What the Bay Gives

The bountiful waters off Duxbury, Massachusetts, which once fed Pilgrims, today are still home to a thriving ecosystem and abundance of fish.  Saquish is a long spit of sand and cobble guarding the entrance to Plymouth Bay. It has a few beach houses, marshes and mudflats, and crazy currents. It’s also Skip Bennett’s favorite place for winter lobstering. Once or twice a week, he’ll slip away from Island Creek Oysters, the business he founded 20 years ago in Duxbury, Massachusetts, which shares the bay with Plymouth, and run his skiff out to the churning waters off Saquish to get in touch with his roots. His father was a commercial lobsterman in Duxbury for 40 years, and Skip maintains a 10-pot recreational license. In the summer, he sets them in “guzzles”—underwater troughs in the inner bay–but in winter, as the lobsters begin to head offshore, he fishes the Saquish ledges. The first trap Skip pulled last December 8 had one lobster, the next two, and they looked good to Skip: “Hard shells. No culls. No eggers.” The next pots had one, one, two, and two. Skip tallied as he rebaited the last pot: “Nine lobsters! Nice!” Just as he tossed the last one toward our basket, a wave rocked us and sent the lobster ricocheting off the basket rim back into the sea. “Oops. Eight lobsters.” Skip flashed his famously boyish smile. “Still, pretty good for this time of year!” It felt like a good idea to send one back to the gods of the bay, anyway. The bay has been Skip’s patron for all of his 48 years, and I’d been begging favors from it since 5:00 a.m., when I’d squelched through Back River Marsh on a goose hunt with two other Island Creekers: Mark Bouthillier, who farms the oysters, and Chris Sherman, who runs the wholesale and retail side of the business. We’d crouched in a frozen duck blind and watched squadrons of little arrows winging their way across a slate sky; finally Mark had talked one down to us with his goose call and then hit it solid. His retriever, Tug, had proudly carried it all the way home. You’d think that when you spend your days on the water scrubbing oyster cages, you’d spend your off time inland and indoors, but “la vie Island Creek,” as Chris Sherman calls it, has always been a full-contact bay sport. A quartet of Island Creekers, all local Duxbury boys—Skip, Mark, Chris, and Gardner Loring, the farm manager (that’s “Benny,” “Cuss,” “Sherm,” and “Gard” in Island Creek vernacular)–have been doing it all their lives. In summer they fish for stripers and bluefish and grill on the beach, but once or twice each winter, when waterfowl are in season and the clams and oysters are at their sweetest, the time comes to take stock of their lives and their world. Here in early December, their schedules had jibed, and they’d been kind enough to invite me along. The goal: a feast at the Bennett family cottage on Saquish that would warm our chilled souls and let us savor the many sides of the bay. The rules: We eat what we catch. My heart (and stomach) had quavered after the morning hunt yielded no ducks and just the one goose, because we’d be joined at dinner by three wives and two kids, and I pictured the 10 of us gnawing on goose feet and an oyster or two, but now with the lobsters I was feeling a bit better. With any luck, lots of clams and sea ducks awaited us. As Skip and I hauled each trap to the surface, icy Atlantic spray misted our faces, and the wind found gaps in our Grundens and funneled 28-degree air inside. Saquish is a wicked-cold place to be in an open boat in December. I could savor the raw slap of it, because I knew Skip’s cottage awaited, but I couldn’t help but think of another open boat that found itself in much grimmer circumstances in this same spot, 393 years ago to the day. That flat-bottomed, 33-foot shallop had been launched from the Mayflower, anchored a few miles east in Provincetown Harbor. It carried 10 of the leaders of the Pilgrims, along with eight crewmen from the Mayflower, and as it bore down upon the crashing breakers of Saquish, it seemed very much as if the Pilgrims’ great experiment in the New World would come to a soggy end before it had even begun. The Mayflower had landed at Provincetown on November 11, but the settlers had quickly realized that the sandy Cape had neither the fresh water nor fertile land they needed. A mate onboard the ship, who had visited the area on an exploration six years earlier, recalled a good bay with a navigable river on the mainland (probably Boston Harbor), and they decided to try to find it in the shallop. But the shallop was caught on Cape Cod Bay by a fierce December storm that broke its rudder. “It was as much as two men could do to steer her with a couple of oars,” William Bradford, the future governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote in his account. With night falling and the winds building, the mate spied what he thought was the entrance to the harbor. They raised their sail and tried to make the bay before the last of the light disappeared, but the winds snapped their mast in two places and blew the sail overboard. Rowing with the wind, soaking wet and hypothermic in the sleet, they came in too high and missed the entrance, bearing down on the rocks of Saquish instead. The first mate, peering into the blackness, suddenly wailed, “Lord, be merciful unto us, for my eyes never saw this place before!” It was a heck of a time for such an epiphany, and I can well imagine his companions’ thoughts as they discovered they were about to “run her ashore, in a cove full of breakers, before the