I wonder if they put tomato in it?


Harry Krause wrote:
The New York Times

January 17, 2007
Sea Sends Distress Call in One-Note Chowders
By MOLLY O'NEILL

Stonington, Me.

DICK BRIDGES has big, calloused hands, hands that have been thickened by
half a century of fishing, hands that can build a life and shape a
community. They are not the sort of hands you expect to see mincing
onions in a church kitchen. But on a recent Saturday evening Mr. Bridges
grasped a flimsy knife, reached for a sack of yellow onions and launched
into a soliloquy about fishing in America and the dish that tells the
story: chowder.

The endlessly varied mélange that can banish chilblains and restore
survivors of storms has never been merely a soup. Early Colonial
versions called for fish to be layered along with onions, biscuits and
water in a caldron; by the time Ishmael and Queequeg feasted on steaming
bowls of the stuff, milk, cream and salt pork had found their way into
the pot. Otherwise, the dish that helped Melville's whalers tell time -
"chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper"
- changed very little for nearly 200 years.

Down Easters said that the more variety of fish in the pot, the "deepah
the flavah." Like most sons of sons of Maine fishermen, Mr. Bridges, 61,
grew up eating fish stews that were as diverse and densely packed as the
local waters.

Cod, haddock, white hake, halibut, cusk and dozens of other groundfish,
fish that live near the ocean bottom, mingled with clams, shrimp,
lobster and mussels under the creamy surface of the stew, cresting a
puddle of yellow butter here, a slick of smoky pork fat there.

Today there is nothing but lobster to be fished commercially near
Stonington. Lobster floats alone in the local chowder, pinking the cream
and, in the mind of food lovers, perhaps elevating Everyman's dish to
luxury status. But when Mr. Bridges looks at a single species stew he
sees a dangerously impoverished fishery.

"The only stable fishery is a diverse fishery," he said. No place in the
world is richer in lobster than the waters around Stonington today, but
the population explosion was caused, in part, by the vanishing of the
groundfish. "They fed on the young lobsters, the spats," he said, "but
the large fin fish are also part of an ecosystem that actually protects
the lobster." Even with good management, he said, the lobster, too,
could disappear.

"And when they go," he added, grasping one of the crustaceans from the
counter of the church kitchen and in a single flourish twisting off its
claws and tail, "the last of America's Colonial industries will go with
them."

What chowder eater, nourished on soups rich with many kinds of fish,
could listen to the scientists who began to worry in the 1970s about the
effects of river damming, pollution and overfishing? Like most, Mr.
Bridges continued to lower his metal-link scallop nets to the bottom of
the ocean. He continued to plot his own course and to keep his
whereabouts to himself. He continued to haul thousands of pounds of fish
every few hours and he continued to ravage the ocean floor.

In 1985 fishermen landed seven million pounds of groundfish in
Stonington alone. Ten years later those fish disappeared from Penobscot
Bay, and for the first time in nearly two centuries, chowder changed.

Mr. Bridges was, he said, "worried so sick" that in 2003 he and three
others broke the fishermen's traditional code of silence and began
sharing their knowledge about feeding and spawning grounds.

Along with their wives they founded Penobscot East Resource Center, an
advocacy group that helps fishermen to restock and manage the fisheries
through science, lobbying efforts and education. They built an alliance
among fishermen to create a single voice for managing the local
fisheries. They created the nation's first fishermen-funded lobster
hatchery. They even learned how to cook.

In fact, in this town where chowder is a way of life and the measure of
a cook, Mr. Bridges is the "Chowdah" King. To him and to the other
activists who join him to chop and shuck and stir, building a chowder is
more than making dinner. It is performance art, an epic, a confession
and a plea.

STONINGTON is a cluster of shingled houses, picket fences, widow's walks
and church spires that rises up a hillside from a shallow, natural
harbor. Unlike the fleets of deeper ports like New Bedford's and
Portland's, from which large boats sail far offshore for days at a time,
Stonington's fleets have long been made up of day boats, small craft
that fish close to home and support an all but antiquated American
lifestyle.

Fishing here was a wave-riding exercise in rugged individualism. The men
went out before dawn and came home in midafternoon - generally clanging
a pail of fish - ready to tuck into a bowl of the chowder that their
wives had made from the contents of the previous day's bucket.

"They could go to the Little League games, join the school board,
volunteer at the fire department," Ted Hoskins said.

Before retiring, Mr. Hoskins was a "boat minister" with the Maine Sea
Coast Mission. His pastoral suite, a 75-foot houseboat, was mobile. When
the groundfish were vanishing, he chugged from Stonington to the islands
on the far side of Penobscot Bay, watching as the changes in the sea
affected life on land.

As the groundfish began to diminish, he said, his congregants' problems
- depression, drinking and family trouble - grew. At the same time,
state and federal efforts to protect the fisheries limited a fisherman's
catch as well as the number of days he could work. And as the fishing
stock in the bay was depleted, fishermen had to move farther offshore.
The 40-foot trawlers that they had bought for under $40,000 and used to
pursue groundfish throughout the 1980s could not withstand waves up to
100 feet offshore. They needed 80-foot boats equipped with radar,
onboard computers, sonar, sonic gear and G.P.S. systems, boats that now
cost half a million dollars.

"The math didn't work: it cost more, there were fewer fish and they were
allowed to take less of them," Mr. Hoskins said. "They got second jobs.
Their wives went to work. They started selling their boats."

