ON THE EDGE
By David Berson
Photographs by Juliana Thomas
GREENPORT—This is a photo series about people you know, some better than others. You will probably recognize some of their faces. They are our neighbors; we see them on the street, shopping at the supermarket, sitting in the bars. They all share one thing in common, they are at the bitter end of a long maritime tradition in the village. In one way or another, these people are still able to cobble a living working on or around the Greenport waterfront.
There was a time when such a series would have been physically impossible to mount. So many people’s lives were tied to the waterfront, that to have all their photographs displayed would have required a space many times larger than any available in this small village. It is probable, as well, that had such an exhibition been hung 20 years ago it wouldn’t have attracted any notice, for in a community built of shipwrights, fishermen, ship-yard workers, who would have thought that they deserved special notice?
Ironically, it is only because these trades are at risk of disappearing that we care to champion them. Even if we can’t articulate the importance of their loss, we recognize that every time a boatbuilder lays down his plane, or a fisherman hangs up his trawl, that another part of the collective tradition of the community vanishes.
For generations, this community prospered facing the east and the water. Slowly it moved west until its gaze turned more to the city and away from the sea.
Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, Greenport barely sustains its maritime community. The numbers of those earning their livings from water-related activities has been reduced. It should be noted, though, that those few might be the best ever to have put to sea in a boat, or beveled a plank, or trapped for lobster, or built a dock. They have to be, in order to survive.
Though many of the people pictured here hope that their children would find an easier means of making a living, a surprising number of them have already taken on their children as co-workers.
It is the unyielding nature of time that has spurred this project. Many old friends are gone, and the moment was right to record the names and photographs of some of those who are still working the waterfront. It is to the memories of those that came before them that this show is dedicated.
Warren “Vanny” Horton
Lobsterman
On a warm summer morning, Vanny Horton is dressed for work: slickers and tank top. He’s on the deck of the 40-foot Mariah Lee threading stinking racks of flounder as bait for his lobster traps. With one hand, Vanny pulls four or five fish remains from a plastic barrel, while, with the other, he runs a spike through them, threading them together with line. Each bundle will go into a trap as bait for the lobsters. Years of the smell of dead fish permeate the boat, adding an almost palpable dimension to the fiberglass and wood.
Vanny is oblivious to the odor. He threads the fish with the ease of a tailor sewing a seam. He works quickly, and even while talking never misses a stitch.
The Mariah Lee—named after the middle names of his granddaughters—looks battered, but not into submission. The fiberglass peels back from the gunwales, exposing the wood underneath. There is a crack in the front windshield secured by a strip of duct tape. “What would happen if a boarding sea broke the glass?” Vanny is asked. “I’d get wet,” he responds.
Today the wind is picking up from the northwest, and the Sound where Vanny sets his traps is too rough to work. He stands in the deckhouse and methodically baits his traps.
Christine “Chris” Kuhlmann
Bar Owner
The bar is called the Whiskey Wind Tavern. It’s named for the wind that blows from the east, the one that keeps the fishermen at home, and hopefully in the bar. On this late afternoon the sun is shinning outside and there are only a few patrons, none of them fisherman. Only one of the two televisions at either end of the long bar has the sound turned up.
In another time, when Greenport hummed with the menhaden fishery, this was Meyer’s Bar and Grill, the favorite for the fishermen working the local waters. It was a rough place in those days.
Now Chris walks the length of the bar greeting the regulars with a hearty “How ya doin’?” A bar stool scrapes the floor as someone rises to go to the jukebox. Clapton comes on. On the far side of the room a couple gather around the pool table, and the clacking of balls striking one another signifies another game beginning.
Somebody comes in with his small dog, and Chris, taking a break, lifts the small animal up to say hello. The dog wags its body in delight. A customer calls from the bar and Chris puts down the dog and goes to serve another drink.
