Learning the Ropes

I was fortunate as a young person to work on a farm owned by Malcolm and Lucille Jewell in Bowdoinham. It was hard work from the beginning, but with great love and humor and the best kind of character leadership by example. One of Mal’s jokes was about losing money on every hay bale, but the volume keeping him in business. Farming and fishing share a common delusional optimism, a certain level of denial being necessary to overcome what common sense will otherwise tell you. The unit costs don’t even begin to account for weather, broken equipment and other variables. Which in turn leads to another joke about the fisherman (or farmer) asked what he’ll do with his lottery winnings and replying that he’ll “prob'ly keep fishing/farming until the money’s all gone.” Thanks to Tim Sample for that one. Back to volume. My inside-out version of Malcolm’s joke about volume is that my profit margin is sky high on all 27 lobsters that I caught last summer. That is to say volume isn’t happening so far. I have no fuel bill and no expensive repairs, insurance or boat payments. I also don’t catch much, especially when I don’t get up to speed until mid July and get skittish with hurricane warnings in late August. Accordingly, my short and longer term goals for the project involve scaling the operation up. This year that means two hundred traps instead of 150. It also means getting them out and having the operation flowing before July. After making the list entitled: Things That Need to Get Done, But Can’t Possibly Get Done in Time, I started with rope. My operation is amateurishly small compared to proper lobster businesses. Since I fish in close to shore, my trap lines are very short, 15 fathoms being the longest compared to the 55 fathoms and longer commonly used on bigger boats. I only need 200. compared to the guys with 800 traps in the water. Even with the small scale, there are still 12,000 or so feet of rope to be checked, cleaned, mended and untangled. I had to make 55 new 10 fathom lines with red paint at the mid point for whale-proofing, 7 fathoms of sinking rope, 3 fathoms of float rope and a toggle buoy. I dug through an impossible baby elephant sized pile of tangled abandoned rope and buoys in my back yard to get toggle buoys, those small floats fastened partway down the trap line to prevent the line from fouling. It was like wrestling a groggy Jabba the Hutt because the rope pile had long ago melded into a single obstinate mass. Maybe a dog leash business makes more sense. Short pieces would be easy. My hands were winter dainty, having had gloves for any real work. After a couple of days of rope work, I was chafed and leaving my own red marks on the rope. This will insure that if a whale wanders into my front yard, he’ll avoid the rope pile. ‘Nother story there. Anyhoo- my hands are getting tough love or perhaps just plain abuse. The rope pile is done. Nice neat rows of warps in bundles of five. It had been spread out all over the front yard where I’d measured and gridded the pieces out to keep them organized. I was left with only a tiny pile of scraps for recycling. That seemed good. Now to just prepare 200 buoys, fix 200 traps, refinish the inside of the boat, put fresh bottom paint on, and rewire everything. Then it’ll be time to set gear. Then I can start work.

You Know It's Time to Get Going with Gear Work When...

When it's 3 something on a Tuesday afternoon in late March and I find myself washing off toothpaste tubes and toothbrush handles, I know that it is really time to move on to the next phase of the year's workflow cycle. Not that it was an existential make-work placebo task. The dental care drawer in the bathroom was several years overdue for a little refreshment.

The drawer preferred not to close as a result of overcrowding. There were enough toothbrushes for a public high school graduating class. They were caked, stuck together. Then there were the toothpaste tubes, ranging from 90% to about 40% used up. There were two dozen or so of these "pre-owned" units, as they say in the car business. Not all the way and then thrown out, but just most or part way used before a newer tube proved more appealing to the brusher and the remainder was left for the next person to squeeze and roll up neatly from the bottom. This would not have created such a mess but for the fact that the caps were left off all of the deselected tubes.

The geology of the drawer was that as new pre-owned tubes were deselected for service, the next layer added pressure, especially when the tired person scrunched the drawer closed. The resulting matrix consisted of a solid mass of old toothbrushes, tubes and caps. Toothpaste gets pretty stubborn when it's had three or four years to sedimentate and metamorphose. I needed a soup can lid to get a bunch of it dislodged from the drawer.

Now you can see why, because of the length of my description, if from nothing else, I needed to get going on outdoor, fresh air, hand chafing lobsterman work. Everybody else seems pretty far ahead. I'm used to that sensation. I also have the same queer feeling of doing very familiar basic gear work, but in the context of a crazy new-age riverboat gamble of a concept: zero carbon lobster harvesting out of a tiny boat with bockety old used and salvaged fishing gear. Familiar and hare-brained. I know this work well AND what the ---- am I doing?

