Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  The Stonington draggers range from thirty to seventy feet. They are built wide for their length and about as close to the water as tugs. Half have gasoline engines, and the other half, the newer ones, have Diesels. Each has a cramped pilothouse. Each has a combined cabin and galley containing from two to six bunks, an oilcloth-covered table, two benches, and a coal cookstove, on which there is always a big, sooty pot of coffee. Each has a mast and a boom, from which the towropes to the net depend. Each has a winch for hoisting the loaded net aboard. Each has a fish hold and an ice bin. The Stonington draggers are well made and sturdy and are frequently overhauled. Even so, lined up at the docks, with their seaweedy nets hanging every which way from their booms to dry and with the harbor gulls fluttering down to snatch fish scraps off their decks, they always look gone to pot. They cost from ten to forty thousand dollars. A few are owned by absentees, but the majority are owned by their captains, or by their captains and crews, who are Portuguese, Italians, and old-stock Yankees. They fish off eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island and on the coastal shelf south of Block Island in grounds known as the Mouth, the Yellow Bank, the Hell Hole, and the Mussel Bed, working chiefly in depths between sixty and a hundred and sixty feet. The crews prefer to stay on the grounds only one day at a time. They go out before dawn, weather permitting, and drag steadily all day, sorting and icing and barreling one haul while dragging for the next. They return at sundown and land their barrels, some at Bindloss’s dock – once known as the Hancock dock, which dates back deep into sealing days – and the others at Tony Longo’s dock, the old Steamboat Pier, which was used in times long past by the Stonington Line, whose side-wheel steamers ran daily between Stonington and New York. The barrels are loaded on trailer trucks owned by the proprietors of the docks and transported during the night to the stalls in Fulton Market. Occasionally, a dragger that has picked up an exceptionally heavy load does not go to its dock but makes an overnight run down Long Island Sound straight to the market. Stonington fish are among the freshest we get.

  A dragger is a small trawler. The principal difference between the Stonington draggers and the trawlers that work out of Gloucester and Boston and New Bedford and stay on the Nova Scotian banks a week a trip is size. Trawlers are two and three times the size of draggers. Both use otter trawls, which are heavy, clumsy, wide-mouthed, cone-shaped nets that are slowly dragged over the bottom and take in all the fish in their paths. The otter trawl towed by a medium-sized Stonington dragger, a fifty-footer, is a hundred and ten feet long. The mouth is eighty feet wide but puckers up to half that width when fishing; it is kept open by two doors, or otter boards, which are about as big as house doors and are rigged at such an angle, one on each side, that the pressure of the water flares them out. Towing this net at two miles an hour, a dragger can strip the fish off ten acres of bottom in an hour. Otter trawls snag easily on obstructions, and a snagged trawl usually has to be abandoned. They are expensive; the smallest, even when rigged with homemade doors, costs a hundred dollars. A Stonington captain once snagged three in one morning; he went home and got in bed and stayed there until Sunday, when he showed up in church for the first time in years, exclaiming brokenly, as he walked up the aisle, ‘Pray for me! Pray for me!’

