Times are tough for everyone
Feel bad for this guy he worked his whole life and he struggles to survive. Works hard for $100 a day. The poachers seem to be everywhere.
Struggles of the oysterman
By Helen O'Neill
WESTPORT, Conn.—On a raw November morning, when the tide is low and the wind blows steadily from the northwest, oysterman Alan Sterling clambers aboard a makeshift raft and paddles to his fishing boat a few hundred yards from shore.
The 26-foot vessel isn't much, a ramshackle wooden hut plopped atop sheets of plywood hammered onto a plastic foam base. There is a rusty piece of dredging equipment, a battered old culling table and an open deck littered with shells. The tiny cabin has a gas coffee burner that provides meager relief from the biting cold.
But to Sterling, his handmade boat is as beautiful as the name he bestowed upon her: Gloria.
She staved off homelessness when he had no other place to sleep. She offered a refuge from loneliness and grief. And in these hard times, Gloria is his economic lifeline, though he can barely scrape a living from her deck.
Sterling's white hair is swept beneath a worn woolen hat and his lean frame is already shivering as he boards the boat. At 69, he grumbles that he is getting too old for oystering. Especially now when the catch is so poor and temperatures so cold.
But he has little choice.
His 150 acres of oyster beds aren't nearly as abundant as they once were, something Sterling blames on poaching as much as shifting sands. These days he is lucky to catch three bushels a day, which he sells for a total of $100 to a local fish market. His feet are frostbitten and the bills pile up in the room he rents for $600 a month. His only other income is his $500 monthly social security check.
And yet, financial woes don't trouble him nearly as much as his heavy heart.
"Hard times," he says with a shrug. "When you have lost the only thing you cared about in your life, it can't get harder than that."
She gazes out from an old black-and-white photograph pinned to the cabin wall, an elegant woman with a halo of white hair and the hint of a smile dancing across her lips.
Gloria.
"She was so beautiful," Sterling says, falling silent as the boat chugs out to sea.
Sterling named his business Saugatuck Oyster, for the famed shellfish flats where the Saugatuck River flows into Long Island Sound. He has been fishing these waters for nearly 30 years, first catching seed oysters (young shellfish that are transplanted into deeper waters to mature) and selling them to the big commercial shellfish companies.
In the 1980s, Sterling says, he could haul 65 bushels of seed oysters in an hour. The beds were decimated by disease a decade later, but they slowly made a comeback and in recent years Sterling has been able to make up to $300 a day.
But this has been his toughest year.
Sterling steers the boat just north of Cockenoe Island, drops the dredge and drags it across the bottom before hoisting it back on deck. The haul is slim -- crabs, stones, seaweed and a few dozen oysters. Sterling starts knocking barnacles off the good shells and flinging them into a bucket to be sold. The younger oysters will be transplanted to another bed.
A pretty gray seagull alights on the cabin roof -- the same bird that seeks out his boat every day. Sterling holds up a fat clam and the gull hops over to grab it. Gloria, he calls the bird. He likes to believe it is her spirit watching over him.
In the distance the trawling fleets from the famed Bloom family shellfish plants in neighboring Norwalk are fishing the same way, though with more sophisticated dredges and far greater hauls. But even these companies, which ship oysters and clams all over the country, are hurting. Orders have been slow. They are heading into their busiest time of the year and they are scared that this holiday season, people won't buy shellfish.
Sterling's only thought about the holidays is that they will be his first without Gloria.
She was 12 years older than him and she had a gentle spirit and outgoing charm and a way of making the whole world want to confide in her. He built the boat in her front yard, next to the little cinderblock house they shared in the woods behind Gilberties Herb Farm.
Sterling's eyes light up when he recounts how they met 30 years ago, when a friend persuaded him to play the horse in an amateur production of "Equus." Gloria was the star. Her monologue, on the Town Hall stage, moved everyone to tears.
Those were happy times in Westport, Sterling says, when everyone knew everyone and even the rich and famous didn't seem pretentious or aloof. Actors and artists and fishermen would gather at Oscar's delicatessen for lunch or at The Player's Tavern for cocktails. You could spot Paul Newman strolling down Main Street or Bette Davis at The Ship's Lantern bar.
Today the mansions of Wall Street titans dot the shores, their luxury yachts fill the marinas and Sterling and his battered little boat seem like a throwback to another era.
Sterling is well aware of the odd silhouette he creates as he drifts past the Cedar Point Yacht Club. But he is immensely proud of his boat. It is built the way an oysterman's life should be lived, he says, plain and simple and clean.
Sterling tries dredging again. Nothing but thick, black mud. He sighs. The day has been a mirror of his misfortunes. He began it fighting a cancellation notice on the insurance policy for his rusting 1982 Volkswagen pickup truck. The week before he was battling the phone bill. The credit card company was calling too.
"I guess I should have found another line of work," he says, wryly.
In fact Sterling has dabbled in many other lines of work: soldier, crop-duster, oil drill researcher and flight instructor. But he was happiest oystering and living with Gloria. He used to drive her all over the state to rehearsals, saving newspaper clippings about her performances, attending all her opening nights.
And yet their best times were the simplest, after she retired. She would walk down to the dock with his favorite turkey-and-peppers sandwich and a flask of martini and they would sit outside the Longshore Sailing School, sipping their drinks and watching the sailboats and quietly marveling at their good fortune.
"It was the best time of my life," Sterling says.
His fortunes waned after Gloria got sick and Sterling became so enraged with the world and the medical system, and his inability to save her, that he eventually moved into a tiny cramped room just a short walk from her house.
The room is filled with photos and mementos and dreams -- of selling his oyster grounds, of making enough money to one day buy her house. Yet even if he could find a buyer for his beds, Sterling says, "in this economy what bank is going to give a little guy like me a mortgage?"
And so he spends his days dredging for oysters, and feeding his seagull, and grieving for a time when the most beautiful woman in the world was waiting for him every day after he tied up his boat and headed home.http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/F...y_end_icon.gif
