The Rivermen

I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running—a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide—and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls that sometimes last as long as half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream. Once, in the course of such a lull, on a Sunday morning in April, 1950, I saw a sea sturgeon rise out of the water. I was on the New Jersey side of the river that morning, sitting in the sun on an Erie Railroad coal dock. I knew that every spring a few sturgeon still come in from the sea and go up the river to spawn, as hundreds of thousands of them once did, and I had heard tugboatmen talk about them, but this was the first one I had ever seen. It was six or seven feet long, a big, full-grown sturgeon. It rose twice, and cleared the water both times, and I plainly saw its bristly snout and its shiny little eyes and its white belly and its glistening, greenish-yellow, bony-plated, crocodilian back and sides, and it was a spooky sight.

I prefer to look at the river from the New Jersey side; it is hard to get close to it on the New York side, because of the wall of pier sheds. The best points of vantage are in the riverfront railroad yards in Jersey City, Hoboken, and Weehawken. I used to disregard the “DANGER” and “RAILROAD PROPERTY” and “NO TRESPASSING” signs and walk into these yards and wander around at will. I would go out to the end of one of the railroad piers and sit on the stringpiece and stare at the river for hours, and nobody ever bothered me. In recent years, however, the railroad police and pier watchmen have become more and more inquisitive. Judging from the questions they ask, they suspect every stranger hanging around the river of spying for Russia. They make me uneasy. Several years ago, I began going farther up the river, up to Edgewater, New Jersey, and I am glad I did, for I found a new world up there, a world I never knew existed, the world of the rivermen.

Edgewater is across the river from the upper West Side of Manhattan; it starts opposite Ninety-fourth Street and ends opposite 164th Street. It is an unusually narrow town. It occupies a strip of stony land between the river and the Palisades, and it is three and a half miles long and less than half a mile wide at its widest part. The Palisades tower over it, and overshadow it. One street, River Road, runs the entire length of it, keeping close to the river, and is the main street. The crosstown streets climb steeply from the bank of the river to the base of the Palisades, and are quite short. Most of them are only two blocks long, and most of them are not called streets but avenues or terraces or places or lanes. From these streets, there is a panoramic view of the river and the Manhattan skyline. It is a changeable view, and it is often spectacular. Every now and then—at daybreak, at sunset, during storms, on starry summer nights, on hazy Indian-summer afternoons, on blue, clear-cut, stereoscopic winter afternoons—it is astonishing.

The upper part of Edgewater is largely residential. This is the oldest part of town, and the narrowest, but it still isn’t entirely built up. There are several stretches of trees and underbrush, and several bushy ravines running down to the river, and a number of vacant lots. The lots are grown up in weeds and vines, and some of them are divided by remnants of stone walls that once divided fields or pastures. The streets are lined with old trees, mostly sweet gums and sycamores and tulip trees. There are some wooden tenements and some small apartment houses and some big old blighted mansions that have been split up into apartments, but one-family houses predominate. The majority are two-story houses, many of them set back in good-sized yards. Families try to outdo each other in landscaping and ornamenting their yards, and bring home all sorts of odds and ends for the purpose; in yard after yard conventional garden ornaments such as sundials and birdbaths and wagon wheels painted white stand side by side with objects picked up around the riverfront or rescued during the demolition of old buildings. The metal deckhouse of an old Socony tanker barge is in the front yard of one house on River Road; it is now a garden shed. In the same yard are a pair of mooring bitts, a cracked stone eagle that must have once been on the façade of a public building or a bank, and five of those cast-iron stars that are set in the walls of old buildings to cap the ends of strengthening rods. In the center of a flower bed in one yard is a coalhole cover and in the center of a flower bed in an adjoining yard is a manhole cover. In other yards are old anchors and worm wheels and buoys and bollards and propellers. Edgewater used to be linked to Manhattan by a ferry, the Edgewater–125th Street ferry. Most of the captains, wheelsmen, and deckhands on the ferryboats were Edgewater men, and had been for generations, and the ferry was the pride of the town. It stopped running in 1950; it was ruined by the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel. There are relics of it in a dozen yards. In former Mayor Henry Wissel’s yard, on Hilliard Avenue, there is a chain post that came off the vehicle gangway of the ferryboat Shadyside, and the Shadyside’s fog bell hangs beside his door. In former Fire Chief George Lasher’s yard, on Undercliff Avenue, there is a hookup wheel that came off the landing stage of the old ferryhouse. It resembles a ship’s wheel. Chief Lasher has painted it white, and has trained a climbing rose on it.

In the middle of Edgewater, around and about River Road and the foot of Dempsey Avenue, where the ferryhouse used to stand, there is a small business district. In addition, a few stores and a few neighborhood saloons of the type known in New Jersey as taverns are scattered along River Road in the upper and lower parts of town.

The lower part of Edgewater is called Shadyside; the ferryboat was named for it. It is a mixed residential and factory district. The majority of the factories are down close to the river, in a network of railroad sidings, and piers jut out from them. Among them are an Aluminum Company of America factory, a coffee-roasting plant, a factory that makes roofing materials, a factory that makes sulphuric acid, and a factory that makes a shortening named Spry. On the roof of the Spry factory is an enormous electric sign; the sign looms over the river, and on rainy, foggy nights its pulsating, endlessly repeated message, “SPRY FOR BAKING,” “SPRY FOR BAKING,” “SPRY FOR BAKING,” seems to be a cryptic warning of some kind that New Jersey is desperately trying to get across to New York.

There are six or seven large factories in Shadyside and six or seven small ones. The Aluminum Company factory is by far the largest, and there is something odd about it. It is made up of a group of connecting buildings arranged in a U, with the prongs of the U pointed toward the river, and inside the U, covering a couple of acres, is an old cemetery. This is the Edgewater Cemetery. Most of the old families in Edgewater have plots in it, and some still have room in their plots and continue to bury there. The land on which Edgewater is situated and the land for some distance along the river above and below it was settled in the seventeenth century by Dutch and Huguenot farmers. Their names are on the older gravestones in the cemetery—Bourdettes and Vreelands and Bogerts and Van Zandts and Wandells and Dyckmans and Westervelts and Demarests. According to tradition, the Bourdette family came in the sixteen-thirties—1638 is the date that is usually specified—and was the first one there; the name is now spelled Burdette or Burdett. Some of the families came over from Manhattan and some from down around Hoboken. They grew grain on the slopes, and planted orchards in the shelter of the Palisades. In the spring, during the shad and sturgeon runs, they fished, and took a large part of their catch to the city. The section was hard to get to, except by water, and it was rural and secluded for a long time. In the early eighteen-hundreds, some bluestone quarries were opened, and new people, most of whom were English, began to come in and settle down and intermarry with the old farming and fishing families. They were followed by Germans, and then by Irish straight from Ireland. Building stones and paving blocks and curbing for New York City were cut in the quarries and carried to the city on barges—paving blocks from Edgewater are still in place, under layers of asphalt, on many downtown streets. Some of the new people worked in the quarries, some worked on the barges, some opened blacksmith shops and made and repaired gear for the quarries and the barges, some opened boatyards, and some opened stores. The names of dozens of families who were connected with these enterprises in one way or another are on gravestones in the newer part of the cemetery; Allison, Annett, Carlock, Cox, Egg, Forsyth, Gaul, Goetchius, Hawes, Hewitt, Jenkins, Stevens, Truax, and Winterburn are a few. Some of these families died out, some moved away, and some are still flourishing. The enterprises themselves disappeared during the first two decades of this century; they were succeeded by the Shadyside factories.

The land surrounding the Edgewater Cemetery was once part of a farm owned by the Vreeland family, and the Aluminum Company bought this land from descendants of a Winterburn who married a Vreeland. As a condition of the sale, the company had to agree to provide perpetual access to the cemetery. To reach it, funerals go through the truck gate of the factory and across a freight yard and up a cement ramp. It is a lush old cemetery, and peaceful, even though the throb of machinery can be felt in every corner of it. A part-time caretaker does a good deal of gardening in it, and he likes bright colors. For borders, he uses the same gay plants that are used in flower beds at race tracks and seaside hotels—cannas, blue hydrangeas, scarlet sage, and cockscomb. Old men and old women come in the spring, with hoes and rakes, and clean off their family plots and plant old-fashioned flowers on them. Hollyhocks are widespread. Asparagus has been planted here and there, for its feathery ferny sprays. One woman plants sunflowers. Coarse, knotty, densely tangled rosebushes grow on several plots, hiding graves and gravestones. The roses that they produce are small and fragile and extraordinarily fragrant, and have waxy red hips almost as big as crab apples. Once, walking through the cemetery, I stopped and talked with an old woman who was down on her knees in her family plot, setting out some bulbs at the foot of a grave, and she remarked on the age of the rosebushes. “I believe some of the ones in here now were in here when I was a young woman, and I am past eighty,” she said. “My mother—this is her grave—used to say there were rosebushes just like these all over this section when she was a girl. Along the riverbank, beside the roads, in people’s yards, on fences, in waste places. And she said her mother—that’s her grave over there—told her she had heard from her mother that all of them were descended from one bush that some poor uprooted woman who came to this country back in the Dutch times potted up and brought along with her. There used to be a great many more in the cemetery than there are now—they overran everything—and every time my mother visited the cemetery she would stand and look at them and kind of laugh. She thought they were a nuisance. All the same, for some reason of her own, she admired them, and enjoyed looking at them. ‘I know why they do so well in here,’ she’d say. ‘They’ve got good strong roots that go right down into the graves.’”

