The Bottom of the Harbor (20 page)

         

The riverman I know best is an old-timer named Harry Lyons. Harry is seventy-four, and has been around the river all his life. He lives with his wife, Mrs. Juel Lyons, in a two-story frame-and-fieldstone house backed up against the base of the Palisades, on Undercliff Avenue, in the upper part of Edgewater. He owns a shad barge and an assortment of boats, and keeps them anchored just off the riverbank, a few minutes' walk from his house. Harry is five feet six, and weighs a hundred and fifty. He is one of those short, hearty, robust men who hold themselves erect and swagger a little and are more imposing than many taller, larger men. He has an old-Roman face. It is strong-jawed and prominent-nosed and bushy-eyebrowed and friendly and reasonable and sagacious and elusively piratical. Ordinarily, down on the riverfront, he looks like a beachcomber: he wears old pants and a windbreaker and old shoes with slashes cut in them, and he goes bareheaded and his hair sticks straight up. One day, however, by chance, I ran into him on a River Road bus, and he was on his way to a funeral down in Weehawken, and he was wearing his Sunday clothes and his hair was brushed and his face was solemn, and I was surprised at how distinguished he looked; he looked worldly and cultivated and illustrious.

Harry spends a large part of his time wandering up and down the riverfront looking at the river, or sitting on his barge looking at the river, but he isn't lazy. He believes in first things first; if there is anything at home or on the barge that should be attended to, he goes ahead and attends to it, and then sits down. He is handy with tools, and has a variety of skills. He is a good fisherman, a good netmaker, a fairly good carpenter, a fairly good all-round mechanic, and an excellent fish cook. He is especially good at cooking shad, and is one of the few men left who know how to run an old-fashioned Hudson River shad bake. Shad bakes are gluttonous springtime blowouts that are held in the middle or latter part of the shad season, generally under the trees on the riverbank, near a shad barge. They are given by lodges and labor unions, and by business, social, political, and religious organizations, and by individuals. Former Mayor Wissel—he was Mayor of Edgewater for thirty years—used to give one every year for the public officials in Edgewater and nearby towns.

When Harry is engaged to run a bake, he selects a sufficient number of roe shad from his own nets and dresses them himself and takes the roes out of them. He has a shad boner come up from Fulton Fish Market and bone them. Then, using zinc roofing nails, he nails them spread-eagle fashion to white-oak planks, one fish to a plank; the planks are two feet long, a foot and a half wide, and an inch thick, and have adjustable props fixed to their sides so that it is possible to stand them upright or tilt them backward. He nails two or three strips of bacon across each fish. When it is time to cook the fish—they aren't baked, they are broiled—he props the planks up, fish-side foremost, in a ring around a bed of char-coal that has been burning on the ground for hours and is red-hot and radiant. He places the planks only six inches or so from the coals, but he gradually moves them farther back, so that the fish will broil slowly and pick up the flavors of the bacon and the oak; they broil for almost an hour. Every so often, he takes a turn around the ring and thoroughly mops each fish with a cotton mop, which he keeps dipping into a pot of melted butter. While Harry looks after the shad, Mrs. Lyons looks after the roes, cooking them in butter in huge frying pans. Pickled beets and new potatoes boiled in their skins are usually served with the shad and the roe. Paper plates are used. The people eat on tables made of boards laid across sawhorses, and are encouraged to have several helpings. Cooked shad-bake style by an expert, shad is crusty on the outside and tender and rich and juicy on the inside (but not too rich, since a good deal of the oil has been broiled out of it), and fully justifies its scientific name,
Alosa sapidissima,
the
“Alosa”
of which means “shad” and the
“sapidissima”
of which means “good to eat to a superlative degree.” Shad bakes require a lot of work, and most of them are small affairs. Some years, the New Jersey Police Chiefs' Association gives a big one. Some years, a group of boss fishmongers in Fulton Market gives a big one. Some years, the Palisades Interstate Park Commission gives a big one. The biggest on the river is one that Harry and Mrs. Lyons have been giving for over twenty years for the benefit of the building fund of Mrs. Lyons' church. This bake is held on the riverbank a short distance above the George Washington Bridge, usually on the Sunday following Mother's Day Sunday, and every year around two hundred and fifty people come to it.

Mrs. Lyons is a handsome, soft-spoken blond woman, quite a few years younger than Harry. She is a native of Fort Lee, the next town on the river north of Edgewater. Her maiden name was Kotze, her parents were Swiss-German, and she was brought up a Roman Catholic. When she was a young woman, out of curiosity, while visiting a friend in Brooklyn, she attended a meeting of a congregation of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is the oldest and most widespread of several schismatic branches of the Mormon religion. A number of prophecies and warnings from the Book of Mormon, an apocalyptic Mormon scripture, were read at the meeting, and she was deeply impressed by them. She borrowed a copy of the Book and studied it for some weeks, whereupon she left the Catholic Church and joined the Reorganized Church. The congregation with which she is affiliated holds its services in a hall in the Masonic Temple in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Harry was brought up an Episcopalian, but he doesn't feel strongly about denominations—one is as good as another to him—and since his marriage he has gone regularly to the Reorganized Church services. Harry and his wife have one daughter, Audrey. She is a member of the Reorganized Church, and went to Graceland College, a junior college sponsored by the church, in Lamoni, Iowa. She is married to John Maxcy, who is a Buick salesman in Englewood, New Jersey, and they have two children—Michele, who is sixteen, and Brian, who is eleven.

