Blue Highways (56 page)

Three-forty:
Because of small-craft warnings, there has been almost no lobstering for three days, and the bait shed smells like the ass end of some great unwashed creature. The old watchers wait nearby in their Valiants as fishermen arrive in crumbling trucks and discuss the forecast: winds easterly five to ten miles an hour, shifting to westerlies by afternoon. It’s the westerlies you have to watch. The seamen head for the boats.

We take the punt, riding low with the four of us, out to the
Allison E
. On board: skipper Tom West; his brother and chief sternman, Ken; and assistant sternman, Ron Jeffers. I am chief observer.

Three-fifty:
Still so early even the gulls are silent. Under way. The running lights show pocks of rain on the water, and our faces glow green from the navigational instruments. The engine gives more noise than heat. For three centuries, white men have gone down this way to pursue the bottomfish—those peculiar species that loll in half somnolence on the ocean floor.

Four o’clock:
On the open sea. Making ten knots, fast enough to raise a wake as high as the transom. The forty-foot
Allison E
rides up the swells and down the other side. Up, down, up, down. Although a new stern trawler, she is built the old way—cedar planks over oak ribs, keel, and stem.

In the forward compartment, Ron lies sleeping wound in among the two-gallon jugs of fresh water for the radiator, the coolers of food, a case of Seven-Up, three five-gallon drums of engine oil, a pair of life preservers, and a first-aid kit. Ken beside him, neither asleep nor awake.

In the small wheelhouse, Tom checks the gauges with a flashlight and watches the double set of six-digit LED numbers on the loran. A funnel above his head makes him look like the Tinman. “We’re going to build in a couple of bunks, but the inclination and opportunity haven’t struck at the same time yet,” he says. “We’re doing the cabin fitting ourselves to keep the expense down.”

Around him hang fifteen thousand dollars in electronic gear: Wesmar Scanning Sonar, Si-Tex Fish Finder, marine radio, CB, radar, and the Loran C. Also binoculars, five Dexter fish knives, whetstone, half-dozen rolled charts (the good fishing coordinates terribly smudged), penciled figures on the bulkheads and overhead.

On the deck, stacked behind the wheelhouse and around the winch, stand thirty plastic fish crates furnished by fish brokers: John Nagle & Co., P. Markos Seafoods, H. R. Drake & Sons. Looking like laundry baskets, the rectangular containers are of several colors, but only one is blue. Also on the deck: two propane bottles, the mast, boom, gallows frame, net, holding box, and the Hathaway winch—a twin spool model, each drum wound with two hundred twenty-five fathoms of chain and steel towing cable. The cable runs through three sets of bollards, then up the gallows where it attaches on each side of the sixty-five-foot Yankee 35 net. At the front end of the net are the “doors”—a pair of four-hundred-pound steel-rimmed oak pieces that serve to keep the mouth of the long net open as it moves over the sea bottom. Atop the wheelhouse is a Givens four-man enclosed life raft with a hydrostatic release.

Four-fifty:
Lights of Cape Porpoise gone from the horizon. Eastern sky cold and gray. Tom says, “We can fish in a good year only about two hundred days. Whatever income from dragging we’ll earn, we’ve got to earn then. We can’t ever make up for a day lost. The only alternative is hauling sport fishermen, but they get demanding. They’ve put down four hundred dollars and—fog or wind—by God they’re going out. They don’t know what the sea is. So you take them a half mile offshore and let them think they’re deep-sea fishing. You hope they catch a rock cod so they’ll go home happy, and you can keep your life, theirs, and your boat. I don’t like that business. We fish twenty miles out with the inshore fleet. The
Allison E
isn’t big enough for overnight runs.”

Five-ten:
The sternmen pull on rubber boots and yellow oilskins. Ron wins the race to dress first—no mean feat in the violent pitching. He crows as he puts on his sou’wester. Everyone animated. The crew sorts through an impossible twining of nylon net, and Tom holds the wheel with his left hand while watching an image flicker across the Fish Finder and listening to the
chat-chat-chat
of the sonar. Occasionally he peers into the screen of the depth sounder housed in a long tube like an Edison peep show to see an electronic cross-section of the sea bottom a thousand feet ahead. As soon as the
Alison E
passes over a ridge of jagged rocks, he waves, and the crew, staying clear of the wildly swinging doors, drops the net. Ken goes to the winch and evenly plays out the tow wire by releasing or braking the drums independently of each other. The cables crackle and thump as they unwind; the tension on them is terrific; should one part, it could cut a man in two. The left drum hangs up, and Ron beats the line free with a hammer. In eight minutes, one hundred twenty-five fathoms of cable is out, and the net rides forty fathoms below.

Five-thirty:
Rain stops. Ten miles offshore and towing at three knots over an area in the Gulf of Maine known as Perkins Ground of Bigelow Bight. Two hundred forty feet below on the mud, sand, and gravel, the net rouses bottomfish as they bump up into the “sweep” and on back into the rear bag called the “cod end.”