wind.” At that moment, not a single Pilgrim on that shallop could have anticipated that less than a year later, he would be breaking bread (well, cornbread) with the local Indians at Plymouth Colony’s very first harvest feast. Nothing had gone right for the Pilgrims up to that point. Countless delays in their transatlantic voyage meant that they were arriving at their new home at the worst possible time of year, short on provisions and sick with scurvy. They had missed their intended destination—New York Harbor–by 500 miles. The day before, their first encounter with the locals had ended in a flurry of arrows and musket shot. And now their best and brightest were about to be dashed to pieces on the black December sea. That shipwreck would have meant no Plymouth Colony, and no Skip Bennett, who can trace 16 different lines from his family back to the Mayflower. But here he is, making a life on the bay four centuries later. For what the Pilgrims could never have anticipated on December 8, 1620, was that their luck was about to turn in unbelievable ways. They had blundered into the wrong bay, but it would turn out to be the right bay, perhaps the only spot on the Eastern Seaboard with the exact ingredients necessary to get them through that first impossible year. They could not have imagined all the things they would soon have to give thanks for. December 8, 2013, coincided with an extremely low tide that turned big swaths of Duxbury Bay into a giant mudflat. After the hair-trigger breathlessness of the morning hunt and the roller-coaster ride of small-skiff lobstering, shellfishing felt like a walk in the park—a very muddy park. If I didn’t keep moving, the ooze threatened to suck my waders right off my feet. This barren mudflat seemed like an unlikely place to find sustenance. I began mentally divvying up the eight lobsters and one goose among the crowd. I wondered whether the seaweed was edible. But then I noticed little squirts of water launching themselves out of the flats in all directions, and Skip showed me the little depressions in the mud that the clams’ siphon tubes had made. When he found a spot he liked, we dug down with our rakes and turned over … gold! Six inches down, the bay was as much clam as mud. It was treasure hunting at its finest. With every turn of the dirt, we gathered the beautiful, polished nuggets by the armful, until we’d filled our buckets. Saquish means “Place of Many Clams” in the local Wampanoag dialect, and it was heartening to see that the name still applied. I felt myself begin to relax and even to entertain the notion that we might prosper this day. Skip had harvested clams throughout his teens, while working for his dad at Bennett Tire & Service. “I could come down to the beach and dig a bucketful of littlenecks,” he said, “and it was more than I made in a week at the garage!” In college, he turned to mussels. It was the 1980s, and America had just discovered mussels, and Skip found that he could gather 3,000 pounds a day in Duxbury Bay: “They were everywhere. It didn’t take long to get that much. I loved shellfishing. Loved the hard work, loved the independence, and loved being outside. And the money was great.” The money was great if you were willing to beat yourself up and risk your life, which he was. “There were a couple of times that I really scared myself,” he recalled. “Out way before sunrise, and nobody knows I’m out there, and the northwest wind is blowing, and I’m taking waves over the bow, in water so cold it will kill you in a few minutes.” More often, the risks were just to his body’s long-term viability: carrying 80-pound bags of mussels all day long through knee-deep mud. After college, Skip lined up a finance job in New York. “I just didn’t want to be 48 years old and having to dig clams every day,” he explained. “That was my biggest fear.” But he pushed the job back so that he could have one more summer on the bay. That summer, he bought a bull rake from a man on the Cape who asked him whether he’d ever thought about farming clams. “I said I’d heard it doesn’t work that well. And he said, ‘Don’t say you heard it from me, but there’s some guys out in Wellfleet who were barely making grocery money and now they’re all driving new trucks and going to Florida for the winter.’ I was 23. I thought, ‘What else do you need? A new truck and going to Florida!'” So in 1990 Skip turned down the finance job and became Duxbury’s first clam farmer. After a few good years, however, all his clams died from a disease in 1995. “I thought long and hard about giving up,” he says. His first daughter was born in 1996, and he put food on the table by filling the back of his pickup truck with horseshoe crabs and selling them to the pharmaceutical industry, which uses their blood in tests for bacterial toxins. He was living well below the poverty line, pushing his physical limits. Still, a desk job seemed unbearable, so he decided to give oyster farming a shot, using his clam gear. And it turned out that the “silence of the clams” was the best thing that ever could have happened to him. Island Creek Oysters came into being just as oyster mania was on the rise in America. And in Duxbury Bay, two pounds of baby oysters, each smaller than a grain of sand, turned into 200,000 pounds of beautifully briny adult oysters in 15 months, purely by straining phytoplankton out of the water. Island Creeks became a New England phenomenon, ubiquitous in raw bars and many restaurants. “It was all starting to work,” Skip recalled as we slogged from the clamming flats to his oyster