Late August.. another day on the water.

Leith had come up from Small Point for dinner and drawing class on a blustery Thursday evening, and the mood had been a bit strange. We call it a class, but actually it’s a bunch of artists pooling funds to hire a model for figure drawings at Carlo’s studio. No instruction. No critiques. Just 3 hours of intense drawing, two nights a week. A female model on Wednesdays, a male on Thursdays, usually. This night the male model was new, for me at least, and the vibe was off.

The session didn’t start propitiously. The model, a black Brazilian dancer, turned toward me as I came in, and his face lit in a warm smile. He struck a pose, and began to get a hard-on. AiiEE. Things went downhill from there. Peggy and Leith arrived shortly after, and the dissonance never dissipated. The model never engaged with us. He was PRESENTING himself for viewing, not part of a dialogue. Maybe it was a language thing, or something about a roomful of whites, I don’t know. Only that it made me uncomfortable, like a voyeur instead of an artist.

By the time I quit the humidity had turned into a thundering downpour. Wind northeast. Leith came back to our house for a shot of caffeine, and I convinced her to let me drive her home. She’s been worried about sporadic nerve troubles, and we didn’t want her out in a storm alone. Besides, I love to be out in the weather.

Trees were shaking and throwing sticks at the road, and the rain slapped at us, but we made it down the Phippsburg peninsula safely. Leith and Stephen were about to be inundated with late arriving guests, but they found a bed for me on the third floor. Their house once was a shorefront hotel, luckily. The narrow iron bed under pattering eaves, and the scent of the coast, carried me back to summer nights in the 50s. I was asleep in a twinkle.

And up early. My room looked down on the Small Point one-design fleet, clustered inside Goose Rock, and I regretted leaving my paintbox to home. Leith was already up, mixing cornbread and bluegreen algae dog biscuits to bake. I called Peggy to come get me before the company was up, and because I was concerned that our boat might have enough water in her to founder. While I waited for my ride I strolled down to the dock and got a snootful of precip and maritime air.

That’s probably what did it. When we got back to Bowdoinham we stopped into Jeanine’s for breakfast, and sat down with Bruce. He and Peggy always seem to get each other laughing. I asked if he was going out (to tend his eel traps) today, and when he said yes, I couldn’t resist. Something about stormy weather and a wet face in the morning.

“Want company?” I asked.

“Sure.” He laughed.

Fifteen minutes later I was bailing out our sharpie while Bruce was putting bait aboard the Sara Anne. It was still pissing rain, but the wind had flunked out, and the sky was a study in ink washes. I hopped over into the Sara Anne as Bruce came by, and we slid down the tide out of town.

Bruce built the Sara Anne two winters ago as a spec boat, hoping to sell her and bootstrap himself into the building business. She’s the perfect river workboat, a beamy flatiron skiff with a big 4-cycle Honda on stern, painted in traditional colors, salmon and beige. Steady as a church, and goes like hell.

Building her was hellacious, as well. Glass on CDX, she was concocted in a plastic shelter alongside Bruce’s trailer, and choosing between heat and ventilation made the whole exercise a toxic experience. I think Bruce kinda likes toxic situations. Like his first two marriages. But you wanted to know about eels.

Bruce picks up his first trap just off Bernard’s, in the lower Cathance dogleg. The Cathance rises in a chain of marshes in Bowdoin, then makes a wide sweep through the soggy backcountry of Upper Topsham before it dumps over the falls, into tidewater, at the mill on the Fisher Road. Eight miles upriver from Bowdoinham village.

Something cataclysmic wrenched the landforms down in Topsham. The Androscoggin, one of Maine’s big rivers, runs southeast toward the sea all the way from New Hampshire, until it hits a wall where Topsham meets Brunswick. Then it takes a hard left, goes over the falls at Fort Andross, and heads back upcountry, or so it seems, into Merrymeeting Bay. The ridges there are full of feldspar and tourmaline, if that tells you anything. Anyhow, the Cathance makes a similar fishhook, inside the curve of the Androscoggin. At Bowdoinham the river reverses itself and hooks round to join the Merrymeeting waters.

We live on the neck of land where the Cathance U-turns, known locally as Brooklyn, because the bridge from here to town was built around the same time as that one. I can walk downhill to the bridge, and Jimmy’s dock, where Bruce keeps the Sara Anne. My skiff hides under Jimmy’s ramp. The Cathance pours by like brown soup, marsh tea, draining the glacial outwash mud these parts are sinking down into. The hydraulic pressure of lower Kennebec tides pump the turbid fresh water up and down a sixfoot range here. Nine on the big ones. It’s about low now, so Bruce’s buoys will be out below Chops. He hopes.