Bob Hamilton
Fisherman
Miss Nancy, Bob Hamilton’s 60-foot stern dragger, was a movie star for a time. Cast to type, Miss Nancy shared the screen with Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in the movie “The Devil’s Own.” Like her owner, though, Miss Nancy doesn’t draw attention to herself and tied up along the dock hardly looks famous. At 51, she is still in her prime—built of longleaf yellow pine and iron. She has served Hamilton, a ixth-generation fisherman, well.
When he’s not out fishing for fluke or scup in the Sound or Gardiner’s Bay, Hamilton, like many fishermen, spends his time fixing things. The nets especially take a beating as they are dragged along the bottom snagging on rocks and ripping.
He checks the net by lowering it from its spool until it spills out on the deck. Standing in its midst, he appears to be the catch. Surrounded by buzzing flies attracted to the smell of fish scales, he attacks the ripped sections, netting needles in hand, moving with the sureness of a surgeon sewing up a wound. When he is satisfied that most of the holes are repaired, the net is raised back onto the spool. “It’s important to keep the nets in good shape,” he says, wiping off the fish scales that have fallen onto his shoulders. “My job, after all, is to kill fish.”
Mark and Mary Bess Phillips
Fishermen and Fishmongers
The fish dock opens on one side to the water, and, on the other, to the road. In one corner is a big ice machine and some stacks of nesting, waxed cardboard boxes, waiting to be filled. The rusted diamond plate floor is crazed and worn thin from years of foot traffic. A scale with a big round face reading up to 100 pounds is suspended from the ceiling. The buzz of a refrigerator fan mixes with the sound of running water. “Mark’s Dock,” is what the local fishermen call it; this is where they have their catch boxed and shipped. And when he’s back home from the winter fishery, off Georges Bank, this is where Mark Phillips, for whom the dock is named, unloads fish from his 83-foot stern dragger, Illusion.
While he’s away, Mary Bess runs the shoreside operation at the dock and at the adjoining Alice’s Seafood Market, where fishermen from both the North and South Forks sell their catch. “The marriage,” she says, “is the business and the business is the marriage. You know,” she continues, “a lot of people think that fishing is romantic, but it’s also hard work. Fishery management has become full of rules and regulations. For wives like myself, it’s a challenge to stay in business.”
With that she excuses herself to head back into the fish market where someone is inquiring about the price of lobsters.
Pete Wenczel
Whelk Fisherman
It’s 5 p.m. and the day has turned cloudy. A 15-knot wind is blowing from the southwest and the air is damp. Rain is coming.
Pete comes into the creek, the stern of the 26-foot Miss Emeline filled with the days catch. He swings the boat wide and backs effortlessly into the slip. The whelks are already bagged. He walks off the stern to tie up.
Once the boat is secured, Pete puts on a brown vinyl apron and lifts the oak traps that need repairing off the stern. He goes ashore and backs his pickup to the edge of the dock, running a line to the bagged whelk on deck from the hoist at the rear of the truck. Each bag weighs about 60 pounds, and he hoists three bags at a time up into the bed of the truck. He does this five times.
When the whelks are loaded, Pete hoses the boat down. He stacks buckets, scrubs, bulkheads. Three-quarters of an hour after his arrival, he’s ready to make the 38-minute drive to the buyer. Then he can go home.
These images and text were taken from the larger series “On the Edge: Workers on the Waterfront,” available at julianathomasphotography.com/projects.html. “This is one of the only projects that I have ever done where the reality of the presentation exceeded our expectations,” said writer David Berson, who hatched the idea for the show with photographer Juliana Thomas in the summer of 2006. “Everyone in the show was seen walking around the village looking like rock stars in the weeks after the show.”
A self-taught photographer raised in Manhattan, Thomas has been taken by her work around the world and has learned to pack only what she can carry. When taking a photograph, Thomas believes the “essence of the individual is brought more sharply into focus by utilizing their environment as a backdrop.”
Berson, a Greenport resident, is the former Northeast editor of Sailing Magazine, writes celestial navigation columns for Ocean Navigator Magazine, runs the only electric-powered, non-polluting tour boat on Long Island (greenportlaunch.com), and has always been attracted to people on or around the waterfront.