The water beside several of the factory piers in Shadyside has been deepened by dredging to depths ranging between twenty and thirty feet. Everywhere else along Edgewater the inshore water is shallow. Off the upper part of town are expanses of shoals that are called the Edgewater Flats. They are mucky, miry, silty, and oily. Stretches of them are exposed at low tide, or have only a foot or two of water over them. In some places, they go out two hundred yards before they reach a depth of six feet. For generations, the Edgewater Flats have been a dumping ground for wrecks. Out in them, lying every which way, as if strewn about long ago by a storm, are the ruins of scores of river vessels. Some of these vessels were replaced by newer vessels and laid up in the flats against a time that they might possibly be used again, and that time never came. Some got out of commission and weren’t worth repairing, and were towed into the flats and stripped of their metal and abandoned. Some had leaks, some had fires, and some had collisions. At least once a day, usually when the tide is at or around dead ebb, flocks of harbor gulls suddenly appear and light on the wrecks and scavenge the refuse that has collected on them during the rise and fall of the tide, and for a little while they crawl with gulls, they become white and ghostly with gulls, and then the gulls leave as suddenly as they came. The hulks of three ferryboats are out in the flats—the Shadyside, the George Washington, and the old Fort Lee. Nothing is left of the Shadyside but a few of her ribs and part of her keel. There are old tugboats out there, and old dump scows, and old derrick lighters, and old car floats. There are sand-and-gravel barges, and brick barges, and stone barges, and coal barges, and slaughterhouse barges. There are five ice barges out there, the last of a fleet that used to bring natural ice down to New York City from the old icehouse section along the west shore of the river, between Saugerties and Coxsackie. They have been in the flats since 1910, they are waterlogged, and they sit like hippopotamuses in the silt.

Close to shore are some barges that are still being used. They are drawn up in a straggly row, facing the shore, and narrow, zigzaggy footwalks built on piles made of drift lumber go out to them. These are second-hand railroad barges. They were once owned by the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the New York Central, the Jersey Central, and other railroads that operate barge fleets in the harbor. Their bottoms are sound and their roofs are tight, but they got too old to be jerked this way and that by tugs in a hurry and bumped about and banged into (most of them are over forty years old, and several are over sixty), so they were discarded and sold. Some are owned by shadfishermen, who move them up or down the river at the start of the shad season and tie them up along the bank, each fisherman placing his barge as close as possible to his row of nets. The fishermen eat and sleep aboard them and use them as bases while the shad are running, and then return them to the flats and keep them there the rest of the year and store their equipment in them. Others are owned by boat clubs. There are seven boat clubs on the Edgewater riverfront, and four are quartered in secondhand railroad barges. One club, the Undercliff Motor Boat Club, owns two, but uses both for the winter storage of its boats, and has its quarters in an old queen of an oyster barge named the G.M. Still. The wholesale oyster companies in New York City used to carry on their businesses in specially built barges that were docked the year round at piers on the East River, just north of Fulton Fish Market. These barges had two or three decks, and could hold huge stocks of oysters. They were top-heavy but beautifully made. Some had balconies with banisters shaped like tenpins on their upper decks, and the offices in several had mahogany paneling; the reputation of an oyster company partly depended on the splendor of its barge. There were over a dozen oyster barges on the East River at one time, and all were painted a variety of colors and all had ostentatious black-and-gold nameboards across their fronts and all flew swallowtail pennants; people visited the waterfront just to see them. The G. M. Still was the last to go. It was owned by George M. Still, Inc., the planters of Diamond Point oysters, and its final East River location was at a pier at the foot of Pike Street, under the Manhattan Bridge; it was there for a generation. In 1949, the city took over this pier, and the Still company was unable to find another, so it moved ashore, and sold the barge to a dealer in old boats, who sold it to the boat club. The G. M. Still is almost eighty years old—it was built in 1880—and the recent years have been hard on it. Even so, not all the teardrops, icicles, scallops, and other scroll-saw curlicues that once ornamented it have disappeared, and its last coat of paint under the Still ownership—black, yellow, white, orange, and green—has not entirely faded, and the balcony on the bow end of its upper deck looks as regal as ever.

Although Edgewater is only a short ride by subway and bus from the heart of New York City, it has some of the characteristics of an isolated and ingrown old town in New England or the South. The population is approximately four thousand, and a large proportion of the people are natives and know each other, at least to speak to. A surprising number of them are related, some so distantly that they aren’t at all sure just how. The elderly people take a deep interest in local history, a good deal of which has been handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, and nearly all of them who are natives consider themselves authorities on the subject. When these elderly people were young, quite a few men and women bearing the names of the original Dutch and Huguenot families were still living in old family mansions along River Road—one old man or one old woman living alone, as often as not, or, in some cases, two old bachelor brothers or two old spinster sisters living together, or an old woman living with a bachelor son or a spinster daughter—and they remember them. They know in a general way how the present-day old families are interrelated, and how several of these families are related to the original families. They can fish around in their memories and bring up vital statistics and stray facts and rumors and old jokes and sayings concerning a multitude of people who have been dead and gone for a generation, and can point out where buildings stood that have been torn down for fifty years. Sometimes, in the manner of old people in old towns, unable to tell only a little when they know so much, they respond to a simple question with a labyrinthine answer. One day, shortly after I began going up to Edgewater, I became acquainted with an elderly native named Henry R. Gaul, and went for a walk with him. Mr. Gaul is a retired oil-company executive. For many years, the Valvoline Oil Company operated a refinery on the riverbank in Shadyside, and Mr. Gaul was chief clerk there. He is secretary of the Undercliff Motor Boat Club and, to have something to do, he looks after the club’s winter-storage barges and its headquarters barge, the old G.M. Still. His friends call him Henny. Walking on River Road, Mr. Gaul and I came to an automobile that had broken down. It was alongside the curb, and two men in greasy overalls were working on it. One had the hood up, and was bent over the engine. The other was underneath the automobile, flat on his back. As we were passing by, the man underneath thrust his head out, to say something to the man working on the engine. As he did so, he caught sight of Mr. Gaul. “Hello, Henny,” he said.

Mr. Gaul was startled. He paused and turned and peered down at the man’s face, and then said, “Oh, hello, Bill.” “That was Bill Ingold,” he said as we resumed our walk. “He runs the Edgewater Garage.”

I was curious about the name; Mr. Gaul had referred to several names as old Edgewater names, and I asked him if Ingold was another one of them.

“Ingold?” he said. “Well, I should hope to think it is. It isn’t one of the old Dutch names, but it’s old enough, and Bill’s got some of the old Dutch blood in him anyhow, through his mother’s people. Knickerbocker Dutch. Not that he’d ever mention it. That’s the way it is in Edgewater. There’s a number of people over here who have old, old families back behind them—much older, I dare say, than the families back behind a high percentage of the people in the Social Register in New York—but you’d never find it out from them. Bill’s mother was a Bishop, and her mother was a Carlock. The old Dutch blood came down to him through the Carlocks. The Carlocks were big people over here once, but they had a preponderance of daughters and the name died out. They owned land, and one branch of them ran a boatyard. The boatyard was torn down years and years ago, but I can tell you where it stood. Did you ever notice an ancient old clapboard building on the upper part of River Road with a saloon in it named Sulyma’s Bar & Grill? Well, in the old days that building was a hotel named the Buena Vista Hotel, only we called it Walsch’s, after the family that ran it. And just before you got to Walsch’s, on the right, in between River Road and the river, was Carlock’s Boatyard. Bill Ingold’s father was also named Bill—William, that is, William F. He was in the Edgewater Fire Department. In fact, he was Fire Chief. He was a highly respected man, and I’ll tell you a little story to illustrate that. There used to be an old gentleman in Edgewater named Frederick W. Winterburn. Mr. Winterburn was rich. He had inherited money, and he had married money, and he had made money. His wife was a Vreeland, and she was related to the Dyckmans and the Westervelts. Among other things, he owned practically the whole of Shadyside, and he lived down there. He lived in a big house overlooking the river, and he had a rose garden in front and an orchard in back. On warm summer nights, walking along River Road, you could smell the roses in his garden. And you could smell the peaches in his orchard, all soft and ripe and still warm from the sun and a little breeze blowing across them. And you could smell the grapes hanging on a fence between the garden and the orchard. They were fox grapes, and they had a musky smell. I’d give anything to smell those grapes again. The garden had marble statues in it. Statues of women. Naked woman. Naked marble women. Goddesses, I guess you’d call them. In the moonlight, they looked real. It’s all gone now, and there’s a factory there. One piece of Mr. Winterburn’s property surrounded the Edgewater Cemetery. His parents were buried in this cemetery, and his wife’s people all the way back to the seventeenth century were buried in there, and he knew he was going to be buried in there, and he took a personal interest in it. In 1909 or 1910 or thereabouts—it might’ve been a few years earlier or a few years later—Mr. Winterburn was beginning to have a feeling that time was running out on him, he wouldn’t be here much longer, although to tell you the truth he lived quite a few years more, and one day he asked five men to come to his house. All of them were from old Edgewater families and had people buried in the cemetery, and one of them was Bill Ingold’s father, Fire Chief Ingold. ‘Sit down, boys,’ Mr. Winterburn said, ‘I want to talk to you. Boys,’ he said, ‘my family owns much more space in the cemetery than it’ll ever need or make use of, and I’m going to set aside a section of it for a poor plot. Any bona fide resident of Edgewater who dies a pauper can be buried in this plot, free of charge. And suicides that are turned away by other cemeteries can be buried in there, provided they’re residents. And nonresidents that drown in the river and wash up on the Edgewater riverfront and don’t have any identification on them, the way it sometimes happens, it doesn’t make any difference if it looks accidental or looks as if they threw themselves in, they can be buried in there. Furthermore, I’m going to set up a trust fund, and I’m going to fix it so the principal can’t ever be touched, whereas the interest can be used in perpetuity to keep up the cemetery. And I want you boys to form a cemetery association and elect a president and a secretary and a treasurer, and the duties of these officers shall be to keep an eye on the cemetery and visit it every now and then and make a tour of inspection through it and hire a caretaker and see that he keeps the weeds cut and the leaves raked and whenever the occasion arises rule on who can be buried in the poor plot and who can’t be.’ So they put it to a vote, and Fire Chief Ingold was elected president without any discussion whatsoever. It was taken for granted. That’s how respected he was. And after he died, Bill was elected president, and he’s held the office ever since. Did I mention Bill’s mother was a Bishop? Well, she was. The Bishops were…”

Some of the people in Edgewater commute to jobs in New York City, and some work in the river towns south of Edgewater, which are, in order, going south, North Bergen, Guttenberg, West New York, Weehawken, Hoboken, and Jersey City, but the majority work in the factories in Shadyside. A score or so of men are spoken of around town as rivermen. This word has a special shade of meaning in Edgewater: a riverman not only works on the river or kills a lot of time on it or near it, he is also emotionally attached to it—he can’t stay away from it. Charles Allison is an example. Mr. Allison lives in Edgewater and works in North Bergen. He is a partner in the Baldwin & Allison Dry Dock Co., a firm that operates a drydock and calks and repairs barges and drives piles and builds docks and does marine surveying and supplies pumps for salvage work, but that is only one of the reasons he is looked upon as a riverman. The main reason is that the river has a hold on him. Most days he is on or around it from early in the morning until sunset. Nevertheless, he often goes down to it at night and walks beside it. Even on Sundays and holidays, he often goes down to it. The offices of the drydock company are in a superstructure built on the deck of an old railroad barge that is permanently docked at a pier in North Bergen, and Mr. Allison has had big wide windows put in three of the walls of his private office, so that he can sit at his desk and see up, down, and across the river. Every spring, he takes a leave of absence from the drydock, and spends from six weeks to two months living aboard a shad barge on the river and fishing two rows of shad nets with a crew of hired fishermen.

