Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Gulls, spotting the activity on deck, come from invisibility and plunge to the ocean to bob and wait. White on blue. Then the orange floats break the surface, then the doors, then the forward portion of the net called the “square” is up. Caught in it are several small starfish—white and brown ones—and a herring. Ron jumps to secure the deadly crash of the doors against the gallows. The net is entirely out of the sea and swinging like a giant pendulum above the deck. Ken reaches under the cod end to pull a line tied in a slip knot, and the bag opens and seven hundred pounds of bottomfish pour all over the deck. We stand ankle-deep in marine quicksilver and opalescent eyes. There isn’t a thrash anywhere.

  I ask, “What’s wrong with these fish?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Not already.”

  “Look at them.”

  The rapid decompression has bulged their eyeballs into spheres. Stomachs swell out of some mouths, and guts dribble from anuses.

  “The bends,” Tom says. “You should see the bag surface with a big load of cod. It explodes from the water when the fish blow their pokes. Their air sacs bust like balloons—and all at once.”

  Most of the catch is flounder, but there are also haddock, hake, a few cod and monkfish, two skate (some dealer will punch circular tidbits from the “wings” and pass them off as scallops), a lobster, a crab, two sea horses, four kinds of starfish (one palm size, another no bigger than a thumbnail), and two Coca-Cola cans.

  As Ken resets the net, Ron hoses down the fish with seawater, then the gear again goes over the stern. Tom takes the wheel, and off we go once more.

  Eight-thirty: In a single motion, each sternman swings his fishpick (a sawed-off broomhandle with a nail through one end) into a fish, mentally grades it, and flips it into the appropriate crate.

  Bottomfish tend toward the primitive and primeval. It’s as if the net had scooped up a big dipper of antediluvian broth and poured it over the deck. The old-world cartographers who mapped the unknown western ocean and inscribed on their charts “Here be strange beasts” might have had groundfish in mind. Take the flounder: this fossil imprint of a fish, rarely more than an inch or so thick but often fourteen inches long, spends a lifetime lying on its left side; consequently, the left side becomes a kind of belly. And that’s good, because the flounder is so flat (hence the name “flatfish”) it has no belly worth talking about. When born, the flounder has eyes positioned normally. But soon the left eye migrates to the “top” so that the right side carries both eyes, and the mouth pivots in order to open and close horizontally as mouths do. The new bottomside loses its gray pigment of camouflage and turns fish-belly white.

  Even more primordial is the monkfish, also called the “goosefish” and “angler fish”—the latter name deriving from the flexible spine tipped with a fishtail-shaped appendage that the creature dangles in front of its mouth. When a smaller something swims in to eat the “bait,” the monkfish gulps hugely to swallow whatever is near. The death-trap mouth is a cavernous thing, full not so much of spiky teeth as stalagmites and stalactites. But more: around the top half of the body are strange growths of skin resembling sea plants that give a resting monkfish the look of an old weedy stone. Under the mouth, where the pectoral fins should be, are two little finny, clawed hands that it uses to scrape out a depression to hunt from. If you’ve ever seen Creature from the Black Lagoon, then you have an idea of a monkfish.

  Ron, a big man, struggles to pick up a four-foot specimen so I can look in its mouth. “They come six feet and longer. This one’s just middle size.” He drops it to the deck, pulls out his knife, cuts away the bony head to leave only the considerably smaller tail that contains a single bone. “Nobody would eat a head that can eat you. Especially when it’s this ugly.”

  “Who’s going to eat that tail?” I ask. The flesh is loose, almost like jelly. “Damn, that’s revolting!”

  “Ever had a franchise fishburger? Did you think you were eating red snapper? Monkfish take on the taste of what you cook with them.”

  The lobster goes overboard although it will almost certainly be eaten before it reaches the bottom. A trawler cannot legally keep lobsters because dragging is such an efficient means of harvest, trawlers could clear out the species in a year or two. “Biggest lobster ever found came up accidentally in a drag net. Forty-four pounds.”

