The Bottom of the Harbor

by Joseph Mitchell

  When Harry was nineteen, Mr. Truax gave up fishing with fykes and began to depend entirely on what he made from shadfishing. For ten years or so, Harry helped him fish a couple of rows of shad nets in the spring, and worked the rest of the year at jobs he picked up on or around the river. He worked mostly as a deckhand on tugboats. He worked on two of the Valvoline Oil Company’s tugs, the Magnet and the Magic Safety, and on several of the tugs in the New York, New Haven & Hartford’s fleet. Mr. Truax died in 1913, aged eighty-four. For three years thereafter, Harry fished a row of shad nets of his own and set a fyke of his own. In 1915, he got married, and began to worry about money for the first time in his life. In 1916, a fireman’s job became open in the Edgewater Fire Department, and he took it. Edgewater has three firehouses. Firehouse No. 1, in which Harry was stationed, is on River Road, a few yards north of the site of the old schoolhouse. It faces the river, and it has a wooden bench in front of it. “Before I joined the Fire Department,” Harry once said, “my main occupation was sitting down looking at the river. After I joined the department, that continued to be my main occupation, only I got paid for it.” He was a fireman for twenty-six years, and was allowed to take a leave of absence every spring and fish a row of shad nets. He became eligible for a pension in 1942. On April 1st of that year, at the start of the shad season, he retired, and resumed his life as a full-time riverman.

  In the spring, Harry sets shad nets. In the fall, he sets eelpots. Some days, he goes crabbing. Now and then, in every season, not for money but for fun and for the table, he fishes with a hand line or a bamboo pole or a rod and reel. He is an accomplished baitcaster, and it is a pleasure to watch him stand on the bank and cast a knot of bloodworms to the outer edge of the flats, out past the wrecks, and bring in a striped bass. He isn’t a striped-bass snob, however, and he often joins the old men and women who come down to the river on sunny afternoons and pole-fish from the bank for anything at all that will bite. Many of the old men and women are opinionated and idiosyncratic, and he enjoys listening to them, and observing the odd rigs that they devise and the imaginative baits that they use. Around Edgewater, catfish and tomcod and lafayettes and eels are about the only fish that can be caught close to the bank, but that is all right with Harry; he doesn’t look down on any of these fish. In common with most of the rivermen, he has a great liking for catfish; he likes to catch them and he likes to eat them. In the spring and early summer, large numbers of catfish show up in the lower Hudson; the spring freshets bring them down from fresh water. Some are enormous. In 1953, one was caught near the George Washington Bridge that weighed over thirty pounds, and every year a few are caught around Edgewater that weigh between ten and twenty pounds. One Saturday afternoon last spring, an old Negro woman fishing a short distance up the bank from Harry caught two big ones, one right after the other. Harry and several other fishermen went over to look at them, and one of the fishermen, who had a hand scale, weighed them; the first weighed seventeen pounds and the second weighed twelve. Harry asked the old woman what kind of bait she had been using. “Chicken guts,” she said. Harry also has a great liking for tomcod. The tomcod is a greedy little inshore fish that belongs to the cod family and resembles the deep-sea codfish in every respect but size—it seldom gets much longer than seven inches or weighs more than half a pound, and it gives the appearance of being a midget codfish. It comes into the waters around the city to feed and to spawn, and it is almost as ubiquitous as the eel. There are a few tomcod in every part of the harbor every month of the year. In the late fall and early winter, during their spawning runs, they are abundant, and some days thousands upon thousands of them are caught from piers and sea walls and bulkheads and jetties all the way from Rockaway Point to the Battery, and from the banks of the Hudson and the East River and the Harlem River and the Arthur Kill and the Kill van Kull. They are eaten mainly in the homes of the people who catch them; I have rarely seen them in fish stores, and have never seen them on a menu. Harry thinks the tomcod is greatly undervalued; it is what he calls a sweet-meated fish, and he considers it the best fish, next to shad and snapper bluefish, that enters the river. “There’s only one thing wrong with tommycods,” he once said. “It takes seventeen of them to make a dozen.” On sunny, crystal-clear mornings in the fall, when it is possible to see into the water, he gets in one of his boats and rows out into the flats and catches some river shrimp. River shrimp—they are also called harbor shrimp and mud shrimp, and are really prawns—are tiny; they are only about an inch and a quarter long, including the head. There are sometimes dense swarms of them in the slues between the barges. Harry catches them with a dip net and empties them into a bucket. When he has a supply, he rows farther out into the flats and ties up to one of the old wrecks and sits there and fishes for tomcod, using a hand line and baiting the hook with the shrimp. Occasionally, he pops some of the shrimp into his mouth—he eats them raw and spits out the shells. By noon, as a rule, he has all the tomcod he can use; he has often caught a hundred and fifty in a morning.