Some men work full time on the river—on ferries, tugs, or barges—and are not considered rivermen; they are simply men who work on the river. Other men work only a part of the year on the river and make only a part of their living there but are considered rivermen. Mr. Ingold, the garage proprietor, is one of these. His garage is on River Road, facing the river. It is a typical small, drafty, one-story garage, except that hanging on its walls, in among the fan belts and the brake linings and the dented chromium hubcaps and the calendars with naked girls on them, are anchors and oars and hanks of netting and dozens of rusty old eelpots. Also, standing in a shallow box of sand in the middle of the floor is a stove of a kind that would be recognizable only to people who are familiar with harbor shipping; it is shaped like an oil drum and burns coke and is a kind that is used in barges and lighters to keep perishable freight from freezing. Mr. Ingold took it out of an old Erie Railroad fruit-and-vegetable barge. In the winter, a group of elderly Edgewater men, most of whom are retired, sit around it and gossip and argue; in the summer, they move their chairs up front to the door, where they can look out on the river and the Manhattan skyline. Mr. Ingold owns two shad barges and several shad boats, and keeps them at a landing a short walk up the river from the garage. Off and on during the winter, he and another riverman, Eustus R. Smith, stretch shad nets across the floor of the garage and put them in shape. They rig new nets, and mend and splice old ones. They are helped occasionally by Mr. Ingold’s son, Willy, and by Mr. Smith’s son, Charlie. In the spring, Mr. Ingold leaves the garage in the hands of two mechanics, and he and his son and Mr. Smith and his son go out on the river and become shadfishermen for a couple of months. In the late fall and early winter, when the eels in the river are at their best and bring the highest prices, Mr. Ingold and Willy set eelpots. They set sixty, and their favorite grounds are up around Spuyten Duyvil, where the Harlem River runs into the Hudson. Some nights during the eel season, after knocking off work in the garage, Mr. Ingold gets in an outboard and goes up to Spuyten Duyvil and attends to the pots, drawing them up hand over hand from the bottom and taking out the trapped eels and putting in fresh bait, and some nights Willy goes up. On dark nights, they wear miner’s caps that have head lamps on them. Mr. Ingold has been dividing his time between the garage and the river for thirty-five years. Invariably, at the end of the shad season he is so tired he has to hole up in bed for a few days, and he always resolves to stay put in the garage from then on—no man can serve two masters—but when the eel season comes around he always finds himself back on the river again.

         

The riverman I know best is an old-timer named Harry Lyons. Harry is seventy-four, and has been around the river all his life. He lives with his wife, Mrs. Juel Lyons, in a two-story frame-and-fieldstone house backed up against the base of the Palisades, on Undercliff Avenue, in the upper part of Edgewater. He owns a shad barge and an assortment of boats, and keeps them anchored just off the riverbank, a few minutes’ walk from his house. Harry is five feet six, and weighs a hundred and fifty. He is one of those short, hearty, robust men who hold themselves erect and swagger a little and are more imposing than many taller, larger men. He has an old-Roman face. It is strong-jawed and prominent-nosed and bushy-eyebrowed and friendly and reasonable and sagacious and elusively piratical. Ordinarily, down on the riverfront, he looks like a beachcomber: he wears old pants and a windbreaker and old shoes with slashes cut in them, and he goes bareheaded and his hair sticks straight up. One day, however, by chance, I ran into him on a River Road bus, and he was on his way to a funeral down in Weehawken, and he was wearing his Sunday clothes and his hair was brushed and his face was solemn, and I was surprised at how distinguished he looked; he looked worldly and cultivated and illustrious.

Harry spends a large part of his time wandering up and down the riverfront looking at the river, or sitting on his barge looking at the river, but he isn’t lazy. He believes in first things first; if there is anything at home or on the barge that should be attended to, he goes ahead and attends to it, and then sits down. He is handy with tools, and has a variety of skills. He is a good fisherman, a good netmaker, a fairly good carpenter, a fairly good all-round mechanic, and an excellent fish cook. He is especially good at cooking shad, and is one of the few men left who know how to run an old-fashioned Hudson River shad bake. Shad bakes are gluttonous springtime blowouts that are held in the middle or latter part of the shad season, generally under the trees on the riverbank, near a shad barge. They are given by lodges and labor unions, and by business, social, political, and religious organizations, and by individuals. Former Mayor Wissel—he was Mayor of Edgewater for thirty years—used to give one every year for the public officials in Edgewater and nearby towns.

When Harry is engaged to run a bake, he selects a sufficient number of roe shad from his own nets and dresses them himself and takes the roes out of them. He has a shad boner come up from Fulton Fish Market and bone them. Then, using zinc roofing nails, he nails them spread-eagle fashion to white-oak planks, one fish to a plank; the planks are two feet long, a foot and a half wide, and an inch thick, and have adjustable props fixed to their sides so that it is possible to stand them upright or tilt them backward. He nails two or three strips of bacon across each fish. When it is time to cook the fish—they aren’t baked, they are broiled—he props the planks up, fish-side foremost, in a ring around a bed of char-coal that has been burning on the ground for hours and is red-hot and radiant. He places the planks only six inches or so from the coals, but he gradually moves them farther back, so that the fish will broil slowly and pick up the flavors of the bacon and the oak; they broil for almost an hour. Every so often, he takes a turn around the ring and thoroughly mops each fish with a cotton mop, which he keeps dipping into a pot of melted butter. While Harry looks after the shad, Mrs. Lyons looks after the roes, cooking them in butter in huge frying pans. Pickled beets and new potatoes boiled in their skins are usually served with the shad and the roe. Paper plates are used. The people eat on tables made of boards laid across sawhorses, and are encouraged to have several helpings. Cooked shad-bake style by an expert, shad is crusty on the outside and tender and rich and juicy on the inside (but not too rich, since a good deal of the oil has been broiled out of it), and fully justifies its scientific name, Alosa sapidissima, the “Alosa” of which means “shad” and the “sapidissima” of which means “good to eat to a superlative degree.” Shad bakes require a lot of work, and most of them are small affairs. Some years, the New Jersey Police Chiefs’ Association gives a big one. Some years, a group of boss fishmongers in Fulton Market gives a big one. Some years, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission gives a big one. The biggest on the river is one that Harry and Mrs. Lyons have been giving for over twenty years for the benefit of the building fund of Mrs. Lyons’ church. This bake is held on the riverbank a short distance above the George Washington Bridge, usually on the Sunday following Mother’s Day Sunday, and every year around two hundred and fifty people come to it.

Mrs. Lyons is a handsome, soft-spoken blond woman, quite a few years younger than Harry. She is a native of Fort Lee, the next town on the river north of Edgewater. Her maiden name was Kotze, her parents were Swiss-German, and she was brought up a Roman Catholic. When she was a young woman, out of curiosity, while visiting a friend in Brooklyn, she attended a meeting of a congregation of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is the oldest and most widespread of several schismatic branches of the Mormon religion. A number of prophecies and warnings from the Book of Mormon, an apocalyptic Mormon scripture, were read at the meeting, and she was deeply impressed by them. She borrowed a copy of the Book and studied it for some weeks, whereupon she left the Catholic Church and joined the Reorganized Church. The congregation with which she is affiliated holds its services in a hall in the Masonic Temple in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Harry was brought up an Episcopalian, but he doesn’t feel strongly about denominations—one is as good as another to him—and since his marriage he has gone regularly to the Reorganized Church services. Harry and his wife have one daughter, Audrey. She is a member of the Reorganized Church, and went to Graceland College, a junior college sponsored by the church, in Lamoni, Iowa. She is married to John Maxcy, who is a Buick salesman in Englewood, New Jersey, and they have two children—Michele, who is sixteen, and Brian, who is eleven.

Harry is generally supposed to know more about the river than any of the other rivermen, and a great deal of what he knows was handed down to him; his family has lived beside the river for a long time, and many of his ancestors on both sides were rivermen. He has old Dutch blood and old English blood, and gravestones of ancestors of his are all over the Edgewater Cemetery. He is related to several of the oldest families in New York and New Jersey. Through his mother, who was a Truax, he is a descendant of Philippe du Trieux, one of the first settlers of New York City. Du Trieux was a Walloon who lived in Amsterdam and who came to New Amsterdam in 1624 and built a house either on a lane that is now Beaver Street or on a lane that is now Pearl Street—the historians aren’t sure which. A scholarly study of his descendants—the name has been spelled Truex or Truax for generations—was published in installments in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in 1926, 1927, and 1928. In this study, Harry is listed in the tenth generation of descent from du Trieux.