  There are a great many shipwrecks, clumps of rocks, and other obstructions on the Stonington bottoms. The Hell Hole is the dirtiest. It is a ground of approximately six square miles in Block Island Sound, it is crisscrossed by coastwise shipping lanes, and there are two dozen wrecks lying in it, some of which always have rotting otter trawls hanging on them. Every now and then, after a gale or a hurricane has opened up a wreck and washed it out, a haul made in the Hell Hole is dumped on the deck of a dragger, and human bones – most often a skull or a pelvic bone; they seem to last the longest in salt water – are found among the fish. On the bottom of the Mussel Bed, a ground in the open ocean off Block Island, there is a group of immense beds of horse mussels, the lips of whose shells point upward and are jagged and sharp. Dragger captains must know the locations of these beds and keep acquainted with their endlessly changing contours, and they must take great pains to skirt them; a net that even grazes one will come up with scores of holes cut and chafed in its underside, through which the fish have escaped. This ground also contains some wrecks. One is a collier, the Black Point, which was torpedoed by a German submarine in May, 1945, in the last week of the European war. The submarine lies nearby; it was depth-bombed by a destroyer as it tried to get away. The Yellow Bank is a narrow ground that runs along the Rhode Island coast from the lighthouse at Watch Hill to Weekapaug Point, a distance of six miles, and its bottom is broken here and there by beds of sponges – elephant flop sponge, which grows in slippery yellow lumps the size of cabbages, and a limp, tentacular species called dead man’s fingers. Both of them are worthless. These animals do not damage nets, but they clog them, and they have to be sorted out of hauls, one by one, and thrown back, a time-wasting task. Some time ago, a net that had been dragged into a sponge bed came up bearing two and a half barrels of fish messily mixed in among approximately fifteen barrels of sponges. In the Mouth, a ground at the mouth of the Thames River, below New London, there are rank patches of seaweed, predominantly bladder wrack, the black, bulby kind on which live lobsters are displayed in the windows of seafood restaurants, and these have to be dodged for the same reason. All these grounds except the Mouth were entered a number of times during the war by enemy submarines, and Army and Navy aircraft dropped hundreds of aerial depth bombs in them, particularly in the Mussel Bed. Some of the heavier bombs, mostly six-hundred-and-fifty-pounders, stuck in the mud and did not explode, and are lying there still. They will be a menace for years, like the German mines in French farm land. There are suspect areas in the Hell Hole and the Mussel Bed that are shunned by draggermen and spoken of as the bomb beds. In the old days, when a winch creaked and back-fired as it began to hoist a net off the bottom, indicating an exceptionally heavy haul, crews were elated and someone always shouted, ‘Money in the bank!,’ but nowadays the noise of a straining winch makes them uneasy; the net might be heavy with flounders or it might have a bomb in it. Five draggers – the Carl F., the George A. Arthur, the Gertrude, the Marise, and the Nathaniel B. Palmer – have brought up bombs in their nets. The first four had their nets on deck before the bombs in them, hidden by fish, were discovered. Rather than attempt to dump them back, each went cautiously to the nearest dock, to which Navy bomb-disposal officers were summoned. The bomb caught by the fifth dragger, the Palmer, was plainly visible, but it exploded shortly after the net hove out of the water, while the crew stood staring at it, wondering what to do. It blasted the dragger and three of the four men in the crew to pieces; the fourth man was freakishly thrown clear.

  Because of these hazards – rocks, wrecks, mussel beds, sponge beds, bladder wrack, and bombs – it is necessary for a dragger captain to have a picture in his mind of what lies beneath every possible foot of water in the grounds he works. A captain’s standing among his colleagues and the amount of ice and oil he can get on credit from the dock proprietor are based on his knowledge of the bottoms and his thriftiness with gear, and not on the quantity of fish he catches. A raw captain may drag blindly and bring up huge hauls for a while, but sooner or later he will snag or mussel-cut so many nets that his overhead will eat up his profits. The most highly respected captain in the Stonington fleet is a sad-eyed, easygoing Connecticut Yankee named Ellery Franklin Thompson, a member of a family that has fished and clammed and crabbed and attended to lobster traps in these waters for three hundred years.

  Ellery – he says he is called Captain Thompson or Mr Thompson only by people who want to get something out of him – is captain and owner of the gasoline dragger Eleanor, which usually carries a crew of three, including himself. Ellery is forty-seven years old and has been a draggerman for thirty years. He has worked out of five Connecticut ports – New London, Groton, Noank, Mystic, and Stonington, all of which are close together �
� and out of two Rhode Island ports, Newport and Point Judith. Stonington has been his home port since 1930. He keeps the Eleanor at Bindloss’s dock, but he lives in New London, fourteen miles away, and drives an automobile to and fro. He lives in a four-gabled, shingle-sided, two-story house on Crystal Avenue. His widowed mother, Mrs Florence Thompson, keeps house for him. He used to sleep in a woven-wire bunk aboard the Eleanor and do his own cooking year in and year out, going home only for Sundays, but in recent years, because of rheumatism, he has got so he rests better in a bed. He says he has discovered that home life has one disadvantage. He is a self-taught B-flat-trumpet player. While living on the Eleanor, he spent many evenings in the cabin by himself practicing hymns and patriotic music. Sometimes, out on the grounds, if he had a few minutes to kill, he would go below and practice. One afternoon, blundering around the Hell Hole in a thick summer fog, he grew tired of cranking the foghorn and got out his trumpet and stood on deck and played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ over and over, alarming the crews of other draggers fogbound in the area, who thought an excursion boat was bearing down on them. After he went back to sleeping at home, he continued to practice in the evenings, but he had to give it up before long because of its effect on his mother’s health. ‘At that time,’ he says, ‘I was working hard on three hymns – “Up from the Grave He Arose,” “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I had “What a Friend” just about where I wanted it. One evening after supper, I went in the parlor as usual and Ma was sitting on the settee reading the Ladies’ Home Journal and I took the easy chair and went to work on “What a Friend.” I was running through it the second or third time when, all of a sudden, Ma bust out crying. I laid my trumpet down and I asked her what in the world was the matter. “That trumpet’s what’s the matter,” Ma said. “It makes me sad.” She said it made her so sad she was having nightmares and losing weight. Under the circumstances, I decided whatever trumpet practice I did in the future, I would do it four or five miles out at sea.’