grounds. “The brand grew, and a lot of smart people helped me keep it going in the right direction. And then three years ago another disease wiped us out, and we didn’t know whether it was ever going to be good again.” The ground here was virtually paved in four-inch oysters, their shells shimmering in a few inches of water. As Skip and I collected them in plastic buckets, I got greedy and reached for a deep one, soaking the insides of my gloves. The pain went straight to the bone, but hunter-gatherer fever overruled my senses; I stripped off the gloves and kept going, my hands red and raw. I shucked an oyster on the spot and tilted it into my mouth. A good oyster smells like the sea breeze, and this was a good oyster. We were surrounded by 300,000 good oysters in this one spot, and there were millions more in the bay. For now, things were good again, but the past 23 years have taught Skip a lesson the Pilgrims knew well: Never take any of it for granted. Clark’s Island, an 86-acre ridge of oak and cedar a stone’s throw from the Bennett family cottage, was the turning point of the Pilgrims’ saga. As they bore down on the cliffs in their shallop in the December sleet, the pilot exhorted the oarsmen, saying that if they be men, they must turn the boat about and row “lustily” in the other direction. They were, and they did. Somewhere in the blackness, the pilot thought he detected the quiet of a “fair sound” where they could ride out the night. They rowed hard across the wind, waves exploding over the side, and got themselves around Saquish Head, into the lee side of some landmass, sheltered from the wind. They remained there all night, soaked to the bone. It must have been punishingly cold, and when the rising sun revealed that they had spent the night behind an island, they resolved to go ashore to dry out, despite fear of Indians. John Clark, the Mayflower‘s other mate, was the first to leap off the shallop onto the shores of the island that has borne his name ever since. They spent the day, a Saturday, recovering and drying their things, and the next day they gave thanks for their good fortune at a massive boulder in the high center of the island, now known as Pulpit Rock. The following day they explored the superb bay they had stumbled into. Not only was it perfectly sheltered, but it was also full of fish and fowl. On the mainland they found “diverse cornfields, and little running brooks, a place fit for situation.” What they did not find were Indians. During the previous three years, a plague, introduced by European fishing boats, had killed 90 percent of the Indians inhabiting the New England coast. Patuxet, the Indian village of 2,000 people that had occupied the site where the Pilgrims would found Plymouth Colony, had been entirely wiped out. The Pilgrims built their new homes not in a wilderness but in a cleared township of abandoned fields and homes. In New York or Virginia, they would have been met by thousands of warriors, but there was almost no one left to defend the New England coast. Still, no one ever moved to New England for the ease of its lifestyle. Despite the natural advantages they had lucked into, the Pilgrims endured a miserable winter much harsher than anything they had known in Europe. They managed to build only seven houses before winter set in hard, and by winter’s end, 52 of their original 102 members had died of starvation or illness. There was little reason to expect the remaining 50 to endure much longer, but in March they met their first Indians, and things went shockingly well. A delegation of the local Wampanoag approached their enclave, and, to the Pilgrims’ astonishment, one of them spoke English. Tisquantum, the Indian whom the Pilgrims nicknamed Squanto, was one of the few survivors of Patuxet village. Captured by English explorers in 1614 and taken to Europe, he had lived in London for several years, mastering the language and the culture. By the time he managed to hitch a ride back to Patuxet in 1619, his people were gone. When the Pilgrims arrived a year later, Squanto was sent to live with them as a go-between. They would not have survived without him. Not only did he smooth communication between them and the Wampanoag, he also regaled the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, with tales of London. (For good measure, he told Massasoit that the Pilgrims kept the plague in barrels that they could unleash at any time.) Instead of 50 rubes without prospect, Massasoit saw the Pilgrims as the advance emissaries of supremely powerful potential allies. And the Wampanoag badly needed allies. Decimated by the plague, they were about to be overrun by the Narragansett, their enemies to the west. The scary white strangers, settling on land nobody claimed anyway, might change the balance of power. So the Wampanoag befriended the Pilgrims in March 1621 and slid them some food to get them through the lean times. Squanto taught the newcomers to plant corn, beans, and squash, to catch eels and fish the rivers, and to clam along the tidal flats. By the narrowest of margins, they survived. In late afternoon, Skip Bennett, Gardner Loring, and I were crouched in Skip’s floating duck blind in the marsh where Saquish nearly meets Clark’s Island, trying to will a few ducks our way. The blind was a plastic Carolina Skiff festooned with plywood and marsh grass to resemble a floating hummock. It rode low in the water and threatened to scuttle at any moment. Decoys bobbed around us. The idea was that sea ducks, which come into the bay during the day to feed and then