Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (70 page)

Ellery’s father kept his dragger, the
Florence
, a thirty-one-footer, which was named for Mrs Thompson, at the Old Fish Dock in New London. ‘I spent the happiest days of my life on that dock,’ Ellery says. ‘It was a perfect place for a boy. It was right across the tracks from the New Haven station. If you got tired looking at boats, you could step over to the station and watch a freight highball through like a bat out of hell for Boston. I despised school. I don’t mean I didn’t like it. Oh, Jesus, I despised it. Whatever I learned in school, I learned a whole lot more down on the Old Fish Dock. Like Pa would drop a barrel in the water off the end of the dock and teach me how to harpoon a swordfish without getting my tail wound up in the line; the barrel would be the swordfish. Or some other man would teach me how to stick little wooden plugs in the hinges of lobsters’ claws; that locks their claws, so they can’t kill each other during shipment. I learned how to scale and gut, how to mend nets, how to read charts, how to cut a fishhook out of your hand, how to crate crabs, and how to tie all kinds of knots and bends and hitches and splices. There were some old, old
fishermen
on that dock. Some went down in the whale with Jonah, to hear them tell it. They didn’t go out much any more. They mostly just sat around, hawking and spitting and God-damning everything in sight. They were full of old, handed-down secrets and sayings. I learned two things from them. I learned how to judge weather, and I learned how to take the good Lord’s name in vain. Like all fish docks, this dock had a shack on it with a kerosene stove inside, and I learned how to make coffee. That’s important. There’s nobody so worthless as a fisherman who can’t make a good, strong pot of coffee. In the summer, the Block Island steamer used one side of the fish dock. It met three trains a day. Back then, Block Island was a resort for the rich. If you weren’t quite rich enough for Newport, you went to one of those big wooden hotels on Block Island. It was great fun to watch the people get on and off the steamer. Some days, like the Fourth, they’d have a band aboard. The first drunk woman I ever saw was an old sister they took off the Block Island steamer. She was white-haired, and she was so saturated she didn’t know Jack from jump rope. Somebody’s mother. It was a revelation to me. Around that time – I must’ve been eleven or twelve – there was a Greek café near the station and up above were rooms for rent, and sometimes I’d notice a woman sitting in the window of one of the rooms for rent; she’d crook a finger at some man passing below or give him a wink. I’d try my damnedest to figure that out. The facts of life. If the boats were out on the grounds and nothing doing on the dock, I’d sit in the shack and read Frank books. Oh, Jesus, I enjoyed Frank books. They were called the Gun Boat Series. There was “Frank on a Gun Boat,” “Frank Before Vicksburg,” “Frank on the Lower Mississippi,” “Frank in the Woods,” and “Frank the Young Naturalist.” I’ve still got some Frank books on my dresser at home. Every so often, I get one down. You take “Frank on the Lower Mississippi” – I bet I’ve read it thirty times. When I was sixteen, I got into first-year high school, but I couldn’t stand it. I went to Pa and I told him, “One more day of that mess –
amo, amas, amat
– just one more day, and I’ll drown myself.” Pa said he guessed he’d sooner have an ignorant living son than a highly educated dead one, and next morning I went out on the grounds with him.’

