“All right, git on up the’ah!” Joe C points.

Stevie’s already shimmying up the nearest pile. His bare feet grasp each knot on the smooth, bark-less pole. A bulky coil of tarred hemp draped over his right shoulder, heading for a block hanging from its skinny top.

Stevie climbs the net’s mesh as if it were a rope-ladder. Threads new line. Scrambles all the way around to the other side of the Bowl from where the Nellie & Mary is tied. These saplings are much thinner than the stout wharf pilings. The net sways and shakes. Shudders to his passing. Vibrations telegraph all the way around its perimeter.

Josey hauls on the anchor lines. Grapples for stray gear visible on green-rippled sand a dozen feet below their keel. Clear water magnifies everything on the bottom. Shells and pebbles loom and wobble across his vision on the underside of ripples riding atop pulsing wavelets. Sammy manhandles the new net. Pulls home on a halyard, a brace. Antone sees to it that each line runs free. Prepares for the next task before its called for.

Joe C barks orders. Demands they do what’s already half-done. Curses when they meet a snag. His temper carries him from his spot aft by the wheel high-up onto the net-pile. He bounces off Sammy, trying to shove the young man’s immovable bulk aside. Intent on replacing the young man’s brawn with his own cranky will. Sammy continues to do the lion’s share of the hauling, pulling, and lifting while allowing Joe C his illusions of mastery.

The sun sets behind them. The net gathers the deepening indigo gloom. The torn net is replaced. Its Heart repaired. Sammy glows with the heat of his exertions. Stevie yawns. Reaches for their bow-line looped around a nearby piling. Josey catches this yawn like an infection. It spreads across his placid face. Antone looks the same as always, husbanding his strength. He holds his exhaustion close. His effort is a marathon. His race measured in decades not hours.

Joe C grunts, swinging his starting crank. Well pleased with all he’s managed to accomplish, Keep this useless rabble in line. Noses to the grindstone!

“Git me my suppah-tin!” Hungry for his stew. He smiles to himself, Warm it on the engine….

Stevie brings his lunch-pail aft from under the foredeck after stowing the bow-line. A questioning look passes between the rest of the crew, Should be back to the dock in under an hour? Joe C smiles at their confusion, Not goin’ home yet y’a basta’ds!

He’s eager to check another trap, Bait-fish jumpin’ around all aft’ah noon.

Spiraling flocks of terns surround them. The shadow of a four foot torpedo runs under the boat. Striped Bass! One jumps clear out of the water standing on its tail. A Tinker Mackerel in its jaws.

Most fish stay trapped. Stripers’ll come and go as they please. Joe C smiles, A haul of prime stripers! Send ’em off to Bohston o’ah Noo Yohk! Salivating at the thought of high prices on the restaurant market.

Take ’em now! Won’t wait ’til mo’hnin’.

The Fall Equinox marked the most fecund season in an endless abundance. The nutrient-rich, highly-oxygenated Labrador current swept south past the Gulf of Maine over the banks and into Cape Cod Bay. Long summer days and warm weather brought an explosion of phyto- and zoo-plankton, leading to an orgy of feeding from the smallest fry to massive Right, Humpback, and Fin whales.

Herring, Mackerel, and Tuna schooled in shoals. Segregated by size, eating anything that fit in their maws. Everyone racing to get larger. Sand Lance and Anchovy and Squid fed Stripers and Bluefin. White Sided and Atlantic Dolphin. Common and Monk Seals. Toothed, Pothead, Beaked, and Cuvier’s Whales. Diminutive rorqual Minkes. Blue Sharks, Basking, Mako, and Thresher. Swordfish. Sail Fish. Ocean Sunfish. Giant Loggerhead and Green Sea Turtles. Great White Sharks and Orcas swam at the pinnacle of predation.

This fury in the upper waters matched a parallel intensity below. Red and Brown and Purple Algae and Rock Weed grew fast on long summer days. Sunlight reaching far deeper than during the rest of the year. Bryzoids and Crynoids, Sea Fans and Sea Pens formed animal meadows over mud, sand, and gravel bottom.

Star fish, Sand Dollars, Urchins, Anemones, Sea Squirts. Darting Sea Scallops. Sea Clams, Cherrystones, Little Necks, and Quahogs. Blue and Horse Mussels. Oysters and Slipper Shells and Segmented and Smooth Worms.

