Lobsta

To hear Fran tell it, I cannot pass a road with the word "wharf" in the name without turning down.  I really can't argue the point, as I have turned down innumerable roads that begin with "No Exit, Dead End, No Outlet, Pas De Sortie" and end in a wharf or small harbor.

I am enthralled by the people, the boats, the gear and the processes of harvesting protein from the sea: herring from weirs, swordfish and tuna from long lines, lobster and crab from traps, etc.. Judging from the longevity of the TV program Deadliest Catch, I am not alone. The sea has an element of je ne sais qua missing from the feedlots of Kansas City or the chicken houses of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

My engagement with the lure of the ocean and the lore of fishermen began during several summers when my mother took my sister and me back to the North Shore of Massachusetts where she grew up. Our family had followed my father's job opportunity to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My mother had a hard time adjusting. For a couple of summers in the late 50's my father woluld drive us up to Swampscott, Massachusetts where we rented the first floor of Captain Jack's house next to the The Fish House on Fishermans' Beach. After helping us settle in, he would then fly back to Pittsburgh and spend the Summer alone until he returned for his two week vacation at the end of August.

Lobster boats in Swampscott Harbor with Egg Rock in the background
(Looking much smaller than it did when I was a kid)

Captain Jack was a private yacht captain when we knew him. And his house was right next door to an active fish house. The beach was strewn with the dinghies of the lobster boats in the small harbor,  the worn-smooth wooden rollers that rolled them and the few remaining Swampscott fishing dories down to the water and back up beyond the tide line.

The Fish House in the glory days

I never saw the fishermen go out as it was way too early in the morning for me to be up. But I often saw them come in. I especially remember the ancient (to me) men who slowly rowed their dories up to the beach. The men who had come in earlier would go down to the water line, admire the catch, then help get the dory up on rollers and push it up the beach. I was just big enough to peak over the low point of the gunnels and see the fish, some still expiring, in the bottom of the dory.

A Swampscott Dory

Every weekday trucks idled in the driveway between our house and the fish house. They dropped off bait and picked up the catch to take to market. Fish scales covered the driveway. It was always wet with ice melt and refrigeration water. The smell was constant and definitely of fish but not unpleasant.

I especially remember an afternoon in August. The moon must have been very full as the tide was very low. My summer friends and I were able to wade well out among the lobster boats and pleasure boats in the harbor.  When we looked down into the water through our diving masks we saw that the bottom was crawling with lobsters. The lobstermen must have thrown old bait overboard and the lobsters had come in to get it. We got some buckets and began to pluck the lobsters off the bottom. When we had filled several buckets some adult came out to tell us that it was illegal to take lobsters without a permit. We threw the lobsters back! It turned out that, according to Capt'n Jack, it wasn't true that it was illegal. You can pick lobsters up from the bottom with your hand. I never trusted a grownup again.

Now the fancied-up home of the Swampscott Yacht Club

I think it only fair to add two additional, slightly more scholarly influences on my long-lived enthrallment to fishing. The late Marvin Harris was a social anthropologist who advanced the controversial theory that human culture and human conflict developed in response to the struggle for fat and protein. A few examples: the Indian Subcontinent land mass could never have supported the population if beef cattle had become a primary source of protein. Only the wealthy would have eaten and starvation and conflict would have been endemic. So cattle became sacred. Similarly, since pigs don't sweat and need shade and mud to wallow in to stay cool, trying to raise them in the deserts of the Middle East would not be a wise use of resources. Hence the pig abominable to Jews and Muslims. In places where Christians and Muslims live in close proximity, like, say, Bosnia, the goats of the Muslims eat the small trees and shrubs that shade the pigs of the Christians, an age-old source of friction between the two. Perhaps Mr. Harris took his theory a step too far when he posited the possibility that in ancient Incan society the 1% of those times had seats in the first row at the base of the sacrificial pyramids. When the bodies were thrown down, the rich got the choicest cuts. The more things change.....

Be all that as it may, can't you just hear Sam singing to Ingrid Bergman:

  Its still the same old story,

 A fight for fat and protein...

Before we get knee deep in lobsters, a passing nod to Linda Greenlaw, a second inspiration. If you saw the film, The Perfect Storm, Linda was the real-life person on whom Elizabeth Mastrantonio's character was based. Her book, The Hungry Ocean, recounts the day-to-day life of a long-line swordfish boat and her crew as they work to fill the world's insatiable appetite for protein. She was and probably still is one of the few women to captain such off-shore boats

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So that's my back story and I'm sticking to it every time I turn down a "wharf" road. And on PEI we turned down them from Cap Egmont to North Cape, Malpeque to North Rustico, Lakeville to Lauching Point, Georgetown to Graham Pond.

