The Bottom of the Harbor (22 page)

Mr. Townsend had grown tired of standing, and he sat back down on the capstan.

“Sometime in the latter half of March,” continued Harry, “I and three or four men that I swap labor with get together and move this barge up the river. They help me move mine, I help them move theirs; they help me stake my poles, I help them stake theirs. We tie the barge to a launch owned by one of the men and tow her up on the tide, and take her to a point beside the riverbank half a mile or so above the bridge, where she'll be convenient to both my rows. We run a hawser from that capstan you're sitting on to a tree on the bank and draw her up close to the bank, with the bow facing the bank, and then we anchor her with three anchors—port, starboard, and stern. She stays there for the duration of shad season. Then we get out on the bank and put up a rack to mend nets on and a gallows to hang a set of scales on. The land along there is owned by the Palisades Interstate Park, and a shadfisherman pays rent for the space he uses on the riverbank on the basis of how many rows he fishes—the rate is two hundred dollars a row for the season. Then we go back to the flats and start snaking my poles out of the mud and loading them on a peculiar-looking kind of craft called a double boat. A double boat consists of two forty-foot scows connected together side by side but with a narrow space left in between them. It resembles a raft, as much as it resembles anything. When we get it loaded, we tow it up the river on the tide, the same as we towed the barge, and then we start staking the poles. Until a few years ago, this was a job shadfishermen dreaded. We'd anchor the double boat over the place we wanted the pole to go, and we'd stand the pole up in the narrow in-between space I mentioned, to keep it steady. Then we'd lash a crosspiece on the pole, and two men, the heavier the better, would climb up and stand on the crosspiece and hold on to the pole and bend their knees and make a kind of jumping motion, keeping time with each other, until they drove the butt end of the pole into the river bottom. Sometimes they'd have to jump for hours to get a pole down far enough. Sometimes more weight would be needed and two more men would get up on the crosspiece. The two on the inside would hold on to the pole and the two on the outside would hold on to the two on the inside, and they'd jump and grunt and jump and grunt, and it was a strange sight to watch, particularly to people watching it from shore who didn't have the slightest idea what was going on out there. Shad poles are spaced from twenty-five to thirty feet apart, and you have to put down from forty-one to forty-nine poles on a twelve-hundred-foot row, counting the outside poles, so you can just imagine the jumping we used to have to do. Nowadays, it's much simpler. We have a winch sitting on a platform in the middle of the double boat, and we simply stand the pole in place and put a short length of chain around it up toward its upper end and hook a cable from the winch onto the chain, and the winch exerts a powerful downward pull on the chain and forces the butt end of the pole into the bottom.

“By the last week in March, the shad barges are in place all along the Hudson and the shad poles are up. There's a number of old retired or half-retired sea cooks and tugboat cooks in Edgewater and Weehawken, and they come out of retirement around this time and take jobs as cooks on shad barges. They work on the same barges year after year. As soon as the cooks get situated in the galleys, the shadfishermen start living aboard. Around the same time, men start showing up in Edgewater who haven't been seen in town since last shad season. You need highly skilled fishermen to handle shad nets, and for many years there hasn't been enough local help to go around, so every spring fishermen from other places come and take the jobs. A shadfisherman generally hires from two to five of them for each row he fishes, and pays them a hundred or so a week and bunk and board. Most of them are Norwegians or Swedes. Some come from little ports down in South Jersey, such as Atlantic Highlands, Port Monmouth, Keyport, Point Pleasant, and Wildwood. In other seasons, they do lobstering or pound-fishing, or go out on draggers or scallopers. Some come from a small dragger fleet that works out of Mill Basin, in Brooklyn. Some come from Fulton Market—old fishermen who work as fillet cutters and go back to fishing only during shad season. Some don't come from any particular place, but roam all over. One man didn't show up in Edgewater year before last, the best man with a shad net I ever saw, and last year he did show up, and I asked him where he'd been. ‘I worked my way home on a tanker to see my sister,' he said, and by ‘home' he meant some port in Norway, ‘and then I worked on a Norwegian sealer that hunted harp seals along the coast of Labrador, and then I worked my way back here on a tanker, and then I worked awhile in the shrimp fleet in Galveston, Texas, and the last few months I worked on a bait-clam dredge in Sheepshead Bay.' They know how to do almost any kind of commercial fishing—and if they don't they can pick it up between breakfast and lunch and do it better by supper than the ones who taught them. When they come aboard a barge, all they ever have with them is an old suitcase in one hand and an old sea bag slung over one shoulder that they carry their boots and oilskins in, and they seldom say much about themselves. In times past, there were quite a few rummies among them, real old thirty-second-degree rummies, but the rummies seem to have dropped by the wayside. Oh, there's a few left.

