Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  The trappers were trying to make the most of a good spring run of loligo, or long-finned squid. (Fresh squid, though delicious, is treated in this country with as much suspicion as scallops and mussels, blowfish and monkfish used to be, and is mostly in demand as bait.) Those doing best were Stewart and Calvin Lester, whose traps were in the Water Fence stretch between Hicks Island and Hither Hills. In a single day, Stewart had bailed 6,700 pounds of squid from his two traps, together with a few weaks, butterfish, and porgies; Calvin and his partners had taken 7,000 pounds in one day, 5,500 the next. The price remained high because much of the squid being taken offshore by the draggers was being sold to Japanese processing ships for export, leaving a strong market for the local catch. However, Massachusetts boats that had sold formerly to a Spanish ship were dumping their catch on the New York market, and the price, as usual, was falling.

  Down at Lazy Point, Stewart Lester shoved his yellow skiff into the harbor channel between Lazy Point and Hicks Island, and we headed east into the dawn. “That’s Mickey’s trap there,” Stewart said, pointing at a trap hard by the chimney ruin of the old bunker factory on Hicks Island, “and that’s Herbie Eames, and Stuart Vorpahl—steel trap, y’know, built that himself—and that next one’s Donnie Eames, then me, then Calvin, then me again—hell, there’s traps all the way along to Jimmy Lester, in Fort Pond Bay, and on down to Gin Beach. But most of the big squid run this spring was right in here off Water Fence, Calvin and me; them guys to the west of us didn’t do much.”

  Off Water Fence, where a road comes down through Hither Hills to Gardiners Bay, Stewart worked his way around the pound, or box—twenty by thirty-two feet in dimension—lifting the netting toward the surface and hitching it to the hickory and oak stakes before bailing the catch into the boat. Most of the haul was loligo squid of a strong reddish color, and the water in the trap was black with ink, but the thousands of pounds taken earlier this season had diminished now to a few hundred, in addition to a half-carton of porgies, a few fluke and blowfish, a single small weakfish, and a big tautog. A dozen horsefoots were saved for his son’s winkle pots; the crabs, sea robins, skates, daylights, and short bass we tossed over the side.

  Earlier this spring Stewart had had seven or eight salmon in his traps, and Calvin had caught some salmon, too. “They can’t get into them polluted rivers over there”—he pointed north between the islands toward the gray-blue shadow of New England—“so they’re comin back over here to our clean water.”

  Flying down the coast in his fast sharpie, Calvin pulled alongside to see how we were doing. He had already lifted his two traps, and had twice as many squid as we had, but it was clear that the spring run was near its end. In the last fortnight he has gone back to the beach, where a few big bass and blues were turning up, but with this stiff wind from the southwest it was too rough on the Backside; it looked as if he would have to tong for clams. Calvin wiped the salt spray from his glasses and took off again, long blond hair flying, pounding west across the chop toward Napeague Harbor. (“He’s always going somewhere,” says his wife, Diane, who has resigned herself to Calvin’s intense ways.)

  According to Stewart, the younger fishermen have grown lazy (“If my dad could see how they fished today, he’d have a fit.”). He made an exception of his cousin Calvin, who was still “grindin it” in the old way. “Got to, if you’re gonna make it full-time, got to go from this to that. But most of the fellas fishin now are just makin a few extra bucks in their spare time. Ain’t but twenty, twenty-five of us full-timers left that know where to go accordin to the tide, and most all of ’em’s Lesters and Havens.

  “When I get done packin these few fish, I’ll go on home, rest a little, and around noon I’ll be out in this old boat again, tongin clams in Three Mile Harbor, maybe pin-hookin for porgies, whichever looks best. People think them things is easy cause anybody can do it, but you got to know where to go and when. There’s a world of difference between a good clammer and a fella who’s just out there clammin, and pin-hookin porgies fast enough so you’re makin a day’s pay, the way them older fellas like Uncle Bill and Johnnie Erickson do it, that’s a kind of art.”

