Nature Notes: Those Were the Days

If you’re a child, tween, or teen, summer is a time for work and play away from the confines of the classroom. I wouldn’t trade my boyhood and its summer for all the gold in Captain Kidd’s chest. Growing up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s on the North Fork was all that a lad could wish for.

You could work from the time you could walk, run, and count to 100. I plucked chickens on my grandfather’s farm when I was 6 and after. Then I picked raspberries, strawberries, peas, sweet corn, string beans, and tomatoes until I was 13. Then came harvesting potatoes when I became a teenager. In those years Suffolk County raised more potatoes than any other county in the country, including those in Idaho and Maine.

Aside from working on farms, there was mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, carpentry, pumping gas. Almost all youngsters who could work did work. There was always something to do to make money.

When summer was over there was school. School was fun too, very little pressure to succeed in those days. No child was left behind. The manual arts and business training were as big as academics. Yes, we had the Regents and quizzes and a little homework, but we didn’t plan beyond high school. More boys upon graduation joined the military, and only a few went to college. Whether you were smart or slow, there was very little pressure to succeed or outdo or even keep up with your fellow classmates.

That’s why I enjoyed so much Clarence Hickey’s recent book, “On the East End: The Last Best Times of a Long Island Fishing Community.” Corky, as he was affectionately known when he worked at the New York Ocean Science Laboratory in Montauk in the early 1970s, was an ichthyologist and marine biologist by training, a fisherman by choice. He hobnobbed at sea with trap fishermen and haul seiners. He caught, identified, ate, and dreamed about fish and fishing in the way that real fishermen, the kind that still ply East End waters for this or that fish, squid, lobsters, clams, oysters, or scallops still do and do well.

For most out-of-towners it takes years to adjust to living on the South Fork — it’s an us-and-them place, the Bonackers’ world. But not for Corky. He took to it right away. And the marine lab where he worked was the biggest of its type in New York, bigger than the one at Stony Brook and bigger than Southampton College’s. I know. I was teaching marine biology and sea-related topics at the same time Corky was doing science and hanging out with the baymen. If properly managed, promoted, and funded, it would have competed with the Wood’s Hole laboratory in Massachusetts and Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Perhaps his favorite fishing partner was Jimmy Lester, one of the many fishing Lesters who worked East Hampton’s estuarine and ocean waters. Jimmy maintained fish traps in Fort Pond Bay and Block Island Sound, not more than a stone’s throw from the Montauk lab. There were almost always fish to be caught there, and very often they were exceptionally unusual, such as the 64-pound tarpon removed from the pound in 1974. The proximity of the Gulf Stream to Montauk (as well as to the rest of the East End) brought many subtropical and tropical fish to Long Island shores.

Bringing a haul seine ashore or dipping a net into the pound of the fish trap was invariably accompanied by some kind of surprise: a tarpon or wahoo or bonefish or channel bass or lion fish or any of a dozen other species that most Long Islanders who are occasional fishers have never seen. Lately it’s been endangered and threatened marine turtles, which their captors are ever so happy to record, release, or have the Riverhead Foundation come and retrieve. It’s not our fishermen who are destroying the stocks and the rare fauna found among them, it’s pollution and the foreign fishing fleets.

“Men’s Lives” by the late Peter Matthiessen was one of the first books to extol the virtues and manifold experiences of the local fishing population. My own experiences with them spell out a similar fondness. They are true as blue and one can almost touch their souls by reading the Matthiessen book or the one by Clarence Hickey. By the same token, a trip through the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett gives a similarly wonderful account with the tools of the trade and black-and-white photographs of the fishermen nicely laid out and mounted thanks to the work of Ralph Carpentier, a local artist who created most of the original exhibits.

It was in the 1970s that the fishermen that Corky writes about turned their fishing gear into the plowshares of environmental politics. They demanded that East Hampton’s political electees slow down the frenzied-pace developers who were gobbling up the open lands, converting farms into condominiums, building McMansions, and poisoning the marine waters. They were eventually successful, but at what cost? Several have had to sell their modest houses and move away to a place where the cost of living is much less and the living is easier. The ones that remain are literally eking out a living or beginning to sink under. They continue to fish because it’s in their blood.

The research that the Montauk Ocean Science Lab did was immensely valuable in this respect, as Mr. Hickey and his fellow scientists charted the local seas and their contents more thoroughly than had been done in the past by any institutional or governmental body. That’s precisely one of the reasons that the laboratory eventually failed. The state withdrew its financial support, the several Long Island colleges that formed a supportive bloc, such as Dowling and Southampton Colleges, were busy with their own ambitions, while Stony Brook University, with a base on Long Island Sound but none on the second largest ocean in the world, was waiting in the wings for the tide to turn in its favor. And it did.

Thanks to Jim Monaco and Harbor Electronic Publishing of Sag Harbor for continuing to publish books about Long Island’s natural wonders. And thanks, Corky, for the wonderful text and photographs and for reminding those of us who experienced it in the last century how uniquely wonderful life on the East End was.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].