Tradition

As with most tasks related to the lobstering business, preparing the components for building new traps is redundant and tedious yet somehow very satisfying. Cap decided early this spring that he wants to sell all of his old "beater" traps (his son has been encouraging him to do so, claiming that some of them are as old as me!) and build 200 new ones. I was a little overwhelmed by this proposal until he revealed that he would be buying the "cages" with runners on them and that we would add all of the accessories.

In preparation of assembling the traps, there is much work to be done: preparing little gadgets and do-hickeys that you probably wouldn't even single out if you looked at a trap for 5 minutes. However, perhaps the most time-intensive part is the "heads" (the nylon mesh one-way doors through which the lobsters walk and never return).

I told my father about my recent work tasks and he reminisced back to the days when he was a boy and the elderly matriarchs of the community used to "knit" the trap heads for all of the fishermen. I can just picture them sitting around in rocking chairs, with white aprons and tight white buns atop their heads, fingers working away as if they are quilting or crochetting, exchanging the latest news laiden in thick Maine accents. My great-grandmother, whose name I carry on as my middle name, was probably one of these agile-fingered women. Those were the days when my dad used to build his own wooden traps as did his grandfather, who was a lobsterman and a talented artist. We still have some of my great-grandfathers wooden pot buoys as well as hundreds of his paintings.

We don't knit heads anymore, but there is other preparation involved: cutting the mesh and "lacing" it. Yesterday I was sitting in Cap's living room lacing trap heads and I couldn't help but feel some connection with the elders of this ancient tradition. I'm starting to understand what Cap was talking about when he said that "not many people have articulate hands anymore." Even the skill of knitting nylon mesh (such as trap heads or shrimp nets) is becoming scarcer. My father used to build his own nets. While groundfishermen still mend their nets, very few lobstermen know how to knit their own heads. As with many things in the modern world, there are machines that can knit nylon mesh now.

Knitting or lacing trap heads could be seen as women's work to some people, since it is detail oriented and requires dextrous fingers, as does picking out shrimp. I usually resent this notion of "women's work" since it implies gender segregation of labor. However, for some reason in this case, I find pride in carrying out the lady's task. I feel like I'm in a secret club with my great-grandmother and Cap's wife, who also does this job. It is as if I'm carrying on a female tradition for which men's strong calloused hands aren't fit.

Although Cap and I are doing a more abbreviated, modern version of trap-building, we are carrying on a tradition of self-sufficiency that is hard to come by these days. We continue to develop articulate hands.