The Bonac I Owe

As an infant and a boy, my East Hampton was a place of summer cottages, grownups in white flannels with tennis racquets under their arms. At night in our upstairs beds my brother and I lay awake listening to dinner-party laughter. Sometimes we could feel the house tremble as waves fell hard on the nearby ocean beach. Back in the city after Labor Day alone in my room, I wished for those waves.

They were speaking to me. I knew it, even though I could not comprehend all they said. That came later.

I understood more after an early September adventure, a few days before I would have to leave for boarding school. I was 12, and Janet Morris piled my brother and me and her two sons into her station wagon for an afternoon of snapper fishing at Three Mile Harbor. We would fish from the breakwater on the channel's east side. But first, we needed bait.

A finely knit net of such small mesh it could have been crocheted, the bait seine had poles at each end. "Now, John," Janet Morris said, "hold the pole straight up and wade out. I'll hold mine on shore and together we'll pull the net along. When I tell you, swing around and walk your end back to the beach."

Wading into Gardiner's Bay until its waters lapped at my skinny shoulder blades, I leaned into that warm sea, tugging the net with me, feeling its weight as it bulged, bowed by the bay within.

After a sweep of perhaps 40 feet, Janet called, "Now come ashore." As I reached the beach, she moved closer, and together we backed up the slope of the shore. And as more and more of the seine slipped free of the sea, it came alive.

There under the brilliant afternoon sun of that diamond of an early autumn day, my life changed forever, its center discovered. For nothing I had yet seen had entered my consciousness as gloriously as the creatures that blazed silver in the heart of that net.

The way they caught the light as they tossed, the sheer surprise of their presence in waters I had never guessed held such treasures, the entire moment of discovery flooded me with a delight far beyond the reality of our haul.

There were spearing, the silversides that were our quarry. There were silver-dollar-sized sand crabs, spindly brown spider crabs, flat-sided infant butterfish, luminous, round as coins; strange, sand-colored fish with wide heads and spines, and a sand dab larger than my hand, its translucent thinness so acute I could see the patterns of its internal anatomy outlined in the pale mysteries of its presence.

I recognized my future, gleaming there at that small seine's heart. Feeling those cool, scaled, and silver creatures quivering at my wet palm, I knew. I truly did. For I had met for the first time what I once had been and would one day become.

Fifteen years later, after school, college, and a World War, I walked away from a good job in the city and headed for East Hampton, where I had no job. But I did have Jimmy Reutershan, a good friend, a best friend. That first fall and winter, he gave me a room in his Newtown Lane home and we began fishing together. For I was determined to discover more of the treasure I had glimpsed that afternoon at Three Mile Harbor.

My search lasted eight years, eight years of working on the water. And I discovered much more than fish. I discovered East Hampton. I found it when I clammed alone in my small skiff in Napeague Harbor right through December and January when the beach froze hard as marble. Digging with tongs for chowder clams as big as cobblestones, I could look out to the northwest over Gardiner's Bay and think about summer nights spent in Dick Hamilton's Jersey skiff with its runaround net piled in her stern.

Hamilton fished "on the fire," the phosphorescent wakes left by rocketing bluefish as they surged under our bow. Often I waited in the stern from sunset to sunrise, hoping for my captain's cry, "Let her go, Jawn!"

We fished off Gardiner's Island, where I once spent a summer clamming and laboring to improve the island's salt ponds. We fished off the Promised Land fish factory, where I worked another part of another summer mending huge purse seines set from bunker steamers skippered by fine fishermen like Capt. Norman Edwards, one of my heroes.

And when we did find bluefish, we tossed them in back of Hamilton's truck when we got ashore and rushed them to Ted Lester's fish-packing plant in Amagansett, where we washed and weighed and iced and boxed and tagged our catch in large, damp rooms slippery with pearly fish scales and cement floors awash in shining water. Many days and nights I fished and worked 16 or 20 hours.

I hauled ocean seines and rowed a net-heavy dory with Jimmy and Peter, pulling through the same waves that had once made the house tremble. I mated for charter boat skippers out of Montauk, yanking bluefish and striped bass and school tuna over the transom until my arms ached.

For I was obsessed by the sea and its wonders.

Yet I was not blind. I began to understand the strengths of the men and women I worked with. I came to comprehend their heritage: more than 300 years of fishing and farming from Mecox to Montauk. Every bay, every pothole, every pond, every point, every channel, every harbor, and, of course, the rolling, roaring sweep of the Atlantic . . . all of it the soul of that heritage.

I had learned next to nothing before those eight years. I haven't learned much since. Surely nothing as valuable. My life's course was set for me by those men and women, the sea and its wonders.

What I hope most is for those presences to endure.

John N. Cole now lives in Maine. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Maine Times and is the author of several books, including "Striper," about his fishing years here.