August 97.. Sternman’s Delight.

Herbert’s oversized Dodge pickup rumbled up the driveway a little before 4AM, when I was just beginning to wonder if he’d forgotten me. I’d already dressed in my grungies, rummaged out my foul weather gear, filled the thermos with black tea, packed a lunch, and watered the dogs. I cocked a BLACK CROWS baseball cap on my head, told the dogs to be good, and closed the screen door quietly.

It was dripping fog outside, and the burbling of Herbert’s truck was unnaturally loud in the neighborhood silence. I stashed my sheetrock bucketful of necessaries in the footwell, dislodged Pup-pup from the shotgun position, and clambered up into Herbert’s world.

He was talking to the sprawled dog, a floppy feminine longhair nondescript. Some cocker maybe, a dash of retriever, black with white patches, moody eyes and an affectionate nature. She gave me one long gaze of dreamy abstraction, and promptly fell asleep again, her head in my lap.

“Not a morning person,” Herbert observed.

HE most assuredly is. Herbert gets cranked up early, and can run on all day. He had been jawing at Pup-pup when I got into the cab, but turned the tale onto me immediately, and before long we were rattling on like a pair of morning DJs. Headlights just barely cutting a slice out of the soup. Headed down 201 to the all night gas station in Topsham.

He filled two big plastic outboard tanks, bought cigarettes, a soda, and we nosed back into the blanket of mist. When you learn to drive on the coast of Maine you can sleepwalk your way downcountry in the thickest fog. Around to Cook’s Corner then down to Cundy’s Harbor, rehashing the entire economic history of the late 20th century, the place of California in the national consciousness, the nature of the fish business, the character of Japanese dealers, the foibles of our common friends, and the cost of bait. I slip easily into broad Maineish in the vague and humid light , half-seen woods scrolling past. Wrestling a ‘52 Pontiac full of the boys around Waldo County before I had a license. Finding my way to the Co-op dock in Jonesport to go for sternman. Chasing the wily elver across Washington County in the Spring madness. Wrinkling with Bo and Penny. The voices in the fog talk native. Down on the shore words slide forward on my palate, acquire nasality. Phrases step and copy to a maritime rhythm. My ayes broaden like the stern on a Beals Island girl. We back down onto a wharf to buy bait.

Cut herring. A sour-faced teenage boy was lethargically shoveling ripe cuttings out of a 50 gallon barrel dumped on its side, into tub totes, in the incandescent gloom of the wharf building. Acrid plumes of tobacco streaming out of the dealer’s office made a perfect bouquet. Wet and slippery underfoot, mist blowing in off the New Meadows, rumble of a fishboat idling up to temperature somewhere out there. I helped the kid hump a tote onto Herbert’s tailgate, joining a pair of 5 gallon buckets of the same delicacy. The familiar sweet sticky smell clung to my hands, getting me primed. Pup-pup wriggled in her sleep, rolling up against me.

By now the sky was going gray, and we backtracked up to 24, then rolled down the island chain.. Great Island, Orrs, Bailey’s.. up over the hump of the crib-stone bridge, and around the cove in behind the lobster house. Herbert swung down onto the gravelly shingle and backed up to the grounded end of a string of floats. Offloaded gas, bait, gear, a backbreaker of a 12volt battery.. must weigh 100 pounds.. and reparked the truck on the high ground. Twin saggy planks spanned the gaps between the floats, and I dragged our loaded tubs across them, out to where Herbert’s boat nudged at the fenders.

A 24 foot Whaler-style workplatform, console controls, big 4-cycle Yamaha on the stern. Pup-pup leaps aboard and holes up in her nest, a cuddy full of life-jackets up in the bow. Herbert organizes the ingredients, bad-mouthing the local fishermen in continuous monologue, making asides to Pup-pup about her soft manners, climbing into his boots and bib overalls. I dress up. The motor coughs, then catches, and we idle a while, Herbert chuckling at how many of the boys have stayed in bed just because it’s thick.

“Been spoiled this summer,” he says. Almost no fog. “Some say the old pea-soups are all over,” he laughs. “You wish. Need to unwind a ball of string behind us to find the way back,” he grins.

