My Favorite Fish

The scallop is the most delectable of seafoods. I'm talking about the sea scallop, not the little bay scallop. Those are for Mrs. Paul. The scallop is a cousin of the clam and the oyster. While you eat the entire clam or gulp the oyster, of the scallop you eat only the muscle that holds his shells together. The scallop has a set of simple eyes along the edge of his shell. If he senses a predator, he flaps his shells to move to safety. Once safely settled, he opens his upper shell and feeds on the plankton passing by.

"Scallops are gregarious," my brother Bill told me. That was the first time I had heard the word "gregarious" used in a sentence. Bill is pretty gregarious himself, but at the time he was living alone in an old one-room schoolhouse on an island off the coast of Maine.

After our hitches in the Navy, Bill and I returned to our home in Boston for a year. I met a beautiful woman and moved to Minnesota to marry her. Bill had some friends living on the island in Maine. He  visited them, like it there, and decided to stay a while. He bought an old lobster boat and rigged it for dragging the bottom for scallops.

After a while he bought scuba equipment and started diving for the scallops. Meanwhile, Teresa and I had a little boy, Matthew. When he was three, we packed our station wagon and headed across Canada to visit Bill. Canada is a big country with lots of empty stretches. At night we just pulled off on a side road and slept in the back. 

On our last day on the road, we were trying to make it to the town of Stonington by five p.m. to catch the mail boat out to Isle au Haut, Bill's island. Bill said we could leave our car on the pier in Stonington while we were on the island. Canada is big and so is northern New England. I realized by noon there was no way we were going to make the mail boat. This was before smart phones and google maps. We navigated in those days by sun sightings and dead reckoning. 

I stopped at a phone booth and called the mail boat office in Stonington and asked that a message be passed to Bill that we wouldn't be on  the mail boat. He never got the message, but when we didn't show up on the island, he figured something was wrong.

We didn't arrive in Stonington until after dark. I parked on the pier and we went to sleep in the back of the wagon. About two p.m. there was a knocking on the window. Bill had decided to come looking for us. We loaded our luggage onto the Nana and headed for the island six miles away on the outer edge of Penobscot Bay.

The bay is full of little islands and rocky reefs, and when a thick fog descended, Bill cut the engine and dropped anchor. "We'll just wait till this lifts," Bill said. We went below. Matt was already asleep and we chatted for a couple of hours till the fog thinned enough for Bill to continue, buoy to buoy, till we reached the island. We loaded our stuff into Bill's old International Scout  and headed down the narrow tree hemmed road. I was exhausted from our long day and the miniature inbred deer leaping across the headlights lent a dreamlike touch.

Next day we went fishing. Bill donned his scuba gear and dropped below the surface. He was back in a few minutes with his basket filled with scallops. With his blade he opened the shells, removed the large muscle and threw the rest back into the sea. A crowd of gulls gathered for the feast. Bill popped one of the scallops into his mouth. "Want one?" he asked. I said I liked mine seared.

Bill asked if I wanted to try diving. No thanks. Teresa asked for some of the shells. The scallop shell is iconic. It's the symbol of St. James the apostle. By tradition, James' bones ended up in Compostela near the northwest coast of Spain. Pilgrims who make the trek to Saint James' shrine receive a scallop shell badge, their sins having been atoned for. On the flip side, there's the famous painting of the newborn, though fully grown, Venus, goddess of love, coming ashore in a scallop shell.

After a successful morning of fishing we returned to the island, stopping in the little village to chat with some of the locals. School age children take the mail boat to Stonington for school, and the town rents out the old schoolhouse. Bill's lodgings could not have been more rustic. The little building was surrounded by tall spruce. He had to fetch water from a stream out back. There was no electricity and heat came from a wood stove. "I can't keep plants here through the winter," Bill told us.

Bill gently seared scallops for us on his propane stove and I ate more scallops than I have ever eaten again at one sitting. If someone ever offers me a raw scallop fresh off the bottom, I'll take it. And if I'm ever offered the chance to go scuba diving, I'll take that too.

Bot a Shelly

Merry Christmas dear Readers. It's the birthday of Jesus, new God of love.