Fishermens Tales Illustrate R.I.’s Changing Seaside Landscape
Allen Hazard Sr., a Narragansett Indian Tribe member,
doesn’t consider his quahoagging and wampum-making a job.
For him, it is carrying on a tradition. (Grace Kelly/ecoRI News)
His shop, the Purple Shell, is in the Old Umbrella Factory in
Charlestown
Rhode Island is often sold for its connection to the ocean; advertisements show oceanfront hotel views, beachside tiki bars and calamari hot out of the fryer with rings of neon-green pickled peppers.
But dive beneath the
surface — under the clam’s casino, the umbrella-studded beaches, the chowder
festivals — and what emerges is a more nuanced picture of the Ocean State’s
fishing way of life.
It’s a portrait of hard knocks, sunburned faces, scarred hands and early mornings. It’s the smell of diesel and low tide, the scuttle of invasive crabs and the gut-wrenching feeling of bank account balances scraping bottom before shooting up once more.
Look harder still, and you will also see woven fish traps, wampum beads and
eroding beach access that threatens the connection between past and present.
These are the stories of
a few of these fishermen: a father and son who rake the sea for quahogs and
sell the briny fruits of their labor; a fisherman who has turned to an invasive
species to earn his daily bread; and a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe
who carries on a centuries-old tradition of honoring the bounty of the sea
through his craft.
A tale of two Davids
The life of quahogging with a bullrake and making a living from the sea is hard, and it’s getting more difficult as waters warm, invasive species take hold and access dwindles. (Screen grab/Tyler Murgo/Son of the Sea)
Davy Andrade has a tentacle poking through the collar of his T-shirt. The
tattoo, presumably attached to some sort of sea creature, is one of many that
cover the youngest Andrade’s arms. His father, David Sr., also sports swirling
tattoos that peek their way out from underneath his short-sleeved button-down.
The elder Andrade sits
at his desk like King Neptune on his throne and looks out over his dominion — a
Bristol shop that has peddled quahogs, littlenecks and all manner of seafood
since 1987. He looks at his son, the next in line to the Andrade legacy of
bullraking shellfish in the wee hours of the morning, and smiles.
Andrade Sr. started
quahogging as a kid.
“It just seemed like the
thing to try, and when I tried it, it was good money,” he said during an
interview last September. “I didn’t think I’d be doing it for a living at
first, but as you go along you start doing better. And I liked it, it was like
going to the gym and getting paid for it.”
He fell in love with
quahogging, and 34 years ago Andrade Sr. and his wife, Gigi, opened Andrade’s
Catch on Wood Street. They sold fish caught by other local fishermen, the
quahogs and clams they harvested and fish and chips with coleslaw for those who
didn’t want to wait to eat their fill.
As the shop grew, so did
the Andrade family, and soon three small Andrades were helping sort clams and
prep food. The youngest, Davy, fell hard for the fishmonger and quahogging
life.
“I grew up on the water.
Some of my first memories were waking up in my dad’s boat cabin and hearing the
sound of the rake scratching away,” Davy said. “I guess I’ve always looked up
to him and saw that there weren’t many people carrying on the tradition. When I
turned 16, I was strong enough to pull the rake and from that point on I knew I
wanted to get my own boat and give it a shot.”
The motion of the bullraker is an unnatural-looking one: tanned arms move
to-and-fro and the shoulders bunch up, while shell-scarred hands grip the rake,
which churns up the brackish water and mud below. The heavy rake is then hauled
up, quahogs toggling in its bent jaws. It’s hard work, and the Andrades have
the arm muscles to show for it.
Andrade Sr. is proud of
his youngest son, who lives above the seafood shop and who is carrying on the
Andrade fishmongering line. But he’s also afraid that Davy could be one of the
last of a dying breed of quahoggers, with the industry dwindling significantly
since the boom of the 1970s and ’80s.
“It was pretty big back
then, there were over 3,000 fishermen … now we have like 450, and most of them
aren’t full time either,” the elder Andrade said. “In the ’90s the moratorium
came, and now they have a lottery system now where they allow a certain number
of new licenses each year. We lost a whole generation of fishermen.”