Moon Snails, Dog Whelks, Conchs, Winkles. Sea Slugs and Sea Cucumbers all meandered over the sands and gravels. Shrimp from tiny Ghosts to foot long Mantas. Lady and Jonah and Blue and Spider Crabs and Lobsters. Bottom-fish like Sculpins and Sea Robins, Cusk and Skates. Spiny Dogfish, Goosefish, Wolf-fish, and Tautog. Ling Cod and Hake and Haddock and Pollock and Cod teemed over sunken plateaus.

The surface of the sea hid most of what went on below. Signs, though often subtle, did show. A stray fin cleaving the waves. Jelly Fish billowing beneath the foam. Gulls and terns and Osprey. In the Winter Sea ducks rafted in their thousands. Eiders and Scaups and Old Squaws. Like pigeons on the sea, Mother Carrie’s Chickens were never seen on land. Gannets were often the first sign of action. Black and white gliders with seven foot wingspans, plummeting a hundred feet straight down, sending up gouts of spray. Flocks concentrated schools of bait. Their attacks visible from over a mile away.

Fisherman were alert to these signs. They worked hard and long. Always wary, looking for windfalls. A bonanza might open up at any time. When it did they went at it with a grim determination. Blood-lust, a joy in sheer accumulation and a delight in their mastery. They fished to live; and lived for the climax and surfeit of a big catch.

No one could excel on the fishing grounds without a primal satisfaction in grim reaping. To be known as, “Killer” was a compliment. A title bestowed on a high-line captain A mark of the awe of his rivals.

Four was originally published in Navigating Shoal Hope on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

…We had again sight of the land, which made ahead, being as we thought an island, …we called it Shoal Hope. Near this cape we came to anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of codfish, for which we altered the name, and called it Cape Cod.

Gabriel Archer’s journal of Bartholomew Gosnold’s voyage, 1602.

“Giving up on all optimism and pessimism, one is free to be courageous; one places no trust in tools and instruments; one comes to hope based on human beings.”

Ivan Illich

Epilogue was originally published in Navigating Shoal Hope on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nellie & Mary passes the tip of Long Point, the end of a spiral of sand that turns and turns in on itself. Below the high tide mark its sand banks stand like yellowed sandstone. Like the walls of an eroded pyramid, they fight the ages; withstand erosion; and make nonsense of the angle of repose. A raw, living edge raked by strong currents.

A few miles away on the back side of the Cape substantial cliffs and bluffs tower over a hundred feet above the water. These bluffs erode three feet a year. Year in, year out, acres of land melt away like so much ice cream left out in the sun. This wispy tip of wet sand holds its position. Old timers talk of land they remember on the backside the way an amputee speaks of a phantom limb. Lost to erosion long ago. A place that’s now perhaps a half a mile from shore. Long Point maintains itself like the curl of smoke off a cigarette hanging in still air.

The Highlands lay ahead and to port as they gradually close on the Beach Point shore. A low grassy dune marks its edge. Backed at a distance by the muddy, maroon waters of East Harbor. The great dunes rise behind. Aglow with a golden light, they crest like breakers. Ocean waves transubstantiated into waves of sand that roll down out of the Northeast, the direction of storms.

At this distance the dunes stand out more by their glow than their height. To the east of the offshore trap these sand-hills end at the foot of a high, dark moorland. This land-mass sags under a fine pelt of dusty-green vegetation. Skimmed off the mountains of Maine and New Hampshire, dumped by a glacier these sands, gravels, and fine-milled clays form the backbone of Cape Cod.

A softly undulating landscape, rolling and soft-edged. Covered, not with grass or trees, but a short nap of Bearberry. A blanket of tiny waxy-leaves and bright-red berries. Low spots cradle Bayberry and Beach Plum out of the wind. Dwarf Scrub Oak and Beech fill more protected hollows. Twisted, gnarly branches tower over everything a dozen feet. Branches draped with lichens, knotted with hard, black galls.

A grand vault of sky envelopes everything in a luminous intensity, subtly nuanced and ever-changing. Unlike some western desert with distant mountains hovering above the horizon this is an intimate landscape. Nothing natural rises over a hundred-and-fifty feet. Pilgrim Monument’s not much taller; but there’s a grandeur here out of all proportion.

Our sense of scale is disturbed. Beneath a high sky, or lost in mists and fogs, the ever changing light is more substantial than the landscape it colors. There’s a modesty, even meanness, to this place of low scrub hills.

