The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

in the harbor, the rising and breaking of sludge bubbles makes the water seethe and spit. People sometimes stand on the coal and lumber quays that line the Gowanus Canal and stare at the black, bubbly water.
    Nevertheless, there is considerable marine life in the harbor water and on the harbor bottom. Under the paths of liners and tankers and ferries and tugs, fish school and oysters spawn and lobsters nest. There are clams on the sludgy bottom, and mussels and mud shrimp and conchs and crabs and sea worms and sea plants. Bedloe’s Island, the Statue of Liberty island, is in a part of the harbor that is grossly polluted, but there is a sprinkling of soft-shell clams in the mud beneath the shallow water that surrounds it. The ebb of a spring tide always draws the water off a broad strip of this mud, and then flocks of gulls appear from all over the Upper Bay and light on it and thrash around and scratch for clams. They fly up with clams in their beaks and drop them on the concrete walk that runs along the top of the island’s sea wall, and then they swoop down and pluck the meats out of the broken shells. Even in the Gowanus Canal, there are a few fish; the water is dead up at the head of it—only germs can live there—but from the crook at the Sixth Street Basin on down to the mouth there are cunners and tomcods and eels. The cunners nibble on the acorn barnacles on the piles under the old quays.
    In the spring, summer, and fall, during the great coastwise and inshore and offshore migrations of fishes along the Middle Atlantic Coast, at least three dozen species enter the harbor. Only a few members of some species show up. Every spring, a few long, jaggy-backed sea sturgeon show up. Every summer, in the Lower Bay, dragger nets bring up a few small, weird, brightly colored strays from Southern waters, such as porcupine fish, scorpion fish, triggerfish, lookdowns, halfbeaks, hairtails, and goggle-eyed scad. Every fall, a few tuna show up. Other species show up in the hundreds of thousands or in the millions. Among these are shad, cod, whiting, porgy, blackback flounder, summer herring, alewife, sea bass, ling, mackerel, butterfish, and blackfish. Some years, one species, the mossbunker, shows up in the hundreds of millions. The mossbunker is a kind of herring that weighs around a pound when full-grown. It migrates in enormous schools and is caught in greater quantity than any other fish on the Atlantic Coast, but it is unfamiliar to the general public because it isn’t a good table fish; it is too oily and bony. It is a factory fish; it is converted into an oil that is used in making soaps, paints, and printing inks (which is why some newspapers have a fishy smell on damp days), and into a meal that is fed to pigs and poultry. In the summer and fall, scores of schools of mossbunkers are hemmed in and caught in the Lower Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, and Raritan Bay by fleets of purse seiners with Negro crews that work out of little fishing ports in North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, and Long Island and rove up and down the coast, following the schools.
    The migratory fishes enter the harbor to spawn or to feed. Some mill around in the bays and river mouths for a few days and leave; some stay for months. Only one fish, the eel, is present in great numbers in all seasons. Eels are nocturnal scavengers, and they thrive in the harbor. They live on the bottom, and it makes no difference to them how deep or dirty it is. They live in ninety feet of water in the cable area of the Narrows and they live in a foot of water in tide ditches in the Staten Island marshes; they live in clean blue water in Sandy Hook Bay and they live around the outfalls of sewers in the East River. There are eight or nine hundred old hulks in the harbor. A few are out in the bays, deeply submerged, but most of them lie half sunk behind the pierhead line in the Jersey Flats and the flats along the Arthur Kill and the Kill van