Part of the lobster boat fleet at Malpeque Harbor, PEI

Fish shack with shark tails

Buying lobsters off the Malpeque dock

Row of fishing shacks at Malpeque Harbor

Lobster are a big deal on PEI. Like a 27 million pound and $113 million deal. Unfortunately, it used to be a bigger deal for the 1300 or so licensed lobster fishermen on PEI. In 2012 the lobstermen got an average of $4.20 a pound for their catch. This year we got our first inkling of trouble on the wharf at Graham Pond. A buyer standing by his truck waiting for his last two boats to come in told us that the going price to the lobsterman for canners was $3 a pound and markets were paying $3.50 regardless of the size over 1 1/4 pounds.That 3 pound lobster that retails for $65, and, heaven knows how much in a restaurant, brings the fisherman who caught it $10.50. What was even worse was the buyers were setting daily quotas on what they would buy off the dock because their market was collapsing.

Graham Pond Lobster fleet

Lobsters on the wharf at Graham Pond

 While Fran and I really loved the $5 a pound live lobsters and the $6 a pound cooked lobsters, the lobster industry on PEI is in real trouble. The season started with a strike. Shipments of lobsters from Maine and the Iles de Madeleine to processing plants on PEI have been intercepted by PEI fisherman and kept from the processing plants. Prices to the fishermen haven't been this low since 2009.

Monday morning rush hour at Launching Point on Boughton Bay. The boats
went out between 4 and 5 AM and were coming back just before noon. The traps had been
filling over the weekend. Buyers were waiting on the dock.

We noticed a fair number of women working the boats.
This boat is "manned" by a sister/brother team.

Me taking pictures of the catch still on board. I had just most unceremoniously fallen
into the boat and I was doing my best to mask the excruciating pain.

Haley to my left. Most people fall off boats. I fell on.
The sweater over my arm is hiding the goose egg swelling up.

Each bin contains 90 pounds of lobster. This Monday's catch

for the Haley N' Alban was 600 pounds. Tomorrow's catch, though,  may not be saleable  if the buyers on

the docks have no market. PEI has no lobster pounds where lobsters can be held alive and continue to grow

until the market returns and prices recover.

Canners on the dock bring $3.00 a pound These small lobster (carapace at least 72mm)
are processed into more than a dozen different frozen raw and cooked lobster products. More than
60% of the 27 million pound lobster catch is made into such products and shipped around
the world. A threatened increase in the minimum size of canners could devastate the canner industry on PEI.

This big fella's number is up. He weighs over 8 pounds
and is between 20 and 50 years old. He's too tough to eat but he
weighs too much to throw back at $3.50 a pound.

Lobster legs after processing at the Georgetown plant. It was only noon

and this was the third such bin to come out of the plant that morning. The front

of the plant contains a dormitory that houses young Chinese women who work the plant. 

We were told that as many as 1000 Chinese women work the processing plants

on PEI on an "exchange program"sponsored by the Provincial Government.

Ambivalence thy name is lobster

We got over it!

My Day With Eli

Eli and I went for a ride on Saturday. Rides up here in Vermont tend to last 4 or 5 hours, cover 150 or so miles, include innumerable stops, lunch and a fair amount of serendipity. We started well north of Burlington on the map then we drove east through Fairfax and Cambridge, south through Smugglers' Notch, then down Rt. 100 from Stowe all the way to Hancock,  west through Middlebury until we finally headed north through Vergennes and home.

West Central Vermont in an afternoon

Route 100 through the Mad River Valley

A very special iced coffee

There is a coffee roaster at Fairfax. He Priority Mails his roasts all over the country. He also has a nice way of making iced coffee: He puts about half an inch of brewed coffee in a plastic cup and stores the cups in the freezer.  The customer takes a cup from the freezer and fills it with cold coffee from a container in the fridge. This way the coffee never gets watered down by melting ice.

Boyden Valley Winery

Our rather loose objective was to find waterfalls. Actually, we didn't do too badly.

Fairfax Falls on the Lamoille River

A lot of Vermont still gets electric from small hydro

Rock massif at the top of Smugglers Notch

Moss Glen Falls, just north of Stowe,VT

At the very bottom of Rt 108, the steep, windy route through Smugglers' Notch and past the ski areas  and condos, you come to Stowe Village and Rt. 100. Route 100 is one of Vermont's and Americas

scenic byways. Twenty-six years ago in 1988, when Eli was 9 and his sister, Milli, was 11 we took a summer long camping trip in a 1979 VW Camper the kids named Earnest.

Renovated VW identical to Earnest

We went up through Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick and finally Nova Scotia where we camped the Cabot Trail. On an infernally hot Sunday afternoon we entered Vermont through Glens Falls, NY and Rutland in the southwest of the state headed for St. Johnsbury in the Northeast Kingdom. We stopped to swim in Lake Bomoseen and then, for reasons that still aren't clear, we made a left on Rt.100. It turned out to be an afternoon we all remember affectionately almost 30 years later.