After unpiling all my things and sorting them into new piles and checking my safety items, I'm starting with rope. Going over the stiff and winter- crusted coils slopped together in a hurry before Hurricane Earl and then in October. A few mends here. A new toggle there. The simplest of tricks for a spindly old dude trying to haul up traps partly by hand- a knot a couple of feet from the trap end, which feels as though it makes that last heave about half as difficult as without the knot.

Then there will be work on traps that strangely are in worse shape than they were last spring, which was not that great. More rust, holes, broken vents, torn heads, missing runners than I remember seeing last spring. Buoys to paint and whale proof. Solar power to reconfigure and rewire. Figuring out new ways to keep everything I need on board and still have room for both feet. No sense getting too drove up about it, 'cause it's going to snow tomorrow.

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We lost Ronnie last week. His lengthy career in the theater of Matinicus received mixed reviews, but he always took the stage with a flourish- by sea flying a non-tongue-in-cheek Jolly Roger jigger sail, by land in dump trucks, excavators, cranes, tractors, and by air in his spotless J-3 Cub. His oil truck had murals of two of his cats on the sides and "meow" where the last 4 digits of the phone number would normally appear. I will miss his word-play and humor and commitment to the island as a living community instead of a seafood strip mine. Glass raised.

Running out of Winter, but not soon enough

I tried to skip out on half of February by playing beachside bars, exploring reefs full of Pixar fish, driving on the lefthand side of the road and generally living as a drunken sailor on St. Croix. Many, many thanks to my host, chef, guide, booking agent, manager and good friend and honky-tonk piano dude, Tugboat Tommy.

Fishing looks similar in that the boats and gear are well worn and look dubious if you're seeing them for the first time. Fishermen go out in small boats with outboards and dive for conch and lobster. They sell by the side of the road or at parking lots right out of the boat on a trailer.

I had fresh coconut water, hydroponic lettuce, all manner of bananas, passion fruit, papaya and some kind of drink made from tree bark, all from the open air farmer's market. Curry, conch stew and collaloo came from out of the way places that had that authentic taste as though they found the perfect pans to cook in 30 years ago.

The trip seemed endless, but perversely made the stateside portion of my February seem 13 weeks long. We've had the most robust winter I can remember since President Carter was in office. Many of us are short tempered, swinging between furious busywork and apathetic lethargy. The year-round Matinicus Island lifestyle requires just a little too much together time, if you're asking me this week. And last week. We better turn the corner before we (I) go all Nicholson in The Shining.

The other side of the problem is that I feel I'm already late for the early summer fishing season. I added up all the rewiring, refinishing, repair and problem solving I need to do before the first trap goes over. Hard seeing all of that fitting in with town meeting to crunch numbers for, tax season, left over winter work and kids to enjoy. Last year I designed a solar charged winch rig to go with the rest of my quirky little fishing operation. One of many problems was that I did not know the first thing about solar technology or marine wiring. Aside from the occasional zing in my finger when the business got wet, there was the matter of it cutting out and not functioning. So I need to rewire the whole works and make it waterproof.

There are many other things that I limped by with last year that need to be refreshed or completely redone. Then there are 200 traps which were a little past their prime last year, rope to groom and buoys to paint. Safety gear that needs testing or replacement. All kinds of things I still don't know much about but will have to figure out, improvise or fake my way through. That sounds like life generally.

Winter needs to go. Spring needs to be long and slow. That's all I'm askin'.

Lobsters on the Scanner

I didn't have any of my own lobsters, having been done hauling from Sweet Pea in early October. My gracious host in St. Croix wanted some lobsters and shrimp to remind him of the taste of cold water temperate zone seafood. The good stuff. Lobsters with proper claws on them. Shipping? Apparently not a viable option. So I stopped in at Jess's Market in Rockland and with their expert assistance happened upon the solution. 2 pounds of frozen shrimp cooling 2 live lobsters inside a little picnic bag. The gentlemen in security screening in Boston were amused. The Rockland guys have probably seen it enough that there was no surprise value.

I'm going away for a week and a half to St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. I'll play some tunes and explore and visit with some of the Mainers down there.

