Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Against the Tide

Mariner Books

Chapter One

Siegfried's Fabulous Horde

Brian Gibbons likes jazz. He likes Miles Davis, John Coltrane,Pharoah Sanders, Thelonious Monk. He likes musicthat's tough and sinewy and inventive, that sings againstthe mortal tenor of its own heartbeat, that blue, throbbing pulseof fatal and proximate sadness. He doesn't care so much for BobDylan, the troubadour of his generation, but he knows Dylan wellenough to parody him: "We're artists and we don't look back."

    He stands on Snow Shore, gazing across Nauset Inlet and outto sea. At his back is history: a historical marker saying that theFrench explorer Samuel de Champlain anchored near this spotin 1605 and that Champlain's ship's carpenter, an unfortunatenamed Malouin, from St. Malo in Brittany, was killed on thisbeach by Nauset Indians in a dispute over an iron kettle. It alsonotes that this was the landing for the undersea telegraphic cablethat from 1898 to 1959 stretched three thousand miles betweenBrest, France, and Orleans, Massachusetts, and carried the firstword to America of the success of Lindbergh's solo flight. It notesas well that this was the home port of the early Nauset fishingfleet on Cape Cod.

    At his back is history: the site of the little two-room campthat Dr. Ralph Wiggin, a Boston urologist and surgeon ? Brian'sgrandfather on his mother's side ? bought in rural Orleans in1910 for his hunting and fishing pleasure, his family's rest andsolace; the spot on a curving stretch of the Southeast Expresswaynear Braintree where Brian's friend Eddie's MG sports car wentout of control in 1968 as it was carrying Brian to his inductioninto the army and from there possibly to Vietnam; the cove inPleasant Bay where Brian, by then a husband and breadwinner,was pleased to catch his three-bushel limit on his first day ofbullraking littleneck clams in 1972; all the newspaper racksand magazine stands, the television sets and radios, that in 1976trumpeted the news on the Cape and along the Gulf of Mainethat President Gerald Ford had signed into law the MagnusonFishery Conservation and Management Act, which promised aprosperous new era for hard-pressed New England fishermen;the dock at Wychmere Harbor in Harwichport, where the famousHarry Hunt, who taught Brian how to catch lobsters, waswont to pull his lips tight against his teeth and remind his youngsternman, "The wind, the tide, the weather, and every man isagainst ya."

    At his back is a rampart of glacial till cocked like John L.Sullivan's left fist and thrust thirty miles out into the Atlantic; athis feet is one of the Atlantic's most notorious graveyards. Sincethe English ship Sparrowhawk grounded against a sandbar offNauset Beach in 1627, more than three thousand ships have meta proximate sadness off Cape Cod, and uncounted sailors havelaid their bones near the carpenter Malouin's.

    But that sort of catastrophe seems impossible now. The terns? common, roseate, and least ? have returned to Nauset likethe swallows to Capistrano and are gathering into colonies tomate and nest. The striped bass are back too, swimming northfrom their spawning grounds in Chesapeake Bay and ravenouslyfollowing the herring into the bays and inlets. Whales ? finback,humpback, the nearly extinct right whale ? are feeding off thebeach on krill or bait fish schooled near sandbars such as theone that doomed the Sparrowhawk. The migrating whales occasionallybreak water like sandbars themselves, then settle, submerge,dissipate into spring's seething broth of blossoming diatomsand dinoflagellates, opalescent moon jellies and scarflikenudibranchs, a profligate and proliferous brew comprehendinga million animals in a single quart, as many as three thousanddifferent species among them, each tiny creature as distinct anorganism as a sixty-foot finback, each as eloquent as that whaleof creation's wealth and invention.

    The rim of the harbor is layered with pollen from Cape Cod'subiquitous pitch pines, as were the hood and bed of Brian's Fordpickup as it sat in his driveway twenty minutes ago. Broad magentasplashes of salt-spray rose fleck the gritty scrub behind thebeach. The scent of honeysuckle seeps down from the heightsbehind us, where great and fine houses of glass and cedar shinglekeep watch.

    But Brian Gibbons does not look back. He holds to the harbor,where a small fleet of lobster boats, including his own, the Cap'nToby, rests placidly at anchor. Waves roll under the yellow pollenlike wrinkles being smoothed from a carpet. The horizonhas a telescopic clarity, the boats a cardboard-cutout inertness.Offshore, unseen, scattered pods of Homarus americanus, theAmerican lobster, are moving into shoal waters to their summerfeeding grounds.

    Brian lingers at the door of the pickup, drinking the morningin, joyful just to be here, content in this truce he has struck, atleast for the moment, with the wind and the tide and the weather,if not necessarily with other men or the history that in recentyears has cast such a shadow across his and others' lives.

