The harbormaster’s boat cut a slender wake as it moved away from the docks and out into Casco Bay off the coast of Portland, Maine. The two of us had boarded along with Charlie, a 68-year-old deputy harbormaster, only moments before. We threw on life jackets and with the engine purring took off to patrol the bay.
Out on the water, we crawled past the docks. Not long ago, these piers teemed with fishing boats. Now they were largely empty—save for a Royal Caribbean ocean liner the size of a few city blocks. It towered above the water like an imperial man-of-war. Tourists bustled up and down Commercial Street in the Old Port as we pulled out into open water.
Charlie lazily steered the boat. Jordan stood at Charlie’s side and Chris balanced behind, one hand on the pilothouse roof. It was a stagnant day that languished with dry heat from shore. On the water, though, a breeze lifted off the Atlantic and cut through the riggings and across the bow. As we went, we slipped in and out of fishing grounds, lobster buoys, pleasure-boat wakes, listing sailboats, and the wharves that dot the hundreds of miles of craggy shoreline of the Calendar Islands in southern Maine.
As we left the harbor’s mouth, a wood-sided motorboat steamed by at a fast clip. Charlie, from behind dark sunglasses, waved his arm. Slow, his gesture said, and the painted colors on the harbormaster’s hull prompted a slight downshift in the offending craft.
“We’re not law enforcement,” Charlie said. “If they don’t want to listen to me, then I’ll call the Coast Guard.”
Some boats yielded to his authority. Others simply ignored us.
“Cop on the sea?” Captain Kevin Battle, the harbormaster, had said to us onshore before we boarded Charlie’s ship.
“We’re more like mall security,” he joked.
We had come to the harbormaster in hopes of exploring Maine’s storied lobstering industry. Chris had just taken a class on property law and had read about the industry in a famous book, The Lobster Gangs of Maine by James M. Acheson. Lobstering was an ancient profession. Native Americans used lobster for bait and fertilizer for centuries. Englishmen in Popham Colony fished the crustaceans out of the shallows as early as 1607. Once canning began in the 1840s, lobster reached markets more distant than Boston and New York. But this also led to a precipitous decline as “snappers”—small, still-growing lobsters—were caught and sold at market. Laws followed, including one prohibiting the snaring of pregnant females, and the population stabilized.
In response to this volatility, and through time, lobstermen—the term applies not just to men but women as well—formed social groups and mores to regulate themselves. They formed harbor gangs and developed their own ways of drawing territories and resolving disputes. Old forms of vigilante justice were doled out to offenders of these codes, and lobstermen found a way to get along and make money despite their competing economic interests.
But this equilibrium was often challenged.
Lobstering had just taken a direct blow from a new tariff regime imposed not long before we arrived in Portland. That summer, President Trump had touched off a trade war with China. In June, the United States levied a slew of tariffs on more than $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, including 6,000 items ranging from nuclear reactors to chicken incubators. China responded by slapping a 25 percent customs fee on American-made products, including Maine lobsters. Prices cratered as the burgeoning Chinese market turned toward Canada and other providers to sate its appetite.
All this and we couldn’t find a single lobsterman.
“Good luck,” Captain Battle had said from behind his desk. “They won’t talk to you. They just won’t trust you.”
So we had cajoled him into sending us out on the water with Charlie instead. We had met Charlie on a wharf strewn with the chalky shells of oysters and clams, cracked into jagged pieces by the intruding beaks of harbor gulls. Charlie was a quiet man—a New England Protestant. He shook our hands and introduced himself politely as we jumped the gunwale and came aboard.
“Who’s the first mate?” Jordan asked.
A small, panting dog in a life vest snaked in and out of the gear on the deck.
“I call him Dog,” Charlie said dryly. “It works for him.”
As we motored out toward the Calendar Islands, Dog scampered about the small craft—up and over buoys and coiled lines—often pacing his favorite lookout at the crest of the bow.
“Hey,” Charlie yelled out as the wake of a Windermere sailboat came at us. Dog leaped down off the bow, then scurried along the gunwale and onto Charlie’s foam seat in the pilothouse.
“The lobster boats slow down,” he said, gesturing at Dog, who had returned to a balanced crouch on the bow. “They don’t wanna dunk the dog.”
Charlie seemed as skeptical of our purpose as Captain Battle had. “Did you ever see Route 66?” he asked after we mentioned our search. In an episode of the 1960s television show, Charlie said, two men went out on a lobster boat and came back with one of them bleeding and sprawled over the side of the vessel—the victim of some quarrel out on the water.
From afar, the lobster industry appeared to share some of its heritage with bootlegging and other backwoods enterprises. Blood feuds rivaling that of the Hatfields and McCoys broke out over grounds, permits, and slights real or imagined.
But violence was far from our minds that afternoon on Casco Bay. Sailboats rocked over gentle white crests of tidewater, and rolling green-golden hills hugged the bay tightly.
“Hold on, Dog,” Charlie said as we plowed through another wake—our nose pointed back to harbor.