A big carps rolls up golden-orange out of the murk, and tail-slaps alongside. An osprey gyres overhead. There’s not much in the trap. The tail end of a very slow season, Bruce tells me. Precious few table eels, and hardly enough bait eels to make it worth fishing. Has the impact of elver madness already begun to show? Bruce is willing to bet on it.

The naked greed exposed by the elver fiasco makes the idea of scientific fisheries management look like fuzzyheaded idealism. The rapacious elvermen have gobbled up the seed corn like there will be no tomorrow, and created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Attempts at oversight were, as usual, too little, too late. Self restraint? HAH. Never mind I’m talking about Herbert and Chicker, buddies of mine, among others. Hell, I chased the wriggly bastards myself when I was too indigent to be philosophical.

The tale is quickly told. Millions of tiny glass eels spiral out from the Sea of Sargasso and wiggle up the river mouths of North America in the Spring. Struggling up and around waterfalls and over dry patches they fill all the Atlantic watersheds. Then, at sexual maturity, the big silvers run to sea in the fall storms, and return to Sargasso. Enter the clever Japanese, who’ve been rearing Pacific eels in ponds for the luxury table market for generations. They’ve so depleted the source of Pacific elvers that they’ve started stocking their ponds with the less desirable Atlantic species. Now everyone and his brother is scooping Atlantic elvers in April. And everyone is getting rich. Or thought they were going to.

Back in 1977 a canny fish dealer made $200,000 over a couple of weeks netting elvers, and the next year every hustling Harry along the shore was making fyke nets and dippers out of mosquito netting. Dealers were paying $10 a pound for live elvers in Washington County. They were going for $25 a pound delivered in New York. $150 in Japan. A pound of elvers could produce a thousand pounds of mature eels. At $3 a pound that meant a $10 pound in Maine was worth 300 times as much on tables in Japan. You’d think that was margin enough for everyone. A dipper might get 20 pounds a night in a good spot. And two men with a fyke net might get 100 pounds. Geez. We were all going to be in Fat City. But that wasn’t enough for a couple of slick operators. The oriental elvers were selling for $400 a pound, and happen to be indistinguishable from their Atlantic cousins. Why not smuggle Maine eels into Japan and sell them as orientals? A dandy scam, until the eels got in the ponds, at which point their unexpected parasites and diseases decimated the stocks. When the eel farmers got wind of the ruse, the market for our eels dried up. At the same time the Japanese signed an agreement with the mainland Chinese, and gained access to their stocks of oriental elvers. It was a dozen years before the Maine elver business reared its ugly head again.

The last four-five years have seen another elver gold rush, to the point where every tidal outlet on the coast has been plugged with nets and dippers. There’s been a spate of cuttings, and some gun play, over choice spots, and small fortunes made and lost. Herbert put in a new foundation and bought a truck. But this year the catch was off dramatically, or so the story goes. You can never be sure with fishermen. In any case the conspicuous consumption has disappeared. And maybe the eel population. They sure weren’t in Bruce and Jimmy’s traps this summer.

The Sara Anne is spinning circles down the Cathance, picking them up and dropping them back. An eel trap is a cylindrical cage of fine-mesh coated wire, about a foot in diameter and 4 feet long. Bruce hauls his traps with a pot-hauler, brings it aboard, unhooks the bungey cord latch, picks out the hunks of horseshoe crab (old bait), and upends the trap into a barrel livetank. You don’t grab eels, you pour them or transfer them by net. They’re just too slippery to handle. He shakes the junk in the trap overside, throws a handful of frozen herring into the parlor, rehooks the button, and over she goes. Nothing for me to do but stand back and jaw.

Bruce talks fondly of the dirty old days in this estuary. Straight-pipe septic discharge, no controls on industrial wastes. The chicken factories and the fish plants fed up the eels in fine fashion. The bay was crawling with eels.

“They’ve cleaned up everything but the chemicals,” Bruce grumbles, “all that good gurry going to waste.”

There are a few more small eels in the traps as we work across the bay, but nothing to write home about. It’s gone dead still. The almost black stratus lying just above the treetops, the oily waters glinting like a gunbarrel. Not a soul to be seen. This is why you go fishing. To empty yourself out.

“Yeah. They’ve cleaned it right up. Just as soon shut us down, too. They’re talking about no more horse-shoe crabbing. The independent man is an endangered species,” Bruce goes on.

We talk about the guy in New Hampshire who killed two troopers, a Selectwoman, and a judge.

“They wouldn’t just let him live the way he always had. Couldn’t leave him alone. It might have been me. I can see getting pushed into a corner.”