  Every so often during January, February, and March, Harry gets up early and puts some sandwiches in his pockets and goes down to his barge and starts a fire in one of the stoves in it and spends the day working on his shadfishing gear. While the river wind hisses and purrs and pipes and whistles through cracks and knotholes in the sides of the barge, he paints an anchor, or overhauls an outboard motor, or makes one net out of the strongest parts of two or three old ones. He works in a leisurely fashion, and keeps a pot of coffee on the stove. Sometimes he goes over and sits beside a window and watches the traffic on the river for an hour or so. Quite often, in the afternoon, one of the other rivermen comes in and helps himself to a cup of coffee and sits down and gossips for a while. Harry’s barge is a big one. It is a hundred and ten feet long and thirty-two feet wide. Except for narrow little decks at its bow and stern, it is covered with a superstructure made of heart-pine posts and white-pine clapboards. The superstructure is patched here and there with tar paper, and has a tar-paper roof. It is an old Delaware, Lackawanna & Western barge; on its sides are faded signs that say, “D L & W # 530.” It is forty-two years old. When it was thirty years old, a fire that broke out in some cargo damaged parts of its interior; the Lackawanna repaired it and used it for two more years, and then sold it to Harry. Harry has partitioned off two rooms in the bow end of it—one for a galley and one for a bunkroom. In the middle of the bunkroom is a statuesque old claw-footed Sam Oak stove. Around the stove are seven rickety chairs, no two of which are mates. One is a swivel chair whose spring has collapsed. Built against one of the partitions, in three tiers, are twelve bunks. Harry usually makes a fire in the Sam Oak stove and works in the bunkroom; there is a stove in the galley that burns bottled gas and is much easier to manage, but he feels more at home with the Sam Oak, which burns coal or wood. He sometimes uses driftwood that he picks up on the riverbank. The galley and the bunkroom take up less than a third of the space in the barge. The rest of the space is used for storage, and scattered about in it are oars and sweeps and hawsers and kerosene lanterns and shad-bake planks and tin tubs and blocks and tackles and cans of boat paint and sets of scales and stacks of fish boxes. Hanging in festoons from the rafters are dozens of nets, some of which are far too old and ripped and rotten ever to be put in the water again.

  One day in late February, the weather was surprisingly sunny and warm. It was one of those balmy days that sometimes turn up in the winter, like a strange bird blown off its course. Walking back to my office after lunch, I began to dawdle. Suddenly the idea occurred to me, why not take the afternoon off and go over to Edgewater and go for a walk along the river and breathe a little clean air for a change. I fought a brief fight with my conscience, and then I entered the Independent subway at Forty-second Street and rode up to the 168th Street station and went upstairs to the Public Service bus terminal and got a No. 8 bus. This bus goes across the George Washington Bridge and heads south and runs through a succession of riverfront town
s, the second of which is Edgewater. It is a pleasant trip in itself. At the town limits of Edgewater, there is a sign that says, “WELCOME TO EDGEWATER. WHERE HOMES AND INDUSTRY BLEND. EDGEWATER CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.” A couple of bus stops past this sign, I got out, as I usually do, and began to walk along River Road. I looked at my watch; I had made good connections, and the trip from Forty-second Street had taken only thirty-six minutes. The sunshine was so warm that my overcoat felt burdensome. All along the west side of River Road, women had come out into their front yards and were slowly walking around, looking at the dead stalks and vines in their flower beds. I saw a woman squat sideways beside what must have been a bulb border and rake away some leaves with her fingers. She peered at the ground for a few moments, and then swept the leaves back with one sweep of her hand. In the upper part of Edgewater, River Road is high above the river, and a steep, wooded slope lies between the east side of it and the riverbank. Just past the George Washington School, a public school on the site of the old schoolhouse, there is a bend in the road from which it is possible to look down almost on the tops of the shad barges drawn up close to the riverbank along there. I looked the barges over, and picked out Harry’s. Smoke was coming from its stovepipe, and I decided to stop by and have a cup of coffee with Harry. Several paths descend from the road to the riverbank. Children like to slide on them and play on them, and they are deeply rutted. As I started down one of them, Harry came out on the bow deck of his barge and looked up and saw me and waved. A few minutes later, I crossed the riverbank and went out on the ramshackle footwalk that extends from the riverbank to his barge and climbed the ladder that is fixed to the bow and stepped on deck, and he and I shook hands. “Go inside and get yourself a cup of coffee and bring it out here, why don’t you,” he said, “and let’s sit in the sun a little while.”

