LARRY SEAMAN SR.
Eel Fisherman
Follow Rockaway Boulevard as it curves around the seemingly endless northern boundary of JFK airport until you reach the very edge of the city. It’s a low-lying world of scrub and marshland and chain-link fencing, with the occasional strip mall or radar tower offering what little elevation there is. Planes swoop in to land, fat-bellied and frighteningly unaerodynamic at this close vantage point. Less than a hundred yards before Queens peters out into Nassau County is a small hand-lettered sign, tacked to a telegraph pole, that simply says BAIT.
Turn off here, and suddenly you are in a landscape that would not seem out of place in Florida or the deep South, except for the cold wind blowing off Jamaica Bay. Small shingle houses cluster around a loop of unmarked road, their backs facing a creek with a long wooden dock running along its edge. There are pickup trucks and boats in the driveways; a few dogs bark halfheartedly. This is where Larry Seaman and his son, Larry Jr., the last two full-time eel fishermen in New York City, pursue their lonely occupation.
Seaman Sr. is slim and in his mid-sixties; he wears a blue checkered shirt and waders that come halfway up his chest. His face is suitably rugged for such a profession, buffed by a lifetime of exposure to sun and wind, and his Queens accent has a touch of something ancient in it that’s hard to pin down. “I love it out here,” he says simply. “It’s beautiful. Any time of year, any weather.” The sentiment is echoed by his son, a powerfully built thirty-year-old in a hunting jacket standing next to him on the dock beside a pile of handmade wire-mesh traps. “I wouldn’t give it up for anything,” he says. “I love it, and I love working with him, you know? There’s not too many people get to work with their fathers.”
It’s not an easy life. Father and son are usually both up by 5:00 a.m. seven days a week to prepare the traps, and they are on the water by 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., depending on whether they have eel deliveries to make first. Their flat-bottomed wooden boat is small, offering no shelter, and is loaded with traps and the large plastic barrels into which they dump the captured eels. Propelled by a 150-horsepower outboard motor, they glide out each morning into the vast 9,000-acre mosaic of water and yellow-green marshland that falls away to the city’s southern edge. The charmingly archaic names of this environment—Big Egg Marsh, Pumpkin Patch Marsh, Yellow Bar Hassock—seem a gentle rebuke to Manhattan’s modernity, shimmering in the distance.
It takes about five hours to yank up, empty out, and rebait the Seamans’ seventy or so pots with a section of Horseshoe crab (“It’s like lobster to us, Horseshoe crab to an eel,” the elder fisherman says.) If a pot is empty or contains only a few eels, they might move its location elsewhere. It’s hard work on the back and arms, though not as tough as what local clammers—who wrench their prize from 30 feet of water off Staten Island or Sandy Hook in New Jersey, about three times the average depth of Jamaica Bay—have to endure, Seaman Sr. is quick to point out.
For him this world is as familiar as Midtown’s streets are to a cabdriver, and probably more so. He knows not only the contours of every marsh and inlet in Jamaica Bay from Hook Creek (the tiny inlet his house is on) to the Marine Parkway Bridge nearly 9 miles to the west, but also the contours that lie beneath the water. “I know every bump and dip,” he says. “I could draw a map of it as good as the Geodesic survey they do.” In winter in particular, when the eels take refuge in the thick mud at the bottom of the bay and the Seamans switch from pots to eel combs, dragging their catch out of hideaways with specially made devices, this is invaluable information.
The Seamans catch two types of eels: bait eels, 16 inches long or less, which they sell mostly to charter boats for fishing, and larger eels that weigh up to about four pounds and are 2 to 2.5 feet long, which they sell to local fish markets. When Seaman Sr. first started out in the late 1950s, 25 cents a pound was the going price; eels now fetch between $3.50 and $4.00 a pound. At Christmas, when demand peaks, especially from New York’s Asian community, the price goes up to $5.00 a pound. Seaman Sr. fondly recalls his first big customer, a smoked-eel joint on Cross Bay Boulevard called the Kettle of Fish (now a swimming pool and spa store) that used to take all he could catch. “That’s how I fed my family,” he says. “That’s how I bought my first house.”
During the warmer months, until about the first week of January, the Seamans keep their captured eels in large wooden bins hung over the edge of their dock. (All eels caught in the winter have to be sold the same day, as ice or snow will kill them.) Each storage bin weighs about 500 pounds, and with fierce effort father and son drag one out of the water. Seaman Sr. pulls open the lid with a flourish, and there they are in all their collective fury—a seething mess of black and silver bodies churning up a glutinous foam. He inserts an enormous fist and plucks one out, holding it in a pincer grip between thumb and index finger just below the head. The vehemence with which the eel thrashes is disturbing, as though it is more affronted by such human liberty than fearful of its fate.
Seaman smiles. “They don’t say ‘slippery as an eel’ for nothing,” he says. “Go on, stick your hand in.” Unlike snakes, eels are covered in slime, though the real unpleasantness in holding them lies less in their texture than in their primeval otherness—the sense that they don’t belong to the world of living things we are familiar with. Seaman Sr. says that their slime has naturally antibiotic properties and as proof holds out his hands for inspection; they are devoid of any nick or infection even after a lifetime of outdoors work.
The larger eels are silver in color, the smaller ones black or green. The “silvers” are preparing to head back out to the Mediterranean to spawn, Seaman Sr. explains. He points out the eye size of the specimen he is holding. “See how big his eyes are? The eyes get bigger for traveling the ocean with safety, to watch out for the predators.” Seaman slaps the eel into a scale like a bunch of fruit and notes with satisfaction that he’s close to three pounds.
