From the archives: 2023’s lobster season
Monday morning and it’s a windy mist out my bedroom window, looking to Fox Island. Z & L get to the Law at the big table, in front of a view obscured by fog (but where we saw two icebergs bobbing Trinity-way yesterday morning). This summer is yielding a bumper iceberg crop and the bluey-ness of the ancient icy architecture makes B crave gatorade (or so he says while looking at pictures I send him in verdant Middleburg).
GPK arrived yesterday, driving up from St. John’s with a man we thought was called Marsh but wasn’t. We walk over to Fishers’ in a gale and have cashew ranch carrots with iceberg lettuce and lobster and rhubarb rice-pudding and drink blueberry gin sours and cups of mint tea. Z sings, we laugh, L gives him a decided thumbs down. We walk home in the same gale we met before.
By Wednesday, it’s Z’s birthday. 28th to be exact. We wake up early and Fox is cloaked by fog but we make ourselves coffees and drive to the trailhead and somehow the fog clears and we have sightlines! The bergs are still there. It makes sense that the only hourlong period that Fox Island has been clear this entire week is Z’s birthday morningtime. Back at the Inch, we have crêpes and stewed apples and blueberry sausages. Later still, we have more lobster at Twine Loft under a setting fire sun.
Of lobsters and birthdays and icebergs!
A Friendly Guest Slouch!
“Bodies” by Michael Winter
My parents are English. We emigrated to Newfoundland when I was three. They maintained a British diet, but lobster was an exception. The season for lobster in Newfoundland is brief, a few weeks in early June. And I associate eating lobster with my parents filing their taxes. Our neighbour, Mrs Shears, stood at the back wall and waited for us to finish.
The Shears were born in the nineteenth century. They are the oldest people I’ve ever known. They were originally from Rocky Harbour and moved to Corner Brook well before confederation. Mr Shears had a job at Bowaters mill, the largest pulp mill in the world. We ate the claws and the tail and chewed on the legs while Mrs Shears showed us the magic trick of pulling off the tail fins and pushing a fork through the back end. So the tail meat pops out in one section, like pulling a rabbit from a hat. And then my father gathered up the bodies in the folded-out newspaper (the one I delivered) and handed the bodies over to Mrs Shears. We were all afraid of the bodies. My mother told me, when Mrs Shears died (she was almost a hundred), she called out to her as they loaded her aboard the ambulance, “Goodbye Mrs Shears.” And Mrs Shears said, “Goodbye, Mrs Winter.”
It took a long time for me to discover any interest in the lobster carcass. The roe, a waxy red, was delicious in its own right. But the tomalley (the green liver paste) was something my parents never did eat. But once you travel and eat strange foods from other bays in the world, when you meet people who suck the raw roe out of a sea urchin, who order plates of razor clams with small glasses of beer, who deep-fry tiny fish called, I think, madeira (and you realize they are just like Newfoundland caplin), well then you’re emboldened and ready for the conquest of the cartilaginous underbelly of the scavenger of the sea. But you may be alone at the table with the last of the white wine, picking through the gills and the gastric mill, no one hears you as you rummage for threads of white meat near the head sac and the ganglia, as you express surprise that the anatomy of an arthropod is like a chicken’s.
When I first bought this house in Conception Bay North, my nearest neighbours befriended me. They were, I realized too late, a family who sold land that they didn’t own. They were, in other words, hard cases. One time the son, Gary, said, “We always thought we owned your house.” And that was their attitude: they owned everything. It is the mindset of the poacher. In early June I saw Gary on the road with a large wooden pole and a white bucket. The pole had a sharp prong at the end. I asked him what he was doing. “Get on the bike,” he said.
I got on the back of his ATV, held his bucket and pole, while he drove like a maniac out to the point, well past the signal light, and, in amongst what are called “the mouseholes,” I saw he had an even longer pole in shallow water. On a spike on that pole was a chunk of mackerel. “Ever catch a mackerel on a trout rod? Fun.” Gary stood on the rocks above the pole. “You see him?” I saw nothing. Then he rammed his prong down into the water. Up out of the sea this curling flailing lobster. Gary shook off the lobster in the grass. “Put him in the bucket.” I had never handled a lobster without blue elastics on its claws. Gary waited for another lobster to crawl out of the rocks to inspect his chunk of mackerel. This was yet another chapter in a long history of my understanding the mentality of poachers and their attitude to government property and the folk songs that try, in a few stanzas, to prevent the hanging of a husband who was tempted by the king’s deer.
I buy my lobster (legally) from the marina in Ochre Pit. Just a few days ago I finished my taxes and drove down and climbed aboard Dale Pike’s trapskiff. Dale hauled up a crib from the floor of the marina; this “crib” is a cage, blocked with live lobster. I asked Dale if he does anything else with the boat besides collect lobster. “You want to know the second happiest day of my life? After the birth of my daughter?” He scrolled through his phone while I chose my females. “Here,” he said. And there, on board the very boat we were on, stood Dale and an enormous, hoisted tuna. “A buddy of mine had a license. So we went out. And by the time we got back to port with this tuna, there was a refrigerated van waiting at the apron to rush it to the Fogo Island Inn.”
My friends, Tom and Rick, will not eat lobster before the first full moon in June. They disdain the early lobster. But when its time, they go all-in. The volume of lobster shocked me. I had always been a one-lobster-per-person sort of guy. But when you arrive at Tom and Rick’s for a feed there are cooked lobsters heaped on steaming platters: four of five lobsters per guest. By the end of the night someone will groan in an attempt to reach out an arm to finish off that one last lobster.