The Pilgrim Monument dominates every view. Theodore Roosevelt laid its corner stone. At its inauguration William Howard Taft vied his bulk with its height. A Sienese Campanile set on a sand-mount thirty miles off the New England coast. No more remarkable than a congregation of English dissenters, living in Holland, setting off for Virginia should end up under the lee of this curl of sand.

The Monument is visible from far out at sea when silhouetted against the light, as if to ensure that no misfits should ever fail to find this sheltering arm. At other times, lost in haze, it slowly materializes from the sea horizon. Two-hundred-and-fifty feet of Stonington granite easily dissolved by a trick of the light. Flesh and blood, barges and cranes, dragged Maine to these southern New England waters, depositing its minerals in strict verticality atop a flattened hummock of sand and gravel in this most horizontal of worlds.

A new moon hangs its slivered crescent in the West almost lost in the glare of the setting sun. Joe C has timed their arrival for low-water.

Approaching the trap from the North, Nellie & Mary circles once. All eyes read a calligraphy of lines and mesh and poles. The crew puzzles over what lays in store, gauging work to be done. Close up, on a falling tide, the piles reach well over their heads supported by an array of guy-lines crisscrossed in front of them. Circling a second time they cannot help but feel its disorienting power.

Joe C cuts the throttle. “Gohd Damn Mack’rel Sha’hk!” he growls, too loud over the diminishing slap of chop against their bow. The boat slows into silence. The last drone of the engine echoes off torn and ragged netting.

Just a few days ago they cut down a carcass from the side of the Heart. A Great White had entered the net by a short-cut of her own devising; intent on the panicky fish inside. Her bulk and the velocity of her charge took her body a dozen feet through the net. Not stopping until her pectorals and dorsal fin caught fast. Each torn thread and popped knot took its pounds of test to break, thwarting two tons of intent hurtling in at twenty-five knots.

Her will had never been interrupted in decades spent prowling the ocean. She snapped and charged again and again twisting and rolling. Unable to imagine how profoundly things had changed. She managed to snatch a hundred pounds of mackerel in a single bite. Their blood, mixed with her own, smeared her jaws and flanks. Her teeth, the size of a child’s hand, caught and snagged in the net. Some pulled away, bloody smears left on their neighbors arrayed three rows deep. Hanging overnight, the twine sawed through her armored skin, leaving great arcs of red-rimmed cuts in her flesh.

Must have struck at high tide. When they arrived she hung completely above water. Only the lower crescent of her tail sent a sharp little wake running down the tide. Her stiff corpse did not flex; unaffected by wavelets tapping against her fin. Slowly, ponderously, she swung to the waves produced by their wake. All aggressive agency lost.

Her black eye had exhibited life by swallowing all light. A bottomless hole punctuating the great slab of her head. It was now opaque with a greasy gleam. Its nictating membrane half-occluding a cornea clouded in death.

Antone found a morbid rhyme frozen in this deaths-head. Remembering a gruesome, hand-carved crucifix he had known as a child. The village church’s sanctuary wrapped in gloom. Votive candles flickering to illuminate, animate, a figure writhing above the altar. In this dusk he recognizes the same twisted agony, bloody wounds. The crucifix wore a crown of thorns. Spiky and out of scale, tipped in blood-red paint, they made a strange inversion to these teeth before him. In this image he recognized hunger. Never to be satisfied.

Any consideration of redemption was lost on him. As was the ragged aggression this shark embodied. Shark and savior fell into a rough equivalence. A shared misery of bloodshed and loss.

Chopping away at her fins the crew had hacked at the torn net. Her carcass dropped into the sea in stages. No one mourned. There was no empty tomb….

She was abandoned to drift away under a halo of gulls: Harpies or angels, flapping wings and cutting cries. Along with a widening circle of unseen scavengers below, they sought to simply wrest a bit of sustenance from her squandered treasure. Asking for nothing more than a chance to persevere.

Three was originally published in Navigating Shoal Hope on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hunched over in the lee of the deck coaming Antone’s back rests against the forward bulkhead. The sun full on his face. Out of the breeze. A cloth-cap crammed on his head. Ear-muffs push his ears out. Tips bent at right angles. A short grizzle of beard thickens into a buzz-cut. Hair a more neutral gray than his sallow skin. Face crisscrossed with a myriad of fine wrinkles. Deeper furrows line his forehead and cut between bushy brows. His face culminates in a bulbous, potato-nose. Rosacea spreads from it to bloom across his cheeks.