Such a life, hard as it is, may seem positively carefree compared to the cubicle-ridden wretchedness of many a New Yorker, but the Seamans are under a considerable degree of stress. Not only is theirs a dying profession—there are probably no more than one hundred full-time eelers left between Florida and Maine (there used to be hundreds in New York Harbor and Long Island alone, Seaman Sr. estimates)—but father and son are the subject of ever-increasing antipathy from officialdom. The Wildlife Conservation Society, or “Constipation Society,” as the Seamans have dubbed it, have deemed both the eel and Horseshoe crab population of Jamaica Bay threatened, a position Seaman Sr. bluntly claims is “bullshit, pure bullshit.”
“There’s only us and about three or four part-timers—and I know the names of each one of them—who are catching eels,” he says angrily. “And we’re catching more now than we’ve caught in the last five years. More small ones, and more big ones. So, I mean, where the hell’s the shortage?” The same plenitude applies to Horseshoe crabs: “You go down to Barren Island”—a part of Floyd Bennett Field on Brooklyn’s shoreline—“or back behind the Statue of Liberty on a full moon and look along them beaches there, and there’s more crabs than you can imagine. Twenty thousand or more piled on top of each other. It’s unbelievable.” Seaman Sr. suspects that, apart from “bad science” in calculating the numbers, the real reason Horseshoe crabs are protected is that their proteins have been shown to have potential medical applications. “But we don’t have no voice,” he says. “We don’t have a college education, we didn’t study marine biology, so what do we know?”
One direct consequence of the controversy: To ensure that they do not fall foul of the law, the Seamans are forced to go to Freeport in Long Island to purchase crabs at $3.00 apiece. They once halved the Horseshoes for bait traps; now they parsimoniously quarter them. But perhaps what most upsets the men is the idea that they have been branded as uninformed and destructive of the environment they love. As Seaman Sr. points out, nobody knows Jamaica Bay better than himself and his son: “We see its tiniest change from day to day, depending on the weather. And both of us are conservationists—after all, we have to keep ourselves in check; otherwise we’d put ourselves out of business.”
September 11, 2001, also was not kind to the Seamans, resulting in “a paranoia,” as Seaman Sr. puts it, with serious consequences for their business. Buoys have been established around the edge of the airport, helicopters regularly fly overhead, and the Coast Guard in particular keeps a suspicious eye on everyone. All of which is fine, the Seamans say, except for the fact that they are now in the absurd position of been treated as suspects by people with whom they have been on a first-name basis for years. “It’s not the regular guys,” says Seaman Jr. “It’s the command structure; they’re just so gun-shy about everything.”
Seaman Sr. recalls with a grimace a recent trip with a New York Times reporter and photographer who were doing a story on him. “All of a sudden a Port Authority boat comes up to me and goes, ‘Larry, they want to talk to you,’” he says. Seaman and the reporters were taken ashore to the waiting police and told that they had “breached a security zone.” Seaman was indignant. “I got my first piece of ass on that beach when I was sixteen, so don’t tell me about breaching no security zone!” The Coast Guard was unamused and proceeded to arrest him, threaten him with a $50,000 fine, and hold him overnight. Finding nothing else on the Times reporter, they charged him with failing to pay an old ticket for cycling on the sidewalk. “I mean, if that ain’t bullshit, what is?” Seaman Sr. asks, laughing bleakly.
The Seamans’ kitchen is large and gloomy, with dark faux-wood paneling and a yellow plastic tablecloth. The place is not untidy, but a woman’s touch is clearly absent. Lois, the wife and mother in this household, died of liver cancer in 1998. Although he has a girlfriend in Virginia, Seaman Sr. still shows palpable sadness when he talks about his late wife. “I remember when I came out of the hospital after identifying her,” he says. “I couldn’t believe people were still walking around, cars and buses [moving] and everything. I felt everything should all be still because she had died.” Seaman didn’t know what to do and languished at home until a fellow fisherman advised him that he should simply get up and go eeling again. The advice was “absolutely right,” he says. Seaman Jr. is likewise without his wife: She left him recently, taking their son, Michael, with her back to Connecticut. An album of family photos lies on the table, containing pictures of Seaman Sr. and his wife on their wedding day and of Seaman Jr. playing with his son.
Do they eat eels themselves? The question makes the men laugh. “Anything that can wriggle when it’s dead isn’t going in my stomach,” says Seaman Jr. “But my Dad, he loves them.” This reminds Seaman Sr. about his wife’s squeamishness when it came to eels. She hated the way they squirmed, even after they were dead and skinned; she wouldn’t touch them until the muscular contractions had stopped. As a joke, Seaman would wait until her back was turned and then sprinkle salt onto the sliced-up pieces, which would cause them to contract frantically. “Oh God! It used to absolutely freak her out!” he says. Both father and son crack up.
For now the Seamans will continue to do what they have done all their lives, but both are aware they might soon become just another part of New York’s maritime past, especially with recent talk about a complete moratorium on all eeling and crabbing in Jamaica Bay. “I told my dad the other day, I’ll eel until they put me in jail,” says Seaman Jr. defiantly. His father responds quietly, “Yeah, but they will. That’s the problem.”
***
The Seamans are still awaiting a decision from the Department of Environmental Protection as to whether Jamaica Bay will be entirely closed to commercial fishing.
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BEN GIBBERD
AUTHOR & JOURNALIST
