I passed them by on the Highway as I rushed somewhere, but I couldn't get the image of them out of my mind. As I rushed back home I pulled over in the car and took pictures trying to think of them as the farmers and share croppers of my youth, not as modern commercial fishermen.
It is the conventional platitude to think of the fishing life, as a way to earn a living as a tough way of life, but the reality isn't always very clear it seems to me, in the mids of the office workers and indoor professionals who sit down to a plate of lobster or grouper. There is that hankering image that won't quite go away of a rough and tumble life on the high seas, in fine weather under sunny skies, pirates and freemen of the modern world who ply the oceans looking for that one big catch, the pot of gold that they will spend drinking and whoring when they get back to Port Royal.
These men are preparing for the lobster season to start in a couple of months. They have spent hours painstakingly hammering together the intricate one way boxes that trap the lobster. Now to make sure they sink upright they pour a layer of cement into the bottom of each trap, by hand. The temperature has been hovering well over 90 degrees in the shade these days.
They look neither piratical nor romantic lumbering around with wheelbarrows and cement, more like indentured servants on a construction site...
But it's nothing more than the tools of their trade they are plying. These are the unseen tools, the wheelbarrows and the shovels on the grassy open space far from the romance of the high seas.
It's hard to imagine that whoring and drinking in some mythical Port Royal wouldn't be on the sweat filled brain of even the most devoted family man among these hard working laborers of the sea. Think of wheelbarrows and cement the next time you order lobster or crab in Florida.
It is the conventional platitude to think of the fishing life, as a way to earn a living as a tough way of life, but the reality isn't always very clear it seems to me, in the mids of the office workers and indoor professionals who sit down to a plate of lobster or grouper. There is that hankering image that won't quite go away of a rough and tumble life on the high seas, in fine weather under sunny skies, pirates and freemen of the modern world who ply the oceans looking for that one big catch, the pot of gold that they will spend drinking and whoring when they get back to Port Royal.These men are preparing for the lobster season to start in a couple of months. They have spent hours painstakingly hammering together the intricate one way boxes that trap the lobster. Now to make sure they sink upright they pour a layer of cement into the bottom of each trap, by hand. The temperature has been hovering well over 90 degrees in the shade these days.They look neither piratical nor romantic lumbering around with wheelbarrows and cement, more like indentured servants on a construction site...But it's nothing more than the tools of their trade they are plying. These are the unseen tools, the wheelbarrows and the shovels on the grassy open space far from the romance of the high seas.
It's hard to imagine that whoring and drinking in some mythical Port Royal wouldn't be on the sweat filled brain of even the most devoted family man among these hard working laborers of the sea. Think of wheelbarrows and cement the next time you order lobster or crab in Florida.
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