Harry is generally supposed to know more about the river than any of the other rivermen, and a great deal of what he knows was handed down to him; his family has lived beside the river for a long time, and many of his ancestors on both sides were rivermen. He has old Dutch blood and old English blood, and gravestones of ancestors of his are all over the Edgewater Cemetery. He is related to several of the oldest families in New York and New Jersey. Through his mother, who was a Truax, he is a descendant of Philippe du Trieux, one of the first settlers of New York City. Du Trieux was a Walloon who lived in Amsterdam and who came to New Amsterdam in 1624 and built a house either on a lane that is now Beaver Street or on a lane that is now Pearl Street—the historians aren't sure which. A scholarly study of his descendants—the name has been spelled Truex or Truax for generations—was published in installments in
The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record
in 1926, 1927, and 1928. In this study, Harry is listed in the tenth generation of descent from du Trieux.

Harry was born in the upper part of Edgewater, in May, 1884. The house in which he was born is still standing; it is just up the street from the house he lives in now. He went to school in what people of his generation in Edgewater refer to as “the old schoolhouse.” This was a wooden building on River Road, on a bluff above the river. It had only two rooms—one for the lower grades and one for the upper grades—and was torn down many years ago. I once heard several old-timers sitting around the barge stove in Ingold's garage get on the subject of the old schoolhouse. One of them, former Fire Chief Lasher, said that he had gone to it, and mentioned a number of men around town who had gone to it at the same time, among them Bill Ingold and Charlie Allison and Harry Lyons, and I asked him what kind of student Harry Lyons had been. “Oh, Harry was bright enough, but he was like the rest of us—he didn't apply himself,” Chief Lasher said. “All he studied was the river. At recess, he'd race down to the river and fool around in the mud and attend to some old eelpot he had down there, or crab trap, or bait car, or whatever it was, and I've never in my life seen anybody get so muddy. He was famous for it. He'd get that sticky river mud all over him, and he wouldn't even try to get it off. Some days, when recess was over, he'd be so muddy the teacher wouldn't let him come back in—she'd send him home. I've been watching rivermen a long time, and they're all like that; they love the mud. Harry's nickname was Hotch. People in Edgewater used to have an expression, if they wanted to say that somebody or something was unusually muddy, they'd say that he or she or it was as muddy as Hotch Lyons. Once in a long while, you still hear somebody come out with that expression. I was standing in line in the A. & P. one day last summer and just ahead of me were two ladies my age. I went to school with them, and I remember them when they were little girls, and I remember them when they were young women, and I remember them when they were middle-aged women in the prime of life, and I imagine the same thought that crosses my mind when I look at them nowadays must also cross their minds when they look at me—How fast time flew! So we were standing there, and one of them turned to the other and said, ‘The rain this morning beat down my tomato bushes, and I went out and tried to straighten them up, and I got as muddy as Hotch Lyons,' and all three of us burst out laughing. It brought back the old times.”

Harry's father, William Masters Lyons, was an engineer on the Edgewater ferry. Harry was never as close to him as he was to his maternal grandfather, Isaac Truax, who was a riverman. “My father had a good disposition, but he was serious,” Harry says. “My grandfather Truax would say things that were funny—at least, to me. He would mimic people and say awful things about them. When I was just a little tiny boy, I began to eat most of my meals at his house and follow him around. He was a great one for going out on the river in the wind and the rain and all kinds of weather, and I'd go along. And then, on a nice sunshiny day, when he should've been out on the river, he'd sit on the porch and read. He didn't have much education, and he didn't even think much of schools, but he had three books that he liked—two books of Shakespeare's writings that had come down to him from his father, and a big Bible with pictures in it that would lift the hair on your head—and he'd sometimes read things to me and explain them, or try to.”

Mr. Truax shadfished, and set fykes. A fyke is a long, tunnel-like net that is set on or close to the bottom. It is held open by a series of wooden hoops; a pair of wings flaring out from its mouth guide fish into it; and it catches a little of everything. The spring when Harry was fifteen, Mr. Truax made an unusually large fyke and set it in an inshore channel of the river, off Fort Lee, and Harry quit school to help him operate it. “I decided it was about time for me to graduate from school,” Harry says, “so I graduated out the back door.” Once or twice a week, if fish prices were good in the city, Mr. Truax and Harry would empty the fyke and row or sail their catch down to one of the riverfront markets in lower Manhattan. Sometimes they would go to Gansevoort Market or Washington Market, on the Hudson, and sometimes they would keep on and go around the Battery to Fulton Market, on the East River. Mr. Truax owned a horse and wagon. If prices were poor, he and Harry would drive out in the country and sell their fish at farmhouses. “My grandfather knew all the fish-eating country people in this part of Bergen County,” Harry says, “and they liked to see him coming down the road. If they didn't have any money to spend he'd swap them fish for anything they had, and we'd go home with a wide variety of country produce in the wagon—sausage meat and head-cheese and blood pudding and hard cider and buttermilk and duck eggs and those good old heavy yellow-fleshed strong turnipy-tasting turnips that they call rutabagas, and stuff like that. One day, we drove up in a man's yard, and he had just cut down a bee tree in the woods in back of his house, and we swapped him a bucket of live eels for a quart of wild honey.”