We cast the docklines and mutter out under the cribstone bridge. Slabs of granite stacked into a causeway of open cribwork with a short span of roadway jumping over the tiderace between Orrs and Baileys. Seaweed streaming from barnacled rocks. The world disappears.

Another lobsterman is hauling right in the channel, and Herbert comes aboard him to chew it over as the boats drift in the tide. I pour myself a cuppa and enjoy the byplay, and the scene. I’m never introduced, so I never catch Buddy’s name, but his face is memorable. Round as an apple, and as red, all pouches and wrinkles, his sparkling eyes peeking out from under sagging lids, beaming like a Buddha. Porkpie hat perched on top. Hands like hams. I curse myself for leaving my sketchpad at home, despite the drip.

Herbert is a newcomer on these grounds, sort of. He only began lobstering four years ago, no mean feat in this place and time. Lobstermen are nothing if not territorial, and interlopers tend to lose a lot of gear to the rope wrench (a sharp knife). But Herbie grew up on Baileys, and has been engaged in the fish business in one way or another most of his life. He did wander America in the 60s, doing a bit of time in California, but has been based here ever since. Eeling and dealing. He comes by the necessary reputation of a wild man honestly. Nobody cuts Herbie.

I have to chuckle at how he does it. In the new world of elaborate dayglow bouy colors, Herbert uses “unpainted” as his color. All he has to do is scrub his bouys each spring. He fishes singles in the rockpiles, where the trawl hogs daren’t go, running his gear off into deep holes when storms are coming. He only fishes 140 traps, setting each carefully by sounder, and hauls them all daily (except Sunday, the lobsters’ day off by law). And he does as well as anybody, without stepping on any toes. Pretty slick.

We idle down a compass course until a ledge rears out of the white, make a turn and run down to the tail of the first string. Herbert sets scattershot. Clumps of gear in close proximity. How he keeps track of what he’s hauled in each shot is beyond me. I’m used to thinking of strings of traps running along bottom contours. Herbert’s strings are balls of yarn.

The tales of what’s out there on bottom these days is frightful. Boats fishing thousands of traps in immense trawls, or with teams of sternmen yanking ‘em aboard and setting them back like assembly lines. Huge boats pushing the power envelope, and sucking fuel like Concorde, racing after the evaporating biota. Herbert hands me a pair of cotton gloves, and I step into the slot behind him.

It takes me a trap or two to figure the moves. Herbert is used to fishing alone and habitually swings wide in his dance. After ducking the bouy spindle a couple times I find where to stand, what to expect, and we begin to groove through the gear. Wire traps, with wire heads, mesh pockets I remove, stuff a handful of cuttings into, and replace. It’s all comfortably familiar. Mind disengages as reflex takes over. Mouth works untended.

As promised, the traps are full of the bugs. Mostly shorts, barely under the measure. The letouts seem to do their job of letting the smallest juveniles come and go. I pick the kitchen while Herbie empties the parlor. Lots of berried or notched females, which we throw back. Those keepers we take tend to just over the measure, a universal fact along the shore, and nervous-making for the biologists, indicating a species exploited to the limit. But Herbert and the boys say, “Look, the bottom is covered in lobsters, traps full of breeders and shorts. What’s the problem?”

A lot fewer urchins. The divers have picked off that “under utilized” resource, and landings are now in steep decline. Herbert applauds the divers. Urchins destroy lobster habitat, and the urchin rush has removed a natural competitor. I notice that another species has disappeared. A linguistic one. I haven’t heard an urchin called a whore’s egg since the Japanese started paying good money for them.

There seem to be more conkles, and fewer crabs, although I never fished in Casco Bay before. And cunners. Beau coup cunners. Herbert dreams about a fin-fish trap fishery. Applying the lobster model to the scaly ones. Lobstering has been the biggest aquaculture experiment in history, and is just being realized as such. Why not feed up the young fish instead of killing them in nets?

