The Souvenir

Since well before my sister and I learned to sit still on long car rides, my parents would pack us into the backseat on the first of August and drive the four and a half hours from New York to Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts, where, car and all, we would board the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.

For the two of us, August was the holy month.  The endless scheduling of school and summer camp was only a memory, and for this one month of the year, Martha and I got to make all the choices.  Often this led to dizzying repetition – how many times can you play mini-golf in one week? – but my mother quickly realized that it was not something worth arguing; happy children are a blessing, even if it means that every employee at Putter’s Paradise knows your name.

In August the days were long and hot, but not too long and too hot.  The sun was just a little softer than it had been in July – the perfect amount of warmth for rekindling bones chilled in the ocean.  Even the water had pleasantly warmed itself up over the summer months.  My dad could finally wear t-shirts for a week straight, and our dog could finally roam on the beach.  It was the little things that made August holy.

But the real highlight of the month was fishing with my grandfather in his boat.  The Souvenir was a relic, a thirty-two foot wooden bass boat built in 1962, with a black hull and cream decks.  The hold was lined with faded teal cushions that my grandmother had installed in the early seventies, and over which my grandfather had scattered an array of warped rods and rusted lures.  In the center of the deck was a massive box concealing the diesel engine that rumbled beneath.  The only one real seat on board was a long wooden bench placed in front of the steering wheel.  The bench was raised up high to see over the front of the boat, and, sitting on the engine box, you could lean against the bottom of the bench as a sort of second seat.

On this Saturday in mid-August, we got up early and packed sandwiches as we ate breakfast, my mom making sure to spread the mayonnaise on the bread and the sunscreen on the children.  My dad had flown in the night before from a week at work, and my grandfather, along with the Souvenir, had arrived a few days before that.  This was to be our first fishing trip of the summer.  After all going to the bathroom one last time, we drove down to Menemsha Harbor, praying for a parking spot, cursing the Massachusetts drivers, and noting any obscure license plates we saw along the way.

The first challenge of the fishing day was getting onboard.  The boat was tied in a perpendicular slip, with two or three feet of space left between the stern and the dock so that they wouldn’t knock together as the tide ebbed and swelled.  As any boy between the ages of five and ten is apt to do, I viewed getting on the boat as a leap of Olympic proportions.  My parents grabbed the lines and pulled the boat closer to the dock while I charged forward and leapt across the gap and into the boat, images in my head of sharks circling in the water below.  I then acted very brave and helpful, carrying boat bags and life jackets, but making sure not to get off the boat – one superhuman leap was enough for one day.

My dad removed the sheet of canvas covering the instruments, and plugged in the radar and sonar, rubbing off the dust and adjusting the dials.  He pulled out the choke and turned the key, letting the engine sputter and whine as the gears caught and began to turn.  A puff of smoke belched from the back of the boat and then the deck began to vibrate and Martha covered her ears.  My dad released the choke slowly, letting the engine drop to a gentle rumble.  Then my grandfather emerged from rummaging below and took his customary spot behind the wheel, his long brimmed cap hanging over his zinc-white nose.  He had been a lieutenant in the Navy in World War II, and I could picture him directing traffic in the Mediterranean as he guided my parents with his steady voice.  We untied the back of the boat and while I coiled the ropes my parents walked towards the front, preparing to release the bowlines as my grandfather eased the throttle with his left hand.  My mom balanced on her toes and made a swift move with the boat hook, snagging the rope and pulling it off the pylon as the boat eased by.  My parents walked back along the gunwales, coiling rope as they went until they could hop lightly back to the deck.  We coasted into the channel and passed the ends of the jetty, cormorants and overweight men basking on the boulders and occasionally fishing.  As we passed the big green buoy marking the entrance to the harbor, my grandfather pressed the throttle forward and the nose of the boat rose up out of the water as the propeller churned faster.  Our wake became long and white, cascading out from the stern of the boat like wings.