His eyes, once dark, are bleached, bleary. Bloodshot, resignedly so. Whites like clotted cream. Irises clouded by ripening cataracts. Tufts of wiry hairs protrude from his nostrils and ears. A worn, gray corduroy shirt. A green corduroy jacket. All four buttons done. Its collar turned up. Corduroy trousers, not the match to the jacket, patched at the knees, frayed at the hems, fall over the tops of a pair of salt-stained brown-broughams on sock-less feet. His left shoe tied with marlin. The right with a too-short lacing done in a square-knot.

A short man, wizened to a fraction of his former bulk, his hands appear immense, broader than they are long. He holds his fists loosely clenched. Short fingers, segmented, red, like a boiled lobster’s claws. His right pinky is missing two joints. Thick, yellow, claw-like nails appear to cut into his flesh.

Pain of every sort, loss of every kind, mark every inch of him. A caged self-preservation, more will worn into habit expressed in his every move. Three decades alone in a dory. Fogs and gales on the Grand Banks. Baiting trawl, setting trawl, hauling trawl. Forking a half ton of Cod onto a schooner’s deck. Gutting, splitting, and packing salted carcasses into a pitching hold. Baiting trawl again. His only respite, a few hours perched on a narrow shelf against the bow planking, booming and hissing in the schooners’ passage through those cold, agitated seas.

Absolute solitude in the dory. On board the schooner he was always bumping and rubbing and cursing and fighting with the other fishermen on deck, in the culling pens, or at the bait boards. Below in the hold, shoveling rock salt, layering flattened Cod, like frozen shirts picked off a winter clothesline. Slurping soup elbow to elbow under a gyrating kerosene lantern. Snoring and farting inches from his fellows, a rag of frayed flannel curtain and a pine bunk-board the only separation of mine from thine.

Spells ashore, between trips and between berths, became longer as he dropped from high-liner to has-been and the Salt Bank Fishery faded along with him. He now had the curse of free time. No-one to enforce discipline. Never alone in town, he gravitated to the fisherman’s tavern on Front Street, dark and close. Stale tobacco-smoke. The stench of sour beer, sweat tangled with the sharp-sweet scent of pine-tar and a pervasive, pungent stench of fish-gurry. These talismans of a life at sea never leave him.

Hiding in the bar failed to bring anonymity. Fellow denizens had all been his shipmates at one time or another. On the street he’s surrounded by people from his home island.

In the dory. Alone with gasping Codfish. Intestines bulging from bellies swollen by decompression. Eyes goggling in the drying wind. Blinded by the searing light of day. Crimson gills flex spasmodically seeking to draw oxygen from the air. Useless to them without the cold comfort of dark, deep water. Fish piled higher and higher, forty to sixty pounds each, three to five feet long. Head to tail and tail to head. Golden or greenish. Slipping inexorably from fresh alarm — indignant at such a rude interruption — they fade through dogged resistance to arrive at a fatal resignation. A glazed-eyed acceptance of what they have no capacity to understand. No power to change.

Antone presided over this harvest, day in day out, year in year out. Going through endless motions that only habit gave him the strength to accomplish. Pulling a trawl-line up over his dory’s bow, sharp, wire leaders digging into his flesh with their live weight. Swinging a gob-stick, stunning each fish as he flung it aboard. His mind was never there in the dory. As the bait went out or the fish came in lines of trawl were his rosary. Hooks and bait and fish beads on which to hang his regrets.

On a long, protected shore it was possible to erect a structure at the edge of shoal water that would interrupt the passage of schools of fish swimming parallel to the beach to send them, first seaward, and finally concentrate them into a circling mass to be dip-netted into a trap boat.

Fish traps likes these off Beach Point developed from an ancient technique following a simple underlying principle: Block a school’s intended path along a contour and they will instinctively turn for deeper water. Array a set of barriers to channel their desire to escape into an ever tighter enclosure and you have them.

The earliest fish traps were built by hunter gatherers in many parts of the world. A wall of closely spaced stakes running out from the shore, arcing into a spiral that turns back in on itself. Fish enter. Their one and only thought defeated, they remain trapped to be collected.

Elegantly simple, these traps were hard to build. Tall, wispy saplings had to be cut, stripped of branches and bark, driven into the bottom, and tied together to make a screen. Minor storms waves smashed into them instead of washing through. Eel-grass, mowed by a storm’s breakers, clogged them so that fish would avoid the trap. Foot-long tendrils, waving in the current, a warning to stand clear.

