The Secret Life of Lobsters (3 page)

T
he oceans of the earth abound with lobsters. Lobsters with claws like hair combs sift mud in offshore trenches. Clawless lobsters with antennae like spikes migrate in clans in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. Flattened lobsters with heads like shovels scurry and burrow in the Mediterranean and the Galapagos. The eccentric diversity of the world's lobsters has earned them some of the most whimsical names in the animal kingdom. There is a hunchback locust lobster and a regal slipper lobster. There are marbled mitten lobsters, velvet fan lobsters, and even a musical furry lobster. The unicorn and buffalo blunt-horn lobsters inspire admiration; the African spear lobster, the Arabian whip lobster, and the rough Spanish lobster demand respect.

Nowhere in the world, however, is the seafloor as densely populated with lobsters as in the Gulf of Maine. Though a less sophisticated creature than some of its clawless counterparts, the American lobster, scientific name
Homarus americanus,
is astonishingly abundant.

But at five o'clock on a September morning in 1973, the young Bruce Fernald didn't know that, and he wasn't interested.

“Hey, Bruce.” The door opened. “Come on, son, get up. We're going fishing.”

Bruce groaned, rolled over, and cracked open an eye. Still dark. Jesus. Almost four years in the navy, riding nights away in the bunk of a destroyer, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in
forty-foot seas, and what happens the first time he tries to sleep in his own bed back home? His father wakes him up before dawn to get in a boat.

Sure, Bruce thought as he yanked on his socks, when I was fourteen I hauled traps by hand from a skiff, like every other kid on Little Cranberry Island. Does that automatically make me a lobsterman? The world was big and in the navy Bruce had sailed all the way around it. He wasn't certain he wanted to condemn himself to the hard life his forefathers had endured, hauling up what the old-timers called “poverty crates” full of “bugs.”

But Bruce's first day of lobstering with his father turned out to be lucrative enough to warrant a second day, and after that a third. As autumn settled over the island the days aboard his father's boat became weeks. At the helm was Warren, his dad, and on the stern was the name of his other parent—
Mother Ann
. Bruce stuffed bait bags with chopped herring. He plugged the lobsters' thumbs with wooden pegs to immobilize their claws so they wouldn't rip each other apart in the barrel. He coiled rope. He hefted the heavy wooden traps. And he observed his father at work.

Some of Warren's white-and-yellow buoys followed the shoreline like a string of popcorn. Warren knew just how close he could get to the rocks without endangering the boat, and he showed Bruce how to line up landmarks and steer clear.

Some of Warren's buoys bobbed in ninety feet of water, running in a line east to west half a mile from the island. Unwritten rules along most of the Maine coast governed just how far a fisherman could go before he was setting traps in someone else's territory. Bruce watched where his father went and memorized the landmarks that would keep him close to home.

Come November, Warren and Bruce were hauling traps in water twenty fathoms deep—120 feet—a mile south of the island in open sea. It was cold, especially when the breeze picked up and blew spray in Bruce's face.

“Okay, son, where are we now?” Warren asked, bent over a tangle in the rope.

Bruce, his hands numb, glanced up to see which of the mountains of Mount Desert Island loomed over the lighthouse on Baker Island, half a mile southeast of Little Cranberry. Depending on how far to the east or west the
Mother Ann
was positioned, the lighthouse would line up with a different hill.

“Cadillac,” Bruce answered.

Cadillac Mountain, like the automobile of the same name, honored the first European settler in these parts. In 1688 a small-town French lawyer swindled a land grant to Mount Desert Island from the Canadian governor. He invented the aristocratic title “sieur de Cadillac” for himself and lorded it over the uninhabited island with his new bride for a summer. Bored, he soon retreated inland to found a trading post called Detroit. The Cadillac car still bears his fake coat of arms on its hood. The lobstermen of Little Cranberry had put Cadillac's legacy to their own use. Like the other hills of Mount Desert, his mountain rising from the sea was a map to the treasures under the waves.

