“I don’t think so. Not exactly. At least not the way they define it down here. Conservationists want to save the water, too, but their main interest seems to be endangered species, especially turtles. They give the trawlers grief because nets have to use excluder devices to let the turtles escape. Or the size of the net mesh has to be big enough to let certain species through, stuff like that. And they irk sportsmen because they’re always pushing size and catch limits and they’d like to keep all recreational vehicles off the beach during nesting season. Come to think of it, the fishermen hate the turtle excluders, but they line up beside the conservationists to keep surf fishers from making such deep wheel ruts on the sand that baby turtles can’t get back to the sea in time.”
Lev laughed. “Do they really care, or is it tit for tat?”
“Well, if sportsmen would support getting rid of the TEDs, the fishermen probably wouldn’t be stressing themselves overmuch on baby turkles.”
“Turkles?”
“That’s what Islanders say when they talk about turkle stew,” I said, thinking of the loggerhead shell I’d seen rolling in the surf by Mahlon’s landing the night before.
“Wait a minute. You just said they’re an endangered species.”
“They are. Just like loons. But they’re also a traditional island delicacy, which is why they both keep getting their heads blown off.”
He rolled his eyes in amusement. “Go on.”
“It gets worse. I swear to God every interest group down here’s shooting at loons of one sort or the other— each one thinks that what they’re doing doesn’t really hurt anything and it’s the other guys that are messing it up for everybody else. Fish processors ally with developers against environmentalists because they don’t want anybody looking too closely at their waste disposal procedures. But then the developers turn around and talk environment whenever they can because they know if our coastline starts looking like New Jersey’s, the Crystal Coast is a cooked goose. No more golden eggs.”
“I still don’t see why poor Linville’s supposed to have it in for a fisherman,” he complained.
“I’m getting to that. Have another hushpuppy and listen,” I said testily, wondering what was this poor
He finished boning his grilled mackerel and said, “What the hell is a menhaden anyhow? I’ve never seen it on a menu.”
“That’s because you’re not a chicken. After the oil is pressed out, the leftover meal is used for feed and fertilizer.”
“That’s what Barbara What’s-her-name’s factory processes?”
“Right. But the whole controversy’s turning into a class thing—traditional livelihoods up against privileged leisure.
“See, what you have to keep in mind is that this place didn’t start booming and become the Crystal Coast till the late seventies, early eighties,” I said. “Down Easters lived so isolated and insular that they just assumed God gave them Core Sound back when He first laid down the waters and He meant it for their personal use till the last trumpet sounds. Then down come these upstate sportsmen who can afford to drop three or four hundred for a weekend of fishing. They’re after the same fish a working man’s trying to catch to feed his family and maybe make a mortgage and boat payments. So you start with that resentment between natives and visitors.”
“But if menhaden aren’t edible,” Lev said, keeping his eye on the shifting target, “then why—?”
“According to Barbara Jean, menhaden fishing’s gotten a bad rap both from the sportsmen and from some of the rich retirees along the coast who don’t want to look out from their decks and see big old rusty boats sitting out there off their beach. The stock is healthy, they’re not overfished, and they’re easy to catch because they run in tight schools close to the shoreline. And that’s where the trouble seems to be. About seventy-five percent of the catch is within a quarter mile of the shore. So here comes Barbara Jean’s clunky old
“And haven’t they?” asked Lev, pouring himself a fresh glass of beer.
“Local watermen joke that anybody who can catch a menhaden on a hook is welcome to try and no, the bycatch of game fish is incredibly small—something like three-tenths of one percent because there’s nothing in that school
“But if a net broke—”
“I’m told there hasn’t been a spill worth talking about since 1983 and that was up in Virginia.”
“But why—?”
“I know, I know. Why poor Linville?”
“Well?”
“Because she’s been a very vocal supporter for limits on how close in the menhaden boats can come. She’s even gone up to Raleigh to lobby some of the legislators and they say she’s very persuasive. When people like Barbara Jean or Andy Bynum start yelling in these hearings, she just hangs cool and manages to sound calm and objective and beautifully reasonable. If the boats do get pushed out of the sound and two or three miles offshore, it’ll hurt the industry enough that it may not survive. But Andy thought, and Barbara Jean does, too, that menhaden’s just the stalking horse, a foot in the door.”
“For what?”
“Well, from listening to everybody mouth off about everybody else, there probably is too much equipment in the water down here. Especially since the estuaries are getting so much polluted runoff that nursery stocks can’t replenish what’s being taken out. If they could get rid of all the commercial fishers, then it’d really be a sportsman’s paradise. You heard Linville this evening—right now, tourism’s worth half a billion to this area and growing,