    "Once a week, for thirty seconds or so," he says, "you get tojust love it."

At thirty seconds or so past seven, on this morning of May 20,1995, Brian lifts the engine cover, amidships on the Cap'n Toby,and opens up the lobster boat's seacocks. The raised cover revealsa 135-horsepower, 4-cylinder, turbocharged Volvo marine diesel.The seacocks allow water from the harbor to be pumped into theengine's cooling jackets. Brian kneels at the engine hatch andchecks his other fluids: coolant, crankcase and transmission oil.He switches on the battery, jabs an extra shot of fuel into thecylinders, and turns the engine over.

    Brian doesn't love the cut-down plastic milk jug that hangsjury-rigged on a breather line from his crankcase, which shiverslike a nest of angry wasps as the motor kicks into life and sucksseawater into its cooling jackets. He says that Volvos are notoriouslyhard on their o-rings and seals, and that each day now hisown Volvo is leaving a quart of engine oil in the bilge. The milkjug on the breather line slows that loss, collecting oil vented outof the crankcase and allowing it to drain back into the engine."Where it can then be leaked into the bilge," Brian adds, smiling.

    The only thing he can do with his bilge water is pump it intothe sea. If a quart of oil is mixed into that water, then Brian,according to the federal Water Pollution Control Act, the termsof which are tacked beneath his cabin's port window, is subjectto as much as a $5000 fine from the Coast Guard. This happensto equal the amount of money he spent in March at NausetMarine in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the oil loss. Thosetwo amounts combined equal the price of a new engine for theCap'n Toby.

    Brian stays on the right side of the feds, and keeps the inletclean for lobsters and striped bass and littlenecks with an oil-absorbentcloth inside the milk jug and absorbent pads packed intoa fine-mesh bait bag in the bilge. Every week or so he fishes thisbag out with a gaff and changes it. He actually enjoys the jigglingmilk jug's combination of grade-school science project tackinessand genuine efficiency, but he doesn't like the fact that it's necessary,nor the extra housekeeping it requires. He is also increasinglyfearful that the money he has poured into this engine so farmight as well have been leaked into the bilge or pissed over theside ? especially in light of what has been so far an inexplicablypoor lobster season on Cape Cod.

    The Cap'n Toby is moored several hundred yards off SnowShore. The beach gives way to a level mud plain only one to threefeet under water at low tide, which requires boat captains inNauset Inlet to reach their vessels on the other side of the plainthrough a three-stage shuttle system. Moments ago Brian roweda dinghy just bigger than a bathtub out to a sixteen-foot woodenskiff moored halfway between the beach and the Cap'n Toby.This was slightly comic, with Brian's big arms and jackknifed legssqueezed into that dinghy, his baseball cap askew. He looked likea grown Huck Finn, only now getting around to lighting out forthe territories, putting on the lineaments of boyhood again as hedid so.

    He tied the dinghy to the skiff's mooring and then motored theskiff into shore, beaching it behind the Ford pickup, which hehad parked at the water's edge. Then we loaded the skiff withitems from the pickup's bed: twelve wooden lobster traps to beadded to the gear already offshore, an equal number of buoysand lengths of creosote-dipped rope (what Brian calls warp; thatis, rope for hauling), two coffee-table-sized plastic totes of mackereland squid for bait, two six-gallon diesel fuel canisters, acooler containing peanut butter sandwiches and Diet Pepsi, and abucket of such odds and ends as fresh rubber gloves and a handheldVHF radio. "In case of in case of," Brian said, nodding atthe radio, repeating the cautionary words of Olay Tveit, the captainof a ninety-four-foot scalloper out of New Bedford on whichBrian once served. When the skiff was loaded, we pushed it offthe beach and pointed for the Toby.

    Now Brian arranges gear in the cabin of the twenty-five-footboat while the engine idles. The wooden traps are piled in stacksof three in the stern, and the spindly black-pennanted buoys,constructed so their flags will bob several feet above the waves,are jammed upright through their slats. The totes of bait arestacked amidships behind the engine cover, which has been putback in place. The cooler and the plastic bucket are stowed in thewheelhouse. The fuel canisters are for topping the boat up atthe end of the day, and they remain in the skiff, which has beentied to the Toby's mooring. When the engine's temperature gaugemoves off dead cold and there is that first blush of heat to absorbas the seawater swirls through the housings encasing the coolantlines, Brian scrambles over the starboard gunwale to the foredeck,unties the mooring, and swings back behind the wheel.

    Spitting oil and breathing water, flying as many flags as a unitof hussar cavalry, the Cap'n Toby slips into gear and points eastto the Atlantic.

