Free The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell Page A

inspects their catches for shorts. Several times a year, he bottles samples of the water in various parts of the harbor and sends them to the department’s laboratory. His principal year-round duty is to patrol the shellfish beds. He runs down and arrests poachers on the polluted beds, and he keeps an eye on the clammers who work the legal beds in Raritan Bay. It is against the law to do any kind of clamming between sundown and sunup, and he spends many nights out on the beds. He is a self-sufficient man. He can anchor his skiff in the shadow of a cattail hassock in Jamaica Bay and, without ever getting especially bored, sit there the whole night through with an old blanket over his shoulders, listening and watching for poachers and looking at the stars and the off-and-on lights on airplanes and drinking coffee out of a thermos jug. The legal beds in New Jersey territory in the harbor have been overworked and are not as fertile as the legal beds in New York territory. In recent years, allured by high clam prices, some of the Jersey clammers have become pirates. They tantalize Mr. Zimmer. On dark nights, using Chris Craft cruisers, they cross the state line, which bisects Raritan Bay, and poach on the New York beds. When they hear the rumble of Mr. Zimmer’s skiff, they flee for Jersey. Mr. Zimmer opens his throttle and goes after them, shouting at them to halt and sometimes firing his revolver over their heads, but their cruisers draw less water than his skiff and at the end of the chase they are usually able to shoot up into one of the shallow tide creeks between South Amboy and the Hook and lose him. Mr. Zimmer keeps his skiff in Prince’s Bay. Prince’s Bay has gone down as a port since his boyhood. Not a trace of the oyster-bedding business is left there. It has a clam dock, a charter-boat pier, and two boatyards, and it has Sandy Cuthbert’s rowboat livery and bait station, but its chief source of income is a factory that makes tools for dentists; the factory is on Dental Avenue. The old Prince’s Bay Lighthouse still stands on a bluff above the village, but it is now a part of Mount Loretto, a Catholic home for children; it is used as a residence by the Monsignor and priests who run the home. The light has been taken down and supplanted by a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin’s back is to the sea.
    Once in a while, Mr. Zimmer spends a day patrolling the Staten Island tide marshes on foot. He feels drawn to the marshes and enjoys this part of his job most of all. A good many people wander about in the marshes and in the meadows and little woods with which they are studded. He is acquainted with scores of marsh wanderers. In the fall, old Italians come and get down on all fours and scrabble in the leaves and rot beneath the blackjack oaks, hunting for mushrooms. In the spring, they come again and pick dandelion sprouts for salads. In midsummer, they come again, this time with scap nets, and scoop tiny mud shrimp out of the tide ditches; they use them in a fried fish-and-shellfish dish called
frittura di pesce.
On summer afternoons, old women from the south-shore villages come to the fringes of the marshes. They pick herbs, they pick wild flowers, they pick wild grapes for jelly, and in the fresh-water creeks that empty into the salt-water creeks they pick watercress. In the fall, truck farmers come with scythes and cut salt hay. When the hay dries, they pack it around their cold frames to keep the frost out. Bird watchers and Indian-relic collectors come in all seasons. The relic collectors sift the mud on the banks of the tide ditches. Mr. Zimmer himself sometimes finds arrowheads and stone net-sinkers on the ditchbanks. Once, he found several old English coins. In September or October, the rabbis and elders come. On Hoshanna Rabbah, the seventh day of the Festival of Succoth, an ancient fertility rite is still observed in a number of orthodox synagogues in the city. The