* * *
A few days before arriving in Maine, the two of us had driven from upstate New York to Vermont, where a friend of Chris’s let us stay. The house was down a dirt road cut out of a leafy forest outside Peru. A wide pond gurgled behind the house. The curve of the misty Green Mountains stretched for miles just over a rise in the road no more than a couple of hundred yards beyond.
None of this registered upon our arrival. Chris simply pointed Jordan to his bedroom, then the two of us closed the doors to our respective rooms and did not emerge until well past sundown.
Not for another month or two did Chris identify what was weighing on him: Detroit had left him grieving. He woke in the morning exhausted. His outlook on life dimmed. Other mornings he would wake up rejuvenated, only to find his energy sapped moments into the day. There was a responsibility to what we had experienced. We had been entrusted with life stories—tragedies, mainly, with moments of small, incomplete redemptions—and that weight sat heavy on Chris.
Jordan also felt drained. For him, these trips had always been an opportunity to see the best of our country. Detroit revealed a more dismal side, one that he had always known was there but had never experienced. In the stories of the people we had met, he saw the distance between principles and practice in American life, and that gap was a challenge. America, he felt, was built on second chances. But too many of the people we had met in Detroit hadn’t been given one.
A few days after leaving, Frannie had sent us a poem Gabriel wanted to share with us. It was titled “My State Blues,” and he had scribbled on the side, “To Frannie, here’s something to remind you of the people you give hope to.”
“Lost my mind in far-off reverie,” he wrote. “It now resides in a place where wild things grow…anchored to reality by headstones, row after row…”
It was written in rhyme.
“Focused on that elusive place ‘home’ that I claimed to once know…in My State Blues. Oblivious to common sense, facts…What gets us sent back? It’s insanity, things done time and time again expecting that to warrant a change of events.
“Walking out on family and friends just to be caged-in, again and again.”
We carried that weight to Portland. It made Chris crabby, and left a noticeable pall over Jordan as well. We had become a monosyllabic pair, save for the few times one of us mustered the energy to remind the other that our spells of silence were nothing personal. We were tangling with something larger, something fearful and nameless that careened around each of our thoughts and left us unsure what to do except to turn it over in our heads while we drove, mile after mile.
Captain Battle’s pessimism didn’t help things. Exhaustion had set in, and the thought that we might never find a lobsterman was deflating. Jordan still sent out emails—even turning to LinkedIn to search “lobster” and “Portland ME.” He typed away even as we disembarked from Charlie’s patrol boat that afternoon and returned to the muggy heat of the Portland waterfront.
Frustrated in our search and stained pink and red by the sun, we dawdled in the parking lot of a local bank off Commercial Street. The murmurs of the Old Port wafted above the hum of the straining air-conditioner, but none of it was loud enough to drown out our own internal dialogues. We hunched over a late lunch—lobster rolls and fries from a local shack on the water.
“I’m not sure I like lobster,” Chris said.
“It’s not for everyone,” Jordan responded.
* * *
Come morning, we found the piers along Commercial Street adorned with the dried tails of fish snagged long ago. The sun had tanned them gray. The alleys were wet with offal and the spray of leaking hoses. Men in waders, dragging vats of ice, slipped in and out of clapboard doors and into dark rooms where tubs of water churned. It was our second day in Portland, and we were still looking for a lobsterman. But that day we were looking for one in particular—a man named Willis Spear.
The night before, Jordan had finally heard back from one of the lobstermen he had contacted.
“I called a couple of friends who are lifelong lobstermen,” the man had written. “One of them said he would be willing to talk with you.”
Jordan called the number, and a voice on the other end told us to meet him at the docks around 10 a.m.
Willis, a resident of nearby Yarmouth, had a reputation on the docks. He was something of an activist. When the city council proposed easing zoning laws so that pleasure yachts could moor where lobster schooners had tied off for decades, he took to the water, according to local news sources. Calling other boats over his VHF radio, he carried a petition across the bay on his own 35-foot rig, collecting nearly 70 signatures to halt the change. The new zoning ordinance would have made the moorings prohibitively expensive. As far as Willis was concerned, it threatened lobstering as a way of life.
It was the first salvo in what seemed like a battle for the future of the waterfront. Custom House Wharf, where more than $150 million in seafood was hauled ashore each year, was up for redevelopment. Real estate firms had proposed condominiums, hotels, and parking garages. The lobstermen feared they would be pushed out of their berths—and for good reason. They were already losing wages because tourism traffic was blocking their perishable shipments from getting to market. Worst of all, their voices were being ignored.
Jordan showed Chris a photo of Willis from a news article. He stood next to a sign about ensuring fishermen had access to parking along the wharf. He had broad shoulders, a thatch of wild white hair, thin glasses, and long, ill-fitting jeans. This was our man—if we could find him.
We stopped first at the Porthole, a local bar along the wharf, and found a waitress with blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“Pretty sure Willis was just here,” she said. But he was out on the water now. We were too late.