Harry was born in the upper part of Edgewater, in May, 1884. The house in which he was born is still standing; it is just up the street from the house he lives in now. He went to school in what people of his generation in Edgewater refer to as “the old schoolhouse.” This was a wooden building on River Road, on a bluff above the river. It had only two rooms—one for the lower grades and one for the upper grades—and was torn down many years ago. I once heard several old-timers sitting around the barge stove in Ingold’s garage get on the subject of the old schoolhouse. One of them, former Fire Chief Lasher, said that he had gone to it, and mentioned a number of men around town who had gone to it at the same time, among them Bill Ingold and Charlie Allison and Harry Lyons, and I asked him what kind of student Harry Lyons had been. “Oh, Harry was bright enough, but he was like the rest of us—he didn’t apply himself,” Chief Lasher said. “All he studied was the river. At recess, he’d race down to the river and fool around in the mud and attend to some old eelpot he had down there, or crab trap, or bait car, or whatever it was, and I’ve never in my life seen anybody get so muddy. He was famous for it. He’d get that sticky river mud all over him, and he wouldn’t even try to get it off. Some days, when recess was over, he’d be so muddy the teacher wouldn’t let him come back in—she’d send him home. I’ve been watching rivermen a long time, and they’re all like that; they love the mud. Harry’s nickname was Hotch. People in Edgewater used to have an expression, if they wanted to say that somebody or something was unusually muddy, they’d say that he or she or it was as muddy as Hotch Lyons. Once in a long while, you still hear somebody come out with that expression. I was standing in line in the A. & P. one day last summer and just ahead of me were two ladies my age. I went to school with them, and I remember them when they were little girls, and I remember them when they were young women, and I remember them when they were middle-aged women in the prime of life, and I imagine the same thought that crosses my mind when I look at them nowadays must also cross their minds when they look at me—How fast time flew! So we were standing there, and one of them turned to the other and said, ‘The rain this morning beat down my tomato bushes, and I went out and tried to straighten them up, and I got as muddy as Hotch Lyons,’ and all three of us burst out laughing. It brought back the old times.”

Harry’s father, William Masters Lyons, was an engineer on the Edgewater ferry. Harry was never as close to him as he was to his maternal grandfather, Isaac Truax, who was a riverman. “My father had a good disposition, but he was serious,” Harry says. “My grandfather Truax would say things that were funny—at least, to me. He would mimic people and say awful things about them. When I was just a little tiny boy, I began to eat most of my meals at his house and follow him around. He was a great one for going out on the river in the wind and the rain and all kinds of weather, and I’d go along. And then, on a nice sunshiny day, when he should’ve been out on the river, he’d sit on the porch and read. He didn’t have much education, and he didn’t even think much of schools, but he had three books that he liked—two books of Shakespeare’s writings that had come down to him from his father, and a big Bible with pictures in it that would lift the hair on your head—and he’d sometimes read things to me and explain them, or try to.”

Mr. Truax shadfished, and set fykes. A fyke is a long, tunnel-like net that is set on or close to the bottom. It is held open by a series of wooden hoops; a pair of wings flaring out from its mouth guide fish into it; and it catches a little of everything. The spring when Harry was fifteen, Mr. Truax made an unusually large fyke and set it in an inshore channel of the river, off Fort Lee, and Harry quit school to help him operate it. “I decided it was about time for me to graduate from school,” Harry says, “so I graduated out the back door.” Once or twice a week, if fish prices were good in the city, Mr. Truax and Harry would empty the fyke and row or sail their catch down to one of the riverfront markets in lower Manhattan. Sometimes they would go to Gansevoort Market or Washington Market, on the Hudson, and sometimes they would keep on and go around the Battery to Fulton Market, on the East River. Mr. Truax owned a horse and wagon. If prices were poor, he and Harry would drive out in the country and sell their fish at farmhouses. “My grandfather knew all the fish-eating country people in this part of Bergen County,” Harry says, “and they liked to see him coming down the road. If they didn’t have any money to spend he’d swap them fish for anything they had, and we’d go home with a wide variety of country produce in the wagon—sausage meat and head-cheese and blood pudding and hard cider and buttermilk and duck eggs and those good old heavy yellow-fleshed strong turnipy-tasting turnips that they call rutabagas, and stuff like that. One day, we drove up in a man’s yard, and he had just cut down a bee tree in the woods in back of his house, and we swapped him a bucket of live eels for a quart of wild honey.”

When Harry was nineteen, Mr. Truax gave up fishing with fykes and began to depend entirely on what he made from shadfishing. For ten years or so, Harry helped him fish a couple of rows of shad nets in the spring, and worked the rest of the year at jobs he picked up on or around the river. He worked mostly as a deckhand on tugboats. He worked on two of the Valvoline Oil Company’s tugs, the Magnet and the Magic Safety, and on several of the tugs in the New York, New Haven & Hartford’s fleet. Mr. Truax died in 1913, aged eighty-four. For three years thereafter, Harry fished a row of shad nets of his own and set a fyke of his own. In 1915, he got married, and began to worry about money for the first time in his life. In 1916, a fireman’s job became open in the Edgewater Fire Department, and he took it. Edgewater has three firehouses. Firehouse No. 1, in which Harry was stationed, is on River Road, a few yards north of the site of the old schoolhouse. It faces the river, and it has a wooden bench in front of it. “Before I joined the Fire Department,” Harry once said, “my main occupation was sitting down looking at the river. After I joined the department, that continued to be my main occupation, only I got paid for it.” He was a fireman for twenty-six years, and was allowed to take a leave of absence every spring and fish a row of shad nets. He became eligible for a pension in 1942. On April 1st of that year, at the start of the shad season, he retired, and resumed his life as a full-time riverman.

In the spring, Harry sets shad nets. In the fall, he sets eelpots. Some days, he goes crabbing. Now and then, in every season, not for money but for fun and for the table, he fishes with a hand line or a bamboo pole or a rod and reel. He is an accomplished baitcaster, and it is a pleasure to watch him stand on the bank and cast a knot of bloodworms to the outer edge of the flats, out past the wrecks, and bring in a striped bass. He isn’t a striped-bass snob, however, and he often joins the old men and women who come down to the river on sunny afternoons and pole-fish from the bank for anything at all that will bite. Many of the old men and women are opinionated and idiosyncratic, and he enjoys listening to them, and observing the odd rigs that they devise and the imaginative baits that they use. Around Edgewater, catfish and tomcod and lafayettes and eels are about the only fish that can be caught close to the bank, but that is all right with Harry; he doesn’t look down on any of these fish. In common with most of the rivermen, he has a great liking for catfish; he likes to catch them and he likes to eat them. In the spring and early summer, large numbers of catfish show up in the lower Hudson; the spring freshets bring them down from fresh water. Some are enormous. In 1953, one was caught near the George Washington Bridge that weighed over thirty pounds, and every year a few are caught around Edgewater that weigh between ten and twenty pounds. One Saturday afternoon last spring, an old Negro woman fishing a short distance up the bank from Harry caught two big ones, one right after the other. Harry and several other fishermen went over to look at them, and one of the fishermen, who had a hand scale, weighed them; the first weighed seventeen pounds and the second weighed twelve. Harry asked the old woman what kind of bait she had been using. “Chicken guts,” she said. Harry also has a great liking for tomcod. The tomcod is a greedy little inshore fish that belongs to the cod family and resembles the deep-sea codfish in every respect but size—it seldom gets much longer than seven inches or weighs more than half a pound, and it gives the appearance of being a midget codfish. It comes into the waters around the city to feed and to spawn, and it is almost as ubiquitous as the eel. There are a few tomcod in every part of the harbor every month of the year. In the late fall and early winter, during their spawning runs, they are abundant, and some days thousands upon thousands of them are caught from piers and sea walls and bulkheads and jetties all the way from Rockaway Point to the Battery, and from the banks of the Hudson and the East River and the Harlem River and the Arthur Kill and the Kill van Kull. They are eaten mainly in the homes of the people who catch them; I have rarely seen them in fish stores, and have never seen them on a menu. Harry thinks the tomcod is greatly undervalued; it is what he calls a sweet-meated fish, and he considers it the best fish, next to shad and snapper bluefish, that enters the river. “There’s only one thing wrong with tommycods,” he once said. “It takes seventeen of them to make a dozen.” On sunny, crystal-clear mornings in the fall, when it is possible to see into the water, he gets in one of his boats and rows out into the flats and catches some river shrimp. River shrimp—they are also called harbor shrimp and mud shrimp, and are really prawns—are tiny; they are only about an inch and a quarter long, including the head. There are sometimes dense swarms of them in the slues between the barges. Harry catches them with a dip net and empties them into a bucket. When he has a supply, he rows farther out into the flats and ties up to one of the old wrecks and sits there and fishes for tomcod, using a hand line and baiting the hook with the shrimp. Occasionally, he pops some of the shrimp into his mouth—he eats them raw and spits out the shells. By noon, as a rule, he has all the tomcod he can use; he has often caught a hundred and fifty in a morning.

Every so often during January, February, and March, Harry gets up early and puts some sandwiches in his pockets and goes down to his barge and starts a fire in one of the stoves in it and spends the day working on his shadfishing gear. While the river wind hisses and purrs and pipes and whistles through cracks and knotholes in the sides of the barge, he paints an anchor, or overhauls an outboard motor, or makes one net out of the strongest parts of two or three old ones. He works in a leisurely fashion, and keeps a pot of coffee on the stove. Sometimes he goes over and sits beside a window and watches the traffic on the river for an hour or so. Quite often, in the afternoon, one of the other rivermen comes in and helps himself to a cup of coffee and sits down and gossips for a while. Harry’s barge is a big one. It is a hundred and ten feet long and thirty-two feet wide. Except for narrow little decks at its bow and stern, it is covered with a superstructure made of heart-pine posts and white-pine clapboards. The superstructure is patched here and there with tar paper, and has a tar-paper roof. It is an old Delaware, Lackawanna & Western barge; on its sides are faded signs that say, “D L & W # 530.” It is forty-two years old. When it was thirty years old, a fire that broke out in some cargo damaged parts of its interior; the Lackawanna repaired it and used it for two more years, and then sold it to Harry. Harry has partitioned off two rooms in the bow end of it—one for a galley and one for a bunkroom. In the middle of the bunkroom is a statuesque old claw-footed Sam Oak stove. Around the stove are seven rickety chairs, no two of which are mates. One is a swivel chair whose spring has collapsed. Built against one of the partitions, in three tiers, are twelve bunks. Harry usually makes a fire in the Sam Oak stove and works in the bunkroom; there is a stove in the galley that burns bottled gas and is much easier to manage, but he feels more at home with the Sam Oak, which burns coal or wood. He sometimes uses driftwood that he picks up on the riverbank. The galley and the bunkroom take up less than a third of the space in the barge. The rest of the space is used for storage, and scattered about in it are oars and sweeps and hawsers and kerosene lanterns and shad-bake planks and tin tubs and blocks and tackles and cans of boat paint and sets of scales and stacks of fish boxes. Hanging in festoons from the rafters are dozens of nets, some of which are far too old and ripped and rotten ever to be put in the water again.