Many of the older watermen, he said, retired and sold their days-at-sea
or their quotas to large corporate fishing concerns that operate monster
boats that can pull up to a million pounds in a single six-hour tow,
denuding a swath of ocean about 600 feet long and up to 10 miles wide.
The ocean floor can take 20 years to recover.

Some of the former day fishermen who did not retire went to work on
those vessels, often driving hours to meet the boat and staying on it
for up to two weeks at sea.

"The men were no longer independent, no longer free," Mr. Hoskins said.
"They were employees. The women and children were home alone. I was
watching an entire way of life slip away."

The fishermen who persevered switched to lobstering. Their lives, too,
were altered. The industry is closely regulated. Lobstermen are told
when and where they can fish. They must report their whereabouts and
provide detailed accounting of their catches. Moreover, the wisdom once
gained by a lifetime on the water can, Mr. Bridges said, now be acquired
quickly.

"Using the technology available today, a guy can learn what I know in a
month," he said. "You don't have to use a compass, read a map or
remember where the lobster are. You don't even have to steer a decent
course."

Mr. Bridges began reaching for the mouthpiece of his on-deck radio more
and more. "Come in Mary Elizabeth," he would call to Ted Ames. "Come in,
Sea Flea" he would signal to his friend Wayne Grindle. Then he grasped
the small black microphone in his large hands and began to wax eloquent
about the meal he intended to cook as soon as he got home.

FISHERMEN have always cooked on their boats," Mr. Ames said as he
shrugged out of his slicker. "We just didn't admit it at home." He
smiled then, toward the four burly fishermen crowding the small electric
stove in the church basement.

Aprons wrapped around their flannel shirts, they watched as Mr. Bridges
explained the importance of sautéing lobster meat in butter before
adding it to the simmering onions, potatoes and cream. "It brings out
the color and the sweetness." This and a sprinkle of basil are the
secrets of his champion chowder. Graying heads huddled together, the men
nodded intently; they could have been examining a map, charting a course
through dangerous shoals.

Earlier that day Mr. Ames, 67, sat looking out at the bay, explaining
how fishermen study the surface in order to read the bottom, to locate
the shallow shoals, the rocky outcroppings, the spots that are littered
with sunken boats or other trash that can destroy their nets. They read
the bottom to know where the fish feed, where they spawn and to locate
the nursery areas for young fish. This information, which is critical if
the local fishery is to be replenished, cannot be detected by
sophisticated sounding devices. Rather, it lives in a fisherman's eyes
and hands, like an instinct.

Mr. Ames, who has a master's degree in biochemistry and was a commercial
fisherman for half a century before retiring last year, spent the past
decade using the memories of retired fishermen to create maps of the
spawning and nursery grounds of cod, the areas that must be strictly
protected if the groundfish are to regenerate. His efforts earned him a
MacArthur Foundation grant in 2005. The recognition has contributed to
the discussion on how to best manage and protect Maine's fishery.

"The only ones who can restore these fisheries are us, the fishermen who
worked them and broke them," he said. Pointing to the success of Maine's
closely controlled - and peer-enforced - lobster industry, he added, "We
learned our lesson."

The Penobscot East Resource Center has helped give men like Mr. Bridges
a voice with lawmakers.

When members of the group meet with regulators, they argue that the
fisheries are a massive collection of tiny and particular habitats that
can be tended only by those who know them. If fishing regulations
reflect the knowledge and the needs of the Stonington lobstermen,
smaller day boats like theirs will have a fighting chance against the
enormous commercial vessels. And so will the fish.

"We can't turn the clock back on technology," he said. "We can only
regulate it, the way we regulate the size and speed of vehicles on the
highway."

He and his group plan to ask federal regulators to allow them to manage
the local fisheries and to limit technology. Without a change in the
rules, he said, the small, owner-operated day boats will continue their
steady demise and the large fishing crews will be the only ones left.

"We are in the final stage of a natural, national resource being
converted into a private, corporately-owned resource."

The implications of this shift on the nation's table are huge. Seafood
markets that offer a variety of wild fish now need to import, so fish
reaches the market a day later at a much higher price. "In 1975 I got 25
cents a pound for groundfish," Mr. Bridges said. "If you can find it you
can get $2 to $4 a pound today." Consumers, he noted, pay about three
times what the fisherman receives.

And perhaps it is this change, along with the fear of losing the
possibility of a self-made life, that called the elder statesmen of
Stonington from their homes on a blustery winter night and prompted them
to take up lobster crackers, knives and wooden spoons and to discuss the
chowder they had known, the chowder of today, the chowder that could,
with a single predator or a few degrees rise in the temperature of the
water, disappear entirely.

Already the lobster catch is shifting away from Stonington, said Carl
Wilson, the lobster biologist for Maine's Department of Marine
Resources. If the trend continues, the lobstermen who borrowed heavily
to buy high-tech boats - younger men, mostly, who have known only
gold-rush times - stand to lose much more than a means of puttering
around the harbor.

After several hours of impassioned discussion there was, after all, a
reverent sort of silence among the fishermen when they gathered around
the reddening lobster in the skillet on the stove. And for a moment, as
they hovered tentatively over the small aluminum frying pan, their thick
fingers looked like the hands of giants arranging a smaller, entirely
manageable world.