Nature Notes: The Hunter-Gatherers

Growing up on the rural North Fork surrounded by potato fields and water in the mid-1900s was idyllic for most of us. You could work as soon as you could walk, ride your bike anywhere day or night, play outside games like marbles, tag, hide-and-seek, giant steps, listen, look, taste, smell, and touch. You felt safe and secure.

We had calendars but mostly we got to know the change of seasons by the temperature outside, how long or short the days were, whether the ground was covered with snow or green grass, were there leaves on the trees and were they green, was there ice on the pond, and so on.

Everything was seasonal. The robins would be the first birds to show up in the spring; you wouldn’t hear the honking of geese and quacking of ducks until the fall. Spring peepers would call after the first spring rains, whippoorwills in the first week of May, lightning bugs would light up in July, tree crickets and katydids wouldn’t get stridulating until the middle of summer. Parent birds would raise their young beginning in late April and fledge them all by August. You would only see white-throated sparrows in winter, never in summer.

Farming was the chief occupation and vegetable crops were the chief agricultural pursuit. When the asparagus shot up in the spring, you knew what would follow: green peas, string beans, corn, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, and melons. Cauliflower and brussels sprouts were always the last to ripen; they didn’t peak until mid-November.

Hard clams were the first shellfish to be harvested, scallops the last. One went by the rule: only take shellfish, in particular, oysters, during months, with the letter R in them. Blue-claw crabs didn’t show up in harvestable numbers until August.

For fish it was the same. Winter flounders were the first to bite in the very early spring, frostfish, or whiting, the last to be caught in the winter. In between it was, in order, weakfish, porgies, fluke, blowfish, black sea bass, bluefish, snappers, and blackfish. We didn’t have many striped bass around in those days.

As for farm-raised fruit, we all had fruit trees and berry plants. It went something like this: strawberries, raspberries, peaches, pears, apples, walnuts. As for fruit gleaned from the wilds, blueberries came first, then black raspberries, elderberries, and black cherries, with beach plums bringing up the rear. We didn’t have cranberries; we had to steal them from the South Fork and Riverhead bogs.

You might say we were among the last of the hunter-gatherers of the 20thcentury, certainly in New York. We ate well, raising our own chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, and cows. We were poor, but never went hungry. We gathered and caught what we ate with our hands and feet as much as with special implements such as clam rakes. We could even catch blowfish with our hands.

Almost everybody clammed or picked fruit and vegetables. Picking was as much fun as eating what we picked. As the summer progressed and the days started getting shorter, you began to think of the coming schooldays, which invariably started right after Labor Day.

It turns out that Labor Day was not only the last day to celebrate the joys of summer, but was also one of the best days to catch snappers, baby bluefish born of the year. Just about every one of both sexes and all ages spent a day snapper fishing; the days just before the beginning of the new school year were always the most productive.

We didn’t catch them with our hands but we did use a rather primitive method: bamboo poles provided by the local hardware store, Duryea’s. We tied a piece of ordinarysw string to the end of the pole and a small hook to the end of the string. Spearing, or Atlantic silversides, were the best bait. We caught them with little fine-mesh nets. The best place to catch snappers was just inside the inlet to Mattituck Creek. In an hour you could catch 20 or so. They always put up a bit of a fight. My father got to spend very little time fishing because he was always busy baiting our hooks.

As I think back, those snappers tasted very good pan-fried, not oily and overly fishy like their parents tasted. Of course we asked our parents if we could return the next day for another creel full, but before they could answer we knew that they would say, “No, come morning, you’re off to school. Make sure you’re prepared.” That is how summer would end, just like that, not with a bell or a buzzer, but with a wimper.