In a more literal sense too, Warren and Bruce were fishing on Cadillac Mountain—or at least on pieces of it—and that was what made these waters hospitable for lobsters. Starting a few million years ago, sheets of ice had rolled down from the Arctic for eighty thousand years at a stretch, interrupted by brief warm spells of ten thousand or twenty thousand years. During the most recent ice age the glaciers had scraped up stone from all over Maine and carried it south, carving away at the pink granite of Mount Desert Island on the way. The glaciers had pressed on for another three hundred miles before grinding to a halt, encrusting the Gulf of Maine and the continental shelf in ice as far south as Long Island.

When the glaciers melted fourteen thousand years ago they unveiled the sensuously sculpted hills and valleys that now constitute Acadia National Park. The glaciers also left behind vast fields of debris—boulders, cobble, pebbles, and gravel. Glacial runoff sorted the finer sediments into beds of sand or muddy silt between ledges of hard rock. Sea levels
rose, filling in the convoluted coastline and creating islands, bays, inlets, and in the middle of Mount Desert, the only true fjord on the east coast of the North American continent. Underwater, this terrain of rocks and sediment became the perfect habitat for lobsters. It was an intricate rangeland that Bruce would have to learn by charts, depth sounders, compass points, and intuition rather than by sight. The more he thought about it, the more this seemed a task that might warrant a lifetime.

 

Bruce's great-great-great-grandfather Henry Fernald had settled on the island next door, Great Cranberry. But with a paucity of women there, his three sons had rowed the half mile across the water to Little Cranberry in search of mates. They wooed local girls, married, and settled on the smaller island. When they'd had enough of home life they jumped in their dories and went to sea.

From their boats the Fernalds had lowered lines weighted with a chunk of lead. A clank when it hit bottom meant rock, a thud meant sand, and nothing meant mud. They marked off the depth in fathoms and rowed around feeling where the rock went, then gave each underwater feature a name honoring its shape, characteristics, or the man who found it: Bull Ground, Moose Ground, Mussel Ridge, Tide Hole, Smith's Shoal, Poag's Piece, or George Hen's Reef—the last named by Bruce's great-great-great-uncle George Henry. And in the spring they returned to set their traps.

Lobster traps were a newfangled technology when Bruce's ancestors started using them. Lobsters had been caught by various methods for a long time before that. European explorers dragged up Maine's greenish brown lobsters from shallow water with hooks. The animals looked familiar because European waters were home to the American lobster's nearly identical twin, the bluish black
Homarus gammarus
. Although the two species have evolved separate colors of camouflage, both turn red when boiled in the pot. During cooking, protein
molecules in the shell bend into shapes that absorb different wavelengths of light and end up reflecting red.

These two species also share something akin to a secret undergarment of the brightest blue. If extricated, proteins from the shell of the mostly black
Homarus gammarus
can be grown into brilliant blue crystals, and every so often a specimen of the mostly brown
Homarus americanus
undergoes a rare genetic mutation that unveils its stunning inner indigo. American lobsters that don't get enough calcium in their diets can fade from brown to blue too, but of a less vibrant hue. Genetic mutations of yellow, white, calico, and even red also turn up in living lobsters, and very occasionally one is caught that is half-and-half—the line down the middle of its back as straight as a ruler.

It was from the European
Homarus gammarus
that the name “lobster” originated. The Old English version of the word, “loppestre,” is probably related to loppe, meaning spider. But the original derivation likely goes back to the Latin
locusta
. Pliny the Elder, writing in his
Natural History
during the first century AD, observed that when a lobster was surprised, it seemed to “disappear with a single leap or bound as a locust or grasshopper might do,” and so he used the term
locustæ
—locusts of the sea. With the lobster's obvious resemblance to an insect, the name stuck. Until the English word was standardized, writers used spellings as various as “lapstar” and “lopystre” to refer to the crustacean.

Historians of New England often note that early settlers considered lobster a kind of junk food that was fit only for swine, servants, and prisoners. These claims may be exaggerated. But storms could blow lobsters onto beaches by the hundreds, making them a convenient source of feed or fertilizer for coastal farms, and most scholars agree that lobster was generally considered a low-class dish for human consumption. After their first winter in Plymouth, a group of Pilgrims on an expedition to what is now Boston Harbor gladly helped themselves to fresh lobsters that had been piled on the beach by Native Americans. By the following year, however, the leader of the
Pilgrims, William Bradford, reported shame at having to serve lobster in lieu of more respectable fare.