  Ellery is five feet nine. He is thin and rather frail. Aboard the Eleanor, he wears knee boots, trousers that are leathery with fish blood and slime, a heavy plaid woolen shirt, a pea jacket, and a misshapen old flop-brim hat that always has some toothpicks and pencil stubs stuck in its band. He walks with a pronounced stoop, favoring his left shoulder, where the rheumatism has settled, and he takes his time. ‘If I start to hustle and bustle,’ he says, ‘everything I eat repeats and repeats.’ He abhors hurry; he thinks that humanity in general has got ahead of itself. He once threatened to fire a man in his crew because he worked too hard. Ellery’s face is narrow and bony and, except for the sadness in his deep-set eyes, impassive. His ears stick out, he is long-nosed, and he has a mustache. His voice is nasal but pleasant, and his Adam’s apple works when he talks. A woman in Stonington in her nineties, a town character, once told him that he had an old-fashioned face. ‘Men’s faces nowadays are either empty or worried to death, like they’re dreading something,’ she said. ‘You look the way the old Yankees around here looked when I was a girl.’

  ‘Don’t fool yourself,’ Ellery said. ‘I guess I’m dreading something, too.’

  ‘What are you dreading, Ellery?’ she asked.

  Ellery shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wish to God I did know.’

  Ellery is companionable but reserved. He often sits out a weathery day in the dock shack with other draggermen, listening with enjoyment to the trade gossip and the story-telling but saying little himself. When he does get into a talking mood, much of what he says is ironical. He is deeply skeptical. He once said that the older he gets the more he is inclined to believe that humanity is helpless. ‘I read the junk in the papers,’ he said, ‘and sometimes, like I’m eating in some eating joint and I can’t help myself, I listen to the junk on the radio, and the way it looks to me, it’s blind leading blind out of the frying pan into the fire, world without end. It’s like me and Doc Clendening. There used to be a department in the New London Day called “Diet and Health.” It was run by Dr Logan Clendening, and he was always bright and cheerful. “Keep smiling!” he’d say. “Worry will kill you. A good hearty laugh,” he’d say, “is the best medicine. If you’ve got high blood pressure, laugh! If you’ve got low blood pressure, laugh! The more you laugh, the longer you’ll live.” When I was down in the dumps, I always enjoyed “Diet and Health.” It was the first thing I’d turn to. It cheered me up. And then one day I picked up the paper and it said that “Diet and Health” wouldn’t appear no more because Dr Clendening had cut his throat.’

  Two things are mainly responsible for Ellery’s outlook: rheumatism and the depression. He is one of those who are unable to forget the depression. Fish prices were at rock bottom in the thirties, and draggermen had to take foolish risks and double and triple their production to barely get by. Ellery had one brother, Morris, six years younger, who was also a dragger captain. While working in a December gale off Newport in 1931, Morris was knocked senseless by a huge wave that broke on the deck of his dragger; the wave, receding, sucked him in, and he drowned. ‘He shouldn’t have been out there,’ Ellery says, ‘but the poor boy had just started a family and prices were dropping and he was fighting hard to make a living.’ Ellery and his father and several friends of the family took the Eleanor out while the gale was still in progress and began to drag for Morris’s body. On the morning of the third day, when they had almost decided to quit and go in, it came up in the net.

  Ellery is about as self-sufficient as a man can be. He has no wife, no politics, and no religion. ‘I put off getting married until I got me a good big boat,’ he says. ‘When I got the boat and got it paid for, the depression struck. There’s mighty few women that’ll eat fish three times a day, and that’s about all I had to offer. I kept putting it off until times got better. When times got better, I got the rheumatism. And a man in his middle forties with the chronic rheumatism, there’s not much of the old Romeo left in him.’ Ellery is a member of only one organization. ‘I’m a Mason,’ he says. ‘Aside from that, the only thing I belong to is the human race.’ His father was a Republican and his mother is a Democrat; he says he has never put any dependence in either party and has never once voted for anybody. His family belongs to the Baptist Church; he says he has managed somehow to get along without it. ‘I enjoy hymns,’ he says. ‘I enjoy the old ones, the gloomy ones. I used to go to church just to hear the good old hymns, but the sermons finally drove me away.’