“Every year, on one of the last days in March or one of the first days in April, the shad start coming in from the sea. They enter the mouth of the harbor, at Sandy Hook, and straggle around awhile in the Lower Bay, and then they go through the Narrows and cross the Upper Bay and enter the mouth of the Hudson and head for their spawning grounds. There are several of these grounds. The main one begins eighty miles up the river, up around Kingston, and extends to Coxsackie—a distance of twenty-five miles. This stretch of the river has a great many sandbars in it, and creek mouths and shallow coves and bays. As a rule, shad are four years old when they make their first trip in, and they keep on coming in once every year until their number is up. You can take a scale off a shad and look at the scars on it and tell how many times the shad has spawned, and every season we see quite a few who managed to escape our nets as many as five or six times and go up and spawn before they finally got caught, not to speak of the fact that they managed to keep from being eaten by some other fish all those years. Roe shad average around three and a half to four pounds, and bucks average around two and a half to three. The roes are always heavier. Once in a while, we see a seven-pound roe, or an eight-pounder, or a nine-pounder. I caught one once that weighted thirteen and a half pounds.”

“Just think how many fish she must've spawned in her time,” said Mr. Townsend. “If it had been me that caught her, I'd've patted her on the back and put her back in.”

“A commercial fisherman is supposed to catch fish, Mr. Townsend, not put them back in,” Harry said. “Anyway, as a matter of fact, I killed her getting her loose from the net. The shad won't come into the river until the temperature of the river water reaches forty degrees or thereabouts, and that's what we watch for. Day after day, when the water starts approaching this temperature, we go out just before every flood tide and hang a short net called a jitney in the spaces between several poles toward the far end of the row. This is a trial net. The shad may start trickling in, only three or four showing up on each tide, and continue that way for days, or avalanches of them may start coming in all at once, but as soon as we find the first ones in the trial net, however many there are, even if there's only one, we go to work in earnest. Just before the next flood tide begins, I and two or three of the hired fishermen take a regularsized net out to the row in a shad boat. A shad boat is fifteen to twenty feet long and high and sharp in the bow and low and square and roomy in the stern. It has a well in its bottom, up forward, in which to sit an outboard motor—although you can row it if you want to—and it's unusually maneuverable. We have the net piled up in the stern, and we work our way across the downriver side of the row, and go from pole to pole, feeding the net out and letting the bottom of it sink and tying the top of it to the poles. It's like putting up a fence, only it's an underwater fence. Where my row is, the water ranges in depth from twenty to thirty feet, and I use a net that's twenty feet deep. The net has iron rings sewed every few feet along the bottom of it to weight it down and hold it down. In addition, on each end of it, to anchor it, we tie a stone called a dropstone. Several blocks north of here, there's a ravine running down from River Road to the riverbank. In the middle of the ravine is a brook, and beside the brook is an old abandoned wagon road all grown over with willow trees and sumac and sassafras and honeysuckle and poison ivy. Years ago, the main business of Edgewater was cutting paving blocks for New York City, and wagons carrying loads of these blocks to a dock on the river-bank used to come down this road. It was a rocky road, and you can still see ruts that the wheel rims wore in the rocks. Through the years, a good many paving blocks bounced off the wagons and fell in the brook, and the drivers were too lazy to pick them up, and that's where we get our dropstones. If we lose one in the river, we go up with a crowbar and root around in the mud and tree roots and rusty tin cans in the bed of the brook and dig out another one. Some of us have a notion the blocks are lucky. I wouldn't think of using any other kind of dropstone.