Brian remembers reading somewhere in the knotty science fictionof Philip K. Dick a passage to the effect that paranoia is a finething, actually, a disorder that earns its keep as a sort of preemptivesurvival mechanism. Just being paranoid, this thinking goes,doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's not out to get you.

    But Brian doesn't like paranoia. He described it to me once as"the most self-serving of mental disorders, and beyond a certainpoint its value in survival is lost as it starts to erode the mind andhealth of its host." He also warned me that I would see a lot ofbeyond-a-certain-point paranoia in the New England fishing industry,that it didn't necessarily take hard times for its discordantsong to be heard, that its thematic variations are as subtle andfar-ranging as any Coltrane riff. "It runs the gamut from themadman who accuses everybody on the ocean of hauling histraps to the quiet fellow who always knows damned well that ifyou said this, then you must be thinking that."

    These thoughts were part of a letter Brian wrote me in whichhe sought to explain how a man born to a pair of journalists inDelaware in 1950 came to be chasing lobsters, owning a boatand a house, raising a family, and taking the measure of his occupation'spsychological rip tides in Orleans, Massachusetts, in1995. To all this Brian attaches a certain onus of fate. "Shortly afterHagen tricked Kriemhilde into relinquishing Siegfried's fabuloushorde of gold," he began, "my great-great-great-great ...Perhaps I shouldn't begin so far back."

    He didn't. He began with his grandfather, Dr. Ralph Wiggin,who bought a small camp in Orleans. "This camp eventuallyserved as a retreat and center for low-cost existence for his children(and grandchildren}. As an example, while he was stationedin Fort Dix during World War I and then a field hospital inFrance following the Armistice, my grandmother closed theirCambridge home and set up house with their two young childrenat the Orleans camp. A kerosene heater, a hand pump, and anouthouse were the amenities provided at the two-room camp. Westill used the outhouse until I was four or five."

    Brian's grandmother died when his mother, Marian, was approachingadolescence, and his grandfather remarried two orthree years later. "Within a few years his health began to fail toarteriosclerosis, and his fortunes declined from sundry reasonsspawned by the Depression and poor health. Hence, for mymom, the Cape became a place of physical retreat and also spiritualserenity."

    Marian graduated from Colby Junior College in New Hampshireand returned to Orleans, getting by, or nearly so, on thethree or four dollars a week she earned writing book reviews forthe Boston Evening Transcript. Eventually she moved to Bostonto work full-time at the newspaper. There she met young JohnGibbons, who worked at the paper with his father and commutedwith him to Boston from their native New Jersey everyweek. "They met; they courted; their first date was the night ofthe 1938 hurricane; the rest is history. (Historians have overlookedthe fact that my parents were climbing Mount Monadnockthe day Hitler invaded Poland.)"

    John Gibbons never went to war, and Brian isn't sure whetherit was his age, his occupation, or his children that kept him aheadof the draft. During the war he left the Transcript and landed at asmall paper in Wilmington, Delaware, where Brian and his twobrothers and sister were raised. Marian Gibbons, however, stillrelished the solace of the Orleans camp, and she adjourned thereeach summer with the children.

    It was a life of many pleasures and few embellishments. "Believeme, it was the budget plan all the way. The summers on theCape were a nearly cashless enterprise, the main activities beingbaseball, swimming, picking berries, endless combat in the beachplum entanglements while garbed in German World War I geargathered in France by my grandfather, and a vigilant monitoringof the comings and goings of the boats in nearby Rock Harbor.Thus, the brood became Cape Codders of a sort."

    Dr. Wiggin, the first Cape Codder of a sort, lived in an agewhen medicine was not so remunerative as it is now. Neither didJohn Gibbons ever make a lot of money in journalism. In theearly 1960s he lost his job at that Wilmington newspaper, buthe was able to parlay his knowledge of the ins and outs ofthe Delaware statehouse into some catch-as-catch-can politicalpublic relations work. Brian described his grandparents' holdon middle-class status as "tenuous." He concedes that the slipperinessof that hold has shadowed his family for as long as hehas lived.

For the moment the Cap'n Toby lies at rest outside the harbor,and the twelve-inch mackerels that Brian and I are cutting up forlobster bait are ripe, their bellies gravid with either blood-red roeor milt the color of sailors' bones. Brian slices them behind thegills; I put the heads and tails into nylon bait bags the size of asmall purse. The bags' quarter-inch mesh openings are convenientfor a lobster's claws, but not for most larger scavengers. Themackerels' flesh is dark and firm and scentless, their skin a steelblue along the spine and cut with jagged zebra stripes of indigo.These in turn are limned in iridescent tones of silver and brassand copper.