One of my favourite meals occurred on the coast of Spain. Friends ordered paella, and I saw on the menu a paella with squid ink. All the paella arrived, glorious colours, and then, finally, my squid ink paella: it was dull as charcoal. I tried my best to hold back my disappointment. Friends said we could share. No, I said, that’s ok. And I had a bite. I’ve never had the sea in my mouth quite like that. So I make paella. Tiny squid beach themselves near me, and I’ve removed the quill and milked the ink and made paella. I make it with lobster meat. Lobsters are the scavengers of the sea. They eat dead bodies. I often think of Mrs Shears, waiting for our bodies. I remember Mrs Shears saying in Rocky Harbour they had the best drinking water in the world. Until they built the new cemetery up on the hill. That was one of the reasons why they moved.
What I’m chewing on these days:
On the wall:
Willem Claeszoon Heda (1594-1680) sits comfortably within a tradition of Dutch Golden Age artmakers who privileged the public over the private. His practice of still life, engaging in its compelling aesthetic realism, only feigns at capturing a ‘real’ picture of everyday domestic life. Mary Pratt, who I discussed last week, is a more faithful record keeper of her domestic everyday. Whereas Heda’s Still Life with a Lobster (Figure 1) is a scene tied to the economy of trade, in Grilse on Glass (Figure 2) Pratt makes public the private economy of her kitchen. The things in Heda’s still life are isolated from their context in the routine of the domestic to form new public contexts. The things in Pratt’s still lifes are all the more powerful for remaining in their domestic contexts; she illuminates without hyperbole.
But, of course the line between “public” and “private” is not easy to draw. Or perhaps, what is truly private is public (and visa versa). Pratt’s treatment of fish across her career balances the economic, environmental, and cultural identity of Newfoundland—coastal life, extremes of weather, and the province’s long-lasting and (sometimes tumultuous) reliance on fisheries. In these works Pratt is at her most rich and complex: she is in her Newfoundland kitchen gutting a fish; she is thinking about tonight’s dinner party, art history, and environmental degradation.
Coming forward in rumpled elegance from a shadowy backdrop is Heda’s Still Life with a Lobster. At first glance, this tablescape seems to be a bric-à-brac collection of agitated objects: a soused dinner guest gets caught up in the tablecloth as they decamp, upsetting the plate of olives. But look again, and the objects of the painting emerge as the deliberate iconography of image writing. The cloth, lying beneath exotic and precious silver, glassware, and foodstuff, has the satiny sheen of soft-to-the-touch extravagance. Muted olives and lemon from the faraway Mediterranean, the delicate porcelain from China, and the peppercorns, perhaps, from India. Even the domestic products are obvious displays of wealth. Making up the solar system of the painting is a handsome lobster, a cylindrical roemer wineglass and its tactile raspberry-like knobs, Mars atop the gold goblet surveying his surroundings, a spread-winged waterfowl perching on a terracotta pot, and a cornucopia of rock salt jewels. From the gloom of this supposedly private realm comes a deliberate, imagined demonstration of political, public consequence.
In Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth Century Dutch Still Life Painting, Harry Berger Jr. recounts a dark reality often swept under these laden tables. Oftentimes, these spreads seem to emerge, artificially lit, from the dark solitude of the private sphere while boastfully engaging in the lively commercial discourses of the outside public. The visual record of Dutch still life depicts — but does not openly acknowledge — the conquest of empire. As Dutch trade expanded into the New World and Asia, their trading vessels were increasingly militarized. These paintings are silent in the face of the colonial atrocity that went hand in hand with the pursuit of these commodities — catalogues of accumulation and the transformation of that accumulation into spectacle. Beneath the surface of this spectacle, however, lies more disturbing truths that go beyond the cultural organization of the material world.
For her part, Elizabeth Alice Honig resists a reading of the stuff of still life that solely privileges its commodity context (privileging its public context over and against its private context). Certainly, every object can be a commodity. But in this same way, every object can equally not. Her discussion surrounds the motives of still life and emphasizes understandings of these painted spreads as insights into shared rituals of consumption and mentalities of collecting. Is the most interesting thing about Heda’s beady-eyed lobster its economic value? There is a difference between objects and images of objects; the material, tangible histories of these commodities, non-commodities, once commodities, and then their visual portrayals in paint.
Bringing Heda’s lobster into Mary Pratt’s kitchen has me thinking lobsters in their economic precedents and afterlives. Today’s disputes about Canada’s lobster fisheries rest on complex, and often forgotten, histories of colonialism and legal treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. Rooted in the peace and friendship treaties of the 1700s, which acknowledge Indigenous rights to hunt and fish for personal subsistence, the recent constitutional challenge initiated by Cody Caplin, a member of the Eel River Bar First Nation, casts a spotlight on the enduring struggle for recognition and autonomy. While Indigenous communities can fish outside commercial seasons for ceremonial and subsistence needs, the prohibition on selling catches complicates matters. As defined in the 1999 Marshall decision, many Nova Scotia cases focus on Mi’kmaw fishers seeking to earn a “moderate livelihood:” to hunt and fish without the interference of the government. At heart of the matter lies a fundamental question: can federal regulations coexist with Indigenous sovereignty over fisheries, balancing modern conservation regimes with ancestral rights and local knowledges? As legal battles unfold, the future of Canada's lobster fisheries hangs in the balance — one of the many ways our country continues to contend with our colonial past and present.
So here again we grapple with the weight of the things of still life. The form has always been a genre of storytelling: the things that bear witness and that make up the pleasurable monotony of everyday lives and drive lively and violent societies. There is aesthetic realism and anecdotal realism. Surrounding these represented moments, viewers imagine the preceding preparation and proceeding consumption of the domestic occasion. In their enduring present, the objects of these paintings are first frozen in time, then endlessly brought back to life—freeze-thaw cycles of intervention, manipulation, and perception.
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An appendix of crustaceans: