_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._
“J.F.”
My good friend, J.F. Small, who kept a grocery store in our Cape
village, might not be considered a great man by today’s standards but
I considered him to be in the years that I was growing up and I always
shall. He was kind and honest and efficient and he had a philosophy
that was the equal of any situation.
J.F.’s store was a kind of hub of the community in those days and it
was a good store, not one of the new kind where you wheel a little
wagon around and feel foolish and can’t find anything, but one in
which he helped you graciously and simultaneously to good merchandise
and good conversation, and everyone had plenty of time anyway. It was
a well-built store, a kind of Greek-revival with a Cape Cod accent,
meticulously clean within and shining without. Only its huge front
windows and pale yellow siding set it apart from the village of neat,
white houses that sprawled around it. To compensate for that, there
was, atop it, a fascinating cupola from which you could get a view of
the Sound. Along the front of the store there was a commodious porch
with two large benches. The benches carried on their slatted back a
faded advertisement for Dr. somebody-or-other’s Bitters but bitters were
already out of fashion and you could hardly have read the advertisement
anyway because the benches were never empty. They had been placed just
so to catch the pleasant breezes from the Sound and they were for
resting and conversation.
Inside the store and along each of the two side walls were rows and
rows of narrow wooden shelves that reached right up to the ornamental
tin-ceiling. The shelves held a colorful mass of tinned goods and
Quaker Oats and tea and if you wanted something from the high ones J.F.
would secure it for you with a boat-hook. His aim was deft and true
and it was always a temptation to ask for some of the little-called-for
merchandise from the heights. In front of each of the tiers of shelves
there was a long counter which held made-up orders and daily specials
but most especially they held some very wonderful and tantalizing
glass show-cases. The glass case to the right of the store held corn
cob pipes and cut plug, shoe laces, work gloves and fish hooks, all
in an ordered disorder that made everything easy to get at. No matter
how much was sold this display always appeared to be miraculously
unchanged. But it was the glass case on the left-hand counter that
always drew my attention for inside it in regimental rows were
displayed all the wonders of a small boy’s world. There were sleek,
curly licorice whips and cigar-shaped licorice sticks; banana-tasting
candy in the shape of bananas, mint-tasting candy in the shape of mint
leaves, peanut butter candy in the shape of pink, satiny bolsters;
there were heart-shaped peppermints with red mottos like “I love U”
and “Oh you kid”, there were large, round, chocolate Old Fashioneds,
orange and white “corn kernels” and many another item to keep a boy
in agonizing, wonderful indecision. Time was only responsible to your
own appetite and once you had made up your mind the penny candy would
be carefully counted out and put helter-skelter into a small brown bag
with a string around its neck. It would be discovered only later on the
walk home that, somehow, several extra pieces had been slipped into the
bag.
At the back of J.F.’s store there was a wrapping counter with a huge
roll of butchers paper and a fascinating string that dangled down from
an ornate iron cage at ceiling height. To the rear of the store also
were the massive sliding doors of the cold room where all the good cuts
of meat were hung. And then there was a stove-hole, neatly disguised in
summer by a handsome chromo of Lake Como but, in winter, holding the
shiny pipe that lead to a large coal stove. The cheerful glow from that
stove in winter was a real attraction to the men of the village who
seemed to much prefer it to the warmth of their own kitchens. There was
always a cluster of rocking chairs about it and they were never empty.
They were for resting and conversation.
J.F. ran his store alone, except as the summer population began to
grow he would hire a boy to make deliveries, with horse and wagon
for many years and, finally, with a small truck with the name of the
establishment modestly proclaimed on its sides. He was leisurely
and when he became successful it was almost as though it had been
inevitable, even though you knew better. Once a Cape bank asked him to
join its Board of Directors.
