The Bigger the Pile . . .
I was returning from a dump run the other day, and for once did so without having plucked some doodad from the freebee table of claptrap, jettisoned painfully or not from a Montauk neighbor’s horde of bric-a-brac — gizmos with wires, romance novels, and a turkey-handled potato peeler that probably hadn’t skinned a spud in years.
As I drove east, feeling proud for having kept my hoarding instinct at bay (although Thanksgiving is nigh and a turkey-handled peeler would . . . no, no), I noticed a small sign with the words, “Fishing Yard Sale.” Elsewhere in the country, the meaning of the sign might not register, but in Montauk such signs are not all that uncommon. They beckon this time of year, and they are sad.
I have a friend who is a serious, some might say pathological, hoarder. We all have a touch of it, and while I’m not a shrink, it occurs to me that hoarding is a reach for immortality: The three gas grills in the garage, each needing work, a switch to repair, a wheel missing. I’ll get to them some day. The curtains. All they need are rods. The Andersen windows I picked up on the side of the road. They’ll come in handy when I put the extension on the house. “I’ll get to it.” In other words, the piles in the garage, closet, and attic — they are the future. The bigger your pile, the longer you’ll live.
One day, I posed my theory to my hoarder friend. He looked at me as though I’d just discovered the sky was blue, and said, “Of course,” and this is why fishing yard sales are sad on the one hand and smack of the eternal on the other.
There is usually a table or two in the front yard on which the man’s terminal gear is displayed, his lures, the Kastmasters, diamond jigs, bucktails, wooden plugs — a few that bear the teeth marks of bluefish — a bucket of lead sinkers, fillet knives honed to a sliver of their former selves.
A quiver of rods leans against the other table, boat rods, an old Johnny Stick surfcasting rod, and on the table, big reels for tuna and sharks, reels for bottom fishing, casting reels. Reeling in the memories. If only they could talk, and if the fisherman is a good salesman, they do. Next to the tables, an anchor or two, a mooring ball, a pair of rubber boots, waders perhaps, buckets of carefully coiled line.
Maybe he’s old, or moving, or sick. The bottom line is that fishing yard sales are the rituals that accompany a man’s severing his ties to the sea — no small matter around here. Sad. Then again, this particular sort of hoard will be taken up by those who drop by the sale, purchase his rod, his terminal gear for a song — his ties to a salty future.
On Tuesday morning, surfcasters were awaiting the promised east wind that should blow the schools within casting range at Montauk Point and propel them west down the sand beaches of Napeague, Amagansett, East Hampton, and beyond.
Word has it that 30-inch striped bass were being taken in Amagansett early this week. If you hear the occasional shotgun blast in the distance, it’s a signal that the hunting season for sea ducks, scoters in particular, is under way.