In 1920, after fishing with his father for several years, Ellery borrowed four thousand dollars from a firm of fish shippers in New London and bought a dragger of his own, the
Grace and Lucy
. He lived on flounders and coffee, cut corners, went out in foul and fair, and paid for her in a year and ten months. He had a lot of affection for her, but she was top-heavy and she rolled and pounded. In 1924, he sold her and bought another, which he named the
Louise
, after his sister. ‘The
Louise
was rolly, too,’ he says. ‘She was the
Grace and Lucy
all over again.’ These were small draggers; both were less than forty feet. At the end of 1926, Ellery decided to build a new one, a bigger one. ‘I didn’t want a whore’s dream,’ he says. ‘On the other hand, I didn’t want a barge. I wanted a good, plain working boat that would squat down in the water and let the net know who was boss. I wanted to crowd everything I could up forward, engine and winch and cabin and pilot-house and life dory, so I’d have plenty of deck in the stern to empty my net on. I tried to explain this to some boatyard fellows, some professional designers, but they had ideas of their own. They tried to talk me into one of those boats with so much labor-saving gear on them you’re so busy saving labor you can’t get any work done. I decided I’d take a chance and design my own boat, about like a fellow up for some awful crime would decide to be his own lawyer.’ Ellery made a study of several draggers in the Noank and Stonington fleets whose behavior in rough water he admired, and he went to the boatyards and examined the designs from which they had been built. Then he sat down with some dime-store calipers and rulers and made inboard and deck-arrangement plans for a fifty-foot dragger to be called the
Eleanor
. He made them on the backs of two wrinkled Coast and Geodetic charts. He showed these plans to a friend named Ernest C. Daboll. Mr Daboll was, as he still is, editor of the
New England Almanac and Farmer’s Friend
, familiarly called ‘Daboll’s Weather Book,’ which has been published in New London by the Daboll family almost continuously since 1772. Many old fishermen still have more respect for its weather predictions than for those broadcast on the radio. Mr Daboll is also a surveyor and draftsman. He corrected Ellery’s plans and had them blueprinted. Early in 1927, Ellery sold the
Louise
, withdrew his savings, borrowed some more
money
, and took these blueprints to the Rancocas boatyard, in Delanco, New Jersey, down near Camden. ‘The
Eleanor
was launched the middle of May,’ Ellery says. ‘Oh, Jesus, I was nervous. When I started up the coast with her, I took a quart of gin along, in case of disappointment, but I didn’t even unscrew the cap. Much to my satisfaction, she turned out good. In fact, she turned out perfect.’ Ellery is disinclined to tell how much the
Eleanor
cost. ‘What she cost doesn’t mean a thing,’ he says. ‘She’s getting old and frazzly, but I wouldn’t sell her for what she cost, or nowheres near. I wouldn’t sell her for fifteen thousand dollars.’

In his first two boats, Ellery was nomadic. If a rumor came down from Martha’s Vineyard that there was a phenomenal run of cod off Gay Head, he would fill his gasoline tanks and go up there. If he heard that swordfish had been sighted foraging on mackerel off Montauk Point, he would sharpen some lily irons and go out and try to strike a few. One morning, in the
Louise
, working out of New London, he and his mate went on a scallop-dredging trip, fully intending to be back that night. Instead, for three weeks they strayed down the coast, dredging until nightfall and then putting in at the nearest port to express their scallops to Fulton Market. They reached Sheepshead Bay before turning back. ‘If there was a speakeasy near the fish dock in those ports, and there usually was,’ Ellery says, ‘we’d hole up in it and hobnob with the riffraff. I remember one speakeasy down on Great South Bay that was run by three sisters. All were red-headed and all were widows. They were called the Three Merry Widows. It was a disgraceful way of life, and I sure did enjoy it.’ Ellery found that the
Eleanor
was much more of a responsibility than his other boats. Shortly after getting her, he quit wandering and began concentrating on the Mouth, the Yellow Bank, and the Hell Hole.

There are two kinds of dragger captains: those who go out every day the weather allows and drag all over everywhere, figuring if they cover enough bottom they are bound to run into fish sooner or later, and those who carefully pick their days and drag only in areas where they are pretty sure fish are congregating. In his youth, Ellery was of the first kind; he is now the best example in the
Stonington
fleet of the second kind. He has a vast memory of the way the six species of flounders inhabiting the Stonington grounds have behaved in all seasons under all sorts of weather conditions. Consequently, he can foretell their migrations, sometimes to the day. Blackbacks, for example, the sweetest-meated of the flounders, spend the summer in the cold water offshore. Some time in the late fall, they begin moving inshore by the millions to the shallows, where they spawn. The biggest hauls are made during this migration. Ellery is always ready for the blackbacks. He knows the routes they follow and the best places to intercept them. Frank Muise, his mate, and Charlie Brayman, his third man, profess to believe that he thinks like a flounder. ‘Ellery doesn’t need much sleep,’ Brayman says. ‘He only sleeps four or five hours. The rest of the night, he lies in bed and imagines he’s a big bull flounder out on the ocean floor. When the blackbacks get restless, he gets restless. One morning he shows up at the dock with an odd look in his eye and he says, “The blackbacks commenced moving into the coves last night.” And I say, “How the hell do you know?” And he says, “Let’s go out to the Hell Hole and try the fifteen-fathom curve off the Nebraska Shoal.” Or he says, “Let’s go up to the Mouth and drag in between Bartlett Reef and the North Dumpling.” He never misses. We go where he says and we always hit them where they’re good and thick.’ Ellery has a simpler explanation. ‘I take a look at the weather,’ he says, ‘and I act accordingly.’