The waitress directed us to the working side of the dock, and we made our way over. The restaurant side boasted live music every night and smelled of Clorox and other cleaning fluids; this side stank of fish guts. Metal parts lay rusted and warped with salt and sun and time. A woman in an apron threw fish heads to cackling gulls. Lobster traps tangled with vascular rope lines were stacked along the docks below the piers. This was the famous working waterfront. The lobsterman’s narrow domain.
We walked up and down the dock in search of Willis’s boat, the Providence, and found it along a placid stretch of wharf near the mouth of the channel.
“Guess we’re not too late,” Jordan said, but Willis was nowhere to be found.
At a loss, Jordan turned to two men in knee-high boots—one young and one old—huddled over something he couldn’t make out. They had been eyeing the two of us as we pointed at the Providence and stood, puzzled, beside the dock’s splintered pylons. As Jordan approached, he found the younger of the two rolling a cigarette.
“Willis?” the older man said. “I heard he was in the hospital.”
“But we spoke to him this morning.”
“Oh,” the man said, watching the other pinch the cigarette and lick its length. “Well, that’s good news. You might try the Porthole, then—see if he’s having a pint.”
Things felt dire again.
“It’s only 10:30 in the morning,” Chris said to Jordan as we surveyed pink salmon flanks, gray shrimp, and purple tuna at the Harbor Fish Market. “And already we’ve heard this guy might be dying—or tying one on.”
We returned to the Porthole and sat at the brass bar. Leon Bridges played on the stereo. Gulls yapped wildly from roof spines. The Old Port looked like a Colonial relic, all narrow alleyways and tightly packed buildings. Indeed, Portland had been burned down and reborn over and over again throughout its 400-year history. Each turn added a layer of worn history to the cobblestone paths winding along the harbor.
After loafing by the bar for a few minutes, we tried the Providence again—and there stood Captain Spear.
* * *
“Come on board,” Willis said, and the two of us climbed a yellow ladder down to the deck below. Willis, 67, was an imposing man with a jutting jaw and a thick chest. His face was wrinkled, his lips chapped. He kept a worn hat snug to his ears. Willis was a workingman, and he carried himself tall.
After brief introductions, Willis confessed this was a workday for him—he couldn’t stop for us. He had bait to fetch and repairs to make. But he agreed to bring us along for an hour or so.
With Willis at the helm, the Providence motored down the dock to where an ancient man in an oiler waited with black plastic boxes of rotting haddock and herring, gray sole, scrod, and other groundfish.
“Now I don’t want you touching this stuff,” Willis said to us with fatherly care. “Once you touch it, you can’t get it off you.” The man in the oiler nodded.
Willis, grunting, took aboard one heavy crate of fish after another. Each sloshed with rank liquid as he bent under the weight. Like Charlie, Willis was a soft-spoken, humble man. He tried to wave away a check the bait man offered, accepting it only after the man quietly insisted with adamant, excited words.
We pulled back up to the dock, lashed the Providence to a berth, and chatted under the eve of the pilothouse. Willis was intent on installing a cleat on the side of the boat. A stabilizer sail flapped in the wind while he examined the hull and planned his repairs. We pleaded with him to let us help, but he refused. Within minutes, he was drenched in sweat. His joints flexed deliberately with age and use.
Slowly, Willis let us pitch in. We could move a crate of fish here, then stack another atop that one there—snugly, of course. Before long we were bent over, helping to measure and mark for Willis’s drill. We spent the rest of the day outfitting the ship. There were lobster boxes to lug aboard and stack tall. The bait needed to be shifted up-deck. We toiled away at all the small labors required to make the Providence sea-ready.
“First day back in a while,” Willis said, sitting up, sweat on his cheeks. As he recovered, he tapped at his chest. Heart attack two weeks ago, he explained.
“It was a warning. I’m glad I listened.”
After a stent was put in his chest, he had been laid up in his family cottage on Long Island in Casco Bay for the past four days.
“Should you be working?” Chris asked.
“Oh yeah—I’m fine.”
And with that, he mustered a deep reserve of energy for the final fastening of the cleat to the fiberglass hull of the Providence. Willis got up, painfully, and tied off the sail.
“Where you from?” he asked us. He twisted the line up and over the pegs of the cleat, grimacing with the effort.
“Los Angeles,” Jordan said.
“I’m from the Bay Area,” Chris added. “Berkeley.”
“Berkeley, huh?” Willis said. “My pop was born in Stockton. Grandparents worked for Del Monte Food farther south around the Depression.”
“Yeah, not that far.”
“You know that author—what’s his name—Steinbeck?”
“John Steinbeck.”
“Yeah, that’s him. I love Cannery Row. You know it? What’s that bay down there?”
“Monterey.”
“Monterey, that’s right.”
Willis uncoiled himself and stood at his full height.
“You know my favorite line? What is it? From Cannery Row.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose to wipe his eyes and consider it.