  The flounders, looking like speckled, pointy Ping-Pong paddles, do not need to be cleaned even though two-thirds of the fish is waste; but the cod, hake, and haddock—heftier fish—must be gutted to keep them fresh. The transom is wet with slime and blood and entrails. Seabirds rise in a tremendous whirling and milling as they grab guts and the small fry that get shoveled overboard. One bird, flying off with a whole fish that it cannot quite get down, gulps frantically to keep it, until a larger one swoops and yanks out the half-swallowed herring.

  The last of the catch to get cleaned is a big vicious-looking thing with rows of fangs rather than teeth. I prod it with my boot.

  “Want to lose a toe?” Ron shouts. “Don’t get nosy with a wolf fish.”

  “It’s dead.”

  “It’s the only one that might not be dead. They’ll bite your ass right here on deck. They’ll snap as you cut their goddamn heads off.”

  “Who eats wolf fish?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Mrs. Paul.”

  With the catch cleaned and stacked, Ron picks up the Coke cans. One has a return-for-deposit imprint. The other goes overboard. “Five cents,” he says.

  “I never guessed a deposit law would work at forty fathoms.”

  Nine-twenty: The day is cold enough there’s no need to carry a hundred pounds of ice as the trawler must do in summer. The crew hoses down deck and oilskins. Gulls make one more pass at the floating guts, then disappear.

  Ron and I climb atop the rocking wheelhouse to lie back in the sun as the Allison E unwinds her course over the swells. Before he falls asleep, Ron sniffs and says, “Amazes me. When you’re on shore you smell the sea. When you’re at sea, you smell the land.”

  Eleven-ten: Sternmen don oilskins and again haul in the net. A small catch, maybe four hundred pounds. There is little talk as they sort and clean. Ron picks up a three-foot cod by the tail and shakes a half-dozen shrimp from its mouth. “That’s breakfast. Let’s see what Big Mama had for supper.” He slips the knife in below the anal fin and slits open the belly. “Look.” Inside lies a whole lobster as red as if just out of the steampot.

  I say, “Can you eat a lobster cooked in a cod’s stomach?”

  “Take a bite and let me know.”

  Eleven-thirty: Ron calls in to Tom for permission to throw overboard the blue fish crate. Tom nods. Over it goes, floating off like a little barge.

  “What’s wrong with that crate?” I ask.

  “It’s blue.”

  “So?”

  “Never bring things blue aboard,” Ken says. “Bad luck. Almost as bad as sticking a knife in the deck or leaving a hatch cover upside down. Or saying p-i-g or eating walnuts on board.”

  “You mean you believe if I say pig—”

  “Nobody believes it. We just don’t do it.”

  Twelve-ten: Tom watches the sonar apprehensively. He says, “We may be in trouble, lads.” He throttles back, and no one speaks. The moony eyes of the fish goggle blankly through the slots in the baskets. Finally, Tom says, “Get ready to haul in.” The crew dresses and hurries astern. The catch is again small because of the abbreviated tow. Ron mutters a single word: “Blue.”

  I ask Tom what happened. “I steered into a canyon—rock piles on both sides. No room to turn around without hanging up the gear. There goes four hundred dollars.”

  A hundred and sixty million years ago, according to plate tectonic theory, the Atlantic didn’t exist; this water was land. For a dragger, it still is.

  One-twelve: The Allison E trawling a new location. I ask Tom what the future of bottom fishing is for Maine.

  “Good, bad, so-so. All of that. In ’seve
nty-six, the government extended the old three-mile territorial limit to two hundred miles to keep foreigners out. Had to do it. Russians and Germans and Japanese were coming in with armadas of trawlers and factory ships that process and freeze the catch. Once they found a good coordinate, they’d sit on it until they cleaned it out. A factory ship can hold six-months’ catch so their draggers don’t have to return to port to refuel or off-load. And they used roller nets so they could drag bottom we couldn’t, and they fished with two-inch mesh nets, whereas we have to use five-inchers to let the little ones escape. The Europeans and Japanese lost all their boats during the war so their governments subsidized new ones in the sixties. Their fleets are newer and more efficient than our Yankee one. We couldn’t compete. But since the two-hundred-mile limit, our catch is way up.”