    The squid in the tote next to the mackerels have neither colornor form. They lie like gobs of phlegm in the May light, theircollapsed tentacles defined only by the purple pinpricks of theirsuckers, their glabrous heads by the wet inkdrops of their eyes.Usually Brian sticks to mackerel and herring for bait at thistime of year; these squid are here on a trial basis. Brian told meyesterday that sometimes "oddball bait" works well with lobsters,something different from their customary fare, a little morepiquant, perhaps. He recalled a brief infatuation among Orleanslobstermen with squirrel and rabbit after an immigrant fromProvincetown said that road kill worked pretty well up there. Butwhen a rumor circulated that some Provincetown lobstermenwere going so far as to kill dogs for bait, this practice was abandoned.Brian isn't sure about these squid, but it's been, after all,the sort of spring to drive a man to opossum.

    His main VHF hangs from a mount in the pilothouse above hisSi-Tex electronic fish-finder. The radio crackles with the chatterof long-liners ? fishermen pursuing cod and haddock with linesof baited hooks anchored to the bottom of the sea ? who complainthat as many as three fourths of their hooks today are beingtaken by dogs, that is, spiny dogfish. The dogfish are small butvoracious sharks, two to three feet long, whose numbers haveballooned on Georges Bank and the waters immediately off theCape as populations of cod and other groundfish, or bottomfeeders,have precipitously declined. "I love hearing that," Briansays, noting this first untoward report in his truce with the elements."Dogs just love mackerel. They'll bite holes in these trapsto get at them, and then the traps won't hold lobsters."

    The traps that Brian means to haul from the bottom todaywere baited with mackerel and herring three clays ago. The twohundred or so traps that he has gotten into the water so far thisspring are arranged in north-south lines of ten to twelve, calledstrings, at points two to three miles off the beach. The preciselocations of the first and last trap in each string are entered intoa logbook kept next to the wheel, and the direction in whichBrian hauls ? whether he works from north to south or viceversa ? depends on the direction of the tide. Today he'll start atthe south end of each string, steaming against the tide to createslack in the ropes as he picks up his buoys and runs the linesthrough his hauling equipment. We head up the beach towardWellfleet, cruising at ten knots and navigating between corridorsmarked by the flags of other lobstermen's buoys. "By June it'sgoing to look like a goddamned miniature golf course out here,"Brian says. "From Truro to Chatham, you'll be able to walk onthe buoys."

    The narrow northern finger of Nauset Beach, alternately splitopen and stitched together again by nor'easters, yields withintwo miles to Eastham and the neat red-and-white buildings ofthe Nauset Coast Guard station and lighthouse. Above the lighthousea line of gritty cliffs rears up behind the beach, runningnorth to Truro and climbing as it goes. Within five miles thebeach shrinks to a thin blank strip footing the cliffs. The sandbecomes a specimen of moat, the cliffs military ramparts raisedagainst a besieging sea that, at its current rate of increase, willentirely engulf Cape Cod within six thousand years, drowningmunicipal miniature golf courses and lending an element ofprophecy to the Puritan cleric Cotton Mather's observation thatthis land would be known as Cape Cod until "shoales of coddefishebee seene swimming on its highest hills."

    Opposite the cliffs of Wellfleet, with the tide running southdown the beach, the Cap'n Toby slows and tiptoes up to thesouthern end of Brian's first string. This stretch of bottom isknown to lobstermen as the Can, because of a large buoy thatonce floated here. Brian throws the motor out of gear, leans overthe starboard gunwale, nabs the bobbing lobster buoy with aboathook, and then runs its rope, its warp, through a block suspendedfrom a four-by-four oak beam bolted across the wheelhouseroof. He drops the buoy to the cabin floor and turns ahandle that activates a hydraulic winch, the trap hauler, which isbolted into the cabin rail at his feet. Finally he lassos the warparound the turning wheel of the Hydro-Slave hauler. This takesbut a few seconds and is accomplished with an athlete's economyof motion. The quarter-inch warp shivers and throws off wateras it runs into the sheave of the hauler, then frees itself into blackloops on the cabin floor. The hauler sings with a frog's madchortle.

    The first trap is coming 120 feet up from level, sandy bottom. Ipeer over the gunwale into green water of deceptive clarity,which seems wholly without secrets but which frays and dissolvesthe straining warp into milky nothingness within a fathomof the surface. The trap is just a mote in an emerald void, then agradually spreading cloud. In an eyeblink the cloud crimps andhardens into a geometry of wire and twine barreling toward thesurface like an oncoming truck. The trap foams from the waterand for an instant swings lengthwise, green and dripping beneaththe block, its cargo scuttling within, the whole apparatus like acore sample torn from the bowels of a wreck, now glinting likea trophy in the sun.