Yankee ingenuity focused on this ancient tool as it had on so many others in the Nineteenth Century. Piles rigged with panels of netting. A long perpendicular barrier, running for a thousand feet out from the shore formed the Leader.

A pair of cupped chambers, the Hearts, channeled fish from either side of the Leader through a Gate into a final chamber, the Bowl. These nets acted as fences. Their bottoms roughly conforming to the sand below. The Bowl was arranged in two parts: A Bottom Panel had lead sinkers around its perimeter. It ran under the Gate. The Rim hung around the Bowl and was strung to the Bottom. Sheets and halyards allowed the Bowl’s nets to be drawn up to dry and to clear them of weed.

The entrance to the Bowl was left open until the net was full. The Hearts presented curving walls between the Leader and the Gate. The momentum of circling schools sent them circling until the boat arrived. Reluctance to change direction sealed their fate.

Traps were set in pairs or groups of threes. The outer-most sat in about forty-five feet of water. It had the longest piles, the freshest gear, and was called the Offshore Trap. The next was predictably, the Middle Trap. The innermost, the Skunk, was constructed of the oldest, hand-me-down gear.

Seventy-five foot long Hickory poles were delivered from Down-East by schooner to this tree-less place. Set by crews working from a Pound Scow in early Spring. This was a sailing barge fitted with a tall gantry on one end used to drive them into the hard sand. Pumped water pressure loosened the sand as the butt-end of a pile was pounded down. Before these pumps were motorized, the scows carried a pair of gang-handles similar to those on horse-drawn fire engines.

Pilings stood vertically or nearly so. They trailed along the Leader in a long line. The ones supporting the Bowl were splayed outwards, guyed by a tracery of lines. This gave the Bowl the look of a ragged crown.

Waves washed through these traps much more freely than the old sapling weirs; but algae and barnacles still grew on them. Marine-borers would honeycomb pilings. To counteract this they were dipped in Creosote and nets were soaked in a concoction of strong copper-salts mixed with Pine-tar.

To kill algae and barnacles and clear away eelgrass entrapped in the Bowls they were raised out of the water periodically. Brailed, like so many sails, every two weeks during the season. From a distance this gave the traps a sinister appearance, like giant woolly-spiders. From the right angle, this resemblance was uncanny. Blocks hanging in the rigging suggesting the many eyes of a Tarantula.

Traps looked menacing from above. They were deadly to those approaching from below. Fish never saw the contraption as a whole. They simply reacted to a barrier by turning away from shore. They congregated in the Bowl, forming a growing, restless mass.

They would maintain their normal routines as best they could, schooling by species, hunting or avoiding predators in a tilted world where straight-ahead no longer existed and every turn only took them around again back to where they started.

As their concentrations tightened bursts of panic swept the enclosures. An endless circling might create — in the right conditions of calm, slack water — a whirlpool. Faint yet visible evidence of an aquatic Tarantella. A dance no more effective than its medieval counterpart at protecting its adherents from sudden death.

Two was originally published in Navigating Shoal Hope on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Shafts of light tremble in the darkness between pilings. Patches of eelgrass loom, looking like holes in the bright, yellow sand. Foot-wide starfish quiver, as though painted on the underside of ripples. Moon-snails wander at the heads of meandering trails, a bulge of sand curling off each side like the wake of a steam tug chasing the scent of salvage. Sand eels shiver and coalesce. Schools, turning, disappear under the shadows of a flock of terns, Dah-Ta-Da, dee-te-dee. Overhead for a moment. Lost down the breeze. Sharp-pointed, sharp-crooked wings slicing into the fish below.

Joe C lies perched, bent over an engine block, half-in, half-out of the cuddy at the stern of the Nellie & Mary. A trap boat docked in a bit of open water under the fish house, nestled between draggers, crammed together three-abreast at the end of Railroad Wharf. The arc of Provincetown Harbor’s shoreline shelves gradually out to deep water. The wharf is nearly a quarter of a mile long. Spindly tarred-pilings rise a dozen feet out of the water on this falling tide.

Half upside down to get around the hot exhaust; its cast-iron elbow inches from his forehead; he concentrates on a hex-head bolt, turning a rusty wrench almost beyond reach. It slips. Fresh blood smears a swollen knuckle, tearing open old scabs.

He’s locked in an intimate embrace with mute iron. Hard, sharp edges, snaky cables, convoluted piping jab at him. He lays across the engine, spark plug to hip, chest to magneto, “Gohd damn you bitch…, I’ll get you yet!” Spitting out whispered threats through the gaps in his teeth.