When Harry was nineteen, Mr. Truax gave up fishing with fykes and began to depend entirely on what he made from shadfishing. For ten years or so, Harry helped him fish a couple of rows of shad nets in the spring, and worked the rest of the year at jobs he picked up on or around the river. He worked mostly as a deckhand on tugboats. He worked on two of the Valvoline Oil Company's tugs, the
Magnet
and the
Magic Safety,
and on several of the tugs in the New York, New Haven & Hartford's fleet. Mr. Truax died in 1913, aged eighty-four. For three years thereafter, Harry fished a row of shad nets of his own and set a fyke of his own. In 1915, he got married, and began to worry about money for the first time in his life. In 1916, a fireman's job became open in the Edgewater Fire Department, and he took it. Edgewater has three firehouses. Firehouse No. 1, in which Harry was stationed, is on River Road, a few yards north of the site of the old schoolhouse. It faces the river, and it has a wooden bench in front of it. “Before I joined the Fire Department,” Harry once said, “my main occupation was sitting down looking at the river. After I joined the department, that continued to be my main occupation, only I got paid for it.” He was a fireman for twenty-six years, and was allowed to take a leave of absence every spring and fish a row of shad nets. He became eligible for a pension in 1942. On April 1st of that year, at the start of the shad season, he retired, and resumed his life as a full-time riverman.

In the spring, Harry sets shad nets. In the fall, he sets eelpots. Some days, he goes crabbing. Now and then, in every season, not for money but for fun and for the table, he fishes with a hand line or a bamboo pole or a rod and reel. He is an accomplished baitcaster, and it is a pleasure to watch him stand on the bank and cast a knot of bloodworms to the outer edge of the flats, out past the wrecks, and bring in a striped bass. He isn't a striped-bass snob, however, and he often joins the old men and women who come down to the river on sunny afternoons and pole-fish from the bank for anything at all that will bite. Many of the old men and women are opinionated and idiosyncratic, and he enjoys listening to them, and observing the odd rigs that they devise and the imaginative baits that they use. Around Edgewater, catfish and tomcod and lafayettes and eels are about the only fish that can be caught close to the bank, but that is all right with Harry; he doesn't look down on any of these fish. In common with most of the rivermen, he has a great liking for catfish; he likes to catch them and he likes to eat them. In the spring and early summer, large numbers of catfish show up in the lower Hudson; the spring freshets bring them down from fresh water. Some are enormous. In 1953, one was caught near the George Washington Bridge that weighed over thirty pounds, and every year a few are caught around Edgewater that weigh between ten and twenty pounds. One Saturday afternoon last spring, an old Negro woman fishing a short distance up the bank from Harry caught two big ones, one right after the other. Harry and several other fishermen went over to look at them, and one of the fishermen, who had a hand scale, weighed them; the first weighed seventeen pounds and the second weighed twelve. Harry asked the old woman what kind of bait she had been using. “Chicken guts,” she said. Harry also has a great liking for tomcod. The tomcod is a greedy little inshore fish that belongs to the cod family and resembles the deep-sea codfish in every respect but size—it seldom gets much longer than seven inches or weighs more than half a pound, and it gives the appearance of being a midget codfish. It comes into the waters around the city to feed and to spawn, and it is almost as ubiquitous as the eel. There are a few tomcod in every part of the harbor every month of the year. In the late fall and early winter, during their spawning runs, they are abundant, and some days thousands upon thousands of them are caught from piers and sea walls and bulkheads and jetties all the way from Rockaway Point to the Battery, and from the banks of the Hudson and the East River and the Harlem River and the Arthur Kill and the Kill van Kull. They are eaten mainly in the homes of the people who catch them; I have rarely seen them in fish stores, and have never seen them on a menu. Harry thinks the tomcod is greatly undervalued; it is what he calls a sweet-meated fish, and he considers it the best fish, next to shad and snapper bluefish, that enters the river. “There's only one thing wrong with tommycods,” he once said. “It takes seventeen of them to make a dozen.” On sunny, crystal-clear mornings in the fall, when it is possible to see into the water, he gets in one of his boats and rows out into the flats and catches some river shrimp. River shrimp—they are also called harbor shrimp and mud shrimp, and are really prawns—are tiny; they are only about an inch and a quarter long, including the head. There are sometimes dense swarms of them in the slues between the barges. Harry catches them with a dip net and empties them into a bucket. When he has a supply, he rows farther out into the flats and ties up to one of the old wrecks and sits there and fishes for tomcod, using a hand line and baiting the hook with the shrimp. Occasionally, he pops some of the shrimp into his mouth—he eats them raw and spits out the shells. By noon, as a rule, he has all the tomcod he can use; he has often caught a hundred and fifty in a morning.