         

One day in late February, the weather was surprisingly sunny and warm. It was one of those balmy days that sometimes turn up in the winter, like a strange bird blown off its course. Walking back to my office after lunch, I began to dawdle. Suddenly the idea occurred to me, why not take the afternoon off and go over to Edgewater and go for a walk along the river and breathe a little clean air for a change. I fought a brief fight with my conscience, and then I entered the Independent subway at Forty-second Street and rode up to the 168th Street station and went upstairs to the Public Service bus terminal and got a No. 8 bus. This bus goes across the George Washington Bridge and heads south and runs through a succession of riverfront towns, the second of which is Edgewater. It is a pleasant trip in itself. At the town limits of Edgewater, there is a sign that says, “WELCOME TO EDGEWATER. WHERE HOMES AND INDUSTRY BLEND. EDGEWATER CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.” A couple of bus stops past this sign, I got out, as I usually do, and began to walk along River Road. I looked at my watch; I had made good connections, and the trip from Forty-second Street had taken only thirty-six minutes. The sunshine was so warm that my overcoat felt burdensome. All along the west side of River Road, women had come out into their front yards and were slowly walking around, looking at the dead stalks and vines in their flower beds. I saw a woman squat sideways beside what must have been a bulb border and rake away some leaves with her fingers. She peered at the ground for a few moments, and then swept the leaves back with one sweep of her hand. In the upper part of Edgewater, River Road is high above the river, and a steep, wooded slope lies between the east side of it and the riverbank. Just past the George Washington School, a public school on the site of the old schoolhouse, there is a bend in the road from which it is possible to look down almost on the tops of the shad barges drawn up close to the riverbank along there. I looked the barges over, and picked out Harry’s. Smoke was coming from its stovepipe, and I decided to stop by and have a cup of coffee with Harry. Several paths descend from the road to the riverbank. Children like to slide on them and play on them, and they are deeply rutted. As I started down one of them, Harry came out on the bow deck of his barge and looked up and saw me and waved. A few minutes later, I crossed the riverbank and went out on the ramshackle footwalk that extends from the riverbank to his barge and climbed the ladder that is fixed to the bow and stepped on deck, and he and I shook hands. “Go inside and get yourself a cup of coffee and bring it out here, why don’t you,” he said, “and let’s sit in the sun a little while.”

When I returned to the deck, Harry motioned toward the riverbank with his head and said, “Look who’s coming.” Two men had just started up the footwalk. One was a stranger to me. The other was an old friend and contemporary of Harry’s named Joe Hewitt. I have run into him a number of times, and have got to know him fairly well. Mr. Hewitt is six feet two and portly and red-faced. He lives in Fort Lee, but he is a native of Edgewater and belongs to one of the old Edgewater families. He went to school in the old schoolhouse at the same time as Harry, and fished and worked around the river for a few years, and then went to a business school on Park Row, in Manhattan, called the City Hall Academy. Through an uncle, who was in the trucking business and often trucked shad from Edgewater and other riverfront towns to Fulton Market during the shad season, he got a job as a clerk in the old Fulton Market firm of John Feeney, Inc. He became head bookkeeper in Feeney’s, and subsequently worked for several other firms in the fish market. He retired over ten years ago. He spends a lot of time in Edgewater, and often hangs out in Ingold’s garage. Years ago, Mr. Hewitt bought three tracts of cheap land along the Hackensack River, one in Hudson County and two in Bergen County; he speaks of them as “those mosquito bogs of mine.” In recent years, two of these tracts have increased in value enormously, and he has sold sections of them for housing developments and shopping centers, and has become well-to-do. He is a generous man, and often goes out of his way to help people. Once in a while, a riverman gets in a bad jam of some kind and is broke to begin with and other rivermen take up a collection for him, and Mr. Hewitt almost always gives more than anyone else. However, despite his generosity and kindness, he has a bleak outlook on life, and doesn’t try to hide it. “Things have worked out very well for you, Joe,” I once heard another retired man remark to him one day in Ingold’s garage, “and you ought to look at things a little more cheerful than you do.” “I’m not so sure I have anything to be cheerful about,” Mr. Hewitt replied. “I’m not so sure you have, either. I’m not so sure anybody has.”

“Who is the man with Mr. Hewitt?” I asked Harry.

“I never saw him before,” Harry said.

Mr. Hewitt came up the ladder first, and stepped on deck, puffing and blowing.

“The sun was so nice we decided to walk down from Fort Lee,” he said, “and what a mistake that was! The traffic is getting worse and worse on River Road. Oh, it scares me! Those big heavy trucks flying past, it’s worth your life to step off the curb. Slam on their brakes, they couldn’t stop; you’d be in the hospital before they even slowed down. You’d be lying on the operating table with an arm off, an arm and a leg, an arm and a leg and one side of your head, and they’d still be rolling. And the noise they make! The shot and shell on the battlefield wouldn’t be much worse. What was that old poem? How’d it go, how’d it go? I used to know it. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row…’ And good God, gentlemen, the Cadillacs! While we were standing there, waiting and waiting for a chance to cross, six big black Cadillacs shot by, practically one right after the other, and it wasn’t any funeral, either.”

“Times are good, Joe,” said Harry. “Times are good.”

“Thieves,” said Mr. Hewitt.

His companion reached the top of the ladder and awkwardly stepped on deck. “Gentlemen,” said Mr. Hewitt, “this is my brother-in-law Frank Townsend.” He turned to Harry. “Harry,” he said, “you’ve heard me speak of Frank. He’s Blanche’s younger brother, the one who’s in the sprinkler-system business. Or was. He’s retired now.” He turned to me. “Blanche is my wife,” he said. Then he turned to Mr. Townsend. “Sit down, Frank,” he said, “and get your breath.” Mr. Townsend sat down on a capstan. “Frank lives in Syracuse,” continued Mr. Hewitt. “He’s been down in Florida, and he’s driving back, and he’s spending a few days with us. Since he retired, he’s got interested in fishing. I told him the shadfishermen all along the Hudson are getting ready for shad season, and he’s never seen a shad barge, and I thought I’d bring him down here and show him one, and explain shadfishing to him.”

Harry’s eyebrows rose. “Shadfishing hasn’t changed much through the years, Joe,” he said, “but it’s been a long, long time since you lifted a net. Maybe you better let me do the explaining.”

“I wish you would,” said Mr. Hewitt. “I was hoping you would.”

“I’ll make it as brief as possible,” said Harry, walking over to the edge of the deck. “Step over here, Mr. Townsend, and look over the side. Do you see those poles lying down there in the mud? They’re shagbark-hickory poles, and they’re fifty to seventy feet long, and they’re the foundation of shadfishing; everything else depends on them. During shad season, we stick them up in the river in rows at right angles to the shore, and hitch our nets to them. When the season’s finished, we pull them up and bring them in here in the flats and bed them in the mud on both sides of our barges until we’re ready to use them again. They turn green down there, from the green slime, but that’s all right—the slime preserves them. As long as we keep them damp, they stay strong and supple and sound. If we let them dry out, they lose their strength and their give and start to rot.”

Mr. Townsend interrupted Harry. “How much do they cost you?” he asked.

“Shad is an expensive fish, Mr. Townsend, not to speak of shad roe,” Harry said, “and one of the reasons is it’s expensive to fish for. You can’t just pick up the phone and order a shad pole from a lumberyard. You have to hunt all over everywhere and find a farmer who has some full-grown hickory trees in his woods and is willing to sell some, and even then he might not have any that are tall enough and straight enough and strong enough and limber enough. I get mine from a farmer who owns some deep woods in Pennsylvania. When I need some new ones, I go out there—in the dead of winter, usually, a couple of months before shad season starts—and spend the whole day tramping around in his woods looking at his hickories. And I don’t just look at a tree—I study it from all sides and try to imagine how it would take the strain if it was one of a row of poles staked in the Hudson River holding up a shad net and the net was already heavy with fish and a full-moon tide was pushing against the net and bellying it out and adding more fish to it all the time. I study hundreds of them. Then I pick out the likeliest-looking ones and blaze them with an axe. The farmer cuts them down, and sends them up here on a trailer truck. Then I and a couple of men around the river go to work on them and peel their bark off and trim their knots off and smooth them down with adzes and drawknives and planes until there’s no splinters or rough spots on them anywhere that the net could catch on. Then we sharpen their butt ends, to make it easier to drive them into the river bottom. I pay the farmer eighteen to twenty dollars apiece for them. After the trucking charges are added to that, and the wages of the men who help me trim them, I figure they cost me between thirty-five and forty dollars apiece. You need at least forty of them for every row you fish. Tugboats are always blundering into them at night and passing right over them and bending them down until they crack in two, so you also have to have a supply of spares set aside. In other words, the damned things run into money.”

Some young girls—there were perhaps a dozen of them, and they were eight or nine or maybe ten years old—had come down one of the paths from River Road, and now they were chasing each other around on the riverbank. They were as overexcited as blue jays, and their fierce, jubilant, fresh young voices filled the air.

“School’s out,” said Harry.

Several of the girls took up a position near the shore end of the footwalk to Harry’s barge. Two of them started turning a rope and singing a rope-jumping song, a third ran in and started jumping the rope, and the others got in line. The song began:

Mama, Mama,

I am ill.

Send for the doctor

To give me a pill.

Doctor, Doctor,

Will I die?

Yes, my child,

And so will I—

Mr. Hewitt looked at them gloomily. “They get louder every year,” he said.

