Chapter 6 - LITTLE ITALY


Dunk had three onion sacks full of periwinkles cashed on the ledges around him at dead low water, when he stood up to stretch and sniff the wind. It was a big green tide and more of the seabed was exposed than at any other time of the month, right down into mussel country. In the morning sunlight white granite ledges sparkled and the rockweed was a dark olive-green. The islands scattered around him, girt in granite and cloaked in dense spruce and fir, made black and white patterns against the cobalt sea. The wind was easing, just ruffling his red tangles, and the steady beat of waves against stone plashed in his ears. The air was thick with iodine and ooze.

"Can't beat this," Dunk muttered, kneading his kidneys, and breathing deep. At this rate it looked like a 300lb. or better day, and even if the price went down to 25¢ per, he might make $100 on the tide. Maybe as much again this evening.

"Pretty good for a numbnuts," he smiled. Dunk pulled a fresh sack out of his high boots, dumped the sheetrock bucketful he'd just collected into it, and hoisted it atop the nearest ledge.

The trick was to keep moving as fast as you could, from good picking to good picking, leaving your bags stashed where you could retrieve them later. There were wrinks everywhere below the hightide mark, but the bigger ones where what you wanted, and the thickest patches. Wrinkles crawled up in good weather, but shut their doors and rolled down in a storm. After this recent blow there were valleys in the rocks where you could shovel wrinks by the hands full. Of course, your hands were a mess of scar tissue. Always easy to tell a wrinkle-picker.

Picking periwinkles is a cyclical business. It became a commercial enterprise when Italian immigrants began collecting the snails on the North Shore, outside Boston, in the late 1800s. As the nearer rocks were picked clean of market-sized wrinkles, generally between the size of a dime and a quarter, the business moved downeast along the New Hampshire and Maine coast. About the time the best picking left was around Smithport, the tiny wrinks upwest were getting to market size again. So the business went back west. There were always bazillions of seed wrinkles everywhere.

Nobody had picked wrinks out of Smithport for a couple generations, when an enterprising fromaway named Don Clouse came to town a few years back, and began harvesting the big wrinkles right in the reach. He made a market at Freshwater, in Boston, and at Fulton, in New York (the latter mostly selling to oriental restaurants), started paying other pickers, and shipped his product on Wild Bill Kellaher's trucks. Naturally Wild Bill started his own buying operation, as did a handful of other shellfish dealers. Another wrinkle rush was on. Prices ebbed and flowed with the tide. When there was lots of product, on the big tides, the price to the pickers dropped, but a storm could cut supplies and the price would soar. Yesterday the price to Dunk had been 35¢ a pound for table wrinks, the big ones.

"YO, DUNKO." Came a hail, and Dunk straightened up from combing his hands through a patch of Irish moss, to see Muk polling his tin skiff through the narrow maze between outcrops, maybe 50 yards off.

"Prime pickin," Dunk said. He had the knack of projecting his voice, so it sounded clearly right at your ear, even from a hundred yards away. The trick made Muk rotate his pinky in his ear, and shake his head like it was full of bugs.

"Definitely bugs.." Dunk thought, smiling at Muk's wide grin. Mark Lodge had drifted down the coast maybe ten years back, after escaping a middleclass life and a couple of failed marriages. He was holed up in a ramshackle little house right on Goose Rock and lived off the land, and sea. Wispy red hair surrounded his round red face, and he wore an old-style long-brimmed fisherman's cap in all weathers, along with an infectious grin.

Muk and Dunk often worked wrinkle turf together, not infrequently needing a tow home, a spare cigarette, or a gallon of gas. They had made up their own names for the best wrinkle ledges, so they could talk about them among other pickers without giving away secrets. They had dubbed these rocks "Little Italy."

"Bit late, ahn't y'h?" Dunk asked, lighting a Camel Filter, and bending back to the hunt.

"Y'h-y'h-y'h." Muk responded. "Had another shipment of kids." His ex-wives sent the kids downeast by bus for summer vacations, and Muk let them run wild over the landscape, where they cavorted in filth and glory.

"Snort?" Muk asked, offering a bottle of coffee brandy.

"Nah, Thanks," Dunk replied, shaking out a smoke for him, which Muk took and lit with a stick match and a flourish.

"I'll work over east," Muk said, wedging his boat between two rockweed covered humps, and throwing his long painter over the highest ledge in reach. He squished across the seaweed, without benefit of rubber boots. Muk just wore ordinary leather workboots, with slits cut in them so they'd drain, and old jeans which were all tatters from the knees down.

Dunk watched Muk clambering along, out of the side of his eye, and shook his head. Of all the adults he knew, Muk was the most care-free. Made you wonder about all the "being responsible" stuff most adults handed out. His kids loved him. There was always food on the table. And Muk always saw the brightest side of things. Not like Dunk, who could worry up a storm out of a sneeze. He sniffed and wiped his nose on the shoulder of his sweatshirt.

The tide had been at stand for twenty minutes now, and was starting to move across wrinkle country. It rose in waves, threading between the rock. Up a foot. Halt. Up a couple more. Soon all this acreage would be under water again. Dunk plotted his moves to save the highest pickings for last, and to work his way back around to where his skiff was secured to a high boulder. He'd been caught out before this, and gotten a dunking retrieving the boat. All the time Dunk thought about the lay of the ledges and the wrinkle population.