  The day before, I’d run into his cousin Lewis, who had pin-hooked thirty-five dollars worth of porgies early that morning and was complaining that he had had to quit to go to work. Complaining, with Lewis, has always been a half-humorous nervous habit, and Stewart rolled his eyes—“He don’t never stop!” I mentioned the day nearly thirty years before when Lewis had asked me to join his new haul-seine crew, saying he needed a good, experienced man. “Must have been desperate,” I said, to hide my pride in it, and Stewart stopped bailing fish long enough to squint at me. “You was experienced, by Jesus, after three years with my old man! You graduated from Cap’n Ted’s School of Hard Knocks, and you done it in them years when you had to row!”

  Stewart skittered a daylight over the side. “The captain’s captain! Remember how he hollered that day down Hither Plains when we both broke an oar on the same side, goin off? You was on bow oars, me in the middle and him settin net—he wouldn’t let Richard go in the dory because Richard wouldn’t put his back into it, the Captain said. Weren’t no weather to go anyways, no good slatches at all. And next thing I know I hear ol’ Pete catch his breath behind me—Jees-us!—and I look back, and then I look up, because up was where that goddamn sea was, over your head! Talk about puttin our back into them oars! We stood up and heaved, but that damn sea must’ve sucked all the wash right out from beneath us, dropped the boat, and them old oars of his struck into the sand, busted right off with the boat’s weight comin back, and that sea rolled the dory broadside, filled her up, and net all over the place—oh, that was some hell of a mess, bub, that was!

  “So the old man was runnin in every direction, gettin things back together, damned if he weren’t goin to try her again, remember? Yellin at us and me yellin at him; used to get so mad sometimes, I’d drive right off the beach! Trouble was, he was always right, that’s what bothered me the most!” Stewart laughed. “Just like me and Teddy! But that was one day he was wrong. Shoved us off at the wrong time, and on a day when we should never have gone off in the first place.”

  On the way in, we met Mickey Miller at the landing. “Can’t change my luck,” Mickey said, looking over Stewart’s catch. When Stewart reminded him of the five good years he had had earlier, he did his best to grin, without much success. “Can’t put those years on the table, can I?” Mickey said. Not long thereafter, Mickey took his trap nets out, and he did not bother to put them back in the late summer, preferring to scallop rather than deal with the fall run of short bass.

  Rough weather persisted through the soft June season of white potato blossoms and ocean fogs shrouding the fields. The sea winds continued through a fortnight of July; Danny King’s crew5 made just three hauls in two weeks. In the mid-seventies, Danny had built a pleasant house with a small swimming pool, but these days, sand eeling and clamming, he felt lucky to make enough to pay for groceries. His seven-year-old son, Danny Junior, has cerebral palsy, and was soon to be hospitalized with complications; Danny, already broke, looked haunted. “We’ll just have to grind it a little harder, is all,” he said. Yet when I left the beach, Danny yelled after me, “Where you goin, bub? Better take home a couple fish to eat!” When I yelled back that he’d better catch some first, Danny held his open hands out wide, then grinned and waved.

  In late July, Calvin’s crew landed 180 cartons of bluefish, weaks, and a few bass. Although the bluefish had already fallen from ninety to twenty-five cents a pound, it was the best haul made so far this year. Richard had picked that day not to show up, and was so disgusted that he announced his retirement from fishing. “Meant to do it last year, by the Jesus, make better money doin somethin else! I’m gettin sick of all this aggravation!” Next time I saw him, in the fall, he was back on the old family crew with Jens and Francis.

  August 1 was a soft, humid day, and the Havens crew, making a set in front of G
urney’s Inn, was sweating hard as the men picked up the sand crabs after the haul. “Bad place to leave ’em!” William grunted, glancing up at the early risers on the sun decks. “Gets them tourists hollerin. Them people got us comin and goin. Don’t like it if a fish gets left on the beach and don’t like it if we throw ’em back and they wash up. Don’t like comin out here and settin their ass down on a sea robin, is what it is.”

  The CB radio was crackling in the truck, and William listened a moment, nodding his head. “Calvin done good again this mornin! Never misses, that fella. He’s lucky, he’s got the Posey smell, and he don’t never stop.” But this crew, too, had done all right, with twenty-two cartons of blues at eighteen cents, and two hundred pounds of bass at three dollars a pound.

