FARMING THE SALT SEA
With the Captain
“Stay on Cape Cod, boy,” an old timer once counselled me. “There’s no snow to fight in winter and plenty of food in the sea for those who will go after it.” The Captain was one of those who went after it with the aid of one of those wonderful Cape Cod Catboats, in the beginning to sell his catch commercially, and later for the entertainment of the summer visitor on charter excursions into the Sound. Such a trip was something to look forward to with great excitement and it was no wonder that one gray morning he caught me with my foolish questions down. I arrived at the old fish shanty on the bank of the little tidal river out of breath and fearful that the lowering skies and soft gray puffs of fog from the Sound might cancel our long-awaited trip. I found the Captain seated on an upturned keg cracking shellfish bait and examining stout coils of sturdy hand-line. Like so many of my friends on the Cape he was never one to waste words and when I entered the fragrant dimness of the shanty he said his “good day” with a quick look in my direction and a slight nod of the head. (Nothing more was needed because if he hadn’t been pleased to see you, you would not in the first place have had access to the temple where all the precious tools of his trade were spread about him, where a green-horn could get all snarled up and ruin everything, and where more than sometimes the Captain would retire to think and claim sanctuary from the women-folk and the complications of life away from the shore.)
“Is it going to clear up,” I asked him breathlessly and fearful of the answer.
“It always has,” he answered soberly, and I have never been able to bring myself to ask that question of anyone since.
The Captain was right of course and it cleared much sooner than anyone could have hoped, with the first sun in many days shining eerily through the gray skies to chase the fog back out towards Nantucket. In what seemed moments, a mean kind of day had become a day of rare beauty and we were out in the Cat with a fair southwest breeze and the golden sunlight glinting off blue-green water. There was the wonderful smell of salt and of hemp and of the sun-bleached wood of the fish barrels that now carried only our hopes. There was the less appealing smell of the fresh bait in which the circling and scolding gulls had placed their hopes.
The Captain stood at the helm, his heavily tanned and wind-burned face almost black against the morning sky. One cheek was now heavily distorted and a thin line of tobacco juice seeped slowly out of the corner of his mouth. Sometimes he would wipe at it casually with the back of his hand in a most natural gesture and sometimes he would let go into the Sound but never would the tiniest speck reach the immaculate decks of his ship. His eyes were like an Indian’s, keen and penetrating, always alert and picking out things at sea, and back on the receding, pine-fringed shore, that I never learned to see although I knew they were there. He only spoke when there was really something to say and we knew that one thing he would ultimately say was that I could take a turn at the tiller. In spite of the importance of that to me it was entirely against the code to request the privilege before it was extended and I respected the code. When the great moment came the Captain would direct my course by the pointed-finger method and his own estimate of land and sea marks proved to be as unerring as any compass. Soon he would have guided us skillfully and mystically to the fishing ledge that was his secret. (He had given me explicit directions for three successive summers that had proved to be as different and contradictory as they were explicit before I became discreet enough not to ask again for the location of his particular salt water farm.) There we would sit with the sun warm and all over us and sending up little waves of heat from the bright sands of Monomoy, and with the lazy tolling of a distant bell-buoy in our ears.
The rhythmic toll of the bell combined with the slow roll of the boat was almost hypnotic and, in any other circumstances than good fishing, would have induced sleep to the worst insomniac. But the fishing was good and it was a rare thrill to see the barrels fast filling with flounders, scup and tautog. It seemed that it might go on forever, a wonderful forever, the constant baiting and hauling, and the lively flopping noises from the barrels. But the sun moved relentlessly westward and after just one more catch it was time to stow our gear and weigh anchor. Then we would head for the distant shoreline of the Sound which was now but a hazy, purple line in the distance. Off towards Great Island the sun was an orange ball, full of promise of a bright tomorrow, but the air was suddenly chill and it was time to fetch the warm jacket that had been carefully stowed in the little cabin. The Captain now relinquished his “chaw” for a well-worn pipe and you could feel his mood of contentment at the end of a day well spent in a way he liked to spend it. My own reluctance to leaving the ledge was tempered by thoughts of the dinner waiting ashore and the pure joy of describing our fishing luck to the poor, land-bound neighbors to whom I would proudly deliver my share of the catch. Looking back on those summer evenings I can believe that those neighbors frequently had a superfluity of fish. But they were kind and gracious and laudatory and I never suspected for a moment that they did not share my excitement and enthusiasm.
