Lake Superior Profiles: People on the Big Lake

2. A Work Farm

2 A Work Farm Grand Marais, Minnesota It’s five thirty in the morning, and I make my way from the main street of Grand Marais, Minnesota, down a sloping driveway to a pier behind the Dockside Fish Market. An invisible dog barks at me. About a hundred feet from the road, a fisherman named Harley Toftey, and his helper, Marty, wait for me by a fish boat with no name. We get on board, throw off the lines, ease off the pier, and head slowly toward the open water. Just offshore, a small breakwater, running parallel to the land, protects small craft. A quarter mile beyond that, two long breakwaters, both with lights, embrace this harbor on the north shore of Lake Superior. It is late October, mildly windy and decidedly cold, with a bright sickle moon. The starlight is brilliant, like that seen from a mountaintop. Harley is fishing for herring. He has six five-hundred-foot nets to pick; the farthest is perhaps two miles from shore. They’re set in about sixteen feet of water. Normally he fishes farther out (three to eight miles) and deeper (up to four hundred feet), but that’s when the fish are more scattered and the catch is more lean. Now it is near spawning time, and the herring are congregating and moving close to shore, and the catch is concentrated and fruitful— “more of a volume deal,” Harley says. “They’re not spawning yet,” he adds. “They come in to take a look.” They are ripe with eggs, which Harley’s wife, Shele, processes into herring caviar, plebeian fare compared to beluga caviar but highly favored in Europe, especially Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. This relatively pricey product drives this autumn fishing operation, although the herring itself is sold, too. Past the big breakwaters, Harley moves strong and fast to his first set. He has GPS and knows exactly where he’s going in the dark. “You don’t monkey around looking for nets,” he says. “You can drive right to ’em.” Behind us, a few town lights glow; ahead is darkness. 36 % chapter 2 Harley’s boat is twenty-seven feet long, with a ten-foot beam. Made of aluminum, the vessel has an open deck except for a four-by-four-foot, threesided , glassed-in pilothouse, where two is a crowd. Harley, with the help of an Alaskan boat builder, constructed this boat ten years ago. It cost $15,000. It is powered by twin 115-horsepower motors; one is for necessity, and the other is for safety. “You don’t want to have just one out on this lake here,” he says. Midway along the boat, the deck—Harley calls it “a wet deck”—is just eighteen inches off the water, and a mildly rough sea breaks across it and drains out of the scuppers. On this day the waves are choppy but small. There is a reason Harley is out on the lake at this hour. Besides having to stock the market for the day, he says, “You can beat the wind when you come out early. The sun comes up—a lot of the time the wind comes with it.” The weather has to be “pretty bad” for him not to go out. The swells are harder on the nets than on him. They “jerk the net around” and cause wear and tear, which he mends in the winter when the harbor is iced in and the lake inaccessible. Harley is a tall, broad-shouldered, solid man, with thick dark hair that is beginning to gray, a dark mustache, and a few days’ worth of whiskers. Marty calls him “the grand mariner of Grand Marais.” Marty says of himself, “It ain’t all bad being a nobody.” The pair works the nets together. At each set, Harley powers down and turns on two spotlights on the roof of the pilothouse that cast a small halo around the boat, showing fish bellies as white as the moon and scaly sides and backs that flash like crystal daggers. Each net drapes over the bow of the boat, across a plywood table, which is soon smeared with blood and scales. Harley and Marty disentangle the fish and throw them in plastic tubs. Two tubs are filled with ice and lake water for fish that are still alive and in really good shape. “I pick out the ones I’m going to fillet,” Harley explains. “They got nice color...