Part 2

The Sound is as unpredictable as any sea and there were days when the Cat rolled and strained and was never still. One of the safest and most seaworthy boats ever built, it can, nevertheless, achieve the most disturbing movements. But I could never let the Captain think me a landlubber by self-indulgence in mal de mere and I never did. I was grateful for that training years later when I rounded the Cape of Good Hope in a troopship that was being tossed about by the largest seas I have ever seen. Huge vessels that were part of the convoy would completely disappear for long and anxious moments into the gaping troughs of the seas and I was able to stay on deck and watch and rather enjoy it. Feeling the roll of the great ship as it edged its way around Africa it was easy to send the mind spinning back across the sea to that little Catboat on the Sound. I could have wished, though, that the Captain had been there and at the helm. I would have felt safer.

_Weir Fishing_

Spring comes slowly to the Cape. She comes with halting footsteps, hesitant and capricious, one step forward and half a step back. You wait, and you are happier for the waiting, for at last she gives the earth her full attention and the land is renewed and green and shining amidst its four blue seas. It is the blue seas that have to do with spring’s timidity. In summer they are the air-conditioners which give the Cape comfortable temperature while the nearby cities of the Mainland swelter. In November, their warmth holds back the winter and the threat of snow turns to rain. Then, until they are warmed again, they will, in April, hold back the springtime. Then, when your heart is ready for sunlight and the promise of spring, there may be a series of gray days with a chilling blast of moist air from the Sound, and in your impatience it seems as if it must be fated to be a year without a summer. From the still-naked branches of ancient elm trees a flock of crows caw defiance at the rolling mists from the shore. The first-come robins hop disconsolately about the grass as if they wished they were elsewhere and the crocus looks brave but somehow misplaced. It is the kind of day to make you look afield for comforting affirmations that spring is really on its way after all. Then you will see the little buds of green on the lilac hedge that only yesterday were not there. Perhaps through the opened door of a silver-gray barn you may see a Cape Cod boy putting the last perfect and gleaming touches to a fishing rod. But when you pass a certain large field where the fishermen’s nets have long been spread for mending and creosoting and find them no longer there, you know that the weirs are out and, weather or no, it is Spring.

Not so long ago, standing on the beaches of the Sound in spring, one could look along shore to east or west and make out the shadowy forests of the weir poles with their intricate web of nets stretching from the shallows of the land out into the fishways of the Sound. They, like the fleets of small fishing schooners that once set out from all our inlets to gather in the fish-harvest, were once an important part of the Cape’s economy. Like the fishing schooners, the number of weirs along the shore has declined today, for they are expensive to maintain, both in capital and in the demands upon the men who run them for skill and hard work. But the fish are still there, and still, in spring, some weirs are set out along the shore to trap them. The weirs consist of a long, leader line of poles and netting that runs straight off-shore. At the outer end of the leader more fish fences run at an angle to the line of poles setting out from the land. The fish, ever leery of inshore, shallow waters, follow the leader line of nets outward until they find themselves without visible means of retreat and the only obvious means of escape from this mix-up appears to be through a small opening which seems to be the more a logical course because of the number of fish-brethren swimming about behind it. When they have entered the beckoning hole they are in the Pound where the mysterious maze of nets spreads not only around them, but beneath them, and they are doomed.

There could hardly be a sweeter awakening than to that of the _chug-chit-chug_ of the weirs boats heard across the sparkling waters of the Sound in late spring. When I was growing up I would frequently rush to the window to watch the white wake from their broad-beamed sterns all the way to the weirs. When I knew from the sound of the returning boats--with their engine sound muffled now and the boats settling low under the weight of pay-load--I was punctually at the wharf to watch wide-eyed the unloading of the silver harvest. Trying all the while to keep out of the busy commotion of the unloading, grading, and icing down of the fish for shipment to the waiting cities, I would, eventually, end up with a prize--a newspaper-wrapped parcel of tinker mackeral. The delicious, combined smells of wet newsprint, salt and the mysterious, dark regions of the sea went with me up the beach and homewards.

