by Henry Hughes
“It’s clear,” my father said as we looked out over the water then turned into the potholed yard of Ralph’s Fishing Station on Long Island’s Mount Sinai Harbor. There were dinghies flipped over on cement blocks, runabouts, cabin cruisers, and barnacle-bottomed game boats on trailers and wooden racks. A speed boat spilled corroded parts out of its transom while an old sailboat, partly draped like a flapper after too much champagne, flashed bare oak above her waterline.
Spring 1973. People talked about Vietnam, Watergate, George Steinbrenner buying the New York Yankees, the amazing red azaleas outside our house, and a new TV show Sanford and Son, whose junkyard set reminded me of Ralph’s. My father parked his yellow Chevy pickup near two men in greasy sweatshirts poking into an Evinrude outboard tilted in a water-filled barrel. A tall man walked up, handed one guy a spark plug, then yelled, “Damnit, Charley. What-da-hell you think ya’ doing?” I jumped. It was my father’s name. But he walked right past us and stood below a guy pulling some wires out of the wheelhouse of a propped-up lobster boat.
“Either get me dat six months or get dis piece-a-shit outta here.”
“How’my gonna get your money if I can’t fish? For Chrissakes, Ralph!”
“Well, get in the goddamn water then.”
I was seven, and my father turned me away from the dispute. Rancid fish wafted from blue barrels on a flatbed truck stacked with wooden lobster pots. Men were drinking canned beer and smoking cigarettes. Among them stood a short, stocky guy in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt.
“Hey Herbie,” my father greeted him. “What’s going on?”
“Getting my skiff outta hock. Didn’t catch many muskrats this winter.”
“No, hah? You working?”
“Here and there,” Herbie said. “I’d rather be fishing.”
My father introduced me to Herbie Clark, a union laborer he knew from work. The man was older than my father, with a high-tide hairline, reddish face, and bulbous nose, but his eyes were warm, and he asked if I liked fishing. “Yes,” I said, though I’d never really been.
The men talked construction. My father was a crane operator, and Long Island was building, but there were highs and lows, good jobs and bad. Such things bored me and I wandered behind a wind-torn blue building, admiring a quiver of rods leaning against a fence. Squatting to touch the reels, I looked up and screamed. A huge pig bore down on me, his snout and jaws smeared red. My father and Herbie were right there. “That’s Arnold,” Herbie laughed. The boar sniffed me, snorted, and trotted off.
“He killed something,” I gasped.
“No,” Herbie laughed some more. “They gave ’im some spaghetti and meatballs. He loves Italian food.”
Ralph finished chewing out the lobsterman and walked over to us, his face softening in concern. “Everything okay?”
“Arnold scared the boy, that’s all,” Herbie said.
“He’s a big pig,” Ralph nodded. “Ate a whole bucket of flounda d’udder day.” Ralph offered the men cigarettes and lit one for himself.
“The boy wants to do some fishing,” my father said. “Can you help us out? I don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“Yeah, d’er gettin some flounda.” Ralph smiled at me. “Fishing’s a lotta fun. You wanna ren a boat, Charley?”
“Sure. It’ll be me, the boy, and his friend.”
“Okay,” Ralph said. “High tide’s at nine tomorrow. Come over round six-thirdy. We’ll set you up.”
“From fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,” wrote the Long Island bard Walt Whitman. But I was born into an Island family that did not fish. My father grew up in Port Jefferson, near where we lived, and he knew a bit about boats and motors but never had any interest in catching a fish. My mother grew up in Queens. “Your grandfather liked to fish,” she told me. Aunt Lillian, my mother’s older sister, wrung a dish rag and smirked, “Yeah, he caught things all right.” I would later learn that my late grandfather was a philanderer, but the daughters had made peace with him in the last years. Lil lived with us in our cedar shingled Cape Cod on Central Avenue and did a lot of the cooking.
“Yes, yes. He liked to fish,” Lil said and surrendered a smile. “He’d dump ’em in the sink. What a mess. But he cleaned ’em and I cooked ’em.” I was too young to remember my grandfather as anything more than a red sweater rowing off into the fog. A couple of his varnished wooden rods and corroded Penn reels hung in the garage.