I don’t see Bruce shooting a trooper, but I sympathize with his sentiments. I know and like Douglas up in Belfast, who was jailed for a month this summer because he didn’t clean up his yard. I’m not joking. Douglas is a collector, and an irrepressible font of obscure technical information. One of those rare beings these days: a local character, with a yard to match. But the character of Belfast is changing. MBNA has come to town, real estate is soaring, and corporate esthetic standards are Camdenizing Broilerville. Look out Douglas. And Douglas isn’t always playing with a full deck. So he ends up in jail in violation of a prettiness ordinance. Lucky he doesn’t collect guns, judge.

“Figure they’re gonna write rules about housepainting after they see my place?” I ask.

“Better watch out,” Bruce warns.

As we move into the deeper water in the Kennebec channel, Bruce’s traps have a cinderblock tied into the buoy line. Strong currents here, and the buoys are often pulled right under. Bruce spots a loose buoy and starts to reel in the line, but then chucks it back. I ask whose gear it is.

“Oh, some Frenchman came in this summer. Set traps all the way down river from Augusta. Didn’t have a clue about tides, currents, depths. In two weeks he’d lost most of his traps.”

“Rope wrench?”

“No. Nobody had to cut him. He was his own worst enemy.”

I can see that eeling in the Lower Kennebec requires a philosophical spirit. Bruce circles round looking for buoys that are pulled under, and finds traps he hasn’t hauled in weeks, that suddenly surface. Some traps are hung down, and he lets them go rather than spoil the day losing one.

“Probably free next time,” he muses.

The river changes dramatically at Chops. That’s the narrow outlet where all the waters flow out of Merrymeeting. A wild bit of water when the wind and tide are in collision. The Bay shores are mostly low-lying alluvial, acres of wild rice and sand flats. The rocky coast starts where the salt laps, below Chops. Ice-rounded granite with a crust of evergreens. We jump a young eagle out of a shattered pine just below the power towers.

“Lots of immatures this year,” Bruce reports. I haven’t seen that many in the bay, my sailing grounds, but Bruce says they are frequent upriver and down. To prove the point we soon see two more. There must be enough fish to feed the feathered tribes. The kingfishers return every August, to swoop their blue iridescence along the riverside. And the marsh hawks make their loping circuits over the grasses every September. The ospreys come back in the spring. But it’s the eagles who take your breath away. We get up close to a youngster alongside Goose Rock, a great hummock of granite close to the West Bath shore. He spreads his huge wings and glides into a tree on shore. No matter how many times I encounter them, I feel it’s a gift. A message coming across.

Bruce has gear on both sides of Lines Island, but it’s not worth the hauling. A couple of decent traps down to Day’s Ferry, then nada. Jimmy is already landing his gear for the year.

“Used to be you could make a decent living out of a few traps,” Bruce reports. “Place them carefully, tend them often enough. Now I’ve got a lot more traps in, and the eels are spotty. Here today, there tomorrow.” Bruce has a way of punctuating his conversation with long pauses. “It isn’t healthy.”

I used to be disconcerted by the extended silences, with Bruce watching me closely. Unsure if he was baiting me, like an African Archeologist we knew used to do. Luring us into unconsidered remarks to fill the silence. Now I enjoy the breaks in the flow. I grin and let the time seep in quietly. Habits of a solitary man, perhaps.

Sara Anne scoots back through Chops, and turns north, along the Woolrich shore.

“There, look.” I see him. A seal. That’s a seasonal anomaly. Sometimes a seal will follow the spring run of fish, alewives and such, into the bay, and hang out by the mouth of the Cathance for a week or so. But a late summer seal is a rarity. Wonder what he’s chasing, or what population pressures drove him here. Is he feeding on the local sturgeon, or stripers?

I hate to imagine what the state of the seal herd is downcountry. With no hunting, and the herring scare (although who knows what to believe about the elusive herring), the bloom of harbor seals must be pushing the support limits. It’s a strange kind of stewardship that protects a predator but gobbles up all its prey. Either they are all holy creatures, bearing spirit messages, and we may share death with them as part of a great dance, or they are just meat for the taking, and our Disney sentimentality should stay in the nursery. The current mix of cold scientific rationality and mawkish anthropomorphism is a sorry way to live with the wild things. And the sea ledges are crowded with seals.

Don’t get me wrong. They are magic creatures to me, and Peggy tries to jump out of the boat when they’re around. But all things in balance.

Bruce finally tries to sail out a hung trap, and the line parts. He gives up in disgust. Streaking over the end of the sands we see another seal, cruising the rips. I tell Bruce about last night’s hard-on, and his laughter bellows an echo off Bluff Head.

“Sure was waisted on me,” I report. We think about futile gestures.

“Probably should just land my traps..” Bruce observes. But there’s simply too many fine days left on the water.. “ but I hate the thought of going back to shorework.”

Isn’t that the truth.