    Brian throws the hauler into neutral with one hand and withthe other pulls the trap over the gunwale, where a touch of theHydro-Slave's reverse gear allows him to lay it gently uprightwith its gate on top. Brian makes most of his traps himself out ofoak lathing, but the ones in this string are factory-made, weldedtogether out of a square-mesh vinyl-coated wire that lasts longerunder water than the oak. There are three lobsters in this trap,their claws jabbed forward in rage, their tails snapping backwardin panic. Brian keeps clear of the claws as he works them out ofthe trap.

    One lobster is plainly a short ? undersized ? and Brian sendsit pinwheeling back into the water. The others he puts on thepegging board, a chessboard-sized piece of plywood laid on topof the engine cover and partitioned into compartments for suchitems as a handful of thumbnail-length wooden pegs, dozens ofyellow rubber bands as small as wedding rings but as thick asbracelets, a scissorslike banding tool for stretching the heavybands over the lobsters' claws, a gauge for measuring the lengthof a lobster's carapace from the thorax to the eye socket to determinethe legal minimum of three and a quarter inches, and corralspace for one or two free-ranging lobsters. The pegging board'sname comes from lobstermen's former practice of pushing thesmall wooden pegs into the lower hinges of a lobster's claws tokeep them from opening. Nowadays this is more easily done withrubber bands, but Brian always keeps some pegs on hand for thatrare lobster whose claws are too big for his bands.

    These two lobsters, both in the neighborhood of minimumsize, are something different from the mackerels and squid, anothersort of invention entirely. They claim in their coloring,perhaps, some degree of the mackerels' designer beauty. Theirshells are green and black and olive, prettily mottled in aquamarineand dusky orange, spiked and tuberculated in red. Otherwisethey occupy a point not even on the scale between themackerels' wind-tunnel symmetry and the squid's broken-eggshapelessness. Our familiarity with the lobsters on our dinnerplates, motionless and with all their pigments boiled away exceptthat well-known mineral red, robs them of their real strangeness.To observe their chitinous, appendage-laden skittering on Brian'spegging board is to go far toward restoring it.

    They look like nothing so much as Swiss Army knives broughtto life, given limbs and difficult personalities on the day HieronymusBosch was hired as a Disney animator. The eight broomstrawlegs, tipped with pincers, are all out of proportion to thearmored plugs that are their bodies. So too, in an opposite sense,are the claws, which even on these small specimens, one or twopounds, look so great and weighty as to be pushed like millstonesahead of them. But somehow the lobsters dance about the peggingboard with disturbing agility. Somehow they hold their bigclaws aloft and wide apart. The claws' snaggled forceps gape.Deftly and with a sneaky quickness, the lobsters parry the threateningmovements of my hands. They rotate like monstrous mantises,their stalked eyes and pronged snouts kept square to me,their claws hair-triggered like leg-hold traps. These are good specialeffects, I think to myself.

    Eventually I find ways for my hands to move over and behindthe lobsters' air defenses. Their eyes drop like periscopes intotheir sockets at the approach of the carapace gauge. One of thelobsters is just barely a short, and I pitch it back in over the portrail. The other is a keeper, a chick, and with the banding tool Islip a rubber band over the smaller cutting claw, the quicker ofthe two, and then another over the more powerful crusher claw.Meanwhile Brian removes from the trap the old bait bag, containingnow only an assortment of clean bones, and replaces itwith a fresh bag of mackerel. He drops the old bag onto thepegging board for me to clean after I place the banded lobsterinto an empty tote at my feet.

    Brian shuts the gate on the trap. He works the last of the warpfree of the hauler's sheave, puts the Cap'n Toby in gear, and letsthe trap slip clear of the rail as the boat starts to move again. Thetrap settles comfortably into the water, like a cat into a pillow,and slips wholly under the surface as Brian looks to be sure thatits warp pays out tangle-free over the boat's transom. At last hethrows the buoy back overboard and throttles north to the secondtrap in the string.

Brian has begun at the northernmost of the strings he is haulingtoday, and slowly works toward home as the day wears on.There is talk. He apologizes for the occasional saltiness of hislanguage, and the saltiness of fishermen's talk in general, with astory of that talk's sense of borders: "I was fishing on the Bell,that big scalloper that Olav Tveit ran, and Olav was bringinghis sixteen-year-old son out with him for the first time. It was theold cook ? cooks frequently being the mentoring types ? whotook the kid aside and told him that he was going to hear a lot ofhard language out there, language that he wouldn't necessarilyuse in front of his mother, and that he should be damned wellsure that he didn't. I thought that was nice. It was something thatOlav couldn't say to him. Olav was a Lutheran, but he could turnthe air blue with the best of them. He claimed fuck and shitpile had no equivalent in Norwegian or any other language."