By the seventeenth century, the word “lobster” had even developed a derogatory usage in speech—calling someone a lobster was like calling him a rascal. One English source from 1609 gives an example: “you whorson Lobster.” During the American revolution, the word was a put-down for British redcoats, and in American slang of the late 1800s it was used to call someone a dupe or a fool.

Despite these connotations, fishermen along the New England coast ate lobster, though primarily out of economic necessity—the fish they caught were too valuable at the market to consume, while lobster was nearly worthless. Gradually the lobster's status improved, and its meat became desirable fare for well-off urbanites. By the early nineteenth century, American fishermen were catching lobsters commercially with a type of net hanging from an iron hoop and shaped like a cauldron—one origin of the term “pot,” still used today to refer to a trap. Traps of wood and twine were far more efficient than nets and caught on in New England in the 1840s.

For Bruce Fernald's forefathers, building twenty or thirty traps could take all winter. The men hauled spruce from the forest and sawed it into sills, then stripped green branches and soaked them in a round washtub to make the arched bows that gave the traps their curved tops. The women who had been foolish enough to marry these men sat by the stove knitting mesh funnels and bait bags from twine. Then the men boiled vats of coal tar and cooked the twine to fortify it against decomposition. While the tar was hot they measured lengths of rope made from Manila hemp or sisal plants and cooked them too.

The buoys they carved from tree trunks, each man painting his floats a signature color. Just before they set a trap they loaded it with beach stones so it would sink; after a week or two the wood would be waterlogged enough that they could remove some of the rocks. And then on a good day each man piled as many traps as he could into a dory, rowed out to where
he thought the lobsters were, and threw the traps overboard. When he hauled a trap back up and found lobsters in it, he noted its location and reminded himself to lie about it when he returned to the island.

For a hundred years the Fernalds mostly set their traps on rocky bottom, where they believed the lobsters liked to hide. Occasionally a storm would churn up the sea and drag the wooden traps to new locations, often off the rocks and into mud valleys several miles away. After the storm the Fernalds would head out in their boats to search for their gear. When they found a trap they were relieved, whether it contained lobsters or not. Still, as the years passed, the lobstermen began to notice an odd phenomenon. Sometimes the traps they retrieved from the mud seemed to contain more lobsters than the traps that had stayed on the rocks. Perhaps the animals had been frightened into the muddy valleys by the raging currents of the storm.

By the time Bruce Fernald was fishing with his father, a new theory had developed. Perhaps the lobsters used the rocks for hiding, but the mud for migrating. It was a theory Bruce grew increasingly eager to put into practice for himself.

 

Jack Merrill's family lived in suburban Massachusetts. His parents brought him to Little Cranberry Island before he was a year old, and Jack spent his boyhood summers entranced by the island's rocky beaches, its stands of spruce, and the scent of salt in the air. One day he eagerly accepted an invitation from an old-timer to go lobstering. At 6:00
A.M
. the young Jack nearly lost his breakfast walking past the bins of rancid bait on the wharf. But staring straight ahead, he held his breath and made it aboard the old wooden boat and out onto the sparkling sea.

“Nature has a way of separating the men from the boys,” the old-timer said, pouring himself coffee from a thermos and soaking up the sunrise.

For Jack, the end of each summer on Little Cranberry, and
the subsequent reversion to suburban life, was torturous. He vowed to make something of his affection for Maine's craggy coast and wide-open ocean. His ancestors on his father's side had come from Maine, and his great-grandfather had been a governor of the state. As he neared adulthood, Jack grew certain that he wanted to return to these family roots.

This dream nearly became the death of him. Jack taught marine ecology for several summers at an outdoor adventure camp in Maine. Once, he and a group of campers were sailing a pair of thirty-foot open boats out of Hurricane Island when an October gale whipped up enormous waves. Both boats were swept out to sea. Jack and his fellow sailors rode the storm through the night, bailing to stay afloat. The gale subsided and in the morning the Coast Guard found them, chilled and exhausted. Jack figured that if he could survive that, he could survive commercial fishing.