  “That’s the good. What’s the bad?”

  “About the same thing—the government. They watch over everything out here now. That helicopter that passed a while back was observers. We’ve got quotas imposed by marine biologists although nobody has an accurate idea how many fish are below. You can’t count them like elephants. A year ago, we caught the entire East-coast quota for haddock in two days. Some of the regulations are just out of line with reason. This is one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. It’s why New England got so prosperous in the early years. It’s why they hung a gold codfish in the statehouse in Boston in seventeen-and-when.”

  “Is the government your main problem?”

  “Government, the sea, weather, rocks, a flounder’s brain, dogfish tearing open nets to get your catch. Hell. Even the church giving up meatless Fridays. Guinea boats up out of Gloucester—old boats that go down all the time. Not long ago one dragged across the courses of fifteen of our trawlers and tied everbody up. Tell me that wasn’t bedlam.”

  Two-forty: Wind strong off the coast. Sea a deep blue-black. As the westerlies grow stronger, Tom waves and shouts, “Heist the gear!” Another tow cut short. What began as a good fishing day has turned sour. The sternmen, cutting the fish, struggle to stay upright on the wet, pitching deck. The return to port at twenty knots over the surge of sea is a harum-scarum carnival ride of bouncing and salt spray and following gulls. “Find a smoother street, captain!” Ron yells. “I’m about to slip with this knife and cut a tallywhacker off!”

  With everything hosed down and secured, Ron pulls out a couple of big yellowtails. In quick strokes, he slices behind the gills, down the spine, flips the fish and does the same thing, then, with two final quick cuts, frees the filets. “Put your nose here,” he says and holds up the flounder.

  “All I smell is sweetness.”

  “Sweetness is right. It’s fresh. Once you eat a real, honest fresh flounder, you won’t like what lubbers call fresh seafood. You’ll be like the woman after the French tickler—never satisfied again.”

  He drops a filet in a bag. Ken says, “Cook it up in your truck tonight. Eat it tonight, or you’ll never know what fresh fish is.”

  Four-twenty: The Allison E warped to the pier. Tom and I watch the catch come up to a broker’s truck. Tom calls down, “Save a nice haddock for the mother-in-law.” To me he says, “We had to heist early three times and that cost us about a thousand dollars. Our check for this haul will only be about eight hundred dollars. Anytime you pull less than a thousand, it’s costing you money.” As we wait for the truck to finish stowing the crates, I ask Tom what’s the most unusual thing he’s encountered at sea.

  21. Tom West in Cape Porpoise, Maine

  “Breath of a whale,” he says.

  I laugh. “Seriously.”

  “That’s it. When they sound and blow, it’s like the mouth of Hell opened.”

  Four-fifty: Tom moves his trawler to anchorage in the harbor and returns to the pier in the punt.

  “What will you do now after a day on the high sea?” I ask.

  “What anyone else here does—watch television.”

  Five-ten: But for the whelm of tide, the pier is quiet and empty of boats, gulls, trucks, fish, and the men that go down to the sea in ships and come home to watch The Price Is Right.

  I walk to my rig, sauté the flounder in butter and pepper, and eat. Ron is right. I’ve become the woman after the French tickler.

  4

  THE main thing here was concrete. Trying to find blue highways down the Northeast seaboard wasn’t going to be difficult—it was going to be impossible. Using the theory (which had worked in the South, West, and North) that an expressway relieves a paralleling road from congestion, I tried U.S. 1, a highway so famous there is a book called U.S. One, which gives a virtual mile-by-mile description of the route as it was in 1938. From New York to Eastport, Maine, much of 1 follows the old Boston Post Road, which itself followed Indian trails.

  Highway statistics: since 1930, American road and street miles have increased only eighteen percent while car traffic has grown by fifty percent, truck by seventy. But most of that increase in roadways has come in surburban streets. Even though there is about one road mile per square mile in the contiguous states, highways take up less than one percent of the three million square miles in the country.