Once I took a closer look at the weir operation, rowing in a dory across the ornery bars at the river’s mouth to where the water lapped softly against a sturdy, white hull in the gray, pre-sunrise. I followed the men over the side into the wide, stubby, gray-painted fisherman that would take us to the weirs. Feeling clumsy in the midst of adult fishermen friends who were suddenly full of business and doing all the right things at the right time, I sat quietly and somewhat miserably as the vessel made its way towards the nets. It was colder than I ever thought it could be on the Sound and the borrowed oilskins that protected me from the salt spray were stiff and had an uncompromising coldness of their own. But all of that was soon forgotten in the excitement of the arrival at the mysterious sea-fences combined with the glories of a sunrise over Chatham. Then the whole boat was alive with activity and very soon it was alive with fish. With hardened hands the fishermen grasped the nets and from the center of the Pound they drew the wonderful fish into the boat, a heavy, swirling, beautiful and ghastly, silver and multi-colored horde of tautog, cod, mackeral and haddock, and strange and unexpected things of the sea. In the capacious, interior of the rolling, settling vessel I was soon awash with them, knee-deep and more, and it was all the fish anyone could want for a long, long time. On the way into Port there seemed to be a good deal more than a sufficiency--and there were also squid. The day was now warmer--and now only through the greatest exertions did I maintain my sea-worthiness. Back at the river, which, with an assist from the incoming tide we navigated with style and without recourse to dory, I did not linger that day to watch the catch sent on its way to Boston.

It was some time before I realized how much I had really enjoyed my trip to the weirs but it was no time before I had gained a tremendous new admiration and respect for the men who farmed them. There are fewer vessels _chig-chugging_ to fewer weirs in the Sound now, but still on a gray morning in April you can discover that the nets and the long stacks of silver poles have left their landlubber existence in the fields of the Cape to go to work on the salt water farms. And still across the blue waters of the Sound you can hear the music of the little vessels on their way to the nets. Then you know that the men of the Cape are reaping the harvest for the appetite of the city--and most especially you know that it is spring.

_Not All Fishing Is From A Boat_

Not all weir fishing is done from a boat. Across the Cape from the Sound is Cape Cod Bay and there, taking advantage of their unusual oceanography, some ingenious north-siders have a different kind of weir-fishing operation which, so far as I know, is unique. At many sections of the Bay, the flats, at low tide, extend so far out from the beach that their outer rims at high tide are well within the fish lanes. Taking advantage of this feature, the men of the north-side set their nets on the flats in such a way that at low water the Pound of the weirs with all its flopping captives was all but on dry land. To harvest the catch they needed no chugging weir boat. Instead they used a high-wheeled cart, horse-drawn, in which they set out over the flats to return heavy-laden with the day’s catch. Nowadays you can still see weir-fishing being done in this manner but the vehicle is more often a rusting Model T and it will never take the place for me of the sea-going horses and their faded blue carts. These carts were built for a single purpose. They belonged more to the sea than to the land and their pilots deserved the title “Captain” as surely as did their brethren on deep-water vessels--for the flats were tricky with channels and it takes more than a bit of knowing to plan a working trip out and back in the face of the incoming tide. I have often watched this strange kind of fishing on the north-side, following the blue carts to the Pound to watch the loading of the fish harvest. There was once a young girl who, with great respect addressed her grandfather as “Captain” and I can’t remember that anyone thought there was anything funny about it. Neither was there about her ability as a “hand” when the cart’s creaking journey to the Pound was completed and the work of sorting and loading commenced. She would wade into the squirming sea of fish with all the aplomb and skill of an expert, wielding shovel and pitchfork, and setting about her to left and right until, at last the cart was filled and the sea-going horse turned towards his home port. If I knew where that young girl of the blonde hair and blue dungarees were now I would tell her how wonderfully skillful she seemed to me as she went about her work. I would thank her, and her Captain too, for an unforgettable picture of a blue cart with its flashing silver cargo making its unsteady way over the flats while, behind them, the lazy gulls swooped screaming over the culls of the Pound and the air had in it the wonderful taste of a fresh, incoming tide.

_Not All Fishing Is For Fish_

Not many years ago, and for the first time in over a century, a long tradition of temperance on Cape Cod faced a threat which was the result of a most curious harvest from the sea. It was in the days prior to and just after the Great Depression that an unexpected windfall came to many sections of the Cape. The narrow land was surrounded by the sea and the sea was the avenue to the free lands across the water who were not engaged in the noble experiment known as the Volstead Act. Many a Cape “Captain” along the coast heard once more the old ancestral call of the sea and without hesitation he accepted employment in ferrying loads of contraband spirits into the convenient, little rivers and harbors of the coast he knew so well. He played a dangerous kind of game partly for money, partly for the pure thrill of winning a kind of hare-and-hounds game of nautical skill from the Coast Guard, and partly from a conviction that the law was bad enough as to not merit full obedience. There is often a conviction that Mainland laws are not tailored to the precise needs of the Cape. So it came about that on dark nights there would be a good deal of activity along the shore and in the dim light of a morning after the gray hulk of a Coast Guard Cutter would appear, always late, but always game and eager.

