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By Root 626 0

trout in the streams. When Angela was pregnant with their daughter, John became restless and bought bait from a Russian factory ship to go longlining for swordfish with buoys made of chlorine bottles. On August 3, 1975, the night their daughter was born, he caught sixty-five swordfish in the deep water beyond 200 miles known as the Canyons. Once their children were grown, the Sanfilippos finally took a vacation to Bermuda. John went fishing with two poles off the pier of the Princess Hotel. Using french fries for bait, he caught tropical fish that resembled the rockfish in Sicily. He advised the kitchen on how to prepare them.

They managed to send their son, Dominic, to Tufts, where he was a political science major. But after two years, he returned to Gloucester saying he wanted to be a fisherman. Angela cried. In Newfoundland, Sam Lee fought with his son because he also dropped out of school and wanted to fish.

“But after a couple of months,” says Angela, “I realized that he is happy. He said he wanted to go to Georges Bank. He couldn’t go before, because it was too far for the small boat with his father. So he crewed on a big dragger and fished the Bank just before it closed. Now he wants to buy a fishing boat. I tell him to keep his money. He will need it for something else. He says, ‘I miss my sunrise and my sunset and the seagulls flying over me.’ ”

Vito Calomo, a Sicilian-born ex-fisherman who now works for the Fisheries Commission in the Gloucester Community Development Department, says, “You buy out a man whose father and grandfather were fishermen, and you are wiping out a hundred years of knowledge. A fisherman is a special person. He is a captain, a navigator, an engineer, a cutter, a gutter, an expert net mender, a market speculator. And he’s a tourist attraction. People want to come to a town where there are men with cigars in their mouth and boots on their feet mending nets. We are going to lose all that.”

At that moment, a pickup truck with a lawn-mowing tractor on the back comes down the coastal road, and Calomo shouts at the driver. “That’s my brother. He was a captain, and now he’s cutting grass. A captain, cutting grass. I saw one washing dishes in a restaurant and one who works as a security guard.”

To Calomo, Sanfilippo, and most of the people in the Gloucester fishing community, their plight is not their fault but the responsibility of government. “What do they do about the Red Sox?” argues Calomo about Boston’s perennially losing baseball team. “They don’t get rid of the Red Sox. They fire the managers.”

Calomo says, “Canada is going to be American, and we are going to be Canada. Because they are subsidizing out-of-work fishermen, they will have them when the fish come back. They are keeping their fishermen. They are going to fill our market. Who’s going to be left to fish here when the fish come back?”

Angela Sanfilippo, who was active in the fight to stop oil exploration on Georges Bank, says, “Who is going to look after the sea if the fishermen are gone?” It is not an unreasonable question. Will it be Unilever, the huge multinational that bought Gorton’s? Will Unilever launch an angry protest when a corporation pollutes the sea?

Is it really all over? Are these last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant? Is Gloucester to become a village of boutiques, labeled “an artist colony,” like Rockport? Will Newlyn one day be only for strolling, like its neighboring towns, or as has already happened to St. Sebastián? Will Gloucester harbor, too, be converted into a yacht basin? Or should it be preserved, as is Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, as a museum to the days of fishing?

Governments understand that there is a social function to having fishermen and having fishing ports. Even while they have programs to reduce the size of their fleets in order to save fish stocks, they are also subsidizing fishing because there is no work available for most ex-fishermen.