  Striped bass were now worth fifteen times as much as bluefish, and the price of bluefish kept on falling. By late August, huge schools ranged everywhere along the beach, herding the bait against the shore and rolling in the breakers as they surged and chopped, chasing packed sand eels right up onto the sand. “Most fish my dad ever seen along this beach in his whole lifetime,” Benny Havens said. “Thirty-one solid miles of ’em right on shore, Montauk to Shinnecock! Why, we was kickin ’em out of the surf; never seen anything like that! Surfcasters as far as you could see, and every damn one of ’em with his rod bendin.”

  The markets were already refusing bluefish, and the crews did their best to unload the bag into the surf and throw back stranded fish that were still alive, but the new man on the Havens crew was too fed up to bother, slinging the blues any old way despite angry warnings from Billy Havens. Finally E.T. threw a fish at Billy, who went after him (“Look up t’other end and damned if I don’t see them two skirmishin around,” grinned Billy’s father, much amused). That day, E.T. quit the beach for good.

  Despite the crews’ efforts, the shore was littered with thousands of bluefish killed in the nets; in the calm hot weather they were there day after day. The swarming gulls could not keep up with them, and disgusted anglers and sunbathers cursed the netters. “Most horrifying thing I ever saw!” one surfcaster told me angrily, refusing to hear out my explanation that there was no way to return so many slammers, choppers, alligators, and gorillas—as the sportsmen call them—into the sea. Finally the crews quit the beach. “Them big blues chew up your nets so bad, wouldn’t have nothin left for fall,” Ben Havens said. “Market don’t want ’em, and ain’t nothin else comes in the nets. Ain’t nothin wants to mix with all them bluefish.”

  The bluefish moved in and out for three straight months, into November, the snapper blues attacking the spearing and sand eels, the bigger fish seizing everything in sight, snappers included, and grabbing at lures even when bursting with bait fish, swallowed whole. One big blue, before taking my plug, had been laid open by a fresh bite wound that must have been made by a frenzied fish of its own size. On many days there was a strike on every cast, until finally the anglers, sick of cleaning and eating bluefish, no longer able to give any away, went over to light tackle and barbless hooks, and even fly rods.

  To all the hue and cry about extinction, the bass itself had paid little or no mind. With Indian summer, striped bass appeared in greater numbers than the crews had seen in seven years. Throughout October, in warm steady weather, hauls up to several thousand pounds were common, and although these catches could scarcely be compared with the huge landings of the early seventies, the high market price made up much of the difference. At the Baymen’s Association meeting in October, a shouting and smiling atmosphere prevailed for the first time in two years, not only because of the unexpected bass run but also because the scallops, well spread out from Lake Montauk to Peconic Bay, would probably see most of the men through the long winter.

  On November 6—Election Day—the beach crews made their biggest hauls since 1978, according to Billy Havens, “the year most of these rigs last got new trucks.” That day the Havens crew was entirely composed of Havenses—William’s brother Lindy, his nephew Fred, and his three sons. Nick Havens, who had recently lost a fingertip on the dragger Tide Three, had filled in for his father, who was out with a bad back; the best William could do was drive down to the beach landing and watch the trucks and dory in the distance. “Knew that was a charge o’ bass soon as the bag come in, even from a good ways off. Don’t know how I knew it, but I did.”

  On the east end of Long Island, in the fall of 1984, there were more bass caught by anglers and commercial men than in any year since 1978, with steady and profitable hauls of legal fish throughout October. On November 6, there were landings of nearly sixty thousand pounds by five crews making one or two sets each—considerably more in a single morning than was taken in most of 1983. Since the crews were spread out along eight miles of beach, the thirty tons of legal fish caught in the nets must have been but a fraction of the huge body of striped bass congregating that day off the south shore. Many of these fish were big—much too big to have been spawned in the last good Chesapeake spawning of six years ago. Where had these fish come from? For years biologists have been saying that 90 percent of the striped bass in this region originated in the Chesapeake, but in May 1984, the D.E.C.’s Byron Young acknowledged that at least half of these fish came from the Hudson, and much higher estimates have been made since.6 Increasingly, so it appeared, striped bass from northern estuaries were moving into the ecological niche emptied out by the decline of the southern migrants.7

