The Secret Life of Lobsters Read Online Free Page B

sleep in his own bed back home? His father wakes him up before dawn to get in a boat.
    Sure, Bruce thought as he yanked on his socks, when I was fourteen I hauled traps by hand from a skiff, like every other kid on Little Cranberry Island. Does that automatically make me a lobsterman? The world was big and in the navy Bruce had sailed all the way around it. He wasn’t certain he wanted to condemn himself to the hard life his forefathers had endured, hauling up what the old-timers called “poverty crates” full of “bugs.”
    But Bruce’s first day of lobstering with his father turned out to be lucrative enough to warrant a second day, and after that a third. As autumn settled over the island the days aboard his father’s boat became weeks. At the helm was Warren, his dad, and on the stern was the name of his other parent— Mother Ann . Bruce stuffed bait bags with chopped herring. He plugged the lobsters’ thumbs with wooden pegs to immobilize their claws so they wouldn’t rip each other apart in the barrel. He coiled rope. He hefted the heavy wooden traps. And he observed his father at work.
    Some of Warren’s white-and-yellow buoys followed the shoreline like a string of popcorn. Warren knew just how close he could get to the rocks without endangering the boat, and he showed Bruce how to line up landmarks and steer clear.
    Some of Warren’s buoys bobbed in ninety feet of water, running in a line east to west half a mile from the island. Unwritten rules along most of the Maine coast governed just how far a fisherman could go before he was setting traps in someone else’s territory. Bruce watched where his father went and memorized the landmarks that would keep him close to home.
    Come November, Warren and Bruce were hauling traps in water twenty fathoms deep—120 feet—a mile south of the island in open sea. It was cold, especially when the breeze picked up and blew spray in Bruce’s face.
    â€œOkay, son, where are we now?” Warren asked, bent over a tangle in the rope.
    Bruce, his hands numb, glanced up to see which of the mountains of Mount Desert Island loomed over the lighthouse on Baker Island, half a mile southeast of Little Cranberry. Depending on how far to the east or west the Mother Ann was positioned, the lighthouse would line up with a different hill.
    â€œCadillac,” Bruce answered.
    Cadillac Mountain, like the automobile of the same name, honored the first European settler in these parts. In 1688 a small-town French lawyer swindled a land grant to Mount Desert Island from the Canadian governor. He invented the aristocratic title “sieur de Cadillac” for himself and lorded it over the uninhabited island with his new bride for a summer. Bored, he soon retreated inland to found a trading post called Detroit. The Cadillac car still bears his fake coat of arms on its hood. The lobstermen of Little Cranberry had put Cadillac’s legacy to their own use. Like the other hills of Mount Desert, his mountain rising from the sea was a map to the treasures under the waves.
    In a more literal sense too, Warren and Bruce were fishing on Cadillac Mountain—or at least on pieces of it—and that was what made these waters hospitable for lobsters. Starting a few million years ago, sheets of ice had rolled down from the Arctic for eighty thousand years at a stretch, interrupted by brief warm spells of ten thousand or twenty thousand years. During the most recent ice age the glaciers had scraped up stone from all over Maine and carried it south, carving away at the pink granite of Mount Desert Island on the way. The glaciers had pressed on for another three hundred miles before grinding to a halt, encrusting the Gulf of Maine and the continental shelf in ice as far south as Long Island.
    When the glaciers melted fourteen thousand years ago they unveiled the sensuously sculpted hills and valleys that now constitute Acadia National Park. The