The moratorium Andrade
Sr. is referencing first came about in 1995 and lasted three years before being
expanded further in 2002.
“New licenses should be
controlled, as necessary, to help prevent overfishing and support the economic
viability of the industry,” according to a 2008 white paper by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
The current number of new commercial quahogging licenses allocated each year hovers around 36. That
number gets divided further into the over-65 shellfish license and the under-23
student shellfish license.
“They made it really
hard to get a license,” Andrade Sr. said. “Unless you were a student, you couldn’t
get a license. They shut a lot of guys out of the business.”
Coupled with younger
generations going to college and getting white-collar jobs and the reliable
fallback of working with your hands became just that: a last resort kind of
job.
“A lot of people want to
make money working on a computer,” Andrade Sr. said. “There are some people out
there that are still willing to go out there and struggle to make $40-$50,000 a
year and work hard. These people are getting fewer and fewer to come by.
“I’m glad I have the business here, you know, but I worry about my son who is working along with me. He doesn’t have the mortgage to pay anymore, but on the other hand, he doesn’t have the volume of business that we had.”
Sea of change
Jason Jarvis had an unorthodox path to fishing. He started out his career as a
chef, before realizing that the hours were bad, the pay worse and the
addiction-fueled industry a life-suck.
Jason Jarvis was introduced to a fishing way of life by his
brother. He’s never left. (Courtesy photo)
“I got out of that
business because it was killing me, and I ended up running a drug rehab center
for eight years for adolescents and kids,” he said. “I started there as a cook,
and they paid for my training to become a therapist.”
Then, one fateful day,
his brother showed up outside Jarvis’ workplace with a bucket of lobsters and a
few meaty tuna loins.
“He asked if I could
work for him, and I said yeah,” Jarvis recalled. “He simplified the job a
little too much, and before I knew it, I was 50 miles offshore in a gillnetter
puking my brains out.”
But the money was good —
Jarvis could make $1,200 a week, and the sea and its bounty called to him. He
later bought his own small boat and has been fishing out of Westerly for seven
years.
The changes to the local
fishing habitats were subtle at first: a bloom of algae here, a sudden glut of
green crabs there.
“The changes, God
almighty, where to begin with that?” Jarvis said in November. “We had an algae
bloom in some of the salt marshes this year, and it was an orange, light-yellow
color that I’ve never seen before in my life, and I’ve been walking past those
since I was a kid.”
He’s also seen a
preponderance of red seaweed, an invasive sea plant from Japan that gets tangled in gear and washes up on beaches,
baking in the sun and emitting a rotten-fish type of stench.
“For the guys that
gillnet, it’s been a nightmare for them,” he said. “And it never really used to
exist until that last 10 to 12 years.”
Then, there’s the green crabs. Formally called the European green crab, this small crustacean is voracious in its appetite for bivalves and has inflicted lasting damage on the East Coast’s soft-shell clam population.
But local fishermen have found a
way to make money off green crabs, by catching and selling them for bait, which
helps control the population. But now, even the once-omnipresent green crab has
been diminishing, and Jarvis believes it’s because of warming water
temperatures.
“This summer, the
Pawcatuck River, where I keep my boat, the water temperature got up to 84, 85 degrees,”
Jarvis said. “Now, this is brackish water, and all that water pretty much flows
out into Little Narragansett Bay and then into the ocean. So, we didn’t see as
many eels in our traps this year, and there are no green crabs in the entire
Pawcatuck River, and that’s pretty scary because for years guys have been
making a living with them.”
The marine waters that
so name the Ocean State are changing. Water temperatures off the coast of New England have risen by about 3 degrees since
1901, which might not seem like much but actually makes the region a leader in
ocean warming. And what was once a region rich with Atlantic cod, lobster and
sea scallops is slowly giving way to warm-water species such as scup, black sea
bass and sea robins.
For fishermen like
Jarvis, this means that what is around today might be gone tomorrow.
“Spanish and chub mackerel showed up almost every year now, and finger mullet too. I’d say probably, the last 15 years they were quite abundant,” Jarvis said. “And then this year we didn’t see any of them in the salt pond. I mean, maybe a handful. Not sure what’s going on with that because they like the warm water, but it’s definitely an environmental factor.”