Remembering the old two-cycle one-lunger, Cross between a cider-press and a giant treadle sewing-machine. That was a good’en! Bearin’s wore out? Manny pou’ahd new ones. Crankshaft broke? He welded it back togeth’ah. Scavenged what he cou’n’t make.

Damn old wat’ah-jack-it rusted out. Always ov’ah heatin’.

He smiles, Scrounged this sweet fo’ah-cylind’ah off’n a mot-a-cah. Not many out he’ah on the Cape. Ow’ah fi’st auto-mobile accident! Summ’ah-kid flipped it. Broke his neck. Family spent more than the car was wo’th on a casket to carry his body home… left the wreck behind.

Joe C wants this bit of maintenance out of the way before the crew arrives. Fisherman neglect their equipment. Always have. Focus on the job not the tools. This is different. His eyes linger on a gleaming valve-cover….

He’s reluctant to let anyone see this. Working the boat his mantle of command shields him. He spits and curses when things break. Splutters at his crew as often as at their gear or their catch. They can’t touch me!

This is different.

We might not guess at the roots of Joe C’s ruin; but the results are clear enough. Every detail of his past is known to everyone. His whole world circumscribed within a few miles of this spot. He’s tied to these pilings, under the drip of melting ice from the fish house. In ear-shot of the panting shunt engine, waiting for stacks of crates of iced Cod and Haddock, Butterfish and Whiting, barrels of brined Mackerel packed into a line of vault-topped box-cars.

Fish-house boys of twelve or fourteen, forty-five or seventy-five, armored in stiff, waxed-canvas aprons, sweat and freeze in ill-fitting rubber boots. Never free of the stench of fish-guts gone sour, hauling wire-basket loads from the boat-holds below, weighing and boxing and icing the catch. They wheel handcarts stacked with over-stuffed, rosiny-pine fish-crates. Slipping and sliding across a cracked, slick floor, to the loading dock and up a narrow ramp into waiting rail-cars.

Turreted-houses of retired whaling captains and merchants stand sheltered from the waterfront that’s been the source of their wealth. The measured tick of wall-clocks envelope them in serenity. Slippered feet pad on damask rugs. Tired eyes shielded from harsh glare by thick, alizarin-crimson drapes. High-line fisherman stride down the wharf under bowler-hats, black suits and high, starched stiff-collars. Meanwhile these fish-house boys toil under the glare of a green-visored foreman, keeping the count of weights and tallies.

With these as his only witnesses, Joe C can relax for a moment. Enjoy his new found fastidiousness. The drain-plug takes on weight in his fingers, slipping from its hole, “Ah. There it goes….” Blood-warm oil spurts between his fingers. Dirty-black, it runs fast, dripping into the bilge, taking the last of the engine’s warmth with it.

Out! Out! Good thin’ I run her first. Werth it! Werkin’ ’round a hot engine. Bett’ah ‘an huggin’ an icy block! His gaze rises up from the cool, deep shadows under the wharf. Runnels of oil, black-red, course down his forearm. Its mineral sharpness stings the wet-sores and line-cuts on his hands. He’s well used to its slippery warmth, “The’ah, y’a Bastahd!”

Quick results. A monumental success, “Got ’ya now!” Replacing the plug, wrenching it tight.

Pop… Pop! He levers the caps off a row of bottles rattling in a wire-bail rack. Fresh, golden oil arcs into a tin-funnel jammed in the fill-hole. He wipes dribble spilled on the head, So it won’t bern lat’ah. Imagining sharp, acrid-blue smoke rising off spilled oil, searing on the red-hot manifold.

He tosses his used rag over the side. It floats away, leaving a trail of oil-sheen running down the current. A slick broadens to leeward. Sunlight reflects off its smooth surface, refracting into sharp, clear, clean colors: reds and violets, indigo and viridian, rippling in time to the harbor chop. Spiky, jagged contours transform into a lapping, sinusoidal undulation. Ripples smothered by the oil.

“I’ll be Gohd-damned if I’m gonna pump the Gohd-damned bilges myself! Where’s that little son-of-a-bitch!” Rising up to his full five foot-three he clears his throat with staccato hacks and splutters, sending a wad of thick spittle after the oil slick. “His job to pump the boat!”

Wharves and boats attract flocks of delicate gray and white Herring Gulls. Along with an occasional Great Black Back they roost on every available surface. Mottled white droppings, topped with clumps of fish bones and mangled cartilage, are everywhere, grim reminders of their epic digestions. The boy has already cleaned the boat once after this morning’s trip.

