Most of those visitors stayed on the north side of the river with the gift shops and galleries selling paintings by artistes, with the motels, restaurants, and tour-boat docks; but a few found the southside eateries, small and slanty, the ones on pilings out over the river; and some people even wandered into the boatyards where winches and cranes clanked out the old music of the harbor.
I went down to the shore. People lay in the sand of a narrow beach blocked at both ends by big broken mounds of glaciated rocks. Children dug holes, mothers read fat novels by women with three names, and fathers read the coeds’ damp T-shirts. Later the women would stretch out on towels, the men doze off under The Wall Street Journal, and the children look for something to do away from the blowing sand, cold water, and six hundred yards of salted humanity.
I drove a hilly back road a couple of miles up the coast to Cape Porpoise, a white picket-fence village bent around a little balloon of an inlet off the Atlantic. Here, in 1629, Englishmen made the first so-called permanent settlement in Kennebunkport. Sixty years later, Indians “depopulated” Cape Porpoise. That first settlement was on Stage Island, now an overgrown rise that loons and gulls rallied on.
At the edge of the town pier sat a lobster house. Lobsters were beyond my means, but I bought two pounds of steamed quahogs (also called “littlenecks” and “cherrystones” when small), walked to Bradbury Brothers grocery for a stick of butter and two bottles of Molson Ale. I packed up my dented aluminum pot and Swedish stove and headed down through the sumac and wild beach roses to a rocky coign of vantage just above a tidal cove Vikings likely saw. While the tide went out, I melted the butter and warmed the clam broth, dipped the steamers into the broth and hot butter, and ate, sitting against the granite, drinking the Molsons, watching the water.
The tide drained the flats with their sea-worn things that once belonged in the air now returned to it for a short space: sunken punts, busted lobster pots, barnacled timbers, pop bottles. And there were banks of shining, steely blue mussels closed tighter than the lips of God. At one time, only gulls harvested the black mussel, but when tidal-flat clams and lobsters became harder to find, people began gathering mussels for steaming, and now they, too, were not so plentiful.
Herring gulls, flashing white in the sun, circled down and let loose their usual hullabaloo, picked over the flats, and cocked a careful eye at little tidal pools full of orange rockweed and iridescent froth washing gently back and forth. They stitched the rank, black ooze with an embroidery of gull feet.
I went again to the pier. Old men had come down in Valiants and Dodge Darts and stood watching the fishing boats. Somebody said they came every day just like the gulls. Always when one died off, another took his place to do the watching.
A westerly had blown in strong, and the little Cape Porpoise fleet was returning early, each boat carrying into the pier an attendant flapdoodle of gulls circling as sternmen gutted the catch, then swooping the water for the pitched entrails. Trucks from Boston fish houses waited under the hoist as the fish tubs came up. Gill netters tore mackerel loose from nets and threw them into baskets. The mackerel is a beautiful piece of design: a sleek body of silver touched with indigo. An old watcher said, “A mack looks better than it eats, unless you’re a cat.”
The trawler Allison E tied up to unload her catch of flounder, cod, haddock, and hake. The skipper climbed the pier ladder and said, “It’s steak and potatoes for me, boys.” He kept an eye on the trawler as his crew cut the last of the catch, and he counted the baskets of fish coming up to the truck. The whole time, I stood at his side and asked questions.
Finally he said, “If you really want to see how a flounder gets from twenty leagues down to the A and P, be on the pier tomorrow morning at three-thirty. If you won’t get seasick, you can go out with us.”
The Allison E was the last to unload. When she moved off to tie up in the little basin, the pier emptied. In late afternoon, schoolboys came down with their Zebcos to fish for pollock. They filched chunks of cod and flounder from the foul shed where lobster bait festered in barrels; the stronger the bait, the better to lure a lobster. One small boy struggled out with a massive codfish head, its jagged maw, a good fourteen inches across, gaping wide enough to swallow him. In the harbor, red-throated loons paddled and dived and gulped, but the boys had no luck and went home when the eastern sky and sea turned inky in the dusk.
I parked Ghost Dancing on a flat outcropping of rock just above the pier; circles of yellow lichens lay over the stone like doilies, and broken mussel and crab shells, dropped by gulls, were all about. From my bunk, I could see out the back window the blinking light on Goat Island, a rocky ribbon once fought over by the British and colonists. On beyond, from deep water, the sorrowing drone of a sonobuoy.
To be able to get up at three, I went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep. I kept hearing music, an old kind of music, coming over the harbor from the village. The melody sounded so much like another time, I thought I imagined it, but it kept drifting softly across the basin like a dream. I got up and followed the sound along the road to Atlantic Hall, a last-century clapboard building that was the town meetinghouse, library, and dancehall. Parked around were Volkswagens, Saabs, Peugeots, Renaults, and an old camouflaged truck with a canoe rack. Each bumper carried a message: SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS, SAVE THE WHALE, EXTINCT IS FOREVER, VIVA LA BICICLETTA!
From the second floor of the hall, music and the thump of feet. Under the roof timbers, a band—upright piano, fiddle, flute, and banjo of immense size—was letting go with a barndance piece while dancers went up and down, stopping only to drink water from enamelware pitchers. The cool sea wind blew through the loft and pushed the sweaty air into the night.
Resting on the stairs was a student from Boston University who had come to Kennebunkport to do research on tide mill design. “I’m studying the old gristmill on the Kennebunk River,” he said. “It’s a restaurant now, but up until a few years ago, it was still milling. Same family ran it for two hundred years. Simple engineering, but ingenious. Yankee all the way.”
He explained how it worked: a rising tide entered the pond through a gate in the mill dam. At high tide, the miller closed the gate to trap the water. As the tide ebbed, the pond drained through a turbine connected to the millstone.
“It worked only twice every twenty-four hours—once at night—but the energy was free, endless, and nonpolluting. I’m interested in a model that would operate with the tide coming and going so there’s ready power most any time. The Bay of Fundy, maybe you know, is not far north of here. Twice a day there you have a hundred billion tons of water rising and falling fifty feet. Two hundred million horsepower every day.”
He drew a sketch of the old mill turbine with his modifications.
“People think hydropower is a Grand Coulee Dam—big. But little is valuable too, especially in New England where heating oil is expensive and falling water is cheap. A lot of tide and streams get wasted now. And you wouldn’t believe the number of little hydroplants on town dams that have been abandoned in the last thirty years. If we developed only ten percent of the small existing dams in the country, we could save a couple hundred million barrels of oil a year. As I see it, that gristmill may be the oldest thing in Kennebunkport, but it’s also the most futuristic.”
3
Three-thirty A.M.: Sky black, sea blacker. Goat Island light blinking every five seconds through a quiet rain. Tide full. Wind off the sea and into the beach roses and sumac. Smell of blossoms and brine. Squeak of a hull against the pier, the far clang of a bell buoy.
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 t
o 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.