  I knew U.S. 1, stretching from the Canadian border to Key West, was capable of putting a man in an institution of one kind or another—at least it once was—but I hoped things had changed.

  They hadn’t. The highway was still a nightmare vision of the twentieth century, a four-lane representing (as Mencken has it) “the American lust for the hideous, the delight in ugliness for its own sake.” After an hour, I gave up, turned onto Interstate 95, and got swept south toward Boston.

  More statistics: if you poured all the sand, gravel, and cement in American interstates into a nine-foot-thick, ten-foot-high wall, it would circle the world fifty times. I went down the interstate miles—driving, driving. Each mile took up twenty-five acres or the equivalent of forty thousand loaves of bread. So I’ve heard.

  Tractor-trailer rigs (using two-thirds more fuel per cargo-ton than a locomotive) blasted me all the way to Boston. Then, to the west, fifty minutes from Haymarket Square, I found Massachusetts 16, a quiet road out of Wellesley, that ran down through stands of maple, birch, and pine, down along brooks, across fens, down miles of stone walls covered with lichens.

  Many New England stone fences built between 1700 and 1875 were laid by gangs of workers who piled stone at the rate of so much a rod. Edwin Way Teale says that in the latter years of the past century, before economic and social developments began obliterating some of the walls, there were a hundred thousand miles of stone fences in New England. Even today, for many of them, the only change has been the size of the lichens, those delicate rock-eating algae that can live nine hundred years.

  At Holliston, I stopped and took a sandwich and bottle of Moxie (once advertised as “the only harmless nerve food known that can recover loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness”) into the old town burial ground and ate lunch while I walked and read the slanting slate tombstones. There were carved urns, hourglasses, and weeping willows; among the mors vincit omnia sentiments were some well-cut death’s-heads and angels of redemption. Often it’s hard to tell the difference because the death’s-heads evolved into angels, the angels into cherubs, the cherubs into portraits of the deceased.

  Near the south end of the cemetery, under a big ash, was Lieutenant Joseph Mellen’s stone. The Minuteman died in 1787, the year of the Constitution, at the age of forty. Toward the bottom of the marker was a poem that appears on many colonial gravestones in numerous variations. Mellen’s version:

  Behold and see as you pass by,

  As you are now so once was I;

  As I am now so you must be,

  Prepare for Death & follow me.

  In other times, people came to burial grounds for contemplation. Next to the stone lay a crumpled sheet of rice paper. I opened it. There, in a half-completed wax rubbing of the old matrix on Mellen’s stone, was a figure of death or redemption—make your choice.<
br />
  While the grounds were appropriate for musing, for falling inward, the bright day wasn’t, and I had no mind to take my darker self (that dogged soldier of the Indian wars) seriously. I picked up the rubbing and stuck it to a wall of Ghost Dancing and got moving—I didn’t know where. “Our destination,” Henry Miller says, “is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”

  Down state 115 southeast toward Taunton. I had to keep checking route markers for the northwest-bound traffic in order to stay on course. Rule of the blue road: the highway side to where you’ve been is better marked than the one to where you’re going.

  Perhaps inclined by days past, I found myself heading toward Narragansett Bay, an area in which I’d spent my Navy service during the sixties. The whole time, the shining waxen eyes of the old stone face, like Uncle Sam’s on the recruiting posters, watched from every angle.

  5

  FALL River, Massachusetts, is chiefly memorable for me as the factory city I have never driven through without losing the way. Once there—predictably, inexplicably, and utterly—I am confounded by the knots of concrete. So, that day, entangled again, it was like old times. Maybe that’s what set me up to expect Newport to be the same.

  The island of Rhode Island is a misshapen boot in Narragansett Bay; just above the instep stands the old town center of Newport, and around the sole stepping into the Atlantic is the other Newport: that of the exclusive oceanside gilded estate “cottages,” detached in space, attitude, and history. Old harborside Newport, however historic, was never quaint; it was much too rough and lusty for that. Nor was it ever a preserved relic like Wickford or picturesquely cute like Little Compton, other Rhode Island villages. In short, it was a real sea town.