Haul: A Letter from the Boat

There is a harbor at the southern tip of Deer Isle, Maine, where the granite meets the water and roughly three hundred licensed lobster boats go out every morning before the sun is up. Denny's family has worked this water for three generations. In late June — traps at fifty feet, herring bait running thirty dollars a box, dealer price at four-sixty a pound — he sat in his truck after a twelve-hour day and wrote a letter he says he's never written before.

What comes through isn't hardship exactly, and it isn't romance either. It's more specific than both: the hydraulic hauler, the breeders you throw back, the knees that go after twenty years of a moving deck. A sternman named Tyler whose hands were wrecked the first two weeks. A daughter named Rosie, eight years old, watching crates come off the boat. A father who doesn't yet know what to hope for her — and who notices that fact quietly, the way you notice fog lifting off Penobscot Bay: all at once, and then the water turns that dark blue-green that looks lit from underneath.