I was pretty well panicked about leaving Lisa and the kids on the island in the winter for such a long period. I've never been away anywhere near that long. My guilt took the form of obsessive focus on firewood, chimney cleaning, heating oil transfer, neurotic floor cleaning and other silliness. I guess some of it was useful.

Now I'm sitting in Logan trying to learn how to wait in a chair in a brightly lit waiting area when what I really want is to be sleeping. I did pretty well at first. I sat in a Dunkin Donuts courtesy seating area and did almost nothing for 2 hours, watching people, staring, breathing. It was a good exercise. Especially when on the road, there seems to be an impulse to always try and be productive or eating or drinking or viewing, consuming, moving. The staring was a good experience. For a couple of hours. Then I had to play some tunes. A bunch of instrumental acoustic guitar and a private funky version of Use Me Up by Bill Withers.

My air travel for the last 11 years has been at a maximum altitude of about 2,400 feet and a duration of 14 minutes or so from the gravel hill sloping to the shore on Matinicus to the Knox County Regional Airport. There was no internet, no taking off my shoes, no chatting with family, checking email. None of it. Laptops, Portable Devices and earclipped cell phones are attached to almost everyone. Me included at the moment.

I went to St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands when I was 5 and never got over it. This is the trip of a lifetime, and at least pretty close to the two far-distant points on my life line. I have always loved to go places for little more than the stimulation of being Somewhere Else. I guess I'm getting that. Lot of sitting though, considering how far I'm going. Better walk around a little.

Chainsaw and Keyboard Season, Hallelujah

My hands don't make an oar shape lately. I've forgotten what bait smells like. I owe a seafood favor to someone and will have to acquire the goods elsewhere and then hope they stay frozen and TSA personnel don't confiscate them for looking like a menace to air travel. I guess St. Croix USVI is a hard location to ship fresh lobsters or shrimp to.

I finished an interior job and started a chainsaw project yesterday. Formidable as is the Stihl 211, I felt like one termite in a very large forest of tangled and blown down spruce trees. Taking a break, I looked across Matinicus Roads, past Ten Pound Island and the Hogshead. All the outlying ledges and islets were sharp white against a blue black ocean. Everything else in every direction was gray, so the black blue and white had a glow of their own, appearing hemispheres removed from the way the area looks in summer. We are Spitsbergen and a summer island paradise depending on the calendar.

I've also been working the sit muscles pretty hard and going back to law school in a manner of speaking. I've started legal research work. I was never the legal analyst, so this is a good chance to fill some gaps in my education. Lots and lots of screen time and ass time only broken by feeding the stove and school children.

That's the beauty and the peril of this life. I'm able to do a bunch of really different things as long as I don't mind being cold, inhaling urethane fumes, dodging falling trees and hardest of all, using my brain while sitting still. As long as I don't mind always being half a step ahead of delinquency notices and calls from customer service professionals who may monitor my call for training and quality assurance.

So today, the snow was whipping and my sinuses pretty well malfunctioning and I decided not to flog myself. What a luxury. I've had many years of dragging myself through court, correctional facilities, sterns of commercial fishing vessels and school while very much under the weather.

On one occasion, I was scheduled to be in front of a superior court justice who is now a federal prosecutor. I was scheduled to be in 2 courts at the same time, which is a fact of life for criminal defense counsel. I was sick as a dog, but apparently indispensible to the justice system and sorely missed by Delahanty. Neither court would accommodate the other, so I went to one and then the other. The judge called me to his office and assembled an audience to watch the verbal horsewhipping. I knew full well that on docket days there is infinite flex in the schedule and that no business made my presence a critical requirement. I guess he had a bad day, for which I feel long term gratitude because I decided that day to stop taking those kinds of cases where I wound up broke with holes in my shoes and a sour disposition. Thanks for helping me along the way, your honor.

We have time for our kids, mindless media entertainment and mid week jammy days. We make up for it the other 11 months. Like Lisa says, this is what January is for.

Chapter 2, Cellar Stairs

Chapter 1 appears earlier in the blog.

The next morning, Patrick opened the cellar door and better understood the lack of evidence of the tenants’ departure. The bottom of the stairs was under an avalanche of black plastic bags. The adventurers discovered one of the island realities left out of waiting room magazine pieces: there’s no place to get rid of anything. Properly, at least.