Stevie half-slides/half-shimmies down the stern line from the dock above. Joe C snaps his head around at the slap of a bare foot somewhere behind him. A shadow of movement flickers across the floorboards and settles on the thwart in front of him. He catches himself. Swivels, leveling a stream of curses spat-out with a glowering look. His arm raised instinctively to guard himself. He transforms this awkward gesture into a cuff aimed at Stevie’s head as he passes. He misses. Stares after him, pointing a sharp, accusatory finger.

A lean, slight frame. A certain hardness in his look gives out mixed signals of his age and maturity. Dark skin, a ruddy mahogany after the long summer. His hair bleached by the sun over mousy brown roots. His green-brown eyes reflect the dazzle off the water and glimmer with a sharp wit camouflaged behind a quick and practiced deference.

Circling old Joe C, Stevie steps nimbly from stern deck to side deck, balancing on its inch thick coaming before landing lightly on a thwart. He drops with a thud to the floorboards, ducking his head into the cubby under the foredeck, reaching for his worn string-mop and cedar bucket. He gets on with his work out of range of any blows that might be sent his way. The neutral angle of his bent back, the studied speed with which he gets on with his chores, take the edge off Joe C’s anger.

After one last parting, spat-out curse Joe C’s attention turns to a clamor of footsteps echoing from the pier above. It’s two of his hands, Sammy and Josey, eyes betraying their rapidly dissolving smiles. Faces hidden, silhouetted against the afternoon sun. He can’t be sure. Joe C stiffens anyway, reacting to a half-remembered chuckle heard through the bustle coming from the fish-house.

Sammy is one of those large young men who still manages to be impossibly light on his feet. Over two hundred pounds, jowly. Baby fat already turning to a middle-aged double-chin. He swings his bulk around a piling as he prepares to slide down a spindly ladder ending in an abbreviation of missing and broken slimy rungs five feet above the deck. Deftly stepping over the edge, he twists, sliding down its rails, jumping, and coming to rest on the thwart right in front of Joe C.

His red and black plaid shirt open to the waist shows a tanned vee of skin on a not quite hairless chest. A bit of pale paunch peaks from a gap at his waist. Dungarees rolled up almost to the knee. His thigh clenches as he steps down onto the floorboards. The fabric shining black-green with a patina of wear and grime. Recognizing that towering five-foot ten over Joe C might not be the best thing, he steps down and forward, dipping and turning, mumbling, “Afternoon, Cap’n.” into his sleeve.

Josey follows. He might be Sammy’s twin without his vibrant vitality. It’s as if he’s made up of cast-offs and left-over scraps of his cousin’s physique. Their parents came from a village on the little island of Fáial in the Azores. The same age, they’ve been inseparable since childhood, running hoops along Provincetown’s boardwalk sidewalks, playing forts in the scrubby woods behind the cemetery. Sammy is sought-after as a hard worker. It’s just expected that any boss must take them on as a pair.

They have dark black hair. Sammy’s is prematurely peppered with gray, poking out from under his black knit-cap. His open shirt his only concession to the still-warm season. In Winter he’ll sport a heavier wool-shirt over the one he now wears. Neck still bare. The red tops of wool socks bulging above black rubber boots.

Joe C stares at his crew as they go about their chores. They, in turn, studiously ignore him. Only dropping a shoulder, mumbling, “Cap’n” as they move around the confined space.

Nellie & Mary doesn’t belong to old Joe C. Even such a rough and humble craft as this is beyond his means. The boat, the gear, the bottles of motor oil, and his greasy rag all belong to the East End Cold Storage Company, one of seven fish plants in town. It owns the traps, the pound-scows that build and service them. Its wharf lies about a mile away to the East. Its warehouse topped by a tracery of piping and metal tanks of its ammonia-condenser. Tons of frozen fish fill its vast concrete interior.

The company has one of the longest of a dozen wharves just in this end of town. They’re alongside Railroad Wharf to take delivery of a replacement net brought in on the noon train. A dark mound piled high above the dock by the tracks. Sepia brown layers of twine-mesh. A veil, weighing close to a thousand pounds. Sticky to the touch. Stepping on it on their way to the ladder, the boys felt the sharpness of its twine bite into their bare feet, leaving a crisscross residue of sticky tar. Creosote and copper salts stain their soles.