Ellery is also an extraordinarily skillful wreck fisher. Fish forgather in great numbers around wrecks, some to feed on the mollusks, crustaceans, sea worms, and other organisms that they harbor, and some to feed on those that are feeding on these organisms. If pickings elsewhere are thin, a few of the more self-confident captains will risk their nets to get at such fish. By trial and error and by hearsay, Ellery long ago learned the location and shape and condition – whether sitting, lying on a side, or broken up – of every wreck in the Mouth and the Hell Hole. On calm, clear days, when he can take accurate ranges on rocks and buoys and on landmarks ashore, he goes out and methodically drags up close to a dozen or so of these. The others are so decayed and their pieces scattered about so treacherously that even he will not approach them. He
usually
starts with the
Larchmont
, a Providence-to-New York side-wheel passenger steamer that collided with the three-masted schooner
Harry Knowlton
during a snowstorm on the night of February 11, 1907, drowning over a hundred and thirty people, and ends with a coal barge that sank from a leak in May, 1944. He drags around the barge more for the coal that spills out of it during storms than for fish. He burns this coal in the
Eleanor
’s galley stove. Some nights, he fills the back seat of his automobile with Hell Hole coal and takes it home.

Ellery is an almost overly cautious captain, and he says that wreck fishing made him so. ‘Once I heard a contractor tell about cutting a ditch through a graveyard,’ he says. ‘It reminded me of wreck fishing. I’ve brought up bones in my net many and many a time, and I’ve brought up skulls or parts of skulls several times. Oh, Jesus! Once I brought up a jawbone with nine teeth left in it, and there was a gold filling in every tooth; some had middle fillings
and
side fillings. Whoever he was – him or her, I couldn’t tell which – the poor soul sure God wasted a lot of time in the dentist chair. Once I was fishing with my brother Morris. I was below eating lunch and Morris was on deck sorting a haul and he found a skull in a bunch of seaweed. The roots of the seaweed had grown around the skull and had kept it intact – the lower jaw was still attached to it, and you could open and shut the jaws with your hands. Morris was standing there, looking at the skull and opening and shutting the jaws, when I came on deck munching on a big juicy peach. Morris looked at me, and then he looked at that toothy jaw, and then he took sick.

‘All kinds of odds and ends come up in the net. One day a bucket of U.S. Navy paint came up, a five-gallon bucket of battleship gray. We prized the lid off and there wasn’t a thing wrong with it I could see. Some sailor probably took a sudden dislike to it and heaved it in. We used it on the
Eleanor
. Another day, what came up only a woman’s pink lace shimmy. Some woman on a summer yacht probably got a couple of whiskey sours in her and flung it off. Oh, it was a pretty thing. It had roses and butterflies on it. We tied it to a stay and flew it like a flag all that summer. Johnny Bindloss said no doubt some mermaid off Newport lost
it
. “Over around Newport,” he said, “even the mermaids wear pink lace shimmies.” Back during prohibition, there were some rum runners around eastern Connecticut. Some were Canucks and some were local boys. They used to buoy their booze in shoal water in the Hell Hole. They’d wrap the bottles in straw and sew them up in waterproof tarpaulin bags, twenty-four bottles to a bag. They were called buoy bags. Sometimes a storm’d part one from the buoy and it’d go wandering around on the bottom. One hot August afternoon, we emptied the net and out dropped a buoy bag. Twenty-four bottles of square-bottle Scotch. The crew wanted to pitch right in, but I could just visualize the consequences, so I argued and pleaded we ought to store it and use it in the winter for chills. So we stored it. Fifteen minutes later, the mate complained he had a chill. Then the third man’s teeth began to chatter. Then I began to feel a little shivery myself. It was a week before things got back to normal. I don’t mind buoy bags. It’s the bones I mind. I had a mate once, a peculiar man, a Rhode Islander, and every time a bone came up, or anything else unusual, he’d squat down and study it. “Throw that thing back where it came from,” I’d tell him. He’d study it some more, and he’d say, “Ellery, there’s many and many a secret buried out there in that Hell Hole.” And I’d say, “Damn the secrets! Please do like I told you and throw that thing overboard.” Oh, I dread those bones. There but for the grace of God go I. Sometimes I take chances. Like a fog comes up, and I keep right on dragging. Then, all of a sudden, I think of those bones, and I don’t fool around no more; I open her up and I head for the dock.’