We stopped several times to swim in ponds along Route 100 then we came to our very first real swimming hole. It was just a wide place in the river where the river ran close to the road. Water had pooled in a hole just below what Eli remembered as a huge boulder. We pulled off onto the shoulder which is all there was at the time.

My kids watched from across the stream as the local kids climbed the boulder and then dove or jumped off. My kids were screwing up their courage. Finally, they literally took the plunge, Milli first then Eli. We stayed for several hours as Milli and Eli took turns with the local kids jumping off the rock. I watched from the far bank.

As Eli and I drove down Route 100 almost 30 years later I very much hoped we would find the place again. As we left Waitsfield I began to despair. Then, at the far end of an earth berm on our left we spotted some heads sticking up. Eli turned around and found an opening in the berm. There, behind the berm, all gussied up, was our old swimming hole.

It has an official name now, Lareau Swimming Hole, and pages of references on Google. In the mid-nineties the town of Waitsfield got the state to remove a salt shed. They built the berm to shield the hole and the parking lot probably so it would not be so inviting to passers-through. They posted signs. Ecoli bacteria test results and warnings are posted next to the outhouse. 

First there were three

Then there was 1 and she wasn't sure

Finally....

You got to learn to swim first

The Rock. Eli said he remembered it as twice as high.

But in all the essential ways it was just as we both remembered it from decades ago. Eli and I carried on with our ride savoring the renewed memory.

Another Moss Glen Falls at Hancock

                                                          Otter Creek, Vergennes, VT

So,we had a bad day in Paradise.....

The Winooski River, belying its name, is a lovely river. And the Winooski bridge spanning the river between Winooski and Burlington is the perfect New England river bridge. It has all the right elements: banks lined with old brick factories or mills, a waterfall above the bridge, a salmon pool below the bridge and then another, much larger waterfall with an old, but still functioning, hydroelectric power plant fed by the lower falls. There is even a large raft of old logs and forest debris which speak of torrents of water rushing down narrow valleys in the Green Mountains to the east.

The Winooski Bridge

Old brick factory now the home of internet startups
note the smaller falls at the end of the old factory.

The Salmon Hole below the bridge

The big falls and the spillway outflow

I had driven over the bridge a few times but only once in Wilbur, going north from North Beach in Burlington to Champlain on Grand Isle. Yesterday morning we moved home back to North Beach (Quebec South) to meet up with our son, Eli. The plan is to spend three days exploring Burlington together, move home back to Champlain from which Fran and Eli will drive up to Montreal for three days. (It's only about 70 miles from Champlain to Montreal.)

Well, we almost made it. At the Burlington end of the Winooski Bridge you have to bear right from a very narrow bridge lane. (Remember the old: THIS VEHICLE MAKES WIDE RIGHT TURNS?) I forgot. And I wasn't the first to forget.

I think this is what is called a Road Hazard

Note the pieces of rebar sticking out

The narrow land from which I turned

Chunks of concrete missing and exposed rebar

I ran Wilbur's passenger side tires against the whole length of that curb. I wasn't the first. Much of the concrete was torn up and rebar protruded into the roadway.  What a helluva racket it made, too. The front hubcap went rolling across the bridge. I saw it through the mirror. I knew immediately something was very wrong with poor Wilbur.

About fifty yards beyond the bridge there is a turnoff and a little parking lot for The Salmon Hole (pictured above.) I turned into the lot. Fran, who had been following me in Charlotte and saw the whole incident in all its gory detail, turned in after me. This is what we saw when we got out of our vehicles:

This Michelin only need to be re-inflated

The protruding rebar did a job of the tire, rim and wheel liner.

This is a $200 hubcap. 304 Stainless Steel

 When we pulled in there  a fellow sitting on the retaining wall taking a respite from his bicycle remarked: 

You're lucky. There's a tire place 100 yards up the road on the right. 

I wasn't feeling so lucky as I made a beeline up the road. The fellow grabbed his bike and accompanied me up  to E and E tires. 

Our Savior

E & E is the kind of place which is the rule rather than the exception up here; a rickety old wooden building that hangs together by habit and veneers of grease. Any place as sterile as a Firestone, Goodyear or Pep Boys would definitely be suspect up here.

A tatted fellow smoking a cigarette greeted me. I told him what happened. 

You ain't the first. I make a living off people who tear their tires up on that bridge. The thing is, its an f-ing brand new bridge. Let me finish what I'm doing and we'll take a ride down and have a look.

I'd noticed a Harley Sportster stradling the back of one of the bays. Is that what he meant by take a ride? I told him I was going to head on back and would be waiting for him. He said he'd only be a couple of minutes.