No one waits to be told what to do. All know what needs to be done. Space cleared. Gear stowed in preparation for lowering and flaking the net.
Joe C curses, Not here yet, “Damn ’im!” Thinking of Antone.

Old, almost sixty. A poor cousin to the plant foreman. Antone’s retired off a Salt Banker after her last voyage. Too old to get a berth on a schooner. Not welcome on one of the new draggers. He’s had no choice but to accept this place on a trap-boat.

A last corner of net runs through Sammy’s fingers. Josey and Stevie walk it into place, avoiding potential snags. They worry it past the ladder. Masses of barnacles and mussels encrust the lower reaches of the pilings. Joe C bends down, defending a clear space in front of his beloved engine. Ready to crank it to life as soon as they’re done.

Without the agility to attempt the ladder at this state of the tide Antone makes his way from the dockside to the fo’c’sle of a dragger, crossing its deck to that of its pair tied outboard. He drops over its rail with a huff, landing with a thud. Catching his breath, he accepts the last few feet of net lowered from the dock, folding it along with the rest. Brief nods of masked recognition pass between him and the rest of the crew.

Joe C ignores Antone’s arrival. Ducks into the cuddy. Opens the fuel petcock, the intake seacock, and checks the magneto. With a single sharp snap of the wrist he swings the starting crank. Lifting it away from the flywheel, he reaches for the throttle with his other hand, listening to the engine’s every sound as he adjusts its idle. Still warm and slick with fresh oil, it answers immediately. A couple of sharp backfires from its open carburetor are followed by a steadying Pup-pup-pup! Smoke shoots from its exhaust pipe angled aft under her stern. The noise scatters pigeons from their roosts under the fish-house. Echoes cross the water and reverberates between the pilings.

Sammy clears their dock lines with a pure animal grace. They arc down, one by one, as if he has gently placed them on the deck. Not dropped them a dozen feet. Forward spring, after spring, bow line…. He steps lightly down the ladder, the stern-line draped over his arm. No tension in it at all. Joe C steps aft from the engine house, shoving the shift lever into gear. A splash of prop-wash off her outboard rudder shoves Nellie & Mary away from the pilings.

The boat rests at the base of a U of open water between draggers tied two-abreast forward and three-abreast aft. She lunges into the narrow space between the prows of the boats ahead. Joe C reverses and gooses the throttle again. The boat stops, rearing up as the stern is pulled down. Two repetitions, back-and-fill, set the boat perpendicular to the dockside aiming for clear water.

They leave the soft gloom under the pilings, crossing angled shadows off roof peaks and high prows. Cross-trees and wheelhouses cut through the sharp sunlight of this Indian Summer afternoon. Dark, emerald green water, pooled in the shade, fizzes with ice green foam. They burst out onto a deep indigo sea flecked with pale cerulean. The short harbor chop reflecting a bright, warm sky.

Every departure, whether to the Grand Banks or to the nearest fish trap, produces at least a moment of peaceful contentment. Leaving the confines of this shadowy canyon satisfies. The labor of stowing the net is behind them. The departure itself is a distraction, freeing each of them from the weight of whatever ills they leave behind. Bright sunlight fills the dome of heaven. Fresh iodine strikes sharp in their nostrils. An vista opens ahead. Heading into open water they are held within the welcome embrace of the arm of the cape.

No-one talks. Joe C puts no more thought into maneuvering between the moored craft than he would crossing from his table to the sink in his own kitchen. Sammy and Josey recline on the front of the massive heap of netting, smoking. Sammy notes some chaffed gear on the bowsprit of a moored schooner as it rears overhead, smiling to himself over a remembered joke.

Josey, following his cousin’s gaze, smiles too with no thought to wonder why.
Stevie sits high on the pile, keeping Joe C’s face out of view behind a fold of netting. A purely instinctive defensive posture, If I can’t see him…. The old man’s shoulder comes in and out of sight as the boat jabs into a freshening chop. Little waves slap rhythmically against their bow. The boat’s motions exaggerated up here, It’s like riding a camel.

Turning his head he looks back towards the town, Stevie checks off a litany of familiar landmarks. His mind barely registers his inventory: the Universalist Church, the Water Tower, Town-Hall Clock. The crenelated stone pillar of the Pilgrim Monument rises above it all. To its right: the tall steeple of the Center Methodist Church, round-topped Mount Ararat, and beyond, staggered rows of pale cresting Dunes….

One was originally published in Navigating Shoal Hope on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.