“By the time we have the net hung all the way across, the flood tide is in full flow, pushing and pressing against the net and bellying it out in the spaces between the poles. We go on back to the barge and leave the net to take care of itself for the duration of the tide. If enough shad to amount to anything come up the river in the tide, some of them are bound to hit it. They'll either hit it head on and stick their heads in the meshes and gill themselves or they'll hit it sideways and tangle themselves in it and the tide will hold them against it the way the wind holds a scrap of paper against a fence. In this part of the river, the tide runs from three and a half to six hours, according to the time of the month and the strength and direction of the wind, and it runs faster on the bottom than it does on the top, and it'll trick you. When we judge it's getting on toward the time it should start slowing down, we go back out to the row in the shad boat and get ready to lift the net. Quite often, we're way too early, and have to stop at the first pole and sit there in the boat with our hands in our laps and bide our time. We might sit there an hour. If it's during the day, we sit and look up at the face of the Palisades, or we look at the New York Central freight trains that seem to be fifteen miles long streaking by on the New York side, or we look downriver at the tops of the skyscrapers in the distance. I've never been able to make up my mind about the New York skyline. Sometimes I think it's beautiful, and sometimes I think it's a gaudy damned unnatural sight. If it's in the nighttime, we look at that queer glare over midtown Manhattan that comes from the lights in Times Square. On cold, clear nights in April, sitting out on the river in the dark, that glare in the sky looks like the Last Judgment is on the way, or the Second Coming, or the end of the world. Every little while, we stick an oar straight into the water and try to hold it there, to test the strength of the tide. We have to time things very carefully. We want the net to stay down and catch fish as long as possible, but if we wait too long to get started the tide will begin to ebb before we get across the row, and belly the net in the opposite direction, and dump the fish out. I sit beside the outboard motor and handle the boat, and I usually have three fishermen aboard. When I give the signal to let's get going, two of the fishermen stand up side by side in the stern, and one unties the net at the first pole. Then, while one holds on to the top of the net, the other pulls the bottom of it up to the top—that's called pursing it. Then they start drawing it into the boat, a little at a time. The third man stands a few feet farther back, and helps wherever he's needed most. We proceed from pole to pole, untying the net and drawing it in. As it comes aboard, the men shake it and jerk it and twitch it and seesaw it and yank it this way and that, and the fish spill out of it and fall to the bottom of the boat. The men tear a lot of holes in the net that way, but it can't be helped. As the net piles up in the stern, the fish pile up amidships. When we get to the end of the row, if we've had a good lift, we'll have over a thousand shad piled up amidships, bucks and roes all jumbled together, flipping and flopping and beating the air with their tails, each and every one of them fit to be cooked by some great chef at the Waldorf-Astoria and served on the finest china, and the boat'll almost be awash. I must've seen a million shad in my time, and I still think they're beautiful—their thick bodies, their green backs, their silver sides, their saw-edged bellies, the deep forks in their tails. The moment we draw in the end of the net, we turn about and head for the riverbank. We beach the boat, and all four of us grab hold of the net—it's dripping wet and heavy as lead—and heave it onto a kind of low-sided box with four handles on it called a net box. We carry this up on the bank, and spread the net on the net rack. Then, while one man starts picking river trash out of the net and mending it and getting it ready for the next flood tide, I and the two other men unload the fish and sort them and weigh them and pack them in wooden boxes, a hundred or so pounds to a box. The roes bring a much higher price than the bucks, and we pack them separately. I write my name on each box with a black crayon, and below it I write ‘A. & S.' That stands for Ackerly & Sandiford, the wholesale firm in Fulton Market that I ship to. There's always some trucker over here who understands shadfishing and makes a business every spring of trucking shad to market. Joe's uncle, old Mr. John Hewitt, used to do it years ago, first with a dray, then with a truck. In recent years, a man named George Indahl has been doing it. Usually, about the time we get through boxing a lift, one of his trucks comes down the little one-lane dirt road that runs along the riverbank up where I anchor my barge, and the driver stops and picks up my boxes. Then he goes on down the line and stops at the next shadfisherman's place, and keeps on making stops until he has a load, and then he high-tails it for South Street.”