More Than Enough
New York Times photo
“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” William Blake
In May, it was clearly Not Enough. In June, it began inching toward Enough. By early July – July 11 to be precise – it became More Than Enough.
Of the estimated 300 lobster boats that routinely fish out of Deer Isle and Stonington, most remained on their moorings that morning. Stonington Harbor, normally waking to thrumming diesel engines, was quiet. Otherwise emptied out by dawn, motionless lobster boats filled the harbor.
In July.
“There is simply too much lobster in the supply chain,” stated Patricia McCarron, Executive Director of Maine Lobstermen’s Association. The Department of Marine Resources commissioner reported, “the market is flooded with a bucketful of soft lobster.” Though more colorfully observed perhaps, bucketful didn’t do justice to what had become critical mass. A glut. And nothing said More Than Enough to the lobstermen than a boat price of $1.50 per pound. Or the fact that some dealers were threatening to stop buying altogether: “We’ve already got too many floaters out there.”
Still, on July 11, no one was calling it a tie-up. Or a shut down. Not publicly that is. If any kind of walk-out had been orchestrated, it happened in parking lot “meetings,” over truck hoods, or in a few overt but more frequently read-between-the-line exchanges via internet and Facebook. Anything smacking of more coordination and coercion would violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act meant to prohibit businesses colluding to influence price.
And lobstering, even if done by independent individuals, is big business. In Maine, more than 100 million pounds of lobster is landed annually. Stonington alone accounted for $45 million dollars’ worth of landings last year.
Recognizing More Than Enough often isn’t easy. But with a drop to a buck and a half – the lowest boat price since 1974’s $1.54 per pound – it’s a cinch. And the reasons for such a price plummet and what Philip Conkling in the Working Waterfront calls “the great silent lobster tie-up” are both simple and complicated. For starters, as most of us living here know, lobsters shed their shells, and until their new ones harden are known as new or soft-shell lobsters. “Shedders” don’t fetch the premium prices hard-shelled lobsters do because they don’t ship well to far-off destinations. Mortality, or “shrinkage,” is high among shedders. Most go to Canadian processing plants happy to have them after the Canadian fishing season ends in late spring.
This year, though, Mother Nature threw a monkey wrench into the cogs of a normally well-oiled machine. After an eerily warm winter and early spring, shedders began appearing six weeks early. Throughout May and June, they made up 70% of most harbors’ landings. And they were especially large – around the time of the no-tie-up-tie-up, daily catches of 3,000 to 4,000 pounds on a single well-rigged lobster boat were reportedly not uncommon. Canadian catches were unprecedented, too – enough if not more than enough to fill Canadian demand. Processing plants across the border brimmed just as our early big catches of shedders were entering the pipeline. Suddenly, dealers here had nowhere there to send our lobsters. Simultaneously, demand among end market users like cruise ships and Red Lobster-like restaurant chains still being hit by a bad economy fell.
Though with an ironic twist of too much versus too little, Maine’s lobstermen suddenly had something in common with the Midwestern farmers who, surveying their parched fields and dying livestock, were already being forced to acknowledge More Than Enough in the seemingly endless days of excruciating heat and painful drought that were hauling them to the brink of economic ruin.
Gifted with a miraculous wad of cells in our noggins, we humans are capable of understanding Enough and can recognize More Than Enough, though we’re often slow to do so. Unlike, say, our trusted canine companions who don’t know enough to know that one encounter with a porcupine is more than enough.
Nor does the crow to whom I toss a few shelled peanuts each morning and who, though clearly a gentleman with manners that, after imbibing, swipes his beak against a branch as though with a napkin before flying off, inevitably returns multiple times a day for more, obviously without the knowledge that my early morning generosity translates to me as Enough. Me, the writer, sitting with pencil and paper on the other side of the window glass, and, with mind clicking, determines as I mull over what I’ve written whether this morning I’m a Putter Inner or Taker Outer – that is, whether my words on the page are not enough or more than enough.
It certainly seems to me there’s more than enough evidence that something is afoot with climate change. I’m even more convinced after seeing the recent satellite photo of July ice melt in Greenland in which, according to NASA, nearly the entire massive ice sheet turned to slush. And while no one has yet to tie it directly to global warming , and decades-old and pre-satellite ice core samples suggest such melting may occur every 150 or so years, glaciologists generally agree that the speed and extent of this melt is “shocking.” Greenland, they say, is losing mass and a reduction of the firm or compacted snow on the outside of the ice sheet could mean a reduced capacity of ice sheet to refreeze. Such a phenomenon or the current brutally prolonged heat and drought in the Great Plains, a counterpoint to the unusually mild winter, and a host of other unusual world-wide weather patterns seem not enough to make even the smallest dent in global climate change concerns to the folks for whom any evidence will likely always be Never Enough.
It probably doesn’t take a scientist, however, to tell us that warmer waters in the Gulf of Maine has led to the appearance of much-earlier-than-normal shedders. As for what else may be prompting conditions observed in local terms by a sternman behind me in line at the grocery store yesterday – “I’ve never seen so many ‘bugs.’ They must be crawling all over each other down there.” – is a more troubling mystery. “It ain’t right,” one veteran lobsterman told me. Of a monoculture that is partly the result of fewer predators, among them the once More Than Enough cod that decades ago was overfished and now all but gone.
But much to their credit and the “good news” in the current lobster abbondanza are the conservation efforts by Maine lobstermen that contributed to such plenty – for example, V-notching breeding female lobsters and throwing back juveniles – the kind of good marine stewardship missing in so many other fisheries. Still, what’s evolved as a monoculture of lobsters and on which our Maine fishing communities, none more than this one, rely could alarmingly point toward Not Enough. With no diversity of species, risks increase, particularly in times of overcrowding and More Than Enough. A virulent virus or an outbreak of shell disease that currently is becoming more prevalent could lead to a massive die-off. To Not Enough. Or the unthinkable None At All.
Within a few days of the not-even-a-defacto-shutdown, skiffs replaced boats on moorings in Stonington Harbor. Such a short stoppage didn’t appear to change things – such as the old paradigm: Buy low from the lobsterman, Sell high to the consumer. Nor did it hit the re-start button on demand. Better to have waited it out longer if the true goal was to ease supply and let shedders harden up enough for transport to destinations far beyond Canadian plants and for which lobstermen are paid more.
Caught, as in Conkling’s words, “between the pincher of low prices and the crusher of increased fuel and bait costs,” lobstermen revved up their engines, even as boat prices reportedly dipped to $1.35. Seduced by recent years’ record landings – lobster harvests have increased 500% in the past decade and a half – and now overcapitalized, lobstermen face economic pressures too high for them to stay ashore. "We’ll make it up in volume” has become the credo in times of low prices. Any long-term solution such as fishing less gear or phasing in the number of fished traps over a three-month season isn’t appealing. Fortunately, some folks are looking at the situation more long-term, like Penobscot East Resource Center and the Lobster Advisory Council.
In the future, we may well look back to this year and remember it only as a blip in time, of supply exceeding demand. We may also remember ice melt in Greenland, persistent drought in the Great Plains, a non-winter in the Northeast, a spring of early shedders and a lobster monoculture susceptible to disease. And decide then that the deeply troubling warning signs had in fact been More Than Enough.