“A troubled glass of misunderstood virtue,” he said. “I love that line. It about describes my life.”
* * *
His work complete and the sun setting below its meridian, Willis had turned to us. “So,” he had said, any hint of distrust long since evaporated into the heat of the harbor, “what do you want to know?”
Willis was a fisherman, and fishermen are dock people. They tie up at the wharf, mend traps, drink liquor and watery beer, avoid their spouses, and kvetch about the small tragedies of a working way of life. The docks are their domain. A fiefdom for pilots and captains and deckhands alike. Although, in Portland those days, there was often another presence: the tourists.
“They’re so desperate to see the real America,” Willis said. “I mean we’re running out of it. That’s what they’re looking for.”
He told us about the tragedy unfolding on the docks in Portland, as he saw it. Each year, tourists flooded into the city to experience the vibrancy of an endangered working waterfront. “I mean I’m not bad with tourists,” Willis explained. “I can live with them, but there are times when I can’t get to my boat. The wharf is full of cars—four or five deep—and they don’t give a shit. They might be in the Porthole restaurant, having a burger and a glass of wine. I’ll go in there and say, ‘Look, I gotta get out on the water.’ And it’s like talking to the dog, you know? So then I’ll say, ‘I’m gonna tow.’ And then I get their attention that way.
“Everybody wants to be here,” he continued. “Because this is the last of the Wild West. You guys are down here with the last of the cowboys, or whatever.”
Willis had already reminded us a bit of Pete Mylen, the trucker who ferried us from Las Vegas to Louisiana. They both had solidity and wisdom after decades of labor in hard professions. And they had used the same phrase—the last of the cowboys—nearly word for word. Pete and Willis were lenses into the worlds of the men and women who laid the foundations for the present, good and bad. They were a reminder of something about our past, and perhaps a harbinger of our future too.
“You feel like you’re a monkey in a cage,” Willis said, his words snapping. “And the tourists, they just stare at you and they’ll literally tear the boards off these buildings to get a look.”
He shook his head. A pang of guilt washed over us. Were we so different from the vulturine tourists? We too had wanted to experience the lobster industry. We had hustled our way into it, calling and pestering a number of people until we found Willis.
“Are the waterfronts being sold?”
“It’s been discovered. Like all waterfronts in America,” Willis said. “This place right here, right now as we speak, is one of the most sought-after places in America.”
Waterfronts were becoming the battleground for competing forces: traditional industries and ways of life on one hand, development and tourist demand on the other. And with each passing day, that conflict felt more existential for the less-monied fishermen and trappers of the docks.
“The city is kind of giving away the crown jewels,” Willis said. “The history of it and how important it is for the next generation and for people…” His voice trailed off. “The heritage,” Willis said. “It’s the heritage that’s being taken away.”
* * *
“It’s good of you to stick around to lend a hand,” Willis had said to us earlier in the day. We had long ago finished the repairs on the Providence. “Most of the time people will come down and talk and then—”
He gestured out with his arms like waves disappearing over a far-off horizon.
“I think you’ve earned a trip around the bay,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you with me to Long Island.”
We may not have been able to go out fishing for lobsters, but at least we were getting to sail across the bay with a lobsterman. We helped Willis stow his tools, and with everything set we untied the moorings holding the Providence fast and set a course out into the harbor. Willis stood at the helm and the two of us leaned against the wooden lobster tank beside him.
Along the way, Willis began to call out different landmarks on the coastline. He pointed to a gun emplacement on a large hill overlooking the bay. It was a cannon from the U.S.S. Maine, the famous ship whose sinking launched the Spanish-American War in 1898.
“And that over there is Willard Beach,” he pointed. “That’s where I took my wife on our first date.”
It was also where Willis’s father taught him to mend a line and bait a trap. He had grown up on Casco Bay, and as a boy he had learned all about its shores. Willard Beach was where they would spend nights and dry fish. But now the beach was peppered with million-dollar homes, he explained.
“When I was a boy, I learned from these guys on Long Island,” Willis said. “The same island that my wife’s got this little house on. They taught me how to fish. I would row and haul traps in a small wooden rowboat when I was 12 or 13. I just loved it. And as I got older I got a boat with an outboard motor. I’d lobster with guys during the day. We’d get in at dinnertime. I wouldn’t go home to eat. I’d go out in my little boat and haul like 25 more traps or something. Just loved it.”
Back then, the Maine fisheries were plentiful. “If you read anything about the history, the reason this place was settled is because of the fish. And all the early explorers, from like the very early 1600s, said they never saw anything like it. The quantity and quality of the fish that were just out here. And we got a chance to see the tail end of it, before they just disappeared. I started fishing in ’76, and by ’86 they were gone. Within 10 years they were all gone.”
Willis and his fellow fishermen had been pulling too many fish out of the water. Getting rich off the ancient fisheries, they thought little about what was to come. Willis saw it happening and sounded the alarm. He tried to tell people what would happen if they kept taking small fish and pregnant fish and even adults without temperance, but no one seemed to listen. He joined councils and commissions, and even became president of the Fishermen Co-op, but no one would take heed.