We ate fish at least once a week, almost always on Fridays, and I liked going with my mother and Aunt Lil to Wally Brown’s Fish Market on East Main Street in Port Jefferson. Wally and his wife, Gladys, smiled and nodded when I named the characters on ice. They let me walk behind the counter and peer into the bubbling lobster tank or examine the whole cod and striped bass before they were filleted. Wally had no right hand, but his flippered forearm pointed encouragingly. I poked eyeballs, touched skin, stroked fins, and smelled on my hands a salty, mucusy something that was both familiar and strange. I asked Wally questions then just listened to the iced silence of the fish, dreaming into their watery world.
I loved fish, dead and alive, managed a few home aquariums, sat glued to every episode of Jacques Cousteau, and poured over books about fish, beginning with Fish Do the Strangest Things, which my aunt read to me over and over. I had been to the New York Aquarium and The American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where my mother put a time limit on how long we could stay in the Hall of Ocean Life—the ninety-four-foot blue whale breaching above the dazzling walls of life-size full color fish. But aside from my father’s half-hearted attempt at letting me soak a worm in a fuzzy duck pond while he listened to the Mets on his truck radio, no one had really taken me fishing.
The next morning we woke in the chilly dark, picked up my friend Joey, then drove the four miles to Mount Sinai Harbor. There were very few cars, raccoons crossed in our headlights, and it felt—as it still does, driving early to fish—like having more of the world to yourself.
The flounder were waking up in the shallow April waters, and good weekend weather meant fish and fishermen would be on the move. People milled around Ralph’s Fishing Station drinking coffee from white Styrofoam cups, listening to radio weather, smoking cigarettes, and talking quietly. There was the clang of buckets and rods and snarly boat engines starting. Standing alone smoking a pipe was a wildly bearded old man with a strange mole centered on his forehead under a dirty white yachtsman’s cap. “Good morning, Captain,” my father greeted, holding open the rattlely door as I pushed through with my grandfather’s fishing pole, spearing Joey in the back. Ralph was busy taking orders for sandworms, filling out rental cards, making change. It was all cash over the counter. Rigs, sinkers, line, bait, gas. Ralph scratched his head and poked the cash register while another puffy faced man counted sandworms into rectangular white boxes.
In no rush to get started, my father carried a cup of coffee out to Captain, had a smoke with him, and then came back in the store. “Old Captain was in World War I,” my father said. “On a ship made right in Port Jefferson.” I looked out the window and saw the grizzled man standing alone. We shuffled forward to the counter. “Okay, Charley. We got ya boat,” Ralph said. “A few of dese spreader rigs heer, some two-ounce sinkas. A couple dozen wirms should do. Barbara’ll set you up on the dock. Just anchor outside the channel. Fish right on the bottom through the tide, okay?” My father nodded.
Down on the dock, Ralph’s wife, Barbara, was arguing with a group talking in Spanish. “Six is duh limit,” she commanded in a loud voice. “Three, four, five, six. Dat’s it. You’ll need another boat.” She saw us and walked up the dock followed by two large dogs. “Hi Charley. Is dis your crew? Gonna get some flounda, boys?” She tipped her chin toward the people rocking the green skiff. “Puerto Ricans. What are ya gonna do? Dey love to fish.”
Even early in the morning, Barbara had a bright, smooth face, her movements swift and strong like a Diana of the docks as she handed us three life jackets and then bent t
o pet one of her dogs. She looked at my old blistered fishing pole and shook her head, “Sorry, honey. These’ll work betta for you.” Three white fiberglass rods stood against the red sign for gas. “You want me to start it, Charley?”
“I got it, Barb. Thanks.” My father smiled. She pointed down the dock. “Boat numbah five. Have fun.”
My father held the boat steady while Joey and I stepped in and sat down on the wooden seats. I was a plump child, but I felt magically light in the boat, like the world was suddenly more supportive. The rental was a fourteen-foot green lapstreak skiff with a six-horse Johnson outboard. My father was good with engines. He vented the gas tank, squeezed the ball on the fuel line, opened the choke, and pulled the starter rope twice. It popped. He pushed the choke halfway in, pulled again, and it started. After letting it warm up for a few minutes, he reached over and untied the bow line from the cleat. “Cast off,” he urged with a gesture, and Joey and I pushed the boat from the dock.