Our destination was always No Man’s Land, an uninhabited island southwest of the Vineyard, where my grandfather knew a particular area that was always ripe with fish.  Steep, rusted yellow cliffs jutted out from the short beaches and were topped with tufts of green scrub grass.  The island’s name was inspired by its history as a military test site from World War II until 1996.  Brightly painted signs dotted the beach, warning boaters of potentially undetonated explosives. Landing on the island was strictly illegal, and I secretly hoped that a patrolling fighter jet would appear on the horizon if we got too close.

Fishing, however, was not illegal, and whether or not bluefish are drawn to the vibrations of exploding shells, they came here in droves.  Through drinks or promises, my grandfather had coerced a local fisherman into giving him the coordinates of the spot, and once he had them, he never went anywhere else.

We let out the long lines with their alternating colors, counting the bands as they spun off the reel so we could know how much line had been released.  “Let’s start with three colors,” my grandfather said, “then go to four if they’re not biting.”

My dad laid his thumb on the line and released the reel, letting the line spin out and the lure wiggle into the murky water.  Checking to make sure that the lines were taut behind him, my grandfather ran the boat back and forth across the area, making big swooping turns so the lines would not cross and tangle.  On our second pass, the rod bent deep, pulsing with a thrashing fish, and my dad pulled it out of the holder and began to fight, leaning back and pulling the rod high, diving forward and reeling furiously.  All of a sudden the fish’s outline became visible and I could see its whole body struggling, thirty inches of unrelenting motion.  Then it broke the surface, water churning, my dad’s rod bending in a great arc as the fish was pulled into the boat.  The fish thrashed across the deck, leaving streaks of blood and fish-grime on the cream-colored surface.  Holding it down with one hand, my dad extracted the lure with a set of pliers, working carefully to avoid the sharp teeth.  My sister and I sat and stared, mesmerized by the wonder and terror of it all.

Three or four fish later, we looked around at each other and noticed that something special was happening.  We had been fishing for thirty minutes, but already had more fish than we usually caught in two hours.  We children were neither grumpy nor seasick, and not a single lure had been lost.  It was a good day.  We kept going.

While most fishing parties brought a large cooler filled with bags of ice, our container for holding fish was a brown plastic trashcan, cracked along the side and probably stolen from the back of the local fish market when my dad was a teenager.  After a quick children’s picture with the conquered beast, the fish would be dropped unceremoniously into the can, hosed with water, and left to sit on the deck as we let out the lines again.   Nibbling on a sandwich, my gaze was continually drawn to the fish as it sucked the air and beat the can with its tail until the life ran out and its eyes glazed over.  I did not enjoy the death of the fish particularly, but the conquest of it excited me.  I was amazed by the fact that this thing had been pulled from the deep, teeth gnashing, blood flowing from the place where the hook had broken through.  Keep your fingers away from the teeth, my dad always told me; a fisherman lost his finger once.  The bluefish had been wild with life only minutes before, but everything was calm and quiet in death.  I could touch those teeth now if I was brave enough.  By the time we got back to the harbor in the late afternoon, the strong, supple body had grown stiff and dull, frozen in the shape of the trashcan.

Once the boat was safely tied up and the radar packed away, my dad removed the fish from the trashcan one by one, hosed off any accumulated grime, and placed them in a plastic garbage bag.  A crowd of young children formed on the dock, whispering and pointing as fish after fish was raised out of the trashcan.  I stood by proudly, soaking up the praise of my peers – we had had a very good day on the water.  As the fish kept coming, my dad began to separate them into different bags, and looked questioningly at my grandfather.

Weren’t you counting? He said with his eyes.

Of course not, he grinned back; I thought you were counting.

“Well I definitely wasn’t counting!” I said out loud.

“Me neither!” said Martha.

My grandfather peered into the bags, counting with slight nods of his head.  Nine fish.  Even he – the man who out-eats all of us – recognized that this was too many.  We did the calculations – nine fish, ten to twelve pounds each, one hundred pounds of fish.  I stared down at more than my body’s weight in fish.  It was time for my grandfather to make some deals.

First he offered a fish to the boat next to us, a beautiful old light blue cruiser.  Phalarope was the only other wooden boat left in the harbor, and my grandfather had always had a special respect for it and its captain, a man only a few years my grandfather’s junior.  He kept his boat impeccably clean, and he was always out on the deck tinkering, making things perfect.  “He doesn’t go out very often,” my dad explained, “but when he does, he goes way out.  You can’t let anything go wrong when you’re all the way out there.”