The Sound is as unpredictable as any sea and there were days when the Cat rolled and strained and was never still. One of the safest and most seaworthy boats ever built, it can, nevertheless, achieve the most disturbing movements. But I could never let the Captain think me a landlubber by self-indulgence in mal de mere and I never did. I was grateful for that training years later when I rounded the Cape of Good Hope in a troopship that was being tossed about by the largest seas I have ever seen. Huge vessels that were part of the convoy would completely disappear for long and anxious moments into the gaping troughs of the seas and I was able to stay on deck and watch and rather enjoy it. Feeling the roll of the great ship as it edged its way around Africa it was easy to send the mind spinning back across the sea to that little Catboat on the Sound. I could have wished, though, that the Captain had been there and at the helm. I would have felt safer.
Weir Fishing
Spring comes slowly to the Cape. She comes with halting footsteps, hesitant and capricious, one step forward and half a step back. You wait, and you are happier for the waiting, for at last she gives the earth her full attention and the land is renewed and green and shining amidst its four blue seas. It is the blue seas that have to do with spring’s timidity. In summer they are the air-conditioners which give the Cape comfortable temperature while the nearby cities of the Mainland swelter. In November, their warmth holds back the winter and the threat of snow turns to rain. Then, until they are warmed again, they will, in April, hold back the springtime. Then, when your heart is ready for sunlight and the promise of spring, there may be a series of gray days with a chilling blast of moist air from the Sound, and in your impatience it seems as if it must be fated to be a year without a summer. From the still-naked branches of ancient elm trees a flock of crows caw defiance at the rolling mists from the shore. The first-come robins hop disconsolately about the grass as if they wished they were elsewhere and the crocus looks brave but somehow misplaced. It is the kind of day to make you look afield for comforting affirmations that spring is really on its way after all. Then you will see the little buds of green on the lilac hedge that only yesterday were not there. Perhaps through the opened door of a silver-gray barn you may see a Cape Cod boy putting the last perfect and gleaming touches to a fishing rod. But when you pass a certain large field where the fishermen’s nets have long been spread for mending and creosoting and find them no longer there, you know that the weirs are out and, weather or no, it is Spring.
Not so long ago, standing on the beaches of the Sound in spring, one could look along shore to east or west and make out the shadowy forests of the weir poles with their intricate web of nets stretching from the shallows of the land out into the fishways of the Sound. They, like the fleets of small fishing schooners that once set out from all our inlets to gather in the fish-harvest, were once an important part of the Cape’s economy. Like the fishing schooners, the number of weirs along the shore has declined today, for they are expensive to maintain, both in capital and in the demands upon the men who run them for skill and hard work. But the fish are still there, and still, in spring, some weirs are set out along the shore to trap them. The weirs consist of a long, leader line of poles and netting that runs straight off-shore. At the outer end of the leader more fish fences run at an angle to the line of poles setting out from the land. The fish, ever leery of inshore, shallow waters, follow the leader line of nets outward until they find themselves without visible means of retreat and the only obvious means of escape from this mix-up appears to be through a small opening which seems to be the more a logical course because of the number of fish-brethren swimming about behind it. When they have entered the beckoning hole they are in the Pound where the mysterious maze of nets spreads not only around them, but beneath them, and they are doomed.
