The Bottom of the Harbor (21 page)

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.”