Gloucester is known for its fishermen, actually one fisherman more than the others – the one made of bronze, who grasps the wheel of his boat and peers out into an obvious storm on the Atlantic, south of the harbor. His is the memorial for all those Gloucestermen who were lost at sea either catching fish or hunting whales. I would encounter him as I drove by on my visits to the northern coast of the town where the University of Massachusetts Marine Station is located.
For several years, a minor part of my academic career was serving as Acting Director of the Marine Station. I wish I could have done something useful when I held the position, but Warren Gulko, the University’s Budget Director, made sure I had just enough funds to cover the salaries of the handful of junior faculty and a few employees who tried to keep the station open and functioning. Expenditures for maintenance were minimal and certainly not for any expansion. I tried to help them get support through the usual grant mechanisms, but Woods Hole to the south of Gloucester was internationally known for its oceanographic research.
When the Marine Station’s Director moved to a new academic site, Warren convinced Chancellor Bromery that the Amherst campus, which was nominally in charge of the station, did not really need an expensive replacement. Since I was Associate Graduate Dean for Research, it made economic sense for me to take over the administration of the station located on the coast some three or four hours from the main campus in the Connecticut Valley.
Every few months, I would drive to the coast to meet with the faculty there and try to encourage them to keep up their efforts, even though the University was not in favor of providing much financial support to them. I enjoyed learning about what they were doing but avoided accepting their invitations to go out on the water with any of them. I have always loved the tranquility of a coast with its sound of incoming surf and the shifting of the sand beneath my feet. However, actually sailing on oceanic depths beneath me, was a very different matter. Much later in life, I learned to enjoy large cruise ships on the Mediterranean Sea, but back then I preferred to keep my legs on a platform having minimal movement.
Karen and I, later in life, did vacation briefly in Gloucester and Rockport, where we ate as much lobster as possible and viewed the buoys once attached to the traps used for gathering them. A photograph of a red “barn” with its multicolored ornaments hanging on its side, brings back a vivid nostalgia of what life along the New England coast was like in those days. Now, the yellow, orange and pale-blue paints on wood have been replaced with Styrofoam floats to reduce damage to propellers, but not necessarily to marine critters who chew on them. I’m happy I was able to see the real thing so many years ago.
I’m even more pleased we had the opportunity to consume lobsters in their native locale. The taste does depend significantly on the salts found in the tanks where they are kept prior to being dropped into boiling water. Crustaceans shipped to Houston are not nearly as marvelous as those ingested directly in New England. Some might claim it’s really the butter which accounts for the gastronomic pleasure of succulent lobster, but the protein does have its unique flavor. On the other hand, the taste of mudbugs from the Gulf Coast is greatly masked by all of those Cajan spices. I cannot imagine eating any of those tiny crawdads with only a butter sauce!