“I still fished because everybody else did,” Willis said. “But I’d go to meetings and I’d say, ‘Hey, we ought to stop.’ I got laughed out of the room.”
In the early 1980s, fishermen across New England hauled 100 million pounds of fish out of the water each year. By 2016, that number was a meager 3.2 million. With the cod fisheries collapsing, Willis swallowed his pride and began shrimping in the winter and lobstering when the weather changed. The money wasn’t as good, but he loved it. In the meantime, his children were getting bigger and becoming men in their own right. A few of them were attracted to the same industry as their father.
He tried to persuade the government and the fishing industry to close down certain areas for a while so the fish could spawn, or to try a new method of fishing instead of towing nets.
“I was trying to do something for the next generation,” he said. “Not for me, just for the next generation.”
The federal government eventually imposed quotas, and fishermen became versed in the language of conservation, but their Damascus road moment may have come too late. Northeast cod fishing in 2018 was the least valuable in half a century. And some experts project lobster populations will plummet by another 40 to 60 percent in the next 30 years.
Willis didn’t believe such dire predictions, however. There are stirrings of life in the old fisheries. The quota for 2018 was bumped up ever so slightly, and Willis has heard tell of massive schools of fish, ripe with eggs.
“It was a hoot,” Willis said. “Never thought I’d see them again in my lifetime.”
* * *
Around sundown, we pulled into a quiet harbor on Long Island, where several boats rocked in their berths to the rhythms of the soft tide. Rusting lobster traps lined the shore, and the white wooden planks of the dock creaked under our feet as we made our way to land.
“Come on,” Willis said. “I’ll give you a tour of the island.”
It was a 15-minute walk to Willis’s house on the opposite shore. We cut across a junkyard filled with old maritime equipment, making our way onto a road that wound up and away from the bay.
Willis’s house was a warm, wood-sided home with a chimney running through the center. His wife, Christine, greeted us with a gruff hello. There was suspicion in her tone, and she put us to work immediately, moving two-by-fours into their basement.
Time passed, and Willis and Christine invited us to have dinner with them. We ate pizza and salad with olives and grilled chicken with a few beers and a bottle of pinot noir that Jordan had brought.
The two of them spoke charmingly about their early years together—Christine’s life as a fisherman’s daughter and now as a fisherman’s wife, and the years when the sea provided a small fortune. But their life together had not been without its own dramas. Willis had a boat and a slip, and so did his sons. But they also once owned large shares of entire wharfs and shipped fish and lobster all over the East Coast. There were ebbs and flows to the Spear family’s fortunes. The ocean could be fickle, and so could fate. Fourteen years ago, Willis and Christine lost one of their sons to cancer on Christmas Eve.
“I had four sons,” Willis had said on the ride over. “Now,” his voice trailing off as he held up three fingers.
After dinner, Willis took us on a tour of the island, telling us sagas of money, betrayal, and marriages somehow constantly on the rocks. He carried with him generations of stories, and he told them as if that history were a part of him and ever-present. They were elements of his identity and his sense of place in the world. Earlier that morning, Willis had told us a story about his ancestor, one of the first settlers in Maine, and how he had nearly died in the 1600s on an expedition near the Finger Lakes. Various other Spears littered the history of Maine. Willis carried their memories, which connected him to his past and thrust him into the future through all the generations of Spears to come. Like the needle on a compass, these stories coalesced to give him a true north—one tethered to the rocky coastline and the shifting waters that carved it.
Eventually, Willis drove us to the port to await the 7 p.m. ferry back to Portland. He parked his truck and we watched the sun set over the water. The sky was painted pink and red and orange as a cold wind passed through the windows of Willis’s pickup. A distant peak shimmered on the far-off horizon like an earthen jewel.
On the ferry back to shore, the two of us started to open up again. The tension of Detroit was easing. The evening had also given us a deeper understanding of the precariousness of Willis’s life. He and Christine were getting by, but their financial situation was touch-and-go. Christine went back to work as a nurse to help pay their bills. Willis’s fortunes were tied to his daily hauls, which seemed to bring in less and less each year, and were now imperiled by his heart attack. It was a lot for one family to bear.
Yet Willis projected comfort, even safety—a kind of rootedness. Perhaps it came from his sense of history and his place in it. His stories were of a particular heritage, one handed down from generation to generation and embedded in his memory and identity. Even through struggle, they allowed him to make sense of the world.
* * *
The morning was purple over Casco Bay, and the docks were cast in gray. They reminded us of the wharfs off San Francisco, where crabs are hauled in by the thousands and sea lions bark their displeasure at passersby. When we arrived, the Providence’s engine was already purring as the mirage of the sunrise spread across a low bank of white clouds. Gulls cawed overhead—a pelagic symphony above the docks of New England.