    Concern for his own children was one of the factors that compelledBrian finally to abandon the Bell and other big New Bedfordboats, with their ten-day voyages out to the rim of the continentalshelf, out to Georges Bank and the Cultivator Shoals, infavor of lobstering. The wisdom of hindsight might call thatan economically savvy move as well, now that New Englandgroundfish stocks on Georges Bank have collapsed, now that thescallop harvest is in a tailspin, now that the docks of NewBedford and Gloucester have gone idle and their slips are full of shipsfor sale or in receivership. New England lobster harvests, meanwhile,have climbed steadily throughout the 1990s, so much sothat this little spot off Wellfleet ? which once very few peoplefished, coming here under cover of fog lest other lobstermen startworking this rich bottom ? now has that proto miniature-golf-course look.

    Brian himself isn't so sure. Again, he likes to take the longview, suggesting that the fate that made him a lobsterman hasmore to do with history and circumstance than market forecastsor biomass analysis, albeit he ? like many others, both fishermenand scientists ? saw the industry's current crisis cominga long way off. But not so far back as the early 1960s, whenBrian was still summering on the Cape with his mother and siblingsand when the vigilantly monitored boats sailing out of Orleans'sRock Harbor, a nick on the western or bay side of theCape, were transforming themselves from a fleet of small commercialquahog draggers to charter boats catering to tourists andsport fishermen out for striped bass. Meanwhile, out on GeorgesBank, 150 miles east of Cape Cod, the first great ships of theinternational distant-water fleet were making their appearance.

    "In my early teen years, the occasional odd job of helping toscrape and paint the bottom of one of the old draggers was sometimesavailable to otherwise listless wharf rats," Brian wrote."Sometimes the wharf rat might even be pressed into service outon Cape Cod Bay, picking piles and bagging up quahogs." Duringhis later teenage years, he worked ? "slaved," Brian correctedme ? on one of the Rock Harbor charter boats, the Empress,under a skipper known as one of the harshest taskmastersin the fleet. The not-so-patient Stu Finlay, Brian told me, "wouldbe driven into apoplexy by my wooden-headed adolescent stupidity."

    In 1969, however, Brian was drafted into the army. He hadn'tgone to college after graduating from high school in Delaware,though at that time college would have provided him with adeferment. He says he was only an indifferent student, and hewas put off by the campus upheavals of the late 1960s. "I was,shall we say, ambivalent about the politics of the day," he says,"and it seemed to me that you could party and carouse just aswell without the formality of attending a university." After receivinghis greetings from Uncle Sam, he bought a ticket for a6:30 A.M. bus from Hyannis to Boston and prepared for his inductionthe next day with what he describes as "classic debauchery."But he overslept that morning, missed the bus, and somade a desperate call to a friend who had just gotten back fromVietnam and invested his discharge money in an MG. Eddie tookhim racing up Route 6 and the Southeast Expressway, averagingeighty to ninety miles per hour and weaving through weekdaymorning traffic.

    Near Braintree, around a curve and on the back side of a rise,lay a steel I-beam that had just fallen off a truck and come torest across the middle lane. Eddie swerved and sent the car skiddinginto the guardrail, where the impact shot both passengersthrough the MG's convertible canvas roof. Eddie hit the grassyslope on the other side of the rail and came away unhurt. Brianhit the highway and skidded on his shoulder into one of thedriving lanes. There another careening car ran over his left leg.

    The accident left Brian with a steel plate in his leg and a permanentlimp; also with a 4F deferment from the draft, the impossibilityof GI funding for college, and $5000 in medical bills. In aroundabout way, the accident also brought him a wife and child.He became friendly with a nurse at Cape Cod Hospital during hissix-week stay there. Later that nurse's sister, Suzanne St. Amand,visited from San Francisco with her infant daughter. Brian andSuzanne met; they courted; they lived together off and on forseveral years. Six months after Brian and Suzanne were married,in 1973, adoption proceedings made Brian the child's father.

    "By 1971 I was getting pretty serious about making money,"he wrote. "I worked forty hours a week as a carpenter, two tothree nights a week as a bartender, and tried to do odd jobs(painting, firewood, shingling) on weekends. This was, in part,prompted by what I thought to be enormous hospital bills, whichI paid off with a few dollars here and a few dollars there everyweek. But the slow increments of financial gain I was realizing asa carpenter paled by comparison to the money fishermen couldmake shellfishing in the local estuaries.

