestured around the room. “Somethin’s the matter with us people,” he muttered. “Too many damn cousins. Weren’t enough women to go around back then; families got too close.” Twirling a finger at his temple, he laughed a sudden raucous laugh that reminded me of his brother Richard.

  In Easter week, the price on mackerel was already falling, due to heavy landings offshore and in New Jersey, and the crews were barely getting by with a few cartons of weakfish and shad picked out from the sea robins that were snarling up the nets of all three crews (“When the rob, rob, robin comes bob, bob, bobbin along,” Jimmy Reutershan would sing sourly at times like these). Bill Lester came down and retrieved some small brown robins, which he prefers to the big reddish species4 (and to bass and bluefish, too), but few nonfishermen care to fool with the spines of either breed. And seeing the tons of tasty robins dumped, pitchforked, hurled, and booted back into the sea, I regretted anew the great chance lost with the closing of the fish flour factory over in Greenport.

  Among the robins were some tiny silver bass, a small remnant of the many more that had sprinkled through the mesh, and the men speculated that the little fish might have come from local ponds such as Georgica and Sagaponack, where the gutways had opened up with the spring flooding, dumping the salt ponds’ life into the sea. Good numbers of small bass, six to twenty-one inches, were also entering the traps. In April and May, Stewart Lester told me, he had taken just one legal bass, and Calvin, Donnie, and Wally, with their four traps to the east and west of him, had done no better. Jimmy Lester had more small bass in his traps at Fort Pond Bay than he had ever seen in all his life. “For a while there we got nothing but short bass and trash fish, not a damn thing to take home!” Sandy Vorpahl told me later in the summer. “I was so upset that I just stood there yelling.” (The short bass has become a trash fish, her former brother-in-law Stuart Vorpahl observes bitterly.)

  On May 15, Danny King released about three hundred pounds of illegal fish. “When it’s clear bass, it’s okay,” Danny says, “because they can be dumped quickly, and most live. But where there is a load of trash fish, many bass are killed, or die before they can be returned to water. Bass are the last to enter the bag, they stay up in the throat, and we just don’t get to them in time.”

  Not all of the crews (nor all of the trappers, draggermen, and sportsmen) were returning all small bass into the sea. Beach trucks are vulnerable to inspection, and very few illegal bass were being shipped to market by the crews, but a lot of short bass were being filleted off for use at home. I was offered small fish more than once, and felt uncomfortable when I refused them. One day I tossed some back into the surf before I realized it was not up to me to do this, and I got in the habit of departing the beach soon after the haul, not caring to know who was stowing short bass under the tarps and who was not. (In early September some short bass and short fluke would be found in a routine D.E.C. check at Stuart’s Seafood, and it was common knowledge that good numbers of such bass were turning up one way or another at the Fulton Market, where they brought half the price of legal fish of the same size from Maryland and Virginia.)

  All spring, only the King and Havens crews attempted to make the daybreak haul each day. Though they kept a close eye on the beach, and hauled occasionally, Calvin, Donnie, and Wally were still trapping at Napeague, while Jens was tending traps at Fort Pond Bay. On May 8, when I went over to Two Mile Hollow on a day of rain squalls and increasing southeast wind, the Havens crew, on the Eagle Boat set, was the only one on the whole length of the beach. “One legal fish this mornin,” Benny Havens said. “Makes twelve altogether in three weeks of haulin.” The ocean fishing had just started to improve a little when an easterly storm that carried over into early June kept the crews idle for more than a week, in the worst season on the beach in memory.

  In this cold spring, the weakfish were late in arriving, and so were the small bluefish, which brought a good price at this time of year. Unable to put together a day’s pay, the men would leave the beach after the daybreak haul and go over to the bay. Benny was setting winkle pots, while Danny King, trying in vain to fill a contract to supply bait to a fishing station, was hunting for sand eels everywhere from Northwest Creek to Accabonac. Brent Bennett and Milt Miller did well after late May, gill-netting blues in Cherry Harbor and Bostwick Bay. Because so few were being taken, the price for blues was ninety cents a pound.
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  A scattering of large bass appeared in early June, but the Havens crew never caught more than three or four in the dawn haul, and Danny King’s crew did no better. In unseasonal weather, the ocean remained cold, and blues, weaks, butters, porgies, and fluke were scarce; with no money for fuel, the silent crews could not try their luck farther westward. On June 15 the winch broke on Danny’s truck, and Benny’s was already out of action. (“Can’t get parts for it. Got some goddamn kind of mishmash or morphadite axle part, I guess,” his father said.) Both crews had to operate with borrowed trucks, and still the men tried to remain cheerful. “Goin to give you a fish to eat,” Danny laughed, “just soon’s we catch one!” But later he said seriously, “No fish along at all. And when them fish come back, won’t make no difference, cause the tourists’ll holler till they throw us off the beach.” By November, Danny was predicting, the last beach rigs would be up for sale for next to nothing. “Call the bass endangered! You seen all them little bass? They ain’t near so endangered as we are!”