  Or perhaps they have been here all along. Bill Lester says that in “open winters when warm water comes in from the Gulf Stream, brings some bait, we have fished bass practically all winter.” In March 1984, the ocean draggers were taking large nonmigratory bass on the continental shelf, six or seven miles offshore, at fourteen fathoms, while other big bass were reported overwintering in deep channels near the mouths of Connecticut rivers. These signs, together with the shoals of little bass in the traps and nets, all point to regional populations of unknown size and distribution. The one thing that can be said for sure is what the baymen have been saying all along, that the information on bass distribution on which most legislation has been based is woefully incomplete, therefore inadequate.

  Possibly the big fish that turned up this year are old Chesapeake cows that for some reason convened off the South Fork, but the same cannot be said of all these small ones. One day this year the Havens crew released myriads of these little fish—more than fifteen hundred pounds—from a single haul, and many more bass even smaller must be passing through the mesh. Since all the evidence suggests that “stripers do not travel far until they are two years old,”8 what is the source of these little bass, some of them no larger than big minnows? Could bass be spawning in the Peconic River, or in our tidal creeks, or the coastal ponds that are opened periodically to the sea? Are many of these little bass devoured by the hordes of bluefish, as Bill Lester suggests? (A boat angler9 who works the north rip at Gardiners Island told me recently that he has found small bass in his gutted blues.) If so, then the inevitable end of the bluefish cycle might permit the return of the striped bass that the baymen so wistfully predict.

  On November 7, the wind backed around to the northwest, knocking the seas down, and the air turned cold. Some school bass would move along the beach until mid-December, but “the heighth of the bass” was already over. Flocks of black scoters, down out of the north, hurried across the wind in tight black bunches, and bone-white gannets with their big brown young moved in off the Atlantic to fish with the loons and cormorants along the bar.

  The dories went off in silhouette on the cold pewter sea. The first day after the big haul, Calvin’s net got sanded twice on the way in, and the most bass taken that day (by Danny King) was two hundred pounds. “Never get bass two days in a row.” “Never get bass with them big rock crabs.” “Never get bass when you see them shitepokes”—the men laughed, mimicking these old sayings, knowing that, whatever happened, they would survive to fish another year. “Hell, we don’t know nothin,” Lindy sighed. “And we
never did.”

  EPILOGUE

  In the winter of 1985, beginning in mid-February, the East End draggers made small but regular catches of striped bass, which were widely interpreted as good evidence of a local and increasing bass population independent of Hudson and Chesapeake stocks. In the spring, small bass showed up early and in good numbers in the traps and seines.1 (On April 27, in Calvin Lester’s bunt, I saw a 12-inch bass with a bright yellow Maryland tag on it. This fish and another that showed up a few days earlier in the Havens nets were the first products of the twenty-year Chesapeake tagging program that these men had ever seen.)

  One morning in early May, Danny King’s crew took an estimated ten thousand pounds of bass, all of which were returned into the surf. Farther east on the same day, the Havens and Calvin Lester crews released another ton of bass between them. But because of the disputed data on bass numbers and the disputed data on PCBs and the tangle of restrictive legislation that had resulted, even the large fish had to be let go, and this at a season, after the hard winter, when the men were broke. By May 8, when the bass season began, the weather was fitful and the fish so scattered that Danny King took his crew off the beach, by no means certain he would come back in the fall. Two crews were left where once there had been seven to ten, and both were to suffer the loss of a key man.

  At a Baymen’s Association meeting in late April, Donnie Eames announced that he was giving up fishing for a caretaker’s job at the Amagansett School, and no one doubted that there would be others. “I was just beatin my head against the wall,” he told me a week later on the Flag Set at Amagansett, where he was making his last haul as a regular on Calvin Lester’s crew. “Calvin’s still kinda stiff about it, but when you have young kids you got to have some kind of security.” He shook his head. “That decision was the hardest of my life.”