Like any beginner, my father just followed the others. About half a mile from Ralph’s in the vicinity of a couple small boats, he asked Joey and me, “Well, you wanna try it here?” What did we know? He turned off the engine and told me to drop anchor. But by the time I had untangled the mess of rope and heaved the heavy iron over the bow, we had drifted deep into the channel. My father began rigging the rods, Joey’s first, tying on a double-hooked spreader rig with square knot and burning off the excess with his lit cigarette.
Poking through the seaweed-packed bait box, my father recoiled with an, “Ouch.” Then, like a snake wrangler on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a favorite Sunday evening television program, he grasped a sandworm firmly behind the head and held it up, fangs flashing. “Damn,” he said. “This worm means business.” But this was bait, so he pushed a hook through its skin. Blue blood squirted and the worm writhed and twisted. Right from the beginning I would recognize that there was pain connected to fishing. A medic attached to an aid station during the Korean War, my father was not squeamish, but I could see he was not enjoying himself.
“You crucified him,” Joey wailed.
“Take it easy, Joey,” my father said and frowned, always skeptical of high drama. “You wanna catch a fish, right?”
My father knew enough about reels to understand the clutch and drag and how to avoid backlash—some of the same principles applied to crane operating—and he gave us simple instructions. Joey flipped the clutch and sent the clumsy rig down to the bottom, the reel spooling on into a bird’s nest of green line. “You gotta keep your thumb on the spool,” my father repeated. “Stop when you feel it hit bottom.”
“How do I know it’s the bottom?”
“You feel it, I guess. Okay, just hold on. Let me get this other one going.”
Just as my father started helping me, Joey’s rod jumped. “I got one! I got one,” he shouted, cranking the reel to a tangled halt. “It’s stuck.”
“Okay, relax.” My father grabbed the line and started hand hauling. “Oh yeah, you got something on here.” Up from the dark water came a bizarre creature, about a foot long, with bright calico wings, leggy forefins, and a horned and armored face—a sea robin. My father grabbed it, punching a spine through his palm. “Goddamn it,” he yelled. More pain. “Hand me that rag.” The big-headed fish emitted a rather sweet bark, like a distressed underwater puppy, its green eyes shining. Getting a hook out of the fish’s mouth was another challenge. Not thinking to bring one of his fifty pairs of pliers, my father wriggled and twisted the hook around the barking mouth until it wore a hole big enough to back out the barb. “Can we keep him?” I asked. “He’s not a flounder,” my father said and threw him over.
By the time we got Joey’s line untangled, which required cutting and completely rerigging, the tide flooded and several boats anchored just outside the channel were catching fish. “They caught one,” I reported. “She’s got one,” Joey noted. “He’s got another one,” I complained. Then my rod bent and I yelled, “Got one!” But it was just the bottom. Another strong pull and the line broke. I reeled in and my father studied the pigtails where his square knot easily snapped. “What the hell?” he puzzled.
Joey caught a second sea robin, and my father raised two small crabs. A couple boats went by, and one guy shouted, “You’re in the channel.” We all looked at each other, figured something must be wrong, undertook the laborious task of pulling up the anchor, and re-established ourselves in shallower water.
“It feels mushy down there,” Joey said. Almost immediately I felt the tap of life. Something was down there. The thrill of fishing is charged by the knowledge that something desirable lies unseen in the darkness below. But it’s not enough to know it’s there. You’ve got to hold it. My father and Joey also had bites but couldn’t hook anything. We were, of course, using whole, delicately pierced sandworms—an expensive and relatively safe form of feeding marine fauna. Retrieving our bare hooks and mud smeared sinkers, we exclaimed, “Stole the bait,” and, “He cleaned me,” having at least mastered the parlance of bait fishing failure.
Finally, my father hooked one. “Here we go.” His rod bent and pulsed, he put his cigarette in his mouth and reeled in a genuine winter flounder, slapping it down on the floorboards of the skiff. My father grabbed the fish with the rag, its back a dark brown and its creamy white belly shining beneath a haze of fine mud, unhooked it, and dropped it into a galvanized bucket I had filled with seawater.