    "Though I had gotten somewhat burnt out by my summerindentures in the charter fleet, I always pursued the bass, theflounder, and the steamer clam whenever the time and opportunityallowed. In 1972 I quit my standard construction job andwent to work building a charter boat with a Rock Harbor skipper.You can imagine that through all these years, and especiallywhen boat building, every coffee break, every lunch, every beer,was steeped in conversations about fish, technique, and money.At that time I was strong, quick on the uptake, could drink prodigiousquantities of beer or liquor without staggering, and hadbeen brought up ? while friends were waxing surfboards ? towork twelve- to twenty-hour shifts, often under adverse conditions,frequently with a maniac screaming at me, and with rarelya day off. I felt that I could do anything."

    Brian meant to go back to his carpentry work when the boatwas launched in June that year. Instead he bought a small skiffand an outboard and went bullraking for littleneck clams, a.k.a.quahogs, in Pleasant Bay. He caught the three-bushel limit onhis first day, made $40 or $50, and decided right there that he'djust made a career change ? a fateful change, as he looks back atit now: "I've often thought about this early success from theperspective of a life spent luring a fish to a hook or a lobster intoa trap."

    Later that summer, while Brian was in the office of theSaquatucket harbormaster, who told him that good money wasbeing made by the offshore lobster boats moored there, HarryHunt came in. The old lobsterman groused about an engineproblem, swore at the Russian factory trawlers circling the deep-watercanyons he liked to fish off Georges Bank, and lamentedhis lack of a third hand to go out with him that afternoon. "Fourhours later I was on the Gertrude H with Harry, Harry Jr. (still ahigh school lad), and an old drunk who had last shipped withHarry when Harry tried to bring a small quahog dragger aroundfrom Nauset to Cape Cod Bay by way of Race Point duringthe 1938 hurricane. For my services as an inexperienced lobster`bull,' Harry promised me $200 per two-and-a-half-day trip. Iwas hooked," Brian explained.

    I never met Harry Hunt, who died a couple of years ago, but Isee him in Brian's talk, the stories of other Orleans fishermen,and their gleeful imitations of his manner and speech. Brian is ofmedium height and build, though if you look at his forearms, attheir breadth and ropy sinew, you see the same sort of musculaturecaricatured in Popeye. Harry Hunt was no taller than Brianbut thirty or forty pounds heavier, with much of that extra beefslabbed into his shoulders, the rest into his enormous hands,which he carried in front of him like the claws of the eighteen-poundershe hauled from the deep-water canyons a hundredmiles offshore. Physically he suggested a troll out of the BrothersGrimm, Brian says, but his features were American Hero out ofthe Hollywood mold, so much so that his wife, Gertie, called himDuke: his jaw square and rocky, his eyes narrow and hooded andpenetrating.

    Hunt could be tough on his crew and tough on his family.Being a member of both qualified as double jeopardy. CarlJohnston, a friend and neighbor of Brian's, works on a draggerharvesting groundfish out of Chatham. Carl remembers once seeingHarry Jr., a grown man then, come sprinting up to his pickuptruck in the parking lot at Wychmere Harbor, dive to the pavement,and wiggle underneath it like a spooked dog. Harry Jr.whispered to the amazed Carl that his old man was after him andplease not to say anything about where he was. Down in theharbor, meanwhile, the elder Hunt raved from the foredeck ofthe Gertrude H.

    As long as Brian knew father and son, the only words ofaffection he heard pass between them began with Harry's promisethat if his son were ever in the hospital on a life-support system,he'd pull the plug. No doubt misty-eyed, Harry Jr. would vowthat he'd do as much for his old man. But Harry suffered a strokeand passed his last years in a nursing home, living in a slack tidebetween life and life support, his famous misanthropy flat-linedinto a blurred, drug-hazed cussedness.

    Harry Hunt taught Brian how to make money at catchinglobsters. As tough a master as Stu Finlay of the Empress, Huntworked Brian to the last ounce of his wooden-headed zeal. WhenBrian finally quit, however, it wasn't the work that had gotten tohim but the misanthropy. Yet he didn't blame Hunt entirely forthe anger that always seemed to be going at a rolling boil insidehim. "Hunter-gathering depends on continuous conceptualization,thousands of microanalyses going on in your head all dayevery day," Brian told me. "Fatigue, burnout, and the everpresentpossibility that your analysis of something you can't see-- lobsters on the bottom ? can be thrown off by someonehauling your pot is the combination with which paranoia opensyour door. When Harry fished inshore, where we fish, he wouldmany summers haul pots a hundred days in a row without abreak, without more than four to six hours of sleep per night.Getting bait, repairing engines, fixing stuff, were all done beforeor after the day's haul. When I first started fishing with Harry, hewas sixty-two years old. At an age when many men are thinkingof retirement, he was starting to run boatloads of pots a hundredmiles offshore in a forty-three-foot boat. There are reasons whyhe became pretty crazed."

