Gather at the River. David Joy
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don’t come out of the sea with bright red shells and claws bound by thick rubber bands. It was only as a tween, when I went lobstering with my friend, Griff, on a humid summer day, that the truth about lobsters was revealed.
Griff kept his boat tied up to the dock next to his house, and we’d set out to pull his pots that hugged the coast of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Idling next to a buoy, the boat rocked gently as he showed me how to hoist the Styrofoam marker and the rope into the boat, the large unwieldy pot not far behind. If luck was on our side, we’d find a few dark greenish specimens in the structure’s netting. One of us would hold the lobsters—with their claws waving in the air they looked like small maestros searching for a tempo—and the other would put the bands in place.
My friendship with Griff was forged in afternoons on the water, but it all started with a paper route that took me around the neighborhood every afternoon. A talkative kid who liked to meet the neighbors, I would dawdle along the route. It would often take more than an hour to finish, given that I had to check in with my customers and collect the occasional treat.
Griff and Mrs. Griff—a well-known couple in the neighborhood in their sixties—were just beyond the halfway point on my travels and my favorite stop on my route. Their house was down a steep flight of stairs, perched on the water, and I’d always find Mrs. Griff in the kitchen, and Griff in his recliner next to the window that overlooked the harbor. He had binoculars and a police scanner; nothing would happen on his watch without his knowledge. We’d catch up on the day’s news, and then I’d finally climb the stairs to the street and finish unloading my canvas bag of papers.
Griff and I began to take on projects, and I found that my neighborhood lobsterman was mischievous and delighted in surprising me. In addition to lobstering, he had a large vegetable garden, which seemed to claim ever more square footage in the yard every season. He grew pumpkins, and one October, I was thrilled to find a large pumpkin on our doorstep, my nickname, Iggy, writ large on the orange surface. Griff had used a knife and written my name on a baby pumpkin, only to have it grow, the letters stretching across the surface. I posed proudly for a picture with the gift. I had spent my childhood searching through “Irenes” and “Isaacs” in the displays of tiny license plates and souvenir bracelets, never finding an “Ingrid.” It was magical to receive such a unique, personalized item, and it was a squash! Who got their own squash?
At one point, I expressed an interest in having my own garden, and Griff and I hatched a plan to cultivate a small square of soil between the street and my front yard. We planted tomatoes and peppers, and I tended them faithfully, watering when required, and weeding as needed. But patience has never been my strong suit, and every day I would check the plants, eager to see some progress. I was always disappointed; where were the large, red tomatoes and the glossy peppers that had been promised on the seed packets? What more was I supposed to do other than wait, for which I had no capacity?
One morning, I came outside and did my cursory review of the small garden only to be stunned by what I found. The vines bowed under the weight of ripe tomatoes and peppers: I’d finally reaped a bounty! I took a step into the plot, pushing aside green tendrils, and was puzzled by what I found. Near the ready-to-eat veggies were baby versions, green and not quite fully formed. Upon closer inspection, I found that the ripe vegetables were tied on to the vine with green twist ties, the product of more mature vines in some other garden. I informed my parents of the development. They claimed innocence. That left only one possible suspect. I called Griff and thanked him for bolstering my belief in my farming skills, if only temporarily.
A peculiarity of my childhood neighborhood was that a small AM radio station broadcast out of a former house across the street. There was a field surrounding the radio tower, which by the way, Griff had climbed clandestinely as a young man. Griff knew the staff well and wondered if I might like a job there. Apparently, he felt my chatty disposition was well suited to radio work, and on his recommendation, I was offered a job working the 5-8 a.m. shift. The early hour felt brutal to my fifteen-year-old self, and I would leave the radio station each morning and head straight to a YMCA camp counselor job with four-to-six-year-olds. It was an exhausting schedule, but I loved working at the radio station.
A shoestring operation, the radio station was run by a small, but loyal staff, and I was shown the ropes and allowed to do just about everything. I found stories on the AP wire, called local police departments to check if there’d been any news overnight—there never was—and did segments on-air. I still cringe when I remember mangling the baseball highlights, but I realized by the end of the summer that every sports quote was the same: “I just put the bat on the ball/stick on the puck/ball in the hoop and get the job done.”
I got some fan mail and calls from the largely elderly audience, and one day, I started getting mail from other parts of the United States. The writer would recall being in the area and hearing my outstanding broadcasting. He or she just had to let me know how wonderful I was. Years of Griff’s hijinks had honed my BS detector and after I’d received a handful of letters, he admitted that he was the writer. A commercial pilot in the neighborhood had been kind enough to mail the notes and cards from his stops across the country. Griff had even gone so far as to try and disguise his handwriting; if I didn’t look too closely, I could almost believe I had a transcontinental following.
I saw less of Griff as I got older, but he always seemed to know what was going on and had an opinion on it. Sophomore year of college I was dating my now-husband, and we’d often spend the weekends at my childhood home, where my parents no longer lived full-time. My husband drove a bright yellow Jeep, and it occupied a prime spot in the driveway when we were there. One afternoon, Griff called and said he was so sorry that my boyfriend was having car trouble and needed to spend the night so often. Griff would be happy to come over and troubleshoot, say, take a look at the engine, so as to get my boyfriend safely back on the road. I thanked him for his concern, but reassured him that the car was in fine working order.
But it was lobstering with Griff—bobbing in the Atlantic, learning to pull pots, no matter that I was a girl and this wasn’t usually a job for girls—that comes to mind when I think of my neighborhood buddy. When you grow up in New England, you learn that lobster isn’t for the fainthearted. They may be relatively easy to lure into the trap on the ocean floor, but they put up a fight when you pull them out and snap the bands on their claws.
After pulling traps with Griff, I would walk home with some of the crustaceans in a bag, wriggling and emitting a sharp salty tang. My sisters and I would each choose a competitor and then let them loose on the kitchen floor to race. The participants were never focused—crawling off in this direction and that—and the event was a meandering affair that lasted until the water was boiling. Helping my mom drop the lobsters into a pot of scalding water and watching their shells change to bright red never fazed me. How would we enjoy their rich flesh if we didn’t kill them first?
Eating a lobster is a messy proposition, and to the uninitiated, freeing the succulent meat is a puzzle. Lobsters make you work for their bounty. You have to crack open claws—as soft as paper or as hard as rock depending upon when you catch them in molting season. You can’t be put off by the green tomalley between the tail and the upper body, although like me, you may choose to slide the liver substance onto your mother’s plate. The coral-colored roe (black before it’s cooked) is another substance lurking in the body that some diners find delectable. Again, another donation for my mother.
Although I’m not a fan of those parts of the lobster, they don’t put me off my meal, not like dinner guests we once had who looked stricken when crustaceans were put before them. The wife was so distressed by the presentation she needed to lie down. Granted, she was pregnant, however a pregnant New Englander wouldn’t think twice when faced with the beady eyed creature. She would pull off the claws, twist the body apart, remove the center fin on the end of the tail and shove her finger up the lobster’s tail, thereby releasing the largest—and some say tastiest—hunk of meat.
When I return to Massachusetts every August, an image of Griff always comes to mind. On warm sunny days in my childhood, Griff would peel himself away from the police scanner, and I’d find him working in the garden or maybe sitting by the front door taking a breather. He’d be in a plastic folding chair,