“I drove over to that shiny, new building,” he told me, “and it seemed
as if even the car was hanging back on the way. When I got there I just
walked up and down outside and looked at the bank and thought, ‘this
is no place for you, J.F.’. Finally I got up courage to go in and they
were all sitting around a table waiting for me. They introduced me all
around as if I was really somebody and then they got down to business.
I tell you it was nothing but trouble. It didn’t seem as if there was
anything for me to _say_ but I thought about it some and I didn’t
like it. Seemed to me there’s plenty of trouble in the world already
without my sitting there and hearing about more of it and passing
judgment on folks I don’t even know. So when it was all over I came
home and wrote them a letter and said I would be pleased to stop being
a director and I never went back.”
J.F. thought a minute and then a look of puzzlement, incredulity and
good humor came over his face.
“You know what?”, he said. “There’s a big picture of me hanging on the
wall of that room. There’s a brass plate under it with my name and
‘Former Director’ on it!”
Perhaps J.F. was already out of place in the twentieth century. His
first, uneasy recognition of this did not come until the thirties when
the store was still prospering and life in general was as uncomplicated
as ever.
It was in the thirties that a lot of new terms began coming out of
Washington and the Cape first heard of “the little people” and the
“forgotten man.” No Cape Codder would think of himself or his neighbors
as little people and no one locally, at least, was ever forgotten. J.F.
had always extended credit and had often given merchandise to help
neighbors over the rough spots of poor cranberry or fishing years. A
catastrophe such as a fire was the direct responsibility of the whole
community. Otherwise, most people in our village, in those days,
helped themselves--and had never imagined there was any other way.
Nevertheless, the wheels of government had begun to grind and there was
no doubt in Washington that the Cape was a part of the United States.
Each mail brought J.F. a new form to be filled out. It was either an
inquiry into matters he had always considered to be personal or a set
of regulations to be followed in running the grocery.
Whatever professor devised those forms it was a sure bet from the
beginning that he had never been inside a village store. Poor J.F.
would squint through his glasses for hours at the devilish forms.
Sometimes he would ask me for an opinion but, fresh as I was from
college, and full as I was of the concept of the “century of the Common
man”, I could make no more head nor tails of the forms than could he.
Finally he would shrug his shoulders in mystification and shuffle the
forms into a pile at one end of the wrapping counter.
As the weeks passed the pile of forms grew until at last it was too
big for the wrapping counter. Then they were set upon the floor where
they were nearly out of sight and would have been out of mind except
that the letters became more and more frequent and the demands more
forceful. At the end of six months the pile of government verbiage was
monumental and the letters had become almost violently threatening.
One day there came a letter from Washington by Registered Mail. It
looked very ugly and very important. J.F. never told me what was in
that letter but soon after reading it he stooped down and gathered up
the monumental pile of forms and placed them on the wrapping counter.
He wrapped them neatly and methodically in the good butcher’s paper and
he tied them securely with the string that dangled down from the little
iron cage at the ceiling. To the huge bundle he attached an envelope
addressed to the government at Washington and inside the envelope he
had written a note in his neat, meticulous script:
“Dear Sir:
I do not know what it is you want me to do and
I am too old now to take the time to figure it out.
I give up. I am closing the store.
Respectfully,
J.F. Small”
When he had made the bundle ready and inspected it for mailability, he
picked it up and walked past the glass cases of candy and cut plug and
he never looked back all the way to the Post Office. The Grocery Store
was closed.
All of the merchandise in the store was hurriedly disposed of, but
J.F. kept the building, and the chairs that were for resting and
conversation and the stove that was for warmth in winter. He also kept
the wide front porch with the two benches that had been set just so to
catch the breezes from the Sound. I would sit there with him often,
looking through the large windows to the clean, but empty, glass cases
and the haunting shadows that the long-gone cans had left behind them
on the rows of shelving. We would sit there and smoke and talk, or
sometimes not talk, and we would watch the sleek, new cars of the
summer visitors going by lickety-split to the new Super-Market down the
street.