Billy Mac: An Appreciation

Such was the nature of Ogunquit fisherman’s Billy McIntire’s life that when 500 or more mourners turned out at a memorial service for him at the Franciscan monastery in Kennebunk, few were surprised by the size of the crowd

Yet it’s worth asking just why they all came.

As a commercial fisherman who cut his teeth chasing bluefin tuna, Billy Mac was known in ports from Down East Maine to Cape Cod. But so are lots of other guys, some of whom you’d miss if they were gone. The question is, would you miss them enough to give up a beautiful late summer Sunday to fight tourist traffic and drive to Kennebunk from Plymouth, Mass., or Stonington?

In any case, this was not a gathering limited to fishermen. It’s safe to say that half the folks — or more — who attended his memorial wouldn’t recognize tuna outside of a can.

News reports stemming from the tragic night in August when Billy McIntire went overboard and disappeared, off Ogunquit, made much of his reputation as someone who enjoyed a good time. And he did. But people do not attend services for everyone they ever had a beer with.

The truth is that Billy McIntire lived his life in a time and place that will soon to be lost to us. He never surrendered his youth or his optimism and he strived to make the most of every day.

Billy’s father, Sonny McIntire, is a living legend in the tuna fleet, particularly among harpoon fishermen. Sonny and other fishermen of his generation caught a lot of tuna for five cents a pound or less, which is to say they caught them for nothing, but by the time Billy came of age in the late 1980s bluefin were very much worth catching.

Back then, guys who knew what they were doing and were willing to put their time in could catch quite a few bluefin in a season. Billy and Sonny caught their share, and then some.

It never seemed like long ago when you were talking to Billy.

Because the truth is fishing isn’t what it used to be. Yes, the notion of poor years is axiomatic to fishing — how else can there be good years? But the problem today isn't simply fish. A fisherman can wait out low prices and bad weather, but ignorance, politics, and mismanagement are enduring.

Commercial fishing has always been a hard road — if you treasure long days, unrelenting weather, uncertain pay, and lots of heavy lifting it’s just the job for you. Billy Mac knew fishing, lived fishing and loved fishing. He told me spent 12 days on an offshore lobster boat last winter and was the oldest guy on the boat by 15 years.

You’d have never known it to look at him.

Somehow people like me, who in the next 12 months won’t do as much work as Billy did in those 12 days — real work, back-breaking, tired, wet and hungry work — often feel as though we just have to have a break.

And yet, we do work hard, if in our own way. And we are uncertain about our pay. Yes, we get a regular paycheck, but what happens when we’re let go? It happens all around us, all the time. Meanwhile, our money doesn’t go as far as it used to.

We soldier on, but unease gnaws away at something deep within us whenever we contemplate the future. Unlike Billy, we lack the secret to eternal youth. Except that he would have said there was no secret, just knowledge of the world and joyful acceptance of one’s place in it.

And that is why upward of 500 of us showed up at Billy’s memorial service: in addition to wanting to say goodbye and support his family, we wanted to say thanks to him for helping us stay young for all those years.

For 20, 30 years or more, whenever he was around, Billy allowed us to ignore the turning pages of the calendar. No more. We are once again and forevermore in the grip of the hands of time.

On the passage of laws

WELLS, Maine —

A lawyer friend served in the Legislature until term limits ushered him out. “Sleep with one eye open,” he’d say, come January. “We’re in session.”

Like most witticisms, this one is rooted in truth. Cooks cook and lawmakers make laws. The difference is that few of us hunger for laws. Even if we did, we would not starve for long at the rate they are enacted around the country and in Washington.

We have far too many unnecessary laws. Those that arguably are necessary are often needlessly complex. You think not? Apply for a building permit sometime, and if you get it, build the structure according to code.

Worst of all are laws that accomplish exactly what they were conceived to avoid.

The Sustainable Fisheries Act is an example. In 1996 Congress decided that our marine fisheries were in sad shape and that only it could save them. Seventeen years later, U.S. fishermen have seen their numbers reduced by tens of thousands.

New England is an example in the extreme. Groundfishing here has been on life support ever since the SFA was passed, and today many fishermen, confronted with a 75 percent reduction in the cod quota,  are begging for managers to pull the plug — to shut it down entirely.

Thanks to the SFA, when fishery managers go to work in the morning they are thinking not about about rewarding enterprise, stimulating employment or ensuring that coastal communities flourish. They are thinking about reducing overfishing.

Thus, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in its annual report on the status of stocks, crows about “our national journey toward ending overfishing and rebuilding the nations fisheries,” it’s not equating these two missions but prioritizing between them. Job one is easy: we reduce effort simply by setting quotas that make it nonsensical for fishermen to go fishing. For those who persist, we simply outlaw catching fish.

Do this well enough, as NOAA has in New England, and job two will soon be moot: there will be no fisheries to rebuild.

Have no fear, however. When we get to that pretty pass Congress will enact a law to address the situation.

WELLS, Maine —

Welcome to "Seems Like Hard Times." I was going to make a final post at "Living it up in Southern Maine," but what would be the point? My last post was April 3. It's not like people are refreshing the page.

Why the name change? Good question.

My first paid literary effort was the "Hard Times" column that ran in the York Weekly beginning in 1982. I was paid $10 for each column. I told my father I didn't think that was much money. He told me I was lucky they weren't charging me $10 a column to publish it.

I named the column after my boat, a 37-foot Jonesporter rigged for dragging. I didn't name the boat. The Hard Times was so christened by its previous owner, who was going through a divorce. Some people, my father among them, thought the name was a jinx. I did not. The first job of a fishing vessel is to bring the crew home safe, and the Hard Times aways did.

For $25 a week I moved the "Hard Times"column to the York County Coast Star, in Kennebunk, a couple of years later. By and by I stopped writing it because the paper got a new editor who actually edited it. Nevertheless, he offered me a reporting job, so I quit fishing and started covering local meetings. I didn't go back to writing the column until I went to work at the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald a couple of years later, and then only for a short while.

The fishing vessel Hard Times eventually sunk in Northeast Harbor, where a friend of mine had taken it to go scalloping. We raised it with the help of local fishermen and some beer. The resurrected Hard Times sails to this day, as far as I know.

It would have been nice to relaunch the literary (I did not say literate) "Hard Times," but of course the name is taken, insofar as Google blogs go. My second choice would have been "Welcome to Hard Times," except that this is the title of an early E.L. Doctorow ("Ragtime," "Loon Lake," et cetera) novel. Titles are not copyrighted, for practical reasons — you'd run out of them — but you ought to think them up on your own.

By the way, if you like stories of the wild west, maybe even if you don't, "Welcome to Hard Times" is a wonderful book.

My frustration with the "Living it Up" blog occurred after several weeks, when I decided it needed more focus. More focus translated to no blogging. I now plan to focus on getting something written, not worry too much about the topic, and leave judgments about focus to readers who happen along.

My theory is that if a good writer targets a general audience, and is not too long-winded about it, readers will find his effort worthwhile. I would read anything written by John McPhee, for example.

Whether he'd read anything by me, of course, is another question.