Sometimes an illegal load of liquor would be cached in shallow waters off-shore to await picking up at a later date; sometimes the Coast Guard pursuit would be close enough so that a sense of propriety indicated jettisoning the cargo before making a swift escape to the enveloping darkness of the Sound. Then, with the typical vagaries of Cape tides, the huge piles of burlap sacks would be exposed at the ebb and with rubber boots and wheel barrows (and a tacit understanding that there was no need to notify the authorities until morning) the people along the shore commenced a new kind of harvest from the sea. Cargos that may have been worth upwards of $100,000 were split up to find their resting place at last in Cape Cod cellars and barns. From behind a barricade of imported--and almost priceless--Scotch whiskey the new Cape Cod fishermen smiled sympathetically, but happily, at an arid and land-locked United States. Of course many of the cargos did reach their intended destinations across the canal. One went in a hearse that was part of an elaborate funeral procession and a red-faced constabulary did not realize it until twenty-four hours after they had solemnly and respectfully assisted in its easy passage up the Cape and to Boston.

The Cape Codders who had participated in the harvest of the burlap bags full of straw-covered bottles of joy were following a time-honored tradition of beach-combing and salvage. Many would have been incredulous at the suggestion that any gift of the sea was not rightfully a case of finders-keepers. It is doubtful that any game of finders-keepers was ever carried out with greater enthusiasm until, at last, the Volstead Act was repealed and the liquor traffic came to a halt. For some it had not been the proudest page in Cape Cod history but it had undeniably been one of the most interesting.

_There is this much too about the Cape. There is people. There have been--and will be again--some very great ones, and there have been and will be again some middling poor ones. There are heroes of song and story, and there are the everyday kind of heroes who live brave and good lives and no one hears about it. A Cape Codder is not much of a one for blowing his own horn. He’s not much of a one for an argument either. His response to the perpetrator of an intolerable rudeness is to ignore him. That is why some Mainlanders go home to lecture folks about the “coldness” of Cape Codders. There is an inherent wholesomeness about him which, like his work and play, his home and health, is colored by the land and sea and the salt breezes that sweep over them. The land and the sea have worked upon him just as surely as he has worked upon the land and the sea. And when he goes away it is to dream of a cottage by the sea and a coming back to the land that is home._

“J.F.”

My good friend, J.F. Small, who kept a grocery store in our Cape village, might not be considered a great man by today’s standards but I considered him to be in the years that I was growing up and I always shall. He was kind and honest and efficient and he had a philosophy that was the equal of any situation.

J.F.’s store was a kind of hub of the community in those days and it was a good store, not one of the new kind where you wheel a little wagon around and feel foolish and can’t find anything, but one in which he helped you graciously and simultaneously to good merchandise and good conversation, and everyone had plenty of time anyway. It was a well-built store, a kind of Greek-revival with a Cape Cod accent, meticulously clean within and shining without. Only its huge front windows and pale yellow siding set it apart from the village of neat, white houses that sprawled around it. To compensate for that, there was, atop it, a fascinating cupola from which you could get a view of the Sound. Along the front of the store there was a commodious porch with two large benches. The benches carried on their slatted back a faded advertisement for Dr. somebody-or-other’s Bitters but bitters were already out of fashion and you could hardly have read the advertisement anyway because the benches were never empty. They had been placed just so to catch the pleasant breezes from the Sound and they were for resting and conversation.

Inside the store and along each of the two side walls were rows and rows of narrow wooden shelves that reached right up to the ornamental tin-ceiling. The shelves held a colorful mass of tinned goods and Quaker Oats and tea and if you wanted something from the high ones J.F. would secure it for you with a boat-hook. His aim was deft and true and it was always a temptation to ask for some of the little-called-for merchandise from the heights. In front of each of the tiers of shelves there was a long counter which held made-up orders and daily specials but most especially they held some very wonderful and tantalizing glass show-cases. The glass case to the right of the store held corn cob pipes and cut plug, shoe laces, work gloves and fish hooks, all in an ordered disorder that made everything easy to get at. No matter how much was sold this display always appeared to be miraculously unchanged. But it was the glass case on the left-hand counter that always drew my attention for inside it in regimental rows were displayed all the wonders of a small boy’s world. There were sleek, curly licorice whips and cigar-shaped licorice sticks; banana-tasting candy in the shape of bananas, mint-tasting candy in the shape of mint leaves, peanut butter candy in the shape of pink, satiny bolsters; there were heart-shaped peppermints with red mottos like “I love U” and “Oh you kid”, there were large, round, chocolate Old Fashioneds, orange and white “corn kernels” and many another item to keep a boy in agonizing, wonderful indecision. Time was only responsible to your own appetite and once you had made up your mind the penny candy would be carefully counted out and put helter-skelter into a small brown bag with a string around its neck. It would be discovered only later on the walk home that, somehow, several extra pieces had been slipped into the bag.