  When I returned to the deck, Harry motioned toward the riverbank with his head and said, “Look who’s coming.” Two men had just started up the footwalk. One was a stranger to me. The other was an old friend and contemporary of Harry’s named Joe Hewitt. I have run into him a number of times, and have got to know him fairly well. Mr. Hewitt is six feet two and portly and red-faced. He lives in Fort Lee, but he is a native of Edgewater and belongs to one of the old Edgewater families. He went to school in the old schoolhouse at the same time as Harry, and fished and worked around the river for a few years, and then went to a business school on Park Row, in Manhattan, called the City Hall Academy. Through an uncle, who was in the trucking business and often trucked shad from Edgewater and other riverfront towns to Fulton Market during the shad season, he got a job as a clerk in the old Fulton Market firm of John Feeney, Inc. He became head bookkeeper in Feeney’s, and subsequently worked for several other firms in the fish market. He retired over ten years ago. He spends a lot of time in Edgewater, and often hangs out in Ingold’s garage. Years ago, Mr. Hewitt bought three tracts of cheap land along the Hackensack River, one in Hudson County and two in Bergen County; he speaks of them as “those mosquito bogs of mine.” In recent years, two of these tracts have increased in value enormously, and he has sold sections of them for housing developments and shopping centers, and has become well-to-do. He is a generous man, and often goes out of his way to help people. Once in a while, a riverman gets in a bad jam of some kind and is broke to begin with and other rivermen take up a collection for him, and Mr. Hewitt almost always gives more than anyone else. However, despite his generosity and kindness, he has a bleak outlook on life, and doesn’t try to hide it. “Things have worked out very well for you, Joe,” I once heard another retired man remark to him one day in Ingold’s garage, “and you ought to look at things a little more cheerful than you do.” “I’m not so sure I have anything to be cheerful about,” Mr. Hewitt replied. “I’m not so sure you have, either. I’m not so sure anybody has.”

  “Who is the man with Mr. Hewitt?” I asked Harry.

  “I never saw him before,” Harry said.

  Mr. Hewitt came up the ladder first, and stepped on deck, puffing and blowing.

  “The sun was so nice we decided to walk down from Fort Lee,” he said, “and what a mistake that was! The traffic is getting worse and worse on River Road. Oh, it scares me! Those big heavy trucks flying past, it’s worth your life to step off the curb. Slam on their brakes, they couldn’t stop; you’d be in the hospital before they even slowed down. You’d be lying on the operating table with an arm off, an arm and a leg, an arm and a leg and one side of your head, and they’d still be rolling. And the noise they make! The shot and shell on the battlefield wouldn’t be much worse. What was that old poem? How’d it go, how’d it go? I used to know it. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row…’ And good God, gentlemen, the Cadillacs! While we were standing there, waiting and waiting for a chance to cross, six big black Cadillacs shot by, practically one right after the other, and it wasn’t any funeral, either.”

  “Times are good, Joe,” said Harry. “Times are good.”

  “Thieves,” said Mr. Hewitt.