Five-forty:
Crew out of oilskins. We open the coolers. The coffee and sandwiches for a few moments cover the smell of the sea. A squiggle blips across the Fish Finder: a school of herring. “Sardine fishing’s gone to hell in Maine,” Tom says. As we eat, he gives the news off the marine radio: the relative calm won’t hold till evening. From the CB we hear the day’s prices for “flats” (flatfish): flounders (yellowtails or lemon sole, blackbacks, dabs or plaice, gray sole or witch flounder) are selling at thirty-five cents a pound on the New Bedford market, the earliest auction. Less abundant groundfish—halibut (a flounder), cod, haddock, hake, whiting—are going at forty to fifty cents a pound. What the fisherman will sell for a half dollar a pound, the supermarket will sell for two dollars after the fish passes through the trucker (add ten percent), the broker (another ten), and cutting house where the fish will become a filet.

“In the winter when the weather cuts down on the fishable days,” Tom says, “the supply drops and prices will triple. But the catch is smaller, and we have to fish at twice the depth, so our income stays level.”

“Do you sell your catch in Boston?”

“Mostly, but it goes all over. Some of it, like the sand sharks, even goes to England for fish and chips. Flats that are too small to take to market—the ones we call ‘windowpanes’—those fish end up on the pier as lobster bait at six dollars a box.”

The four cylinder GM-Detroit diesel, sounding like an overloaded bus, works hard and covers over our words. The shouting keeps talk to a minimum.

“Driving a truck up a mountain is less strain than towing,” Tom says, “especially when we go against the tide. You tow with or against the tide. If you pull across it, your doors are going to foul and close up the net. We’re burning five gallons an hour now, and we’ll try to keep the gear down for ten miles or three hours. We like to get three long tows in by sunset. Night dragging isn’t very productive. If we get a good tow, we’ll heist a ton or more of fish. A dragger never knows how well he’s doing until the bag comes up. That’s why you’ve got to tow by the clock. If you tow by feel, the tide can make you think you’ve got a full bag.”

West usually trawls in a spiral pattern from the inside out. The big worry is to keep from getting the net (fifteen hundred dollars) or the doors (eight hundred dollars) or the cable (seven hundred dollars) hung up on an obstruction, often rocks, but sometimes other things. A few weeks earlier, he got entangled in the ribs of an old sailing ship; when the net broke free, it brought up a forty-foot timber and coal clinkers. He figures it must have been a wooden steamer. “A friend hooked up on a sunk German submarine from one of the wars, and another fisherman got bollixed up in an old airplane and had to cut his net. You can’t always jerk it free. I overdid it once and blew a gasket. Another trawler gave me a tow. When you’re dead in the water, the sea does what she wants with you.”

Six o’clock:
Ron forward again and napping. Ken explains the operation of the winch and gallows. He graduated from the “dragging college” conducted by the University of Rhode Island at Wickford, where he studied diesel engines, net design, marketing, navigation, deck gear, and sea survival. For graduation, his parents gave him a three-hundred-dollar neoprene survival suit constructed to prevent hypothermia. At any time of the year, the water temperature is the enemy. His education helps produce a better catch, but it also may help a bank to look favorably on a loan for a boat of his own one day.

Tom attended one semester at Parsons College in Iowa, then taught skiing in New Hampshire, and later worked five years as a contractor in house construction. Before buying the
Allison E
(named after his daughter), he operated his own lobster boat and made his traps in the Maine tradition and learned the rudiments of seafaring. But lobstering is a restricted, touch-and-go way to earn a living. Although the investment and risks are greater in dragging, so are the profits. He sold the small boat. With the trawler, he tried a new fishing method using a Scottish seine that required him to change all his deck gear to accommodate it. It didn’t work well and became an expensive experiment.

Ron, born in Philadelphia, has lived in Maine off and on for ten years. During bad weather, he repairs oil heaters and drives a truck, but he prefers the sea. He hopes one day to buy his own lobster boat.

A day of good tows can bring a gross sale of about two thousand dollars; the crew takes forty percent and the boat sixty; the skipper pays operating costs. A good sternman on a good boat during a good year can bring in forty thousand dollars. But the work is not only rigorous, it’s dangerous. “According to insurance companies,” Tom says, “it’s the second most dangerous occupation. I heard the only thing worse is a bomb squad.”

Eight o’clock:
Sun out. Ken and Ron back into oilskins. Ron says, “In fifteen minutes, we’ll find out if this pond’s got any damn fish in it.” Tom throttles back, and swells come up under the stern, lift the trawler, slide under, and drop her
kerplunk
back down. Ken begins winching in the net as Ron pries with a length of pipe at the cable on the drums to keep the lines from snarling. The cable jerks and flings water. “If she’s going to part, now’s the likely time!” Tom shouts from the wheelhouse. The weight of the net pulls the boat backwards until we are above it. An aura of anticipation. A crew gets paid only for its share of the catch. There are no salaries.

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.