Bountiful beauty
People have cast nets
into the ocean for thousands of years. Here in Rhode Island, Indigenous
communities dug through muddy shoals and inlets for clams and crabs and built
intricate fish baskets designed to trap grown fish and let the smaller ones
pass through.
All the local tribes,
including the Narragansett, Pequot and Mashpee Wampanoag, saw and still see not
only the bounty of the sea but its beauty. Oyster, mussels, clams and quahogs
were thanked for the nourishment they provided, and their shells were treasured
for the deep purple and creamy white that was exposed after the feast.
Allen Hazard Sr. is in
perpetual awe of the beauty of quahog shells. He holds two shells in his large
hands and points out how special this particular find was.
“See how rich and dark
that purple is?” he asked, tracing his finger over the ridges and sloping
sides. “Lots of quahogs don’t get that deep color so far into the shell. I’ll
never cut this one up.”
Hazard, a member of the
Narragansett Indian Tribe, carries on his ancestral tradition of honoring the
bounties of the sea by making beautifully carved, sacred wampum pieces. His
shop, The Purple Shell in Charlestown, is filled with his work: polished earrings,
intricate necklaces and bracelets and stunning ceremonial pipes with purple and
white shell inlays.
“The story of the
wampum, first and foremost, is nourishment,” he said during a February
interview. “It gave its life so we could continue ours … then you are able to
see a beautiful, beautiful color once you scrape out the meat.”
Allen Hazard Sr. learned the art of carving wampum from his mother
and aunt. (Grace Kelly/ecoRI News)
Hazard sits behind his desk that is scattered with papers, seashells, bevel drills and finely cut beads. A portrait of his mother hangs on the wall above.
Hazard learned the
tradition of carving wampum from his mother and aunt.
“You hang around these
people and pick up things, take on some traits,” he said, pointing up at the
photo of his mother. “But I’ll never be what they were.”
Wampum are sacred, and
each piece that Hazard makes not only honors the quahog but also the tradition
that has passed down to him.
“It’s just beautiful.
I’ll never get tired of working with them,” he said. “But this is not my
primary job, I don’t even see it as a job, this is my tradition.”
But access to the coast
— and, therefore, the quahogs and the tradition of wampum making — has slowly been disappearing as property lines cut out areas that used to be
accessible to anyone.
Hazard recalled the days
when he could roll his truck up near an inlet and hunt for blue crabs,
oftentimes also stumbling upon quahogs ripe for the picking.
“I was chasing blue
crabs more than quahogs but when I felt them, I’d pick them out. There was no
problem,” Hazard said. “And then, as the years go on, I’d go back to that same
spot and the next thing you know I got this ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Well,
I’m going blue crabbing. ‘Well, you’re on private property.’ And I’m like oh,
great. So there went that spot. Then further down the road, there went that
spot.”
Coastal access is increasingly under threat, with waterfront homes often sold as
coming with their own “private beaches,” and vague and antiquated median
high-tide rules muddying the legality of who can set foot where.
But for Hazard, this
land — and where it touches the sea — has always been a part of his people’s
traditions. Having that taken away over the years means slowly losing bits and
pieces of his culture and heritage, an ever-present tide of time, “progress”
and development chipping away at tradition.
“It’s very depressing to
know that … we used to inhabit from Connecticut to Massachusetts, the
oceanfront. We were considered oceanfront natives,” Hazard said. “But today,
our reservation is nowhere near the ocean. It’s connected to a swamp, and
there’s a little pond there, but you don’t get quahogs from fresh water.”
While he is happy to
carry on the tradition of wampum making, Hazard fears that the act of fishing,
crabbing and quahogging will slowly be taken away from the everyday person, and
an entire way of life could disappear.
“I don’t know that
there’s a lot of Allen Hazard’s left, and I don’t mean wampum-makers,” he said,
leaning back in his chair and fingering an intricate wampum bracelet. “I mean
good ol’ boys that like to take their kids down to the water. My granddaughter
just turned five and she loves going with pop pop to make believe she’s
catching blue crabs. That old style of entertainment is almost gone.”
Editor’s
note: Grace Kelly was a ecoRI News staffer when she filed this story.