#13 - A Man Who Knew Quality
More than half my life ago I spent a good deal of time in the company of an old man, a fisherman. His name was Winnie Havener. He taught me a lot about a lot of things, and he taught me very clearly there was a right way and a wrong way to do things. He also had a good sense of humor and was seldom at a loss for something to laugh about, especially with me around.
Winnie was a handsome old man. He had a strong nose and the classic blue-eyed, burnt-skinned, white-smiled face of a man who's seen a lot of weather. He wore a dirty old cap and had very tanned forearms, which he often showed off by rolling his sleeves up above his elbows. His clothing was faded green, his life colorful.
The first time I met Winnie, he was sitting on an old broken chair on a ledge on the shore on the island we both lived on those summers. All around him were piled his lobster traps, some new, some in need of fixing, which was what he usually was doing when I found him there. It was a messy place decorated with old paint pails, broken glass, hunks of manila pot warp, blobs of tar on the rocks and a rusty hammer and saw, but this was where Winnie held court.
There was no better storyteller in the world, and the man had a willing audience in me, who despite all the winking to those who knew better, swallowed most of it because I wanted to. One day he was telling me about Dicky Dynamite, the old workhorse that used to be on the island. A good story already, I spawned an even better one by asking how they got Dicky Dynamite out to the island in the first place. Well . . . Winnie launched into the most outrageous tale of all, with infinitely detailed description of the special cork floats that had to be fashioned for Dicky Dynamite’s feet, and the care with which they had to be secured to such a reluctant mariner. Then I heard about the near-catastrophic sea trials of this poor wild-eyed beast, and, finally, how one careful step at a time old Dicky walked himself across from the mainland. It was a hard story not to believe.
Winnie's method of instruction was equally energized, although it often seemed to consist solely of giving me holy hell for doing it wrong. Thus he would slowly and deliberately show me how to tie a bowline knot in a piece of rope with the rabbit coming up out of it’s hole around a tree and back down the hole. Then he'd hand me the rope and say, "Now you try it." Which I did and got the rabbit so screwed up he didn't know whether he was coming or going. "Give me that!" would say Winnie, and he’d yank the rope back and go through the whole thing all over again. But he taught me a lot of knots that way, and I've never forgotten them, nor his teaching me.
In the same way, Winnie taught me the right way to dig clams one foggy afternoon. "What are you doing it that way for, digging down-hill? You're gonna to fall in them potholes. Give me the rake!” And so he showed me, digging back up the sloped shore, how I should spread my feet wide, dig a two or three rake wide trench between them and then start folding the next rakesful of mud back into the trench I’d created. In no time we had a mess of clams and he took me up to his shingled house to show me how to make a real chowder with whole clams, potatoes, milk and fresh cow butter which he pulled up out of his well in a bucket.
There is no end to the things this man taught me - like how to mow tall grass with a scythe - "Not that way!” - and how to keep the scythe sharp with a sharpening stone kept in my back pocket; how to build a stone wharf so the ice won't pull it apart; how to make a good wooden scoop that will bail out a dory in a hurry; and perhaps most important of all I learned to take the time to notice the world around me, the weather, the sounds, the smells and how good I've got it.
Winnie kept lobstering well into his late 70’s. He had ailments and problems, and he swore every season would be his last. "Ain't the same as it used to be," he’d complain. "Look at all them damn pots out there! All these young guys fishing five, six hundred traps - they're going to spoil it all!" Just the same, he kept at it nearly to the end, because he loved it and was good at it.
The last time I saw Winnie, it was on that very same spot where I first met him. As he’d said a thousand times before, beaming with his faded blue eyes, "Oh what a handsome day it is! I think I'll just sit and watch ‘til the sun goes down." He probably did.