  Ellery’s ancestors on both sides – his mother was a Chapman – came from England in the sixteen-thirties and settled near the mouth of the Connecticut River, probably in the Saybrook Colony. Both families have stuck pretty close to the coast of eastern Connecticut, and the majority of the men have been fishermen, mariners, or shipwrights. Some were whalers and sealers. ‘I’m widely related,’ Ellery says, ‘but damn the benefit in that.’ Ellery was born in Mystic, which is five miles from Stonington. When he was around ten, the family moved to New London. He is one of four children, two of whom, Morris and an elder sister, Louise, are dead. Eleanor, a younger sister, is the wife of a switchman on the New Haven; the dragger Eleanor was named for her. Ellery’s father, Frank Thompson, who died in 1936, was a fisherman, but he occasionally did other kinds of work. One year he was a quartermaster on a famous old Long Island Sound passenger steamer, the City of Worcester; another year he was a mate on an ocean-going tug, the Thames Tow Boat Company’s Minnie, that towed coal barges from Norfolk, Virginia, to New London; during the Spanish-American War he was master of a patrol boat, the Gypsy, that guided ships through mine fields off the harbor of New London; and for a while he ran a ferry on the Thames, between Groton and New London; but he spent most of his life hand-lining and dragging in the Mouth. He was one of the first American fishermen to use the otter trawl, which is a British net. ‘Pa was a restless man, but a good man, a good provider,’ Ellery says. ‘He had one bad habit. He played the trombone. H
e could do nearly about as much damage with a trombone as I can with a trumpet.’

  Ellery’s father kept his dragger, the Florence, a thirty-one-footer, which was named for Mrs Thompson, at the Old Fish Dock in New London. ‘I spent the happiest days of my life on that dock,’ Ellery says. ‘It was a perfect place for a boy. It was right across the tracks from the New Haven station. If you got tired looking at boats, you could step over to the station and watch a freight highball through like a bat out of hell for Boston. I despised school. I don’t mean I didn’t like it. Oh, Jesus, I despised it. Whatever I learned in school, I learned a whole lot more down on the Old Fish Dock. Like Pa would drop a barrel in the water off the end of the dock and teach me how to harpoon a swordfish without getting my tail wound up in the line; the barrel would be the swordfish. Or some other man would teach me how to stick little wooden plugs in the hinges of lobsters’ claws; that locks their claws, so they can’t kill each other during shipment. I learned how to scale and gut, how to mend nets, how to read charts, how to cut a fishhook out of your hand, how to crate crabs, and how to tie all kinds of knots and bends and hitches and splices. There were some old, old fishermen on that dock. Some went down in the whale with Jonah, to hear them tell it. They didn’t go out much any more. They mostly just sat around, hawking and spitting and God-damning everything in sight. They were full of old, handed-down secrets and sayings. I learned two things from them. I learned how to judge weather, and I learned how to take the good Lord’s name in vain. Like all fish docks, this dock had a shack on it with a kerosene stove inside, and I learned how to make coffee. That’s important. There’s nobody so worthless as a fisherman who can’t make a good, strong pot of coffee. In the summer, the Block Island steamer used one side of the fish dock. It met three trains a day. Back then, Block Island was a resort for the rich. If you weren’t quite rich enough for Newport, you went to one of those big wooden hotels on Block Island. It was great fun to watch the people get on and off the steamer. Some days, like the Fourth, they’d have a band aboard. The first drunk woman I ever saw was an old sister they took off the Block Island steamer. She was white-haired, and she was so saturated she didn’t know Jack from jump rope. Somebody’s mother. It was a revelation to me. Around that time – I must’ve been eleven or twelve – there was a Greek café near the station and up above were rooms for rent, and sometimes I’d notice a woman sitting in the window of one of the rooms for rent; she’d crook a finger at some man passing below or give him a wink. I’d try my damnedest to figure that out. The facts of life. If the boats were out on the grounds and nothing doing on the dock, I’d sit in the shack and read Frank books. Oh, Jesus, I enjoyed Frank books. They were called the Gun Boat Series. There was “Frank on a Gun Boat,” “Frank Before Vicksburg,” “Frank on the Lower Mississippi,” “Frank in the Woods,” and “Frank the Young Naturalist.” I’ve still got some Frank books on my dresser at home. Every so often, I get one down. You take “Frank on the Lower Mississippi” – I bet I’ve read it thirty times. When I was sixteen, I got into first-year high school, but I couldn’t stand it. I went to Pa and I told him, “One more day of that mess – amo, amas, amat – just one more day, and I’ll drown myself.” Pa said he guessed he’d sooner have an ignorant living son than a highly educated dead one, and next morning I went out on the grounds with him.’