Mark Kurlansky - The Last Fish Tale

Contents

To the people of Gloucester,
to her fishermen and their families,
and to the memory of my friend Harold Bell,
who was a delight to talk to and made
the great city he loved even better

A fisherman is not a successful man he is not a famous man he is not a man of power, these are the damned by God.

CHARLES OLSON,
MAXIMUS TO GLOUCESTER,
SUNDAY, JULY 19, 1960

Prologue

POLE WALKERS

Father Sea
Who comes to the skirt
of the City

CHARLES OLSON, FROM THE MAXIMUS POEMS, 1968

BURLY, BARREL-CHESTED FISHERMEN WERE WEARING THEIR favorite dresses, hairy tufts blooming out from the tops of their bodices. There was also an aviator, a brawny nun, a pirate, a gladiator, some overly made-up floozies in need of a better shave, a fedora-sporting gangster, the Jolly Green Giant, and, of course, Dorothy, his white blouse and blue-checked jumper stretched across broad shoulders, braided locks hanging down. The mayor was there, and the lieutenant governor, a carefully groomed, slim, fair-haired woman looking a little frightened. This was, after all, one of the big events of the year and one of the most Gloucester. Gloucester is a town, officially a city, with such a strong sense of itself that the town name frequently is used as an adjectiveits a very Gloucester way of speaking.

The event was the Giambanco sisters party for the pole walkers on the Sunday morning of the St. Peters festival. Symbolic acts endure and traditions live on when the metaphor is exactly right. That is the principal explanation for why, on the last weekend of every June, dozens of Gloucester men take a boat out to an offshore platform and walk a forty-foot pole covered with a thick, gloppy cushion of grease, try to grab the flag at the end; and whether they succeed or fail, fall a dangerous two or three stories, depending on the tide, to the frigid June sea below. Because the fall into the sea is inevitable and the chances of injury fair, pole walking is very Gloucester.

The tradition, like many of the pole walkers, has its origin in Sicily. More than half of the Gloucester fishing fleet comes from Sicily or descends from Sicilians. Originally, in contests that trace back to fourteenth-century Sicily, the greased pole was vertical and was intended to be a test of mast-climbing skill.

In Gloucester, the pole-walking event is part of the St. Peters Fiesta, held on June 29 in Rome since the fourth century, but held in Gloucester on whatever weekend falls closest to the 29th.

Peter, a lake fisherman turned disciple of Christ, is the patron saint of fishermen. He is also the patron saint of shipbuilders and net makers and also of stonemasons, bridge builders, cobblers, and locksmithsa blue-collar maritime saint, the perfect patron for Gloucester.

The festival came to Gloucester in 1926 when a Sicilian fisherman, Salvatore Favazza, had a statue of St. Peter made in Boston and brought it to Gloucester. Gloucester Sicilians welcomed the statue with a novena, a nine-day religious ritual. They mounted the statue on a platform and carried it around the winding streets of the waterfront neighborhood called the Fort, one of the oldest in Gloucester. An actual fort during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, in the twentieth century this jut of land where fish-processing plants operated became an almost entirely Sicilian neighborhood, with the notable exception of the home of Charles Olson, Gloucesters celebrated poet. During the procession through the Fort, the crowd would shout Viva San Pietro! and the fishermen would shout back in Sicilian dialect, Me chi samiou, dut mut Are we mute? Shout it louder. Then the crowd would respond with an even louder, Viva San Pietro!

Through boom years and crisis, the Sicilian fishermen of Gloucester have always set aside money every year for a weekend to honor the saint of fishermen. The festivities still include nine days of prayer, traditional Sicilian songs, the procession of the statue, the Cardinals tour of the harbor and his blessings, and a public prayer for the fishermen. But pole walking, carnival rides, rowing contests, fireworks, and other events have been added. Although to the purist the major event is still the solemn procession of the statue and other religious rituals, to be honest, the pole walking has become the big event of the weekend.

IT IS GENERALLY RECOGNIZED that to be a successful pole walker a contestant must be tremendously brave, extremely agile, and extraordinarily drunk.

The pole, the thickness of an old schooner mast or a telephone pole, sticks out horizontally from a platform and is covered about six inches deep with a cushion of white industrial grease. They used to use black grease, which looked more industrial. But the pole walkers come out of the water looking cleaner with white grease. Now they go sliding on what appears to be the largest-ever glob of Crisco. As if this were not slippery enough, not without a sense of humor, banana peels are embedded in the greasy muck. The challenge is to walk out forty feet barefoot and remove a flag that is tacked to a stick at the end of the pole.

Because most pole walkers come from families that work in what is widely recognized in the United States and most other countries as the most dangerous jobcommercial fishingthey are undeterred by the numerous ways in which pole walking can cause serious injuries, broken ribs being the most common. If the pole walker feels himself slip and struggles to recover, he may end up falling on the pole, smacking his head or chin on it on his way down, crashing against it chest first, or worse, slamming down with a leg on either side. Surviving that, he will most likely belly flop forty feet into the cold oceanonly the hearty swim in Gloucester in June.

The harbor police circle the platform, ready to fish out the fallen if they are too badly injured to swim the two hundred yards to Pavilion Beach, where the cheering crowd and the bronze statue of a fisherman that is the symbol of Gloucester are watching. Pavilion Beach, once the site of an exclusive hotel by the same name, runs along the Boulevard, Gloucesters attempt at a grand thoroughfare. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, the seaward side of the Boulevard is adorned with 180 American flags. Apparently some Gloucester residents find this a bit excessive or maybe just irresistible; they periodically tear a few down. The previous year at least seventy flags were torn down, shredded, or stolen. This year an angry vigilante group was formed to watch over the flags.

Traditionally, there have been two pole-walking competitions. Anyone can walk on Saturdayor, since 1999, Friday and Saturdaybut only the winner is allowed to walk on Sunday, when he competes with all the past winners, the superstars of greasy pole walking. When a champion gets too old or too sensible to walk on Sundays anymore, he can designate someone to walk in his place.

Pole-walking champions differ on technique. Some try to make their way gingerly through the grease. Others take a flying start and hope momentum will get them the forty feet to the end of the pole. It would be reasonable to imagine that people who are good at scampering along a greasy pole would be thin, light-footed men, but these competitors are mostly big, brawny, strapping Sicilians. Anthony Saputo said, Its a sport. It takes skill, courage, balls, and luck. Saputo is called an international champion because he won a pole walk in Terrasini, Sicily, in 1985, and then in Gloucester in 1988. Saputo said, The secret is to step back to get momentum and then its all Gods will. If you are afraid, you are all done.