“I like to hear them,” said Harry. “It’s been sixty years since I was in school, but I know exactly how they feel. Now, Mr. Townsend, to get back to shadfishing,” he continued, “the first thing a man starting out as a shadfisherman has to have is a supply of poles, and the next thing he has to have is a row—that is, a place in the river where he can stake his poles year after year. In the old days, a man could pretty much decide for himself where his row should be, just so he didn’t get too close to another man’s row or get out in a ship channel or interfere with access to a pier. However, the shipping interests and the tugboat interests were always complaining that the shadfishermen acted as if they owned the river, and vice versa, so the Army Engineers finally stepped in. The Engineers have jurisdiction over all the navigable rivers in the country, insofar as the protection of navigation is concerned. About twenty years ago, just before World War Two, they went out and made a study of the Hudson from the standpoint of shadfishing versus navigation, and the outcome was they abolished some of the rows and left some right where they were and moved some and laid out a few new ones. Every year, they re-survey the rows, and some years they move or abolish one or two more. The best rows are in what’s called the lower river—the section from the mouth of the river, down at the Battery, to the east-and-west boundary line between New Jersey and New York, which is about twenty miles up. Now, all the way up to this point the north-and-south boundary line between the two states is the middle of the river, and it so happens that all this distance all the shad rows are in the half of the river that belongs to New Jersey—there can’t be any over in the New York half, because the main ship channel is in it. At present, there are fifty-five of these rows. The first row is off the big New York Central grain elevator in the railroad yards in Weehawken, about on a level with Sixtieth Street in Manhattan. It’s a short row, only five hundred feet across, and it’s entirely too near the ocean-liner traffic to suit me. Now and then, a big Cunarder or a Furness Line boat or a Swedish American Line boat will back out of one of the piers in the Fifties, and when she gets out in the river she’ll keep on backing to get in position to go down the channel, and her backwash will hit the first row and churn the net up and down and whip it against the poles and empty the fish out of it. Some days, the backwash of those boats can be felt practically all the way to Albany. The fifty-fifth row is off the village of Alpine, which is about on a level with Yonkers and just below the east-and-west boundary line. Up above this line, the whole river belongs to New York, and the New York shadfishermen take over. Some of them fish the same as we do, in rows, with nets hitched to poles, but most of them fish with nets that they drift from boats. Their rows aren’t as good as ours. One reason is, you’re bound to catch more fish if you have the first crack at them. And another reason is, the sooner shad are caught after they leave the sea—or, a plainer way of putting it, the less time they spend in the river water—the better they taste and the more they’re worth. The Engineers have the say-so as to where a row can be placed, but the Conservation Department of the state in whose waters the row is located has the say-so as to who can fish it. The New Jersey rows don’t change hands very often; once a man gets one, he can renew his rights to it every year, and he generally holds on to it until he dies, and then it goes to whoever’s next on the waiting list. You don’t rent a row—what you do is, every year you take out a license for each row you fish, and a license costs twenty-five dollars. Most of the rows off Edgewater and Weehawken are very old. One of the Edgewater rows has been fished for at least a hundred and fifty years, and maybe a good while longer. A man named Bill Ingold fishes it now, but it’s still called the Truax row, after my grandfather, Isaac Truax, who fished it for many years. When my grandfather had it, it was called the Scott row, after the man who had it ahead of him. I’ve heard the name of the man who had it ahead of Scott and the name of the man who had it ahead of him, but they’ve faded out of my mind. I’ve got two rows in my name. They’re the first two rows north of the George Washington Bridge. They’re both twelve-hundred-foot rows, which is the length of most of the rows. The last few years, I’ve been fishing only one of them the whole season through. It’s the lower one. If you ever drive over the bridge on the westbound roadway during shad season, look up the river a little ways and you’ll see my poles.”

Mr. Townsend had grown tired of standing, and he sat back down on the capstan.

“Sometime in the latter half of March,” continued Harry, “I and three or four men that I swap labor with get together and move this barge up the river. They help me move mine, I help them move theirs; they help me stake my poles, I help them stake theirs. We tie the barge to a launch owned by one of the men and tow her up on the tide, and take her to a point beside the riverbank half a mile or so above the bridge, where she’ll be convenient to both my rows. We run a hawser from that capstan you’re sitting on to a tree on the bank and draw her up close to the bank, with the bow facing the bank, and then we anchor her with three anchors—port, starboard, and stern. She stays there for the duration of shad season. Then we get out on the bank and put up a rack to mend nets on and a gallows to hang a set of scales on. The land along there is owned by the Palisades Interstate Park, and a shadfisherman pays rent for the space he uses on the riverbank on the basis of how many rows he fishes—the rate is two hundred dollars a row for the season. Then we go back to the flats and start snaking my poles out of the mud and loading them on a peculiar-looking kind of craft called a double boat. A double boat consists of two forty-foot scows connected together side by side but with a narrow space left in between them. It resembles a raft, as much as it resembles anything. When we get it loaded, we tow it up the river on the tide, the same as we towed the barge, and then we start staking the poles. Until a few years ago, this was a job shadfishermen dreaded. We’d anchor the double boat over the place we wanted the pole to go, and we’d stand the pole up in the narrow in-between space I mentioned, to keep it steady. Then we’d lash a crosspiece on the pole, and two men, the heavier the better, would climb up and stand on the crosspiece and hold on to the pole and bend their knees and make a kind of jumping motion, keeping time with each other, until they drove the butt end of the pole into the river bottom. Sometimes they’d have to jump for hours to get a pole down far enough. Sometimes more weight would be needed and two more men would get up on the crosspiece. The two on the inside would hold on to the pole and the two on the outside would hold on to the two on the inside, and they’d jump and grunt and jump and grunt, and it was a strange sight to watch, particularly to people watching it from shore who didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on out there. Shad poles are spaced from twenty-five to thirty feet apart, and you have to put down from forty-one to forty-nine poles on a twelve-hundred-foot row, counting the outside poles, so you can just imagine the jumping we used to have to do. Nowadays, it’s much simpler. We have a winch sitting on a platform in the middle of the double boat, and we simply stand the pole in place and put a short length of chain around it up toward its upper end and hook a cable from the winch onto the chain, and the winch exerts a powerful downward pull on the chain and forces the butt end of the pole into the bottom.

“By the last week in March, the shad barges are in place all along the Hudson and the shad poles are up. There’s a number of old retired or half-retired sea cooks and tugboat cooks in Edgewater and Weehawken, and they come out of retirement around this time and take jobs as cooks on shad barges. They work on the same barges year after year. As soon as the cooks get situated in the galleys, the shadfishermen start living aboard. Around the same time, men start showing up in Edgewater who haven’t been seen in town since last shad season. You need highly skilled fishermen to handle shad nets, and for many years there hasn’t been enough local help to go around, so every spring fishermen from other places come and take the jobs. A shadfisherman generally hires from two to five of them for each row he fishes, and pays them a hundred or so a week and bunk and board. Most of them are Norwegians or Swedes. Some come from little ports down in South Jersey, such as Atlantic Highlands, Port Monmouth, Keyport, Point Pleasant, and Wildwood. In other seasons, they do lobstering or pound-fishing, or go out on draggers or scallopers. Some come from a small dragger fleet that works out of Mill Basin, in Brooklyn. Some come from Fulton Market—old fishermen who work as fillet cutters and go back to fishing only during shad season. Some don’t come from any particular place, but roam all over. One man didn’t show up in Edgewater year before last, the best man with a shad net I ever saw, and last year he did show up, and I asked him where he’d been. ‘I worked my way home on a tanker to see my sister,’ he said, and by ‘home’ he meant some port in Norway, ‘and then I worked on a Norwegian sealer that hunted harp seals along the coast of Labrador, and then I worked my way back here on a tanker, and then I worked awhile in the shrimp fleet in Galveston, Texas, and the last few months I worked on a bait-clam dredge in Sheepshead Bay.’ They know how to do almost any kind of commercial fishing—and if they don’t they can pick it up between breakfast and lunch and do it better by supper than the ones who taught them. When they come aboard a barge, all they ever have with them is an old suitcase in one hand and an old sea bag slung over one shoulder that they carry their boots and oilskins in, and they seldom say much about themselves. In times past, there were quite a few rummies among them, real old thirty-second-degree rummies, but the rummies seem to have dropped by the wayside. Oh, there’s a few left.

“Every year, on one of the last days in March or one of the first days in April, the shad start coming in from the sea. They enter the mouth of the harbor, at Sandy Hook, and straggle around awhile in the Lower Bay, and then they go through the Narrows and cross the Upper Bay and enter the mouth of the Hudson and head for their spawning grounds. There are several of these grounds. The main one begins eighty miles up the river, up around Kingston, and extends to Coxsackie—a distance of twenty-five miles. This stretch of the river has a great many sandbars in it, and creek mouths and shallow coves and bays. As a rule, shad are four years old when they make their first trip in, and they keep on coming in once every year until their number is up. You can take a scale off a shad and look at the scars on it and tell how many times the shad has spawned, and every season we see quite a few who managed to escape our nets as many as five or six times and go up and spawn before they finally got caught, not to speak of the fact that they managed to keep from being eaten by some other fish all those years. Roe shad average around three and a half to four pounds, and bucks average around two and a half to three. The roes are always heavier. Once in a while, we see a seven-pound roe, or an eight-pounder, or a nine-pounder. I caught one once that weighted thirteen and a half pounds.”

“Just think how many fish she must’ve spawned in her time,” said Mr. Townsend. “If it had been me that caught her, I’d’ve patted her on the back and put her back in.”

“A commercial fisherman is supposed to catch fish, Mr. Townsend, not put them back in,” Harry said. “Anyway, as a matter of fact, I killed her getting her loose from the net. The shad won’t come into the river until the temperature of the river water reaches forty degrees or thereabouts, and that’s what we watch for. Day after day, when the water starts approaching this temperature, we go out just before every flood tide and hang a short net called a jitney in the spaces between several poles toward the far end of the row. This is a trial net. The shad may start trickling in, only three or four showing up on each tide, and continue that way for days, or avalanches of them may start coming in all at once, but as soon as we find the first ones in the trial net, however many there are, even if there’s only one, we go to work in earnest. Just before the next flood tide begins, I and two or three of the hired fishermen take a regularsized net out to the row in a shad boat. A shad boat is fifteen to twenty feet long and high and sharp in the bow and low and square and roomy in the stern. It has a well in its bottom, up forward, in which to sit an outboard motor—although you can row it if you want to—and it’s unusually maneuverable. We have the net piled up in the stern, and we work our way across the downriver side of the row, and go from pole to pole, feeding the net out and letting the bottom of it sink and tying the top of it to the poles. It’s like putting up a fence, only it’s an underwater fence. Where my row is, the water ranges in depth from twenty to thirty feet, and I use a net that’s twenty feet deep. The net has iron rings sewed every few feet along the bottom of it to weight it down and hold it down. In addition, on each end of it, to anchor it, we tie a stone called a dropstone. Several blocks north of here, there’s a ravine running down from River Road to the riverbank. In the middle of the ravine is a brook, and beside the brook is an old abandoned wagon road all grown over with willow trees and sumac and sassafras and honeysuckle and poison ivy. Years ago, the main business of Edgewater was cutting paving blocks for New York City, and wagons carrying loads of these blocks to a dock on the river-bank used to come down this road. It was a rocky road, and you can still see ruts that the wheel rims wore in the rocks. Through the years, a good many paving blocks bounced off the wagons and fell in the brook, and the drivers were too lazy to pick them up, and that’s where we get our dropstones. If we lose one in the river, we go up with a crowbar and root around in the mud and tree roots and rusty tin cans in the bed of the brook and dig out another one. Some of us have a notion the blocks are lucky. I wouldn’t think of using any other kind of dropstone.