Fishermen have come to accept that some resources aren’t infinite, but it’s been a mental wrench. The collapse of one fishery after another has been a rude wakeup. Few fishermen are true believers in fisheries management, though. That’s too big a leap. From stubborn independence to bureaucratic decision-making, the ultimate violation of the maritime life. And a fisherman has to believe there will always be fish to catch, and that he should get as many as he can lay his hands on today. Otherwise you wouldn’t go out. It’s about taking your share of a bounty, if you can.

There’s still a large body of opinion that holds that there will always be the same amount of protein in the sea, though species will come and go. The same philosophy says the trees will always grow back just as thick and fast no matter how we clearcut. The fishermen who believe in the bottomless bounty say they’ll just change over to catch something else when the current mix gets caught up. A convenient faith, perhaps, but more hopeful than environmentalist self-loathing. Herbert is still practicing an ancient tradition, and laughing at the lumps. In general I prefer the company of fishermen to bureaucrats. What does that tell me?

Round and round we go. Alone in a circle of fog. Pup-pup tiptoes out periodically, traipses up and down beside the starboard gunwale, where the dripping traps come and go, then goes back to her nest to lap the juice on her fur boots. Dogs.

The bait is thawing.

“Think this is past it?” Herbert asks, and we sniff discriminatingly.

“Naw. Right on the edge,” is my call. Fingers gonna stink again tonight.

About 30 traps in Herbert corrects my method of launching them back. Probably been bothering him all morning. Everyone has their own habitual routine, which eventually becomes “the right way.” It always galls me to be corrected, even when their way IS obviously better. When I know that my way works as well, from my own experience, it is even harder to take. Usually the bile settles pretty quick, as it does with Herbie, who is anything but dictatorial. And I have some practice as crew. But subservience comes hard, and a lot of the crew mobility the anthros talk about shows what hardcases sternmen can be. And skippers. We keep laughing and scratching.

A lot of the laughs have a Japanese accent. Herbert has been dealing product to the Japanese since the elver business resurged in the 90s. I’d tried to get rich in the false elver boom of the late 70s, when we were hand-to-mouthing in Jonesport, and had resisted a proposed adoption by a trader from Fukuoka. Herbert must be a puzzle to them. He not only says “no”, he is obscene and abrasive about it. All the ritual niceties are just so much mealymouthing, his manner suggests. “I got it. You want it. Let’s deal.” I’d love to be a fly on the wall.

The unlikely juxtapositions of life are a hoot. Here we are out in the fog, up to our elbows in bait, and Herbert’s lugging a bagphone because he’s waiting for a call from Tokyo.

We’ve got company. Another boat just happens to be in eyeshot as we pick traps, repeatedly.

“Nosy bahstids,” Herbert observes. “Let’s pile a few on and see if they chase us.” The great game. Hide the pea. Glendon was a master player in the Magdalens. We’d go out in storms just to shift gear around unseen. Every fisherman I’ve known has grumbled about being watched on the water, about spies hanging out at the dock, and Herbert is no different. We set back right in the backwash of a breaking ledge.

“See if he dares,” Herbert grins.

By 10 o’clock I’ve given up on seeing the sun today. Then the fog suddenly scales up, and the islands stand up around us. Other boats circling their gear fill the panorama, not a sail in sight. A working day. Half an hour later the fog drops its curtain again. By noon Herbert is starting to retell the same jokes, or reusing the punch lines, and I’m out of tea.

The visibility is improving again as we drop the last trap overboard, with a twist. We clean house then Herbie shoves the throttle forward. We’ve done nothing but idle all day, and the boat jumps like it was prodded. We throttle down for a pod of kiyakers venturing out into the clearing, and then romp under the cribstone bridge and up to the float.

Herbert insists on giving me a mess of lobster, even though I object that he’d have caught the same amount without me.

“Glad of the company,” he says. And we cull hardshells, weigh up (about an average day, he tells me), load the truck and head home. We stop for a sixpack of Bud 16s, and squint at the hot sunshine breaking through on the mainland. We even drive a mile or two without saying a word. The hustling traffic at Cook’s Corner seems unreal, if not unnecessary. It’s hot in Bowdoinham.

The dogs go about nuts when they get a sniff of me.