There could hardly be a sweeter awakening than to that of the chug-chit-chug of the weirs boats heard across the sparkling waters of the Sound in late spring. When I was growing up I would frequently rush to the window to watch the white wake from their broad-beamed sterns all the way to the weirs. When I knew from the sound of the returning boats—with their engine sound muffled now and the boats settling low under the weight of pay-load—I was punctually at the wharf to watch wide-eyed the unloading of the silver harvest. Trying all the while to keep out of the busy commotion of the unloading, grading, and icing down of the fish for shipment to the waiting cities, I would, eventually, end up with a prize—a newspaper-wrapped parcel of tinker mackeral. The delicious, combined smells of wet newsprint, salt and the mysterious, dark regions of the sea went with me up the beach and homewards.
Once I took a closer look at the weir operation, rowing in a dory across the ornery bars at the river’s mouth to where the water lapped softly against a sturdy, white hull in the gray, pre-sunrise. I followed the men over the side into the wide, stubby, gray-painted fisherman that would take us to the weirs. Feeling clumsy in the midst of adult fishermen friends who were suddenly full of business and doing all the right things at the right time, I sat quietly and somewhat miserably as the vessel made its way towards the nets. It was colder than I ever thought it could be on the Sound and the borrowed oilskins that protected me from the salt spray were stiff and had an uncompromising coldness of their own. But all of that was soon forgotten in the excitement of the arrival at the mysterious sea-fences combined with the glories of a sunrise over Chatham. Then the whole boat was alive with activity and very soon it was alive with fish. With hardened hands the fishermen grasped the nets and from the center of the Pound they drew the wonderful fish into the boat, a heavy, swirling, beautiful and ghastly, silver and multi-colored horde of tautog, cod, mackeral and haddock, and strange and unexpected things of the sea. In the capacious, interior of the rolling, settling vessel I was soon awash with them, knee-deep and more, and it was all the fish anyone could want for a long, long time. On the way into Port there seemed to be a good deal more than a sufficiency—and there were also squid. The day was now warmer—and now only through the greatest exertions did I maintain my sea-worthiness. Back at the river, which, with an assist from the incoming tide we navigated with style and without recourse to dory, I did not linger that day to watch the catch sent on its way to Boston.
It was some time before I realized how much I had really enjoyed my trip to the weirs but it was no time before I had gained a tremendous new admiration and respect for the men who farmed them. There are fewer vessels chig-chugging to fewer weirs in the Sound now, but still on a gray morning in April you can discover that the nets and the long stacks of silver poles have left their landlubber existence in the fields of the Cape to go to work on the salt water farms. And still across the blue waters of the Sound you can hear the music of the little vessels on their way to the nets. Then you know that the men of the Cape are reaping the harvest for the appetite of the city—and most especially you know that it is spring.
Not All Fishing Is From A Boat
Not all weir fishing is done from a boat. Across the Cape from the Sound is Cape Cod Bay and there, taking advantage of their unusual oceanography, some ingenious north-siders have a different kind of weir-fishing operation which, so far as I know, is unique. At many sections of the Bay, the flats, at low tide, extend so far out from the beach that their outer rims at high tide are well within the fish lanes. Taking advantage of this feature, the men of the north-side set their nets on the flats in such a way that at low water the Pound of the weirs with all its flopping captives was all but on dry land. To harvest the catch they needed no chugging weir boat. Instead they used a high-wheeled cart, horse-drawn, in which they set out over the flats to return heavy-laden with the day’s catch. Nowadays you can still see weir-fishing being done in this manner but the vehicle is more often a rusting Model T and it will never take the place for me of the sea-going horses and their faded blue carts. These carts were built for a single purpose. They belonged more to the sea than to the land and their pilots deserved the title “Captain” as surely as did their brethren on deep-water vessels—for the flats were tricky with channels and it takes more than a bit of knowing to plan a working trip out and back in the face of the incoming tide. I have often watched this strange kind of fishing on the north-side, following the blue carts to the Pound to watch the loading of the fish harvest. There was once a young girl who, with great respect addressed her grandfather as “Captain” and I can’t remember that anyone thought there was anything funny about it. Neither was there about her ability as a “hand” when the cart’s creaking journey to the Pound was completed and the work of sorting and loading commenced. She would wade into the squirming sea of fish with all the aplomb and skill of an expert, wielding shovel and pitchfork, and setting about her to left and right until, at last the cart was filled and the sea-going horse turned towards his home port. If I knew where that young girl of the blonde hair and blue dungarees were now I would tell her how wonderfully skillful she seemed to me as she went about her work. I would thank her, and her Captain too, for an unforgettable picture of a blue cart with its flashing silver cargo making its unsteady way over the flats while, behind them, the lazy gulls swooped screaming over the culls of the Pound and the air had in it the wonderful taste of a fresh, incoming tide.
