suddenly to spy thousands of tiny baitfish breaking the surface, rushing
frantically toward shore. He knew what that meant, as did everyone else
in town with a boat, a gaff and a loaf of Wonderbread to use as bait: the
stripers were running!
Thousands of the highly prized, relatively expensive striped bass were,
in a rare feeding frenzy, suddenly there for the taking. You had literally
only to throw bread on the water, bash the tasty fish on the head with a
gaff and then haul them in. They were taking them by the hundreds of
pounds. Every restaurant in town was loading up on them, their parking
lots, like ours, suddenly a Coleman-lit staging area for scaling, gutting
and wrapping operations. The Dreadnaught lot, like every other lot in
town, was suddenly filled with gore-covered cooks and dishwashers,
laboring under flickering gaslamps and naked bulbs to clean, wrap and
freeze the valuable white meat. We worked for hours with our knives,
our hair sparkling with snowflake-like fish scales, scraping, tearing,
filleting. At the end of the night's work, I took home a 35-pound
monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed
when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on
such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a
lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home
broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It
was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges
of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell
of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest
piece of fish I'd ever eaten, and I don't know if it was due to the dramatic
quality the weather was beginning to take on, but it hit me right in the
brainpan, a meal that made me feel better about things, made me better
for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow . . . It was a protein rush
to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, eaten with the
hands. Could anything be better than that?
As the season came to an end, the regular crew began to fade away, off to
work ski resorts in Colorado, charter boats in the Caribbean, restaurants