“Don’t get on until we lay bait, okay?” Willis said to us as we approached, laden with coffee and sunscreen. He and his sternman, Tim, were already hard at work.
The night before, as we awaited the ferry, Chris had delicately asked if we could join Willis for the lobster hunt the next day.
“Well,” Willis equivocated.
“We’d bring coffee,” Chris said.
“And we’d stay out of your way,” Jordan added.
“You’d have to be there real early.”
“What time?”
“Five-thirty.”
“We’d be there at five,” Chris said.
Willis watched the surf as the ferry churned toward the dock, alight with deck lamps.
“I take mine with two sugars,” Willis relented. “And Tim does a triple-triple.”
So we were back—back on the dock, cupping coffee, under the flinty morning light on a day begun before the sun heralded its start.
“We might spill some bait and wash it off,” Willis continued. “And you can get fish poisoning if you get it in a cut. It can go septic.” A thick hose was put upon the stack of flesh, and Tim started picking through the bait. He tossed fish one by one with a finger in one of their gills. The soiled water leaked about the boat.
“Thought this was going to stink a lot worse, Captain,” Tim said as Willis slipped on white gloves and joined Tim in picking through the vat of rot. Box after box of fish went into a large plastic vat that sat at the center of the deck like some gory altar. They sprayed and picked through each group, looking over the decomposition, seeking the ripest for the lobster below.
“The lobster where we’re going don’t like cod,” Willis said. “The rest is herring.” And lobster did enjoy herring, we learned.
The sorting complete, it was time to hose down the deck. Tim, a volunteer firefighter on Long Island, wielded the hose deftly.
“Come aboard,” Willis said at last. “You’re safe now.”
Tim set about preparing the bait by spearing the fish and slipping them into mesh bags, while Willis assumed his position behind the steering wheel.
As we motored out to the islands, Willis regaled the two of us with stories of ocean gold. How the English once dried fish with a pinch of salt on island beaches and hauled them to Boston for market. How the sardines in Canada made millionaires of their mongers when the region was finally connected to New York City. How the English and French killed each other over herring in battle after battle.
Tim smoked a cigarette as he worked. The two of them had laid the traps two weeks ago, before Willis’s heart had stopped. Traps are typically pulled back up after three to five days; any longer than that and the lobsters can slip away to freedom. There was no telling how many crustaceans were left. Willis’s mortgage, his license, his bait and repair costs, and Tim’s paycheck all depended on whether the lobsters had settled into the traps or had found their way out. Tim, puffing away, stole a moment of serenity as the sun rose and we charged into the bay.
The first buoy—which signaled a line of eight traps below—was hauled aboard with gusto. Willis steamed up to it and hooked the schooner around, flicking out a boat hook and looping the line into a winch. The engine roared and the line began to coil, helped along by the gentle touch of Willis’s gloved hand. Seawater spun off it, and then the first cage came up out of the depths. Tim hauled up a dozen boxes, one at a time. They were teeming with lobsters.
Tim and Willis picked through each box, inspecting the lobsters for size and eggs. The smaller ones were tossed back unceremoniously and the acceptable ones were put in a box on deck where they thrashed once or twice, scooting backward like squid or gnashing their claws before settling into a stupor. The ones Tim didn’t have time to weigh went into a bucket. Occasionally it would tip over, sending a few of the animals scurrying for cover. The red accents on their armor shimmered in the sun as they skittered across the white deck.
Willis picked one up and turned it over. He touched its tail a few times and pressed about its belly. “Eggs,” he mumbled. Then he pulled out what looked like a set of pliers and snipped a V out of its tail. “It’s a legal-size female,” he said, showing it to Chris, who perched behind him in the pilothouse. A V had been cut into her already, but it was small—only a close look revealed it.
“She can breed again,” he said, touching the now-undeniable notch of missing chitin. “This V means no one can take her.”
Any lobster schooner found with her in its hold would be cited, or maybe even worse. Willis tossed her off the boat and she hit the water with a splash.
“It helps perpetuate the species,” Willis said.
There is a contradiction at the heart of the hunter’s profession. Willis and lobstermen like him depend on taking great sums of life out of the ocean. Fortunes are made on the size and weight of that haul. The best take in the most. But each boat’s future depends on doing so responsibly. Lobstermen relied on building a resilience into their culture that kept that life ongoing. Quotas and state inspections do only so much. Willis hadn’t been boarded in years. So people like him relied on nothing more than the power of their culture—the power of their example, and the pride and shame of generations before and since hanging over each boat—to keep pregnant female lobsters in the depths.
Jordan stood near Tim, watching him prep the freshly pulled traps with new bait and tying them on the back of the boat, to be laid down below once again.
“How was this for a haul?” Jordan asked, pointing at the tub of lobster. “Is this considered good?”
“Decent,” Tim muttered as we motored away. He tapped out a cigarette. Twelve or so lobster were splayed atop one another in the holding tank.