Why are they called flounder? They are the steadiest of fish: wide-beamed and well-grounded. This fellow mellowed on the bottom of the bucket, frowning through a thick-lipped sideways mouth, his topside frog eyes seemingly unperturbed.
“Look at those weird eyes,” Joey said.
“They evolved to live on the bottom,” I told him. My books, museum exhibits, and Channel Thirteen’s programming on science and nature convinced me at a young age that evolution was the way creatures came to be, despite my mother’s cocked eyebrow, “You don’t believe we came from monkeys, do you?” or my father’s, “What about Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark?”
My father handed around bananas, poured hot chocolate, monkeyed with a transistor radio, looked at his watch—“Ah, what the hell”—and cracked a beer. “You’re missing Sunday school today,” he smiled at me.
“I have to go to mass later,” Joey groaned.
“Do you like church?” my father asked Joey.
“It’s okay.” Joey slumped.
“I hate Sunday school,” I declared.
“Well, you’re back next week,” my father turned serious.
Sunday school was boring and tedious. I believed in God, though seeing Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments was more awe inspiring than anything experienced or heard in the basement of our church. The greatest miracles were those of ever-changing, ever-surprising nature. Sometimes I brought my worn copy of Fish Do the Strangest Things to Sunday school and tried to explain that flounders are born with eyes on each side of their heads, and their left eye migrates around to help the other see up from the bottom. I wanted people to know about the little male angler fish that attaches itself to the big female, becoming part of her body and bloodstream. “And the two will become one flesh,” the classroom helper quoted some scripture, and the head teacher cut her off, saying, “That’s something different.” But it wasn’t. Nor could any Bible story top the miraculous journey of the salmon, wagging the wide ocean for five years and returning to the little pebbly stream of its birth, or Long Island eels zigzaging down to the Sargasso Sea to join other eels from all over the Atlantic in a slimy love fest. And there were amazing living fossils, such as sturgeon, sharks, rays, and the famous coelacanth, thought to be extinct until one came up in a net off South Africa. Long before animals walked the earth, the seas teemed with fish. And when I evangelized that the “whale” in the Jonah story must have been a great white shark and that Jonah was definitely not okay after the three days in its belly, the Sunday school teacher told me to “Pay attention!” and
“Be brown!” while we crayoned a huge banner depicting Noah’s ridiculous ark.
The church service upstairs was worse with dull directions and grand promises. The world outside promised plenty, I thought, breaching the sanctuary doors and graduating into the firm conviction that true worship was a morning of fishing. Sometimes I even kept the money my mother gave me for the offering plate. A dollar sealed in a blue envelope had better boats to build.
We had more bites, seaweed, tangles, hooks in our clothing, smears of sandworm blood mixed with ham and cheese sandwiches, cookies, more cookies—“I think you’ve had enough,” my father said as he pinched his brows and flicked his cigarette over the side where it hissed and floated on the gray surface. Joey swung a hand-sized flatfish in my face. He and my father each caught a couple more, but I didn’t land a thing. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said. The tide began to ebb, our boat swung in the opposite direction, and the action diminished. My father and Joey talked on and on about the Mets—they had a great bullpen—while I gazed down into the dark stadium below, deep in my desire for another game.
Snappers
By midsummer, the New York Mets were in last place in the National League East, Joey had moved to Brooklyn with his family, our garden tomatoes were ripening, and I received a Zebco spinning outfit for my eighth birthday, practicing on the lawn and driveway with a chewed-up sinker the cats loved to chase. Zebco was originally the Zero Hour Bomb Company, which held a patent on an electrical time bomb but found making simple spinning reels more profitable. The company advertised the reel’s easy use at sporting shows by having a trained chimpanzee execute near perfect casts, one after another. I put sinkers in the trees, on our roof, and through the tool shed window. “Evolution, hah?” my father said and rubbed the top of my head.
“The paper says the snappers are running,” my mother looked up from the kitchen table, her soft blonde curls pulled back in a blue hair band, an icy cocktail on a paper napkin beside her. She smiled, tilting her head toward my father drinking a beer and watching the Mets. She would sometimes tussle my father’s neatly parted short brown hair, telling him, “Don’t be such a square.” Today she made a kissing gesture across the room. “Okay, okay,” his eyes left the screen for a moment. “The Mets are traveling tomorrow. We’ll try for some snappers.”