“By the time we have the net hung all the way across, the flood tide is in full flow, pushing and pressing against the net and bellying it out in the spaces between the poles. We go on back to the barge and leave the net to take care of itself for the duration of the tide. If enough shad to amount to anything come up the river in the tide, some of them are bound to hit it. They’ll either hit it head on and stick their heads in the meshes and gill themselves or they’ll hit it sideways and tangle themselves in it and the tide will hold them against it the way the wind holds a scrap of paper against a fence. In this part of the river, the tide runs from three and a half to six hours, according to the time of the month and the strength and direction of the wind, and it runs faster on the bottom than it does on the top, and it’ll trick you. When we judge it’s getting on toward the time it should start slowing down, we go back out to the row in the shad boat and get ready to lift the net. Quite often, we’re way too early, and have to stop at the first pole and sit there in the boat with our hands in our laps and bide our time. We might sit there an hour. If it’s during the day, we sit and look up at the face of the Palisades, or we look at the New York Central freight trains that seem to be fifteen miles long streaking by on the New York side, or we look downriver at the tops of the skyscrapers in the distance. I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the New York skyline. Sometimes I think it’s beautiful, and sometimes I think it’s a gaudy damned unnatural sight. If it’s in the nighttime, we look at that queer glare over midtown Manhattan that comes from the lights in Times Square. On cold, clear nights in April, sitting out on the river in the dark, that glare in the sky looks like the Last Judgment is on the way, or the Second Coming, or the end of the world. Every little while, we stick an oar straight into the water and try to hold it there, to test the strength of the tide. We have to time things very carefully. We want the net to stay down and catch fish as long as possible, but if we wait too long to get started the tide will begin to ebb before we get across the row, and belly the net in the opposite direction, and dump the fish out. I sit beside the outboard motor and handle the boat, and I usually have three fishermen aboard. When I give the signal to let’s get going, two of the fishermen stand up side by side in the stern, and one unties the net at the first pole. Then, while one holds on to the top of the net, the other pulls the bottom of it up to the top—that’s called pursing it. Then they start drawing it into the boat, a little at a time. The third man stands a few feet farther back, and helps wherever he’s needed most. We proceed from pole to pole, untying the net and drawing it in. As it comes aboard, the men shake it and jerk it and twitch it and seesaw it and yank it this way and that, and the fish spill out of it and fall to the bottom of the boat. The men tear a lot of holes in the net that way, but it can’t be helped. As the net piles up in the stern, the fish pile up amidships. When we get to the end of the row, if we’ve had a good lift, we’ll have over a thousand shad piled up amidships, bucks and roes all jumbled together, flipping and flopping and beating the air with their tails, each and every one of them fit to be cooked by some great chef at the Waldorf-Astoria and served on the finest china, and the boat’ll almost be awash. I must’ve seen a million shad in my time, and I still think they’re beautiful—their thick bodies, their green backs, their silver sides, their saw-edged bellies, the deep forks in their tails. The moment we draw in the end of the net, we turn about and head for the riverbank. We beach the boat, and all four of us grab hold of the net—it’s dripping wet and heavy as lead—and heave it onto a kind of low-sided box with four handles on it called a net box. We carry this up on the bank, and spread the net on the net rack. Then, while one man starts picking river trash out of the net and mending it and getting it ready for the next flood tide, I and the two other men unload the fish and sort them and weigh them and pack them in wooden boxes, a hundred or so pounds to a box. The roes bring a much higher price than the bucks, and we pack them separately. I write my name on each box with a black crayon, and below it I write ‘A. & S.’ That stands for Ackerly & Sandiford, the wholesale firm in Fulton Market that I ship to. There’s always some trucker over here who understands shadfishing and makes a business every spring of trucking shad to market. Joe’s uncle, old Mr. John Hewitt, used to do it years ago, first with a dray, then with a truck. In recent years, a man named George Indahl has been doing it. Usually, about the time we get through boxing a lift, one of his trucks comes down the little one-lane dirt road that runs along the riverbank up where I anchor my barge, and the driver stops and picks up my boxes. Then he goes on down the line and stops at the next shadfisherman’s place, and keeps on making stops until he has a load, and then he high-tails it for South Street.”

“South Street is the main street in Fulton Market, Frank,” Mr. Hewitt said to Mr. Townsend. “Most of the fishmongers have their stands on it. There’s an old saying in the market, ‘When the shad are running in the Hudson, South Street is bloody.’”

“My place on the riverbank is kind of hard to get to, although you can see it from the bridge,” Harry continued, “but the first few days of shad season, every time we come in with a lift, we find a little crowd standing there. They’re mostly old men. They stand around and watch us bring the fish ashore and sort them and box them, and the sight of the shad seems to do them good. Some are old men from Edgewater and Fort Lee. Others are old men I never see any other time. They show up year after year, and I say hello to them and shake hands, but I don’t know their names, let alone where they come from. I don’t even know if they come from New Jersey or New York. Several have been coming for so many years that I tell them to wait until the others have gone, and I give them a shad, a roe shad. They’re well-to-do-looking men, some of them, and could probably buy me and sell me, but they bring a newspaper to wrap their fish in and a paper bag to carry it in, and the way they thank me, you’d think I was giving them something really valuable. One of them, who’d been showing up every spring for years and years with his paper bag all neatly folded in his overcoat pocket, didn’t show up last spring. ‘The poor old boy, whoever he was,’ I said to myself, when I happened to think of him, ‘he didn’t last the winter.’ Day by day, the little crowd gets smaller and smaller, and after the first week or so only an occasional person shows up, and things settle down to a routine. Not that they get dull. Lifting a shad net is like shooting dice—you never get tired of seeing what comes up. One lift, we may get only two or three fish all the way across; next lift, we may get a thousand. One lift, we may get mostly bucks; next lift, roes may outnumber bucks three to one. And shad aren’t the only fish that turn up in a shad net. We may find a dozen big catfish lying in the belly of the net, or a couple of walleyed pike, or some other kind of fresh-water fish. A freshet brought them down, and they were making their way back up the river, and they hit the net. Or we may find some fish that strayed in from the ocean on a strong tide—bluefish or blackfish or fluke or mossbunkers or goosefish, or a dozen other kinds. Or we may find some ocean fish that run up the river to spawn the same as shad, such as sea sturgeon or alewives or summer herring. Sea sturgeon are the kind of sturgeon whose roe is made into caviar. Some of them get to be very old and big. Going up the river, they keep leaping out of the water, and suddenly, at least once every season, one of them leaps out of the water right beside my boat, and it’s so big and long and ugly and covered all over with warts that it scares me—it might be eight, nine, ten, or eleven feet long and weigh a couple of hundred pounds. We get quite a few of the young ones in our nets, and now and then, especially during the latter part of the season, we lift the net and there’s a gaping big hole in it, and we know that a full-grown one came up the river sometime during the tide, an old-timer, and hit the net and went right through it. Several years ago, an eighty-one-pounder hit the net sideways while we were lifting it, and began to plunge around in it, and it was as strong as a young bull, but the men braced themselves and took a firm grip on the net and held on until it wore itself out, and then they pulled it aboard.

“The bulk of the shad go up the river between the middle of April and the middle of May. Around the middle of May, we begin to see large numbers of what we call back-runners coming down the river—shad that’ve finished spawning and are on their way back to sea. We don’t bother them. They eat little or nothing while they’re on their spawning runs, and by this time they’re so feeble and emaciated they can just barely make it. If we find them in our nets, we shake them back into the water. Shad keep right on coming into the river until around the end of June, but during May the price goes lower and lower, and finally they aren’t worth fishing for. In the last week in May or the first week in June, we pull up our poles and move our barges back to the flats.

“The young shad stay up on the spawning grounds through the summer. In October and the early part of November, when the water starts getting cold, they come down the river in huge schools and go out to sea. Way up in November, last year, they were still coming down. One morning, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I was out in the flats, tied up to an old wreck, fishing for tomcod, and all of a sudden the water around my boat became alive with little shad—pretty little silver-sided things, three to five inches in length, flipping right along. I dropped a bucket over the side and brought up half a dozen of them, and they were so lively they made the water in the bucket bubble like seltzer water. I looked at them a few minutes, and then I poured them back in the river. ‘Go on out to sea,’ I said to them, ‘and grow up and get some flesh on your bones, and watch yourselves and don’t get eaten by other fish, and four years from now, a short distance above the George Washington Bridge,’ I said, ‘maybe our paths will cross again.’”

         

Mr. Townsend and Mr. Hewitt and I had been listening closely to Harry, and none of us had paid any further attention to the young girls jumping rope on the riverbank. Shortly after Harry stopped talking, all of us became aware at the same moment that the girls turning the rope were singing a new song. Just then, the girl jumping missed a jump, and another girl ran in to take her place, whereupon the girls turning the rope started the new song all over again. Their voices were rollicking, and they laughed as they sang. The song began:

The worms crawl in,

The worms crawl out.

They eat your guts

And spit them out.

They bring their friends

And their friends’ friends, too,

And there’s nothing left

When they get through….

Harry laughed. “They’ve changed it a little,” he said. “That line used to go, ‘And you look like hell when they get through.’”

“‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. They play pinochle on your snout,’” said Mr. Townsend. “That’s the way I remember it. ‘One little worm who’s not so shy crawls up your nose and out your eye.’ That’s another line I remember.”

“Let’s go inside,” said Mr. Hewitt. “It’s getting cold out here. We’ll all catch pneumonia.”

“You know what they used to say about pneumonia, Joe,” Harry said. “‘Pneumonia is the old man’s friend.’”

“A lot of what they used to say,” said Mr. Hewitt, “could just as well’ve been left unsaid.”