    Brian himself, however, remains spooked by that craziness,and still feels pain over Hunt's turning on him when he finallyquit. "By the time I came to know him, the great Harry Hunt hadcarefully ordered his universe into two vast realms: one, HarryHunt, and two, everybody who was trying to fuck over HarryHunt." Brian didn't quite know what to make of a man who wasconvinced that one empty pot in the middle of a fifteen-pot trawlbeing hauled from 120 fathoms had been pilfered by some cockeatin'Portagee sons of bitches of bastards. "At first, being new tolobstering, and one hundred miles from land, I didn't care. I feltlike I was muscle and barbed wire, I was making money, and Iwas learning new skills. It's tough to be near such a black hole.After a couple years of Harry's megalomaniacal, solipsistic, paranoidbullshit, I moved on, joining the legions of bastards whowere and had always been marching against Harry. As he wouldsay with lips drawn tightly against clenched teeth, `The wind, thetide, the weather, and every man is against ya.'"

Part of the interest in hauling lobster traps lies in what else youmight find in them. A common skate comes twisting out of atrap on Brian's second string. Known otherwise and variously asa little skate, bonnet skate, summer skate, hedgehog skate, oldmaid, and tobacco box, the raylike fish looks like home plate atFenway but gritted over, grown eyes and a tail, possessed by adevil. Skates are on the move now, like the lobsters, swimminginto shoal waters for spawning and summer feeding before retreatingto deeper waters, thirty to fifty fathoms, in December.

    This skate came for Brian's herring, part of a varied diet thatincludes crab, shrimp, worms, amphipods, mollusks, squid, andother small fish. Brian drops it on the pegging board while heduels with a lobster that has grabbed hold of one of the trap'sparlor heads, the twine funnel inside the trap that keeps the lobsterfrom getting out. The skate's left pectoral fin ? more properlya wing ? catches on a partition and the fish writhes onto itsback. Its underside is albino white; its sole features, a grinningmouth and two eyelike ears, are impish and eerily human. Skatesare predators of juvenile cod and competitors with mature cod.Like dogfish, the numbers of skates off the Cape have vastlyincreased this decade as the cod have declined. The fish havesome slight commercial value, around sixty cents per pound rightnow (versus the five dollars that Brian might get per pound for aselect lobster), and Brian sometimes uses skates for bait. But hedoesn't want any now; I catch the fish at the joint of its fleshy tailand pitch it back into the water.

    During that same string Brian pauses to admire a captive hepulls out of another trap. "That's a beautiful fish, isn't it?"

    The black sea bass is the transvestite fan dancer of the bassfamily. Its kitelike dorsal fin runs the whole length of its spine,and its pectoral fins, broad and softly rounded, sweep all the wayback to its anal fin. Its scales are limned in inky blue-black, theinterior of each much lighter, closer to a milky gray. These line uplike strings of dusky pearls stretched along the flanks of the two-poundfish. Hermaphroditic, the fish usually produces eggs atsexual maturity, but later its ovaries dry up and its testes begin toproduce sperm.

    The black sea bass may be found as far south as Florida and isone of many fish living at the northern limit of their range herenear Cape Cod. This is the result of the Cape's position at theclashing juncture of those two flywheels of the west Atlantic, theGulf Stream and the Labrador Current. Forty thousand yearsago, when the Laurentian glacier was a mile thick and coveredmost of New England, this was precisely where the warm watersof the Gulf Stream halted the glacier's advance and eventuallybeat it back. One lobe of the retreating ice sheet left behind themorainal till ? the boulders, rocks, and gravel ? that becameCape Cod once the ocean level had risen again. But the till trailslike a heap of tailings into the misaligned teeth of the Gulf andLabrador currents, which move in opposite directions, the GulfStream flowing clockwise up the East Coast and then out into thecentral Atlantic, the Labrador Current pouring counterclockwisedown from the Canadian Maritimes. The meteorological sparksthrown off by the colliding currents confer upon Cape watersthe fogs and gales that doomed the Sparrowhawk and too oftenthwarted Harry Hunt. They also make these waters unusuallycosmopolitan, a place where the prettiness and the extravaganceof the tropics swim side by side with the puritanism of the NorthAtlantic.

Continues...

Excerpted from Against the Tideby Richard Adams Carey Copyright © 2000 by Richard Adams Carey. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.