Not All Fishing Is For Fish
Not many years ago, and for the first time in over a century, a long tradition of temperance on Cape Cod faced a threat which was the result of a most curious harvest from the sea. It was in the days prior to and just after the Great Depression that an unexpected windfall came to many sections of the Cape. The narrow land was surrounded by the sea and the sea was the avenue to the free lands across the water who were not engaged in the noble experiment known as the Volstead Act. Many a Cape “Captain” along the coast heard once more the old ancestral call of the sea and without hesitation he accepted employment in ferrying loads of contraband spirits into the convenient, little rivers and harbors of the coast he knew so well. He played a dangerous kind of game partly for money, partly for the pure thrill of winning a kind of hare-and-hounds game of nautical skill from the Coast Guard, and partly from a conviction that the law was bad enough as to not merit full obedience. There is often a conviction that Mainland laws are not tailored to the precise needs of the Cape. So it came about that on dark nights there would be a good deal of activity along the shore and in the dim light of a morning after the gray hulk of a Coast Guard Cutter would appear, always late, but always game and eager.
Sometimes an illegal load of liquor would be cached in shallow waters off-shore to await picking up at a later date; sometimes the Coast Guard pursuit would be close enough so that a sense of propriety indicated jettisoning the cargo before making a swift escape to the enveloping darkness of the Sound. Then, with the typical vagaries of Cape tides, the huge piles of burlap sacks would be exposed at the ebb and with rubber boots and wheel barrows (and a tacit understanding that there was no need to notify the authorities until morning) the people along the shore commenced a new kind of harvest from the sea. Cargos that may have been worth upwards of $100,000 were split up to find their resting place at last in Cape Cod cellars and barns. From behind a barricade of imported—and almost priceless—Scotch whiskey the new Cape Cod fishermen smiled sympathetically, but happily, at an arid and land-locked United States. Of course many of the cargos did reach their intended destinations across the canal. One went in a hearse that was part of an elaborate funeral procession and a red-faced constabulary did not realize it until twenty-four hours after they had solemnly and respectfully assisted in its easy passage up the Cape and to Boston.
The Cape Codders who had participated in the harvest of the burlap bags full of straw-covered bottles of joy were following a time-honored tradition of beach-combing and salvage. Many would have been incredulous at the suggestion that any gift of the sea was not rightfully a case of finders-keepers. It is doubtful that any game of finders-keepers was ever carried out with greater enthusiasm until, at last, the Volstead Act was repealed and the liquor traffic came to a halt. For some it had not been the proudest page in Cape Cod history but it had undeniably been one of the most interesting.
There is this much too about the Cape. There is people. There have been—and will be again—some very great ones, and there have been and will be again some middling poor ones. There are heroes of song and story, and there are the everyday kind of heroes who live brave and good lives and no one hears about it. A Cape Codder is not much of a one for blowing his own horn. He’s not much of a one for an argument either. His response to the perpetrator of an intolerable rudeness is to ignore him. That is why some Mainlanders go home to lecture folks about the “coldness” of Cape Codders. There is an inherent wholesomeness about him which, like his work and play, his home and health, is colored by the land and sea and the salt breezes that sweep over them. The land and the sea have worked upon him just as surely as he has worked upon the land and the sea. And when he goes away it is to dream of a cottage by the sea and a coming back to the land that is home.