  His companion reached the top of the ladder and awkwardly stepped on deck. “Gentlemen,” said Mr. Hewitt, “this is my brother-in-law Frank Townsend.” He turned to Harry. “Harry,” he said, “you’ve heard me speak of Frank. He’s Blanche’s younger brother, the one who’s in the sprinkler-system business. Or was. He’s retired now.” He turned to me. “Blanche is my wife,” he said. Then he turned to Mr. Townsend. “Sit down, Frank,” he said, “and get your breath.” Mr. Townsend sat down on a capstan. “Frank lives in Syracuse,” continued Mr. Hewitt. “He’s been down in Florida, and he’s driving back, and he’s spending a few days with us. Since he retired, he’s got interested in fishing. I told him the shadfishermen all along the Hudson are getting ready for shad season, and he’s never seen a shad barge, and I thought I’d bring him down here and show him one, and explain shadfishing to him.”

  Harry’s eyebrows rose. “Shadfishing hasn’t changed much through the years, Joe,” he said, “but it’s been a long, long time since you lifted a net. Maybe you better let me do the explaining.”

  “I wish you would,” said Mr. Hewitt. “I was hoping you would.”

  “I’ll make it as brief as possible,” said Harry, walking over to the edge of the deck. “Step over here, Mr. Townsend, and look over the side. Do you see those poles lying down there in the mud? They’re shagbark-hickory poles, and they’re fifty to seventy feet long, and they’re the foundation of shadfishing; everything else depends on them. During shad season, we stick them up in the river in rows at right angles to the shore, and hitch our nets to them. When the season’s finished, we pull them up and bring them in here in the flats and bed them in the mud on both sides of our barges until we’re ready to use them again. They turn green down there, from the green slime, but that’s all right—the slime preserves them. As long as we keep them damp, they stay strong and supple and sound. If we let them dry out, they lose their strength and their give and start to rot.”

  Mr. Townsend interrupted Harry. “How much do they cost you?” he asked.

  “Shad is an expensive fish, Mr. Townsend, not to speak of shad roe,” Harry said, “and one of the reasons is it’s expensive to fish for. You can’t just pick up the phone and order a shad pole from a lumberyard. You have to hunt all over everywhere and find a farmer who has some full-grown hickory trees in his woods and is willing to sell some, and even then he might not have any that are tall enough and straight enough and strong enough and limber enough. I get mine from a farmer who owns some deep woods in Pennsylvania. When I need some new ones, I go out there—in the dead of winter, usually, a couple of months before shad season starts—and spend the whole day tramping around in his woods looking at his hickories. And I don’t just look at a tree—I study it from all sides and try to imagine how it would take the strain if it was one of a row of poles staked in the Hudson River holding up a shad net and the net was already heavy with fish and a full-moon tide was pushing again
st the net and bellying it out and adding more fish to it all the time. I study hundreds of them. Then I pick out the likeliest-looking ones and blaze them with an axe. The farmer cuts them down, and sends them up here on a trailer truck. Then I and a couple of men around the river go to work on them and peel their bark off and trim their knots off and smooth them down with adzes and drawknives and planes until there’s no splinters or rough spots on them anywhere that the net could catch on. Then we sharpen their butt ends, to make it easier to drive them into the river bottom. I pay the farmer eighteen to twenty dollars apiece for them. After the trucking charges are added to that, and the wages of the men who help me trim them, I figure they cost me between thirty-five and forty dollars apiece. You need at least forty of them for every row you fish. Tugboats are always blundering into them at night and passing right over them and bending them down until they crack in two, so you also have to have a supply of spares set aside. In other words, the damned things run into money.”

  Some young girls—there were perhaps a dozen of them, and they were eight or nine or maybe ten years old—had come down one of the paths from River Road, and now they were chasing each other around on the riverbank. They were as overexcited as blue jays, and their fierce, jubilant, fresh young voices filled the air.

  “School’s out,” said Harry.

  Several of the girls took up a position near the shore end of the footwalk to Harry’s barge. Two of them started turning a rope and singing a rope-jumping song, a third ran in and started jumping the rope, and the others got in line. The song began:

  Mama, Mama,

  I am ill.

  Send for the doctor