At the back of J.F.’s store there was a wrapping counter with a huge roll of butchers paper and a fascinating string that dangled down from an ornate iron cage at ceiling height. To the rear of the store also were the massive sliding doors of the cold room where all the good cuts of meat were hung. And then there was a stove-hole, neatly disguised in summer by a handsome chromo of Lake Como but, in winter, holding the shiny pipe that lead to a large coal stove. The cheerful glow from that stove in winter was a real attraction to the men of the village who seemed to much prefer it to the warmth of their own kitchens. There was always a cluster of rocking chairs about it and they were never empty. They were for resting and conversation.

J.F. ran his store alone, except as the summer population began to grow he would hire a boy to make deliveries, with horse and wagon for many years and, finally, with a small truck with the name of the establishment modestly proclaimed on its sides. He was leisurely and when he became successful it was almost as though it had been inevitable, even though you knew better. Once a Cape bank asked him to join its Board of Directors.

“I drove over to that shiny, new building,” he told me, “and it seemed as if even the car was hanging back on the way. When I got there I just walked up and down outside and looked at the bank and thought, ‘this is no place for you, J.F.’. Finally I got up courage to go in and they were all sitting around a table waiting for me. They introduced me all around as if I was really somebody and then they got down to business. I tell you it was nothing but trouble. It didn’t seem as if there was anything for me to _say_ but I thought about it some and I didn’t like it. Seemed to me there’s plenty of trouble in the world already without my sitting there and hearing about more of it and passing judgment on folks I don’t even know. So when it was all over I came home and wrote them a letter and said I would be pleased to stop being a director and I never went back.”

J.F. thought a minute and then a look of puzzlement, incredulity and good humor came over his face.

“You know what?”, he said. “There’s a big picture of me hanging on the wall of that room. There’s a brass plate under it with my name and ‘Former Director’ on it!”

Perhaps J.F. was already out of place in the twentieth century. His first, uneasy recognition of this did not come until the thirties when the store was still prospering and life in general was as uncomplicated as ever.

It was in the thirties that a lot of new terms began coming out of Washington and the Cape first heard of “the little people” and the “forgotten man.” No Cape Codder would think of himself or his neighbors as little people and no one locally, at least, was ever forgotten. J.F. had always extended credit and had often given merchandise to help neighbors over the rough spots of poor cranberry or fishing years. A catastrophe such as a fire was the direct responsibility of the whole community. Otherwise, most people in our village, in those days, helped themselves--and had never imagined there was any other way. Nevertheless, the wheels of government had begun to grind and there was no doubt in Washington that the Cape was a part of the United States. Each mail brought J.F. a new form to be filled out. It was either an inquiry into matters he had always considered to be personal or a set of regulations to be followed in running the grocery.

Whatever professor devised those forms it was a sure bet from the beginning that he had never been inside a village store. Poor J.F. would squint through his glasses for hours at the devilish forms. Sometimes he would ask me for an opinion but, fresh as I was from college, and full as I was of the concept of the “century of the Common man”, I could make no more head nor tails of the forms than could he. Finally he would shrug his shoulders in mystification and shuffle the forms into a pile at one end of the wrapping counter.

As the weeks passed the pile of forms grew until at last it was too big for the wrapping counter. Then they were set upon the floor where they were nearly out of sight and would have been out of mind except that the letters became more and more frequent and the demands more forceful. At the end of six months the pile of government verbiage was monumental and the letters had become almost violently threatening.

One day there came a letter from Washington by Registered Mail. It looked very ugly and very important. J.F. never told me what was in that letter but soon after reading it he stooped down and gathered up the monumental pile of forms and placed them on the wrapping counter. He wrapped them neatly and methodically in the good butcher’s paper and he tied them securely with the string that dangled down from the little iron cage at the ceiling. To the huge bundle he attached an envelope addressed to the government at Washington and inside the envelope he had written a note in his neat, meticulous script:

“Dear Sir: I do not know what it is you want me to do and I am too old now to take the time to figure it out. I give up. I am closing the store. Respectfully, J.F. Small”

When he had made the bundle ready and inspected it for mailability, he picked it up and walked past the glass cases of candy and cut plug and he never looked back all the way to the Post Office. The Grocery Store was closed.

All of the merchandise in the store was hurriedly disposed of, but J.F. kept the building, and the chairs that were for resting and conversation and the stove that was for warmth in winter. He also kept the wide front porch with the two benches that had been set just so to catch the breezes from the Sound. I would sit there with him often, looking through the large windows to the clean, but empty, glass cases and the haunting shadows that the long-gone cans had left behind them on the rows of shelving. We would sit there and smoke and talk, or sometimes not talk, and we would watch the sleek, new cars of the summer visitors going by lickety-split to the new Super-Market down the street.

AUNT ALICE