We spent the morning hauling. Up came the cages and Willis and Tim would sort through their contents, throwing crabs, undersize lobsters, and claylike mud back overboard. Tim replenished each cage with fetid fish as they went through their routine. After the last cage was pulled and Tim sweetened the trap again, Willis gave the signal and Tim pushed over the first cage. They dropped like cargo out of a plane, the line between each cage writhing like a living creature as the boxes descended.
As the line whipped overboard, Tim and Willis kept their distance. As if animated by some man-made hand of the deep, when these lines spring to life they become one of the deadliest elements of a lobsterman’s life. Many lobstermen have reported losing an item of clothing, getting bludgeoned against the stern by a kink in the line, or losing a crew member overboard to a biting rope. The two of us treated them like deadly snares, warily plastering ourselves against the gunwales and pilothouse as they thrashed.
As the day wore on, Willis pawed through the lobsters in the holding tank, inspecting them as they crawled over one another. “Lobsters are like rattlesnakes,” Willis said. “They’re hardwired. They don’t feel. They’re not nice to you or each other. They like eating their neighbors’ brain and claws. They’re primitive.”
Chris didn’t know whether to believe him, but as he stared down into the water at the growing mass of arthropods, they looked unthinking. Or maybe they looked defeated, unsure of the walls and limits of their captivity.
The day turned out to be a slow haul. Some cages came up empty. Others had a handful of lobsters. “I’m just grateful for what we’re getting,” Willis confessed.
As we motored farther away from land, Willis stretched a finger out over the blue expanse of water. “It’s like the Appalachians out there—peaks and valleys. You never know where the lobsters will be, or why they move.” Willis reached for a waterproof notebook. He crossed out a crate number and put his pencil on a long string of digits—coordinates. And soon we were off toward another string.
As the sun reached its meridian, Tim and Jordan were talking on deck. Chris, however, was somewhat worse for wear. The scent of the fish had turned his stomach.
“How many more?” Chris asked.
“We have 800 out there,” Tim said, “but I don’t know how many he’s going to pull. He’s only supposed to pull 100 with his heart.”
“Scary.”
“Especially out there.” Tim pointed to the open ocean. “People will come to help you out, but for an emergency like that?”
“Four more strings,” Willis yelled back. “Bait them a little heavy.”
“Yes, Captain,” Tim said.
We spun around and Willis frowned as we rocked in our own wake and the winch dragged up the first cage. “Tide’s really ripping here.”
Willis developed a slight overbite of a smile as he reeled in the traps. He and Tim worked the line masterfully, pulling traps, discarding the insides, rebaiting them, and pushing them back into place for release. Chris had decamped to the pilothouse to avoid the smell of the baitfish. From that vantage, he considered Willis’s figure. With one hand on the helm and his jaw clenched at a slight angle, his other hand shot out and hooked the line. Then, with the slap of a lever, Willis set the winch sputtering to life. It was a striking image of a man at work. Each of his movements was timed, measured, and calibrated to the demands of the task, performed in one way or another for close to five centuries. This was as much an art as an act of commerce. Tim slapped open another cage, cigarette hanging from his lip, baited the box, and guided it down the gunwale with remarkable dexterity.
“It’s like reading a month-old newspaper,” Willis said, scanning his notebook. “Too much time has happened since we laid them. It’s hard to know whether there’s more to come.”
* * *
“I think we did okay,” Willis said as he inspected the tank, which roiled with pumped water. Through the ripples, the dark carapaces of the lobsters blended into one mass of brown freckled shells and bent arachnid-like legs. All told we pulled 22 lines that day holding about 180 traps, then laid those same traps back in the water heavy with fresh bait. Willis and Tim would pick them up again in four days or so, inspecting the slopes and valleys of the underwater mountain ranges for their next bounty.
As we approached land, a wave of relief washed over us. We couldn’t imagine how exhausted Tim and Willis must have felt. But they seemed unfazed—even a little disappointed.
“We kept it short today,” Willis said. “I need to ease back into it after the heart attack.”
Back at the dock, Willis and Tim hunched over the tub of lobsters and packed them up individually, slipping bands on their claws to keep them from wriggling away or nabbing a finger. They expertly plucked them from the tub by their tails, keeping their fingers out of reach of the pincers. Each lobster flailed at an obscene angle before being plunged back into a crate and out of the sun once more. Their instinct to wriggle, to push backward like squid, was long gone.
Willis and Tim worked in silence, counting and tagging their haul. Above them on the wharf, fishmongers stood ready to drag each crate up and into the frozen air of the refrigerator behind them. The men amused themselves by throwing fish heads and watching the gulls fight over them like hyenas as they awaited Willis’s bounty.
Four crates of lobster—the reason for our entire day—were wheeled into a darkened chamber behind the men. We waited for the final count in the sun. Willis stood on the deck, chest heaving, hat pulled low over his brow. His forearms glistened with sweat. He bobbed up and down with the gentle swells of the harbor as Tim sprayed the deck behind him.