I thought about how the Souvenir single-handedly kept the Menemsha Coast Guard Station in business with our engine failures and leaks, and had newfound respect for this man and his boat.  It was nice to have him docked next door, and the fish now resting in his fridge ensured that he would be keeping watch on the Souvenir in case it chose to spontaneously ignite again.

His deal with Phalarope finished, my grandfather shuffled down the docks towards the fish market – “Betty Larsen should be willing to make a trade,” he told us.

He returned fifteen minutes later, grinning slightly to himself, the greatest sign of happiness I’ve ever seen him show.  “She’ll give us six lobsters and a pound of steamers each.” He paused.  “I told her they were big ones.”

My dad laughed and gathered the six remaining fish in the trash bag.  We would be eating well tonight.

After making the swap, my dad set up shop on a plastic cutting table attached to the dock and began to fillet our remaining fish.  I ran over to watch but my sister avoided the show, instead going to get candy with my mom.  She has been allergic to fish her entire life, and she had had enough of it for one day.  While Martha could handle catching the fish, seeing it transformed into the food that she knew she could not eat was of no interest to her.  Watching my dad cut open the fish was a more complete form of death in her mind than watching it thrash on the deck, and she did not want to see it.

Grabbing the tail of the fish my dad removed the scales, combing against the grain with a device that looked halfway between a hairbrush and a vegetable peeler.  The iridescent flakes fell in showers around his feet and clung to his hands.  Once the body of the fish had been stripped bare, he washed away the discarded scales with a hose and laid the fish on its side on the clean surface.  He removed the long thin fillet knife from its leather pouch and placed it on the fish, measuring quickly with his fingers and making a deep cut directly behind the front fin.  Sliding the knife parallel to the spine, he began to cut towards the tail, lifting off the translucent, red-flecked flesh as he went and exposing the skeleton beneath.

When both fillets were finished, the bluefish carcass lay naked on the table, its head and tail still perfectly intact but its body gaunt and bloody.  I tried to think back to when this fish had been pulled out of the water, glistening and vibrating in the sun.  It had only been a couple of hours ago but you never could have recognized it now.  My dad carefully placed the two fillets in a bag with ice and tossed the carcass in a trash bag with a little ice of its own – when we went to the beach in a couple of days, it would be the perfect bait for catching crabs.

That night at home my dad performed the ritual of lighting the charcoal grill while my mother and my sister and I shucked corn in the early evening light.  We sat on the porch and tore the green husks into old grocery bags, making sure to get as many of the little hairs off as possible.  Martha and I competitively compared our cobs, each contesting that we had shucked the perfect ear of corn.  My mother smiled and watched quietly as the bowl of clean ears filled quickly.  She had tricked us again.

I watched my dad salt and pepper the fillets and lightly coat them with olive oil.  When the coals were glowing red he laid the fish out on the grill, skin-side down, and it began to sizzle and crisp.  The gray-blue skin shriveled and blackened, and the translucent flesh slowly grew opaque.

Tired of watching the fish cook I helped my mom set the table on the screened-in porch, folding napkins and carrying plastic cups of water.  When everything was ready my dad brought the fish out on large platter and placed it in the center of the table.  As he began to cut into the soft white flesh he said, “What a beautiful fish.  Harry, you helped reel it in, you can pick the first piece.”

I lifted myself up from my chair and peered over the table at the long fillets.  “That one,” I said, pointing to a thick piece that must have once resided in the very middle of the fish, right under the dorsal fin.

“Good choice,” my dad said, and scooped the piece onto my plate.

I looked down at the cooked fish and, poking it with my fork, imagined the path it had taken that day.  I thought of how the fish had thrown itself from the glistening water, how the beautiful translucent flesh had been separated from the bone, and how that had all led up to this moment where it sat on my plate no longer glistening with salt water but with olive oil.

I forked a few rapid bites into my mouth and then sat back, savoring – it was delicious.