There are, however, plenty of woods and ocean bottom. Combustion gets rid of a lot. Refrigerators shoved down one of the steep bluffs often beached themselves in storms the following winter.

Patrick’s own early visits in the summer mingled the sea fog and beach roses with smoldering plastic and damp paper fires. Some times it was just a few things burned in a fifty gallon metal drum with air holes punched in it. Sometimes it was a massive upside down dumping into the sky of a black oily column of former rope, styrofoam, vinyl siding scraps, insulation and anything else inconvenient and combustible.

When he was sterning for Ray Moody, one trap came up full of jelly jars, catfood or tuna cans and a plastic Bart Simpson head. When he first had his own boat, one of the playful and properly pedigreed fishermen left him ice teas and beers, nicely chilled from the ocean bottom and giving refreshment along with the little chill that goes with being reminded who’s in charge out there.

Trash was a different matter here. You learned how much stuff you create just by living in the 21st century and adjacent to the United States of America. You learned that washing out meat trays with hot soapy water because the recycle program will take them was a lot easier than not doing it and having the smell and mess and attractiveness to pests. You get good at punching down cardboard boxes, nesting cans and doing every other trick to work the volume numbers more in your favor and have a little more living space for yourself. It is a part time job that on the mainland Patrick and family, along with most of the republic usually delegated to holes in the earth and waste trucking companies.

There were only actually 8 bags trailing up from the bottom of the cellar stairs. Pat would huck them up into the kitchen, sort through, wash what needed to be washed, haul it to recycle and compost, toss the animal products- if there were any- on the rocks for the gulls, burn a little, bag a little to haul back to a proper garbage receptical on the mainland.

He’d done it before. His own. Summer renters’. Dumpers’. Sorting through, trying to clean up and organize, trying to help things find their way along. When Patrick was practicing street law- criminal defense, child protective and divorces for poor people with no stocks to fight over- a crusty old DA, constantly in the news for blunt and intemperate remarks had told him “I’m really just a gahbij collecta. A human garbage collector. That’s what I do.”

Patrick on the other side of the courtroom aisle, and with 20 years’ hindsight hoped that when he did that work, he was more of a recycler, helping along those mixed up souls at the bottom of the cellar stairs of society.

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Conversation deep underground. Rock. Aquifers. Magma. Motion. Rolling old green mountains with thick coats of dirt and trees. Inland to ocean waterways. Large lakes. Drier. Unclothed rocks. Brown corduroy rolling hills. Prairies with barbwire fences poked into the frozen ground. All talking around their table, passing the ancient message. It vibrates up through the soles of human feet separated by thousands of miles. In a courtroom in Montana.

Snow Cover

I'm sitting on a dry dead spruce limb. It's frozen into the pond. My 2 younger kids are crazy for ice skating, so here we are, lacing up on the frozen pond. We explore the inlets and coves and islets within the little island within Penobscot Bay in the Gulf of Maine. There is the sunset. Over there is the hut, collapsed and almost consumed by the woods at the far edge of the pond. Here we are. Lucky. Privileged to be in this natural wild windy fresh place, twirling, gliding.

I've never been to a rink. Only ponds. Dark murky mosquito-y places in the summer. Silver gray places in skating season. We're here 'til dark. All week.

I'm thoroughly out of touch with the water. The ocean and ocean's work is all consuming, until it's done for the year, when it ceases to exist. Now there is the computer keyboard to tap and the woodstove to endlessly feed. Future work to plan. Inside fix-ups. A long trailing list of tasks at least a quarter of which will be on next winter's list unless their malfunction presents some emergency. One thing on the list was a pair of bedrooms.

The two younger kids roomed together in a cozy, basically big closet sized room. The 34 clowns coming out of the vw beetle have nothing on those two. Conventional figuring of cubic feet provides no explanation how all that stuff could fit into such a tiny space. The contents of that room took up the entire rest of the upstairs while I tried to prioritize, give away, strategically save and distribute all the thousands of items- toys, puzzle pieces, disembodied lego heads, fourteen thousand crayons/pencils/markers, long lost jammy bottoms, remnants of smuggled candy and fruit, homework and, of course, a couple of dozen socks that probably were originally sold as singles.

When spring comes, the some of the other single socks will emerge from the dead grass around the yard.

I'm nowhere near ready for that. I need Snow Cover. I need time to catch up and I need the limits imposed mercifully by the season.