The scene recalled a passage out of Acheson’s Lobster Gangs. These men and women were self-made sailors without masters, but they relied upon one another. Like any commons, there was a community at stake each time one of them motored out to the fishing grounds or laid a net or a trap. “There is some truth in these stereotypes,” Acheson wrote of the cowboy mythology around these men and women. “A man who cannot operate a boat and handle his fishing gear alone at sea does not last long in the business.
“Yet on the whole, such stereotypes are misleading,” Acheson continued. “They obscure the fact that the lobster fisherman is caught up in a thick and complex web of social relationships. Survival in the industry depends as much on the ability to manipulate social relationships as on technical skills.”
We had found it went further than this. It’s not just social manipulation—a term only a law professor could love—but the sewing and mending of social fabric. Willis tended to his community. He wasn’t a cowboy. He was an elder. A keeper of oral history and tradition. A watchman over the fisheries and an essential part of this wild system of fishing on the North Atlantic. He did not manipulate social relationships; he helped define them, nurture them, and sustain them.
“Hey,” one of the fishmongers with tennis shoes and a backward hat said to us. “You’ve found the hardest-working man on the docks.”
* * *
We spent the next two nights in Rockport, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Gloucester. Gloucester, like Portland, is famed for its fishing industry and was immortalized in Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. But Rockport, just a five-minute drive up the coast, felt more like a getaway for the Kennedys and Winthrops and other American brahmins—more refined than any stretch of coast we saw in Maine.
We were nearly done with a five-week road trip, and the warm relief of being shore-bound and free from the stench of the baitfish loosened us up. We had started to come back to life at a fish shack called Susan’s in Deering Junction, past the back cove of Portland. We had shambled into the airy restaurant stinking of fish and sweat. Two live lobsters in a plastic bag hung from Chris’s arm, and we asked if they would cook them up. The waitress was happy to oblige, and we sprawled out over a plastic table to wait stoically for our food. Chris’s stomach was sour, but he’d be damned before he’d give up his loot.
The lobsters arrived orange and set in fatty liquid. We cracked away—scalding our fingers pink on their steaming husks—and ate until our shirts and hands oozed with water and guts. The two of us slurped the claw meat and licked at what spilled. It was buttery and flavorful on its own—the fruit of the sea delivered within hours of being pulled from her depths. Chris had sworn off fish at one point while riding the swells of Casco Bay. That lobster changed his mind.
As we drove through Gloucester that night, we looped down toward the shore. Along a boardwalk, toddlers stumbled around the grass with American flags in hand. Linen-clad adults ordered barbecue from tents, threw Frisbees, and milled about the water in the pink light of sunset. The promise of weekend fireworks had brought out scores of people.
We hung a left and began to pull away from the shoreline.
“Look,” Jordan said, his eyes on the rearview mirror. Chris turned around and saw it. Down the boardwalk, toward the point of the cove where the water was the gentlest, was a statue of a man cast in bronze and facing the sea.
It stood in the southwest of Gloucester, visible from all over the city. The man was green from a concoction of age and the spit of the sea sent ashore. He was bent over a ship’s wheel and clad in oilskins and a brimmed sou’wester. His eyes were fixed on the horizon. He was braced as if for an oncoming wake, rough seas, or perhaps something more menacing than the tides.
The town had erected the cenotaph in the 1920s to honor three centuries of sailors and fishermen lost at sea. The dead were remembered on its base, where the sculptor had carved hundreds of names—lost on the Georges and LaHave Banks, off Cape Sable, and in the waters of the Bay of Fundy. THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS, read the inscription on its pedestal. “They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths, their soul is melted because of trouble,” the psalm it is borrowed from continues.
This statue memorializes those who braved much to build what exists today, hailing from cities such as Gloucester and Portland and Yarmouth and countless seaside towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In the history of the New England coast was the courage it takes to face a capricious sea, year in and year out.
As the silhouette of the “Man at the Wheel” passed across the Boat’s rearview mirror, there was the flash of something more sinister, too. In that unerring, ocean-fixed gaze was the blinding desire for wealth that led to ruin. It was the same look that drove fishermen to ignore the lines of cod eggs splayed out on unwashed decks, or developers to keep lengthening the shadow of scaffolding and high-rises encroaching on the waterfront in Portland.
History is replete with such human failure, but failure alone is no reason for shame. Willis toiled daily to shed the ugly greed and shortsightedness of his birthright, and to cherish all that made him and his fishing kin large and historic. History can be more than just a series of scars and lessons. It helps us bear hardship, find wisdom, and imagine a brighter future for the generation that follows.
Jordan had known of this statue and had kept an eye out for it as we drove. And there he was, the timeless form of the fisherman, poised for combat with a furious sea, lost in another kind of sea altogether. The new Gloucester leaned up against him, playing at his feet in boat shoes and Ray-Bans.
We were with him, and with our thoughts, for a fleeting moment. Then we turned away from the esplanade, and the “Man at the Wheel” faded from sight and passed into memory.