There wasn't anyone to tell you the best way of wrinkling, like there was for clamming or worming. Dunk knew he could probably make a lot more digging worms or clams, but he hated standing in one place and working like a fieldhand. By the time he'd run all over looking for the best patch of mud, everyone else would have full hods and buckets. He was just too curious to be a digger.

Wrinkling was different. You had to scout out the best pickings, or you could waste a whole tide working a bad patch. You had to move fast, and not get hooked. And you got to examine everything living among the rocks. Dunk already knew that the good wrinks were in the Irish moss, on the dulse, or in the gullies after a storm surge. He'd plotted his best days and found they were on south-facing exposures, on the outermost ledges, less one. The very outermost were too sea-swept to support the grazing gastropods.

"Herbivorous gastropods," he savored the words. That lady scientist, Miss Marianne, had told him wrinks were called that. His ears turned red just thinking about her. She was Mrs. Dow's cousin, up from some college in Massachusetts, and doing what they called "a dig" on the big shell heaps over to Rogue Island.

Dunk had bumped into Mrs. Dow and Miss Marianne outside the IGA early in the summer, and Mrs. Dow had introduced him as "the guy who probably knows the most about the marine life near your middens." Middens: that's what they called the old shell heaps. Dunk had blushed and stammered at the compliment.

Mrs. Dow always made Dunk feel good.. and embarrassed. She was his science teacher at the high school, and the first teacher he could remember who really believed he could learn anything. Even the hard stuff. He was always afraid he would disappoint her, but she never doubted him, and he'd discovered he could do just as well as all the "smart" kids, if he took it slow and easy. Step at a time. Dunk had gotten his first A's ever from Mrs. Dow, and he was real proud, because he'd earned them.

Mrs. Dow had told his mom: "Lester's the hardest working student in my classes, and can do anything he puts his mind to." Dunk was in awe of Mrs. Dow. And thought that Sum was some lucky to have such a lady for his wife. But this younger cousin of hers gave him other feelings, and thinking about her he had to shift his jeans to get comfortable.

While Mrs. Dow was a lanky redhead with high cheekbones and a striking nose, Miss Marianne was short and dark and muscular, with square hands and an unruly mop of raven hair. He hadn't expected to see her again, but a couple weeks later he had been working the ledges over to Rogue one morning, and she had called to him as he steamed home past the heaps, and waved for him to come ashore.

She was camped in a tent above the high tide mark, hard by the "dig", and had Sum's 16-foot Whaler as her workboat. Sum had showed her how to rig an anchored outhaul, but she'd let the endless line get hung down, and was trapped on the island. Dunk had cleared it for her, and been given a cup of fresh coffee and a warm thanks in return. Then they'd talked about the sealife on the ledges.

Dunk had gotten in the habit of stopping by whenever he worked over that way, and was looking even more closely at the life on the ledges, so he could ask more questions. He could almost think of her as his summer teacher. Almost. He shifted his jeans again, and scuttled along the crack he was scooping wrinks from. He leaped and galloped across the ledges, both hands digging and grabbing, for the next hour, hour and a half, sun getting higher, rockweed getting stickier, and the sweat working.

The tide was running hard now. Most of the change of level happens in a rush, and when it starts, you best get to your boat before it's over your boots. Dunk grabbed one 60 pound bagful, and his full bucket, and began slip-sliding across the seawrack and barnacles toward his skiff. He'd planned it just about right, with only 20 yards or so to slog. Dunk slung the wrinks aboard, pried his little danforth out of where he'd wedged it, climbed into the skiff, dug a lukewarm Coke out from under a thwart, cracked it, and drank. Burped. And looked around for Muk.

Old Muk had wandered way too far afield, and was wading waist-deep across a racing channel, wrink bucket held high in one hand, his coffee-brandy bottle in the other. His tin boat was just starting to pull its painter off the ledge, when Muk stomped up out of the brine, streaming water, and set his foot on it. He turned toward Dunk and pumped the bottle in the air. Dunk laughed outloud.

Time to fire the Merc, cruise around picking up his bags, turn down his boots, and go raft up alongside Muk for a smoke. The wrinkle-pickers held their gunwales together, outboards burbling, and parlayed as the flood tide swept them toward Smithport.

The Western Bay was alive with watercraft now. The shedders we starting to trap close in, and solo lobstermen were looping along their strings, hauling, picking, setting back, and throttling up to the next one. All the clammers and worm diggers and wrinklers were heading back to the reach.

"Whadaya think?" Dunk asked. "Should we stay with Wild Bill, or go back to Clouse?"

"What's Don offering?" Muk countered.

"30, yesterday," Dunk replied. "but you know Bill's gonna drop his."

"Bill's closer," Muk shrugged.

"Sounds like a plan." Dunk let the silence run for a bit. "Think I'll work over to Rogue second tide."

Muk's eyes twinkled. "Got something for that Lady Scientist?" He chuckled.

Dunk reddened. "Well.. maybe," he blurted. Then threw back his shoulders and took in air. "She's awful nice, Muk."

"Good luck, Dunk." Muk winked. "I'll stay over here for now." Then he let go of Dunk's skiff, cranked up his throttle. The tin boat lifted up onto the step and began planing across the seas. Dunk goosed his Merc and soon they were running side-by-side. The wind, which had slacked off at low water, was beginning to breeze up again, this time from the southwest, and the two boats tossed shimmering spays of water as their bows smacked the waves.

Muk shouted something across the gap.

"What say," Dunk asked in his normal tone.

"THIS IS THE REAL THING!" Muk bellowed, and they both smiled.