The Bay, The Channel, and The Fish

There was a time, prior to 1973, when there was a naval air station at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The Navy stationed two Essex Class aircraft carriers there, which meant there was a deep water channel running from just east of Brenton Tower at the mouth of the East Passage to Narragansett Bay, all the way in to the carrier piers at the air station. The station is gone, and the two carriers, the Intrepid and the Essex, are long gone to scrap.

Naturally, this channel was a prominent feature on the navigational charts of the lower bay. In the early seventies recording fathometers became available to the general boating public at reasonable prices, and as you steamed your boat over this channel, it would appear on the recorded trace as a ditch with sides cut at near right angles.

Two things happened almost simultaneously around ‘73. First, Dad shifted from open ocean fishing to working Narragansett Bay. Second, the two major Rhode Island municipal sewerage treatment plants that had functioned improperly for so many years were upgraded significantly, thanks to a federal lawsuit. The second item was critical. In the course of a single year the menhaden, a small fish that held a critical link in the food chain of two important salt water game fishes, returned to Narragansett Bay in massive numbers. With the menhaden came their predators.

Menhaden swim in huge, tight schools, where bluefish and stripped bass feed on them. As the larger fish tear into the schools of menhaden, the schools move toward the surface of the sea in an attempt to escape their predators. In their panic, the menhaden don’t realize they are running out of water as some of them leap out into the air before falling back into the sea. This causes a ‘boiling’ effect on the surface as the (most often) bluefish feed on the smaller fish. Blues are voracious feeders, with four rows of teeth.

If Dad and I were out on the Bay and spotted the menhaden ‘boiling’ we would make a bee line for the area, taking care to stand off from the ‘boiling’ spot itself. If you cruised your boat right through it, you would drive the menhaden school under and disperse the fish.

We would lie to about ten yards off the school, casting our spinning rods or fly rods into that feeding frenzy. With luck we would entice one or more large bluefish that were feeding on the menhaden to take our lures. Blues are great fighters. A twenty pound blue will give you as good a fight as a forty pound stripper. The idea was to give the feeding frenzy a wide berth; sometimes it broke up on its own.

But back to the carrier channel. The really big blues and strippers didn’t come to the surface much except at night. To get them you put a line deep, just down to the edge of the carrier channel, using lead or wire line. Dad was a master of this. He would run the boat at about two to three knots, trolling those lines just right, back and forth over the edge of the carrier channel. He’d watch the fathometer to ensure the lures were floating back and forth along the edge, and get us into plenty of big blues. That wasn’t as exciting as casting into an acre of boiling menhaden, but it got you into big fish that took quite a while to bring to the stern of the boat. It was exciting to see that dim gray form come into view from deep in the water as the details of an eighteen pound bluefish came into focus, and you tried like heck to not lose her in the last few moments before Dad set the gaff.

Long after Dad could no longer go out on the water we would sit and talk about those days with a special fondness. When dementia had robbed him of so much, it never robbed him of those memories. During the last full day of his life, when he was confined to a hospital bed, he motioned me close, and in a soft voice we talked about those trips on Narragansett Bay, about the different lures, and how they were effective in different circumstances. He even brought up the fact that the flasher on that fathomer wasn’t much good, so it was a damned good thing that we had the paper trace.

After Dad died, I took one of his best salt water reels, a Penn Mariner, that I had cleaned up and lubed so that it was ready to go, and sent it to my son. He is an avid collector of all things family, and he treasures it. It’s not just a relic. The same reel is coveted by fishermen on the Alaskan coast. I know he’ll treat it right, and he has my stories about fishing with Dad.

A Beautiful Kitten Who Died too Young

  

Sweet Kitten

You left us so young,

Left your joy behind,

Hanging in the air,

Like an unused set of clothes,

Barely touched,

You had frolicked in them

But a short time,

A tiny form,

Playing like a big cat,

In a little body,

Charming everyone,

And everything,

Until you burned out too soon,

Sweet Bernice.

When Walmart Came to Town

My wife was the rabbi of a small congregation in the Virginia Piedmont for about ten years. She loved them, and they loved her. Then some particularly crazy folk came on the synagogue board of directors, and decided that they didn’t like her. She was gone after a very unhappy year of harassment during which the congregation tried to keep her, and the board explained that it was their decision.

The area isn’t exactly seeded with congregations, and we weren’t inclined to move, but she did continue to conduct weddings, funerals, and baby namings. As the High Holidays approached, I told her that I thought we should rent a hall, invite every Jew we knew, and put on services. At first she was skeptical. We had neither prayer books nor Torah nor any other necessary furniture of a synagogue.

Nevertheless we decided to make a go of it. We found the former base theater at what was once the Army Intel Command Vint Hill Farms Station at a reasonable price.

My wife went to work putting together our own machzor. Instead of wondering how many pages the rabbi would skip, the congregation would get a crisp, compact prayer book, with plenty of English and Hebrew transliteration, easy to understand, with some nice illustrations. The built-from-the-ground-up prayer book would be readable, because it would be large enough to fit in an 8.5 x 11 loose leaf notebook, and it would contain only those pages used in the service – no wondering about how many of those 300+ pages the rabbi might skip.

We had no web or Facebook™ pages, but we did have a pretty good mailing list, in spite of our old synagogue’s membership director’s position that ‘the rabbi has no need to email congregants.’ We sent out announcements, and hoped for the best.

Attendance seriously exceeded our expectations. If we had made back our expenses, we would have been happy, but we did much better than that, so we went back the next year.

But the theater we rented was not ideal. It was meant for movies and plays. The lights were ‘house lights,’ too dim to comfortably read by. The rabbi found another place, an auditorium at the Community Center in Marshall, Virginia. It had big windows, bright lights, great parking right in front of the building. Heck, you could almost mistake it for a synagogue. We moved there in year three, and things were great. We continued to make a small but tidy profit to go along with my wife’s wedding and funeral work.

Putting on the services took a lot of effort. We had to schlep lots of paraphernalia up to Marshall at the last minute, but the results were worth it.

More and more Jews were moving to the central Piedmont, however. Chabad moved a couple up to Gainesville from Tennessee. At first they were only part time while they got settled, but they held Purim and Hanukkah celebrations for the community. When the young couple was settled, they actually invited us to lunch in their sukkah.

This year we heard Chabad was holding High Holiday Services at a club house right in the midst of the area where much of our congregants came from. Rosh Hashanah would include a dinner. Sure enough, our attendance was down to about half, less than that for some services.

Now I know how local merchants feel when Walmart comes to town. Chabad is a juggernaut. We offered a service. They offered a service with a dinner, and pushed it out there with plenty of publicity.

It was nice while it lasted. There was a difference between the two. My wife offered a beautiful service, highly accessible, even to interfaith couples, with superb sermons. But I think this will be the last year.