return to the safety of the open ocean for the night, would spot the decoys and detour over to see what they were missing. Otherwise, they’d be too far away and moving too fast to be hit. We watched plenty of ducks zip out the channel, but none came to check out the funny hummock with the stiff birds. On the cobbly beach, Chris Sherman started a fire near Skip’s gray-clapboard cottage, a box of windows with a sleeping loft. The original cabin was built in 1904 with lumber from a passing wood barge that had broken loose in a storm and drifted for days before conveniently floating into Plymouth Bay. Skip’s great-aunt bought the place in the 1930s and raised eight kids in the tiny space. His grandfather bought it from her in 1948. When they sold it in 1965, hard up for money, their son, Bill, was heartbroken. For years, Bill left notes for the new owners tacked to the front door, offering to buy it back. Finally, in 1980, they relented. Both Bill and Skip used it as a hunting and fishing spot, but neither of them ever had the time or the funds to keep it up, and by the 2000s it had fallen into ruin. Recently, Skip was finally able to fix it up. It was now tight and warm, with running water and solar power. It served as summer cabin, hunting camp, and the site for the annual Saquish Sessions, a company retreat. After an hour of watching birds wing high over Clark’s Island, it became clear that something about our weird little spot in the marsh was unconvincing. “Ducks are so cagey,” Gardner whispered, holding perfectly still. “If you get one, it’s a feather in your cap.” These ducks seemed determined to hold on to their feathers. The evening sun buttered the marshes and blued the bay. Soon it would be dark. We waited. The temperature plunged. Although we didn’t say it, we all understood that no ducks were going to be snuggling up to our decoys. Thank God for shellfish, I thought. Still, it was good. Holding very still and pushing all your consciousness out to your eyes and ears is the best way to feel a place. Hunched in the blind, I could just make out jagged little swatches of landscape. Wrinkles of water here. Golden reeds there. Friends beside me. Ghosts of hunters past all around. Suddenly, as we each waited for someone else to verbalize our defeat, four dark objects came shooting low over the marsh at us, like fighter planes. “Sea ducks!” Skip said. “Coming right over us!” Gardner said. They sure weren’t slowing down for our decoys, but their flight path was taking them straight over our position. In the space of a second, Skip said, “I think I’ve got a shot!” and then, “I’m taking it!” Four shapes flashed overhead. He squeezed the trigger for the only time that day, the air exploded, and a feathery lump spiraled into the grass. “Numbed him, Benny!” Gardner cheered. “Oh yeah!” Skip said. “That’s how you git ‘er done.” And with that, we could check off all the boxes for our feast. One duck, one goose. Many lobsters. Many, many clams. Oysters to spare. That’s pretty close to what the Pilgrims pulled together for their first harvest feast in 1621, a few short months after the near-starvation of spring. “I never in my life remember a more seasonable year than we have here enjoyed,” Edward Winslow wrote in amazement to a friend in Holland. “I make no question but men might live as contented here as in any part of the world. For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels and [clams] at our doors: oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will.” Even more miraculously, the Pilgrims produced a bumper crop of corn on their first try. “Our harvest being gotten in,” Winslow wrote, “our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation.” Three days! Five deer! Our shindig was humbler. In lieu of 90 Indians, we were joined by Mark’s wife and their 8-year-old daughter; Gardner’s wife and their 3-month-old daughter; and Chris’s wife, his high-school sweetheart, who was pregnant with their first child. Chris, whose first job was at the Bennett General Store, had worked in New Zealand as a yacht builder, aboard sailboats in the Caribbean, and as a schooner bum in Maine before returning to join Island Creek, across the street from the Bennett General Store. “The circle is complete,” he mused as he spread seaweed over the coals of our beach fire. Onto this he layered lobsters, then more seaweed, then hardshell clams, then razor clams, and then a wet cloth over the top. The fire sizzled, and popcorny shellfish aromas filled the cold air as I shucked oysters and handed them out. And although it was among the darkest of days and our beer threatened to freeze in our glasses, we set up a table on the grass above the beach and laid the food upon it because … well, because we weren’t quite ready to let the day go. Steam rose from the lobsters and the clams popped open to reveal their prizes like little jewelboxes. The duck and goose breasts were rare and gamy with the wild energies of the marsh. Did we make any speeches? Any memorable words to mark this latest feast? We did not. We were cold. And hungry. And sore. We powered through the food. We laughed. We drank. We watched the twinkling beacons of houses appear across the water. It had been a good day. A good, hard, full day. And that, everyone agreed, is all you can ask for. We flung our shells into the water. We promised to do it again. And then these children of Saquish hustled toward the warmth and light of the little village on the black bay. Find traditional Turkey Day recipes with a twist at: YankeeMagazine.com/Thanksgiving