Heading Out: Getting hooked
It’s been awhile since I’ve written for a newspaper so I should start with an introduction.
If you missed the byline, my name is Jason Shields and I’ve lived on Shelter Island most of my life. When I was seven, my mother loaded me and a few suitcases into an old Austin America and headed east from Brooklyn to the place of her childhood summers. With no job and a sight-unseen rental cottage, she and I traveled a familiar route; Long Island Expressway to Riverhead to the north road and on to Greenport where the ferry brought us to our new home.
This was 1976 and much of the East End was undeveloped and sparsely populated. I remember potato fields and forests and mailboxes on the North Road (or Sound Avenue, though we never called it that) spaced to accommodate a young kid practicing his counting. And I remember the water — the bays and creeks, the same ones here today though maybe not so much the same.
Back then, there were fewer houses dotting the shorelines and they generally fell in the summer cottage category (I’m talking the old definition of “summer cottage”). Sure, there were docks and bulkheads and groins but they were spread out and you could get around them. And there were plenty of boats, but not so many and as big as now. And the closest thing to a personal watercraft in those days was an inner tube.
The rental was down a dirt drive off Winthrop Road, across from the Dering Harbor Inn, where my mother found work waiting tables. A stone’s throw from the house was Gardiners Creek. The grounds of Sylvester Manor rimmed the opposite shore. It was early October, still warm enough for small fish to collect in the shallows. And when I discovered them, my priority was to catch them. I was uneducated and ill-equipped but did manage to trap some shrimp-like creatures, which my mother declined to cook for dinner. And so they were returned to the water.
It was a cold winter and I wondered where the shrimp and finfish had gone now that the creek was a sheet of ice. They returned the following spring to dart in and out of the green marsh grass. Higher up from the water’s edge, in the meadow grass, I found my first box turtle.
I watched fox and raccoon scour the creek’s edge and osprey soar above it before ascending sharply to snatch an unsuspecting flounder. The iconic raptors were rebounding now that DDT no longer was being used as an insecticide to control mosquitoes (the chemical worked its way up the aquatic food chain to the birds, rendering their eggshells too fragile to survive incubation).
And, of course, there were the deer: a scourge now to most but back then I don’t remember much complaining. Many year-rounders ate deer meat and the proliferation of ailments attributable to ticks was in its infancy. A barking dog did as much good then as deer fence does now. Except you get a summons these days if your dog’s barking irks the neighbors. Good thing for the fence installers.
We moved to a house on the Greenlawns the following year and I was introduced to fishing by Jiggin’ Jim McMillan. I caught my first weakfish on his boat. He was as excited as I was and I blame him for giving me the fever. I’d fish off the dock and catch eels (they were everywhere back then). First one I caught, I dragged up to the house thinking my mom would want to cook it. She left it in a pot on the porch and it was gone the next morning. Some raccoon had been real grateful that night.
The house we lived in was really a mansion on the old Webber estate and there were acres of lawn, forest and fields all around it. I’d go out with the caretakers and they’d let me explore the land. I’d seen trees in the parks in Brooklyn but now I was old enough to climb and really appreciate these organic playgrounds. There were two ancient beech trees on the property that I remember to this day for their vast canopies and multitudinous horizontal branches. Climbing them was like entering another world, shared only with the birds and caterpillars.
When my mom met my future stepfather, a tall lanky cat with a shaved head and soul patch dribbling down his chin, I was protectively skeptical. Then he told me he had a boat and did a lot of fishing. He also hunted and gardened, liked to harvest firewood and was planning on raising chickens and ducks. He certainly knew what to do with an eel — he smoked them and a lot of other things.
One day he brought me to check his eel pots strung on some dock pilings in West Neck Creek. They were rectangular cages of cedar frame and nylon mesh with a funnel at one end and a door at the other. He had me hunt for horseshoe crabs on the beach to re-bait the traps, which typically were filled with slithering brown eels up to three feet long when we pulled them.
It wasn’t long before I gave mom the okay to marry this guy and we moved from the Webber estate to an old hodgepodge of a house on Hudson Avenue in a part of Shelter Island known as Eel Town. I fished and hunted, gathered dried eel grass to mulch the gardens, cut and split wood to bank the stoves and watered and fed the fowl in the pens we had built in the back. Catching and caring for stuff was the fun part for me; learning to eat what we caught, shot and grew came a little harder to this Brooklyn kid. But I did acquire a taste for the wild fare and learned the distinction between livestock and pets. My mother was a great cook and could turn the most gamey sea duck into a palatable dish.
And, of course, we had a couple of rambunctious Labradors who barked their heads off at night and kept the deer away. And no one ever called the cops.
Jason Shields of Shelter Island is a former reporter and editor at the Reporter. He returns to write a monthly outdoors column for the Times/Review newspaper group and to cover fishing for the Reporter in season.