I headed back to Wilbur, Charlotte, Fran and Roscoe. Now that help was on the way I began to take in the beauty of the spot we were in, The Salmon Hole. 

The Salmon Hole just below the Winooski Bridge

Fisherman with their tackle came, glanced admiringly at Wilbur's tires then headed down to fish off the rocks. According to one, the hole yielded small mouth bass up to six pounds. In the spring salmon ran to spawn. Notices were posted on trees at the top warning against fishing during the spawning run or not immediately returning lake sturgeon to the river ($1500 fine). I sat with Fran and Roscoe on the low stone wall above the hole and watched the fisherman. (I didn't see anyone catch anything).

Soon I heard the unmistakeable, throaty roar of a Harley and Rick turned into the little lot. He assessed the damage and said he would be back in a few minutes with a truck and a jack. Good to his word he was back withing a half hour. We made a plan for procuring two new tires and getting Wilbur up to his shop where we would deal with the dog-eared wheel rim.

I went back to watching the fishermen. Hey, what could be more important than getting my home on six wheels back on six wheels. I was doing that, or Rick was doing that for me.  Fran, meanwhile was:

Fran on the phone with insurance

dealing with the insurance company.

 So I went back gazing at The Salmon Hole and contemplating how totally out of character was my response to this "crisis".

I flashed on a speech from what is, IMHO, Tom Cruise's best movie: Collateral. Cruise, a contract killer, has just shot a guy who fell several stories and landed on Jamie Fox's cab. Fox is, understandably, a bit shaken. Cruise councils:

Now. We have to make the best of it.

Improvise. Adapt to the environment.

Darwin. "Shit happens." The I *

Ching...whatever. Roll with it...

That was definitely, definitely me. 

Wilbur, hurting at E & E

Two hours later Wilbur had hobbled up to the shop on 5 wheels. Two tires had been delivered. But no matter how big the hammer, how many or hard the blows, how much the time he devoted to it, Rick could not straighten the rim enough to make a seal with the tire. 

Several frenzied calls later we hoped and prayed that we had ordered two rims out of Springfield, Mass. I say hoped and prayed because the fellow we ordered them from wouldn't take a credit card in advance. He wanted $86 each when the Ford dealer had quoted me $340 each and....he never returned any of my phone calls save one when all he said was:

You won't see 'em before Friday around noon and I don't guarantee they'll fit.

Swell.  So we limped, still  on five wheels, over to North Beach, set up an abbreviated camp and told Eli we would meet him for breakfast. Thursday was a fun day with Eli save for the shadows of doubt as to whether the rims would arrive on Friday. Friday we went out to Williston to get prescriptions filled and food shop. Well, those were the ostensible reasons. I really wanted to be near the tire place to do or say I don't know what when the rims didn't arrive.  (So much for mellow David.) At 11:30 I pulled up to the tire place. And there were my new, bright and shiny rims. 

How much did the Ford dealer want for these?

$340 each.

OEM prices for aftermarket rims. That's a good business to be in. I added $10 to my cost.

Blessings be upon you.

I rushed the tires and the rims over to Rick at E & E for mounting and balancing and told him I would bring the rig back at 8AM the next morningng, Saturday. Eli had made reservations for dinner for us at Hen in The Woods in an old grist mill in Waterbury. Charming place, wonderful, fresh, locally grown food. Then I was awake more than half the night listening to the deluge pummeling Wilbur's roof. Rain. I had not considered the possibility of rain. Would I be able to get out of the site? Could Rick mount the new tires in a downpour?  Will my old site at Champlain be too soft to get back into?

We had been to a concert up in North Hero a couple of days before all this. Mango Jam, a Burlington zydeco band had played.

They did a great rendition of Don't Worry Be Happy

Saturday morning the rain had stopped and the sun was shining.  I limped Wilbur back to E&E. We were there when they opened.

Rick preparing to mount the new tire and rim.

By 9AM Rick had us ready to go. And, guess what, the shortest way home was right back over the Winooski Bridge.

Wilbur safe back home minus two wheel covers.

A note about the cost: 

Rick had quoted me $440 for two tires installed on the rims, balanced and mounted on Wilbur. On Wednesday, after Rick had about 4 hours of labor on Wilbur, his boss came to me and asked where we were on the project. 

We'd really like to help you but I only have the two guys today......

I understand. I'll pay you now, take the tires with me and come back when I have the rims.

He wrote me up a bill for $468.50. That was the $440 plus tax that Rick quoted me. I told the owner to rewrite the bill for $500 and slipped Rick $40 in cash. I still have $300 to spend on wheel covers. Hey, seldom is every body happy about the way things turn out. But this was one of those times.