Stooping, he stepped from the deck into the passageway of the barge and walked past the galley and into the bunkroom, and the rest of us followed. There is a bulletin board on the partition that separates the bunkroom from the storage quarters beyond. Tacked on it are mimeographed notices dating back ten years concerning new shadfishing regulations or changes in old ones—some from the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, and some from the Division of Fish and Game, Department of Conservation and Economic Development, State of New Jersey. Also tacked on the bulletin board is a flattened-out pasteboard box on which someone has lettered with boat paint: “OLD FISHERMEN NEVER DIE—THEY JUST SMELL THAT WAY.” Tacked on the partition to the right of the bulletin board are several Coast and Geodetic charts of the river and the harbor. Tacked to the left of it are a number of group photographs taken at shad bakes run by Harry. One photograph shows a group of fishmongers from Fulton Market lined up in two rows at a shad bake on the riverbank, and Mr. Hewitt himself is in the second row. The fishmongers are looking straight at the camera. Several are holding up glasses of beer. All have big smiles on their faces. Mr. Hewitt went over to this photograph and began to study it. Mr. Townsend and I sat down in chairs beside the stove. Harry opened the stove door and punched up the fire with a crowbar. Then he sat down.

“Oh, God, Harry,” said Mr. Hewitt after he had studied the photograph awhile, “it was only just a few short years ago this picture was made, and a shocking number of the fellows in it are dead already. Here’s poor Jimmy McBarron. Jimmy was only forty-five when he died, and he was getting along so well. He was president of Wallace, Keeney, Lynch, one of the biggest firms in the market, and he had an interest in a shrimp company in Florida. And here’s Mr. John Matthews, who was secretary-treasurer of Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham. He was a nice man. A little stiff and formal for the fish market. ‘How do you do, Mr. Hewitt?’ he used to say to me, when everybody else in the market called me Joe, even the lumpers on the piers. And here’s Matt Graham, who was one of the partners in the same firm. A nicer man never lived than Matt Graham. He went to work in the market when he was fifteen years of age, and all he ever knew was fish, and all he ever wanted to know was fish.”

“I used to ship to him,” said Harry. “I shipped to him when he was with Booth Fisheries, long before he went with Chesebro. I shipped him many a box of shad, and he always treated me fair and square.”

Mr. Hewitt continued to stare at the photograph.

“This one’s alive,” he said. “This one’s dead. This one’s alive. At least, I haven’t heard he’s dead. Here’s Drew Radel, who was president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company, planters and distributors of Robbins Island oysters. He died only last year. Sixty-five, the paper said. I had no idea he was that far along. I ran into him the summer before he died, and he looked around fifty. He’s one man I can honestly say I never heard a bad word spoken about him. Here’s a man who kept books for companies all over the market, the same as I did. He worked for Frank Wilkisson and Eastern Commission and George M. Still and Middleton, Carman and Lockwood & Winant and Caleb Haley and Lester & Toner and Blue Ribbon, and I don’t know how many others—a real old-fashioned floating bookkeeper. I ate lunch across from him at the front table in Sloppy Louie’s two or three times a week year in and year out, and now I can’t even think of his name. Eddie Something-or-Other. He’s still alive, last I heard. Retired. Lives in Florida. His wife had money; he never saved a cent. Grows grapefruit, somebody said. If I felt I had to grow something, by God, it wouldn’t be grapefruit. This man’s alive. So’s this man. Dead. Dead. Dead. Three in a row. Alive. Alive. Alive. Dead. Alive. And here’s a man, I won’t mention his name and I shouldn’t tell about this, but a couple of years ago, when I saw in the New York Times that he was dead, the thought flashed into my mind, ‘I do hope they bury him in Evergreen Cemetery.’”

He turned away from the photograph, and came over and sat down.

“And I’ll tell you the reason that particular thought flashed into my mind,” he said. “This fellow was the biggest woman chaser in the market, and one of the biggest talkers on the subject I ever heard. When he and I were young men in the market together, he used to tell me about certain of his experiences along that line out in Brooklyn, where he lived. Tell me—hell! he told everybody that would listen. At that time, Trommer’s Brewery was the finest brewery in Brooklyn. It was at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Conway Street, and out in front of it was a beer garden. The brewery maintained the beer garden, and it was a showplace. They had tables in the open, and a large restaurant indoors with at least a dozen big potted palms stood up in it. During the summer, they had a German orchestra that played waltz music. And directly across the street from the beer garden was the main gate of Evergreen Cemetery. After a burial, it was customary for the mourners to stop in Trommer’s beer garden and drown their sorrow in Trommer’s White Label and rejoice in the fact that it was the man or the woman they’d left out in the cemetery’s turn to go, and not theirs. On Sundays, people would take the streetcar out to the cemetery and visit the graves of relatives and friends, and then they’d go over to Trommer’s beer garden for sandwiches and beer. Now this fellow I’m talking about, he used to dress up on Sundays and go out to the cemetery and walk up and down the cemetery paths until he found some young widow out there by herself visiting her husband’s grave, and she didn’t have to be too damned young, and he’d go over and get acquainted with her and sympathize with her, and she’d cry and he’d cry, and then he’d invite her over to Trommer’s beer garden, and they’d sit there and have some beers and listen to the music and talk, and one thing would lead to another.”

Mr. Hewitt leaned over and opened the stove door and spat on the red-hot coals. “To hear him tell it,” he said, “he was hell on widows. He knew just what to say to them.”

“Did this gentleman ever get married himself?” asked Mr. Townsend. He sounded indignant.

“He was married twice,” said Mr. Hewitt. “A year or two before he died, he divorced his first wife and married a woman half his age.”

“I hope some man came up to her in the cemetery when she was visiting his grave and got acquainted with her and sympathized with her,” Mr. Townsend said, “and one thing led to another.”

Mr. Hewitt had lost interest in this turn of the conversation. “It’s highly unlikely she ever visited his grave,” he said.

Mr. Townsend shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, well,” he said. “In that case.”

Mr. Hewitt got up and went over and scrutinized the photograph again. “I look a lot older now than I did when this picture was made,” he said, “and there’s no denying that.” He continued to scrutinize the photograph for a few more minutes, and then returned to his chair.

“When I was young,” he said, “I had the idea death was for other people. It would happen to other people but not to me. That is, I couldn’t really visualize it happening to me. And if I did allow myself to think that it would happen to me, it was very easy to put the thought out of my mind—if it had to take place, it would take place so far in the distant future it wasn’t worth thinking about, let alone worrying about, and then the years flew by, and now it’s right on top of me. Any time now, as the fellow said, the train will pull into the station and the trip will be over.”

“Ah, well,” said Mr. Townsend.

“It seems to me it was only just a few short years ago I was a young man going back and forth to work,” said Mr. Hewitt, “and the years flew by, they really flew by, and now I’m an old man, and what I want to know is, what was the purpose of it? I know what’s going to take place one of these days, and I can visualize some of the details of it very clearly. There’ll be one twenty-five-dollar wreath, or floral design, or whatever they call them now, and there’ll be three or maybe four costing between twelve dollars and a half and fifteen dollars, and there’ll be maybe a dozen running from five to ten dollars, and I know more or less what the preacher will say, and then they’ll take me out to the Edgewater Cemetery and lay me beside my parents and my brothers and sisters and two of my grandparents and one of my great-grandparents, and I’ll lie there through all eternity while the Aluminum Company factory goes put-put-put.”

Harry laughed, “You make the Aluminum Company factory sound like a motorboat,” he said.

“I don’t go to funerals any more,” said Mr. Townsend. “Funerals breed funerals.”

“My grandfather used to like the word ‘mitigate,’” Harry said. “He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. ‘You can’t talk your way out,’ he’d say, ‘and you can’t buy your way out, and you can’t shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody—no, not one.’”

“I know, I know,” said Mr. Hewitt, “but what’s the purpose of it?”

“You supported your wife, didn’t you?” asked Harry. “You raised a family, didn’t you? That’s the purpose of it.”

“That’s no purpose,” said Mr. Hewitt. “The same thing that’s going to happen to me is going to happen to them.”

“The generations have to keep coming along,” said Harry. “That’s all I know.”

“You’re put here,” said Mr. Hewitt, “and you’re allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit down and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there’s no purpose to it whatsoever. I try to keep from thinking such thoughts, but the last few years almost everything I see reminds me of death and dying, and time passing, and how fast it passes. I drove through Shadyside the other day, and I noticed that some of those factories down there are getting real smoky-looking and patched up and dilapidated, and the thought immediately occured to me, ‘I’m older than most of those factories. I remember most of them when they were brand-new, and, good God, look at them now.’ And to tell the truth, I’m pretty well patched up myself. I’ve maybe not had as many operations as some people, but I’ve had my share. Tonsils, adenoids, appendix, gall bladder, prostate. I wear false teeth, and I’ve worn them for years—‘your dentures,’ my dentist calls them; ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to him, ‘I know what they are, and you know what they are.’ And the last time I went to the eye doctor he prescribed two pairs of glasses, one for ordinary use and one for reading, and I can’t really see worth a damn out of either one of them. I’ve got varicose veins from walking around on wet cement floors in Fulton Market all those years, and I have to wear elastic stockings that are hell to get on and hell to get off and don’t do a damned bit of good, and I’ve got fallen arches and I have to wear some kind of patented arch supports that always make me feel as if I’m about to jump, and I’ve never known the time I didn’t have corns—corns and bunions and calluses.”

“Oh, come on, Joe,” said Harry. “Don’t you ever get tired talking about yourself?”

A shocked look appeared on Mr. Hewitt’s face. “I wasn’t talking about myself, Harry,” he said, and his voice sounded surprised and hurt. “I was talking about the purpose of life.”

Harry started to say something, and then got up and went out to the galley. It had become too warm, and I went over and opened the window. I put my head out of the window and listened for a few moments to the lapping of the water against the side of the barge. Two of Harry’s shad boats moored to stakes in the flats were slowly shifting their positions, and I could see that the tide was beginning to change. I heard the click of the refrigerator door in the galley, and then Harry returned to the bunkroom, bringing four cans of beer. He paused for a moment in front of Mr. Hewitt. “I’m sorry I said that, Joe,” he said. “I was just trying to get your mind on something else.” Then he stood the cans on the bunkroom table and started opening them. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the purpose of life is to stay alive and to keep on staying alive as long as you possibly can.”

(1959)