A self-contained shellfish fishing culture thrived thirty miles from New York City

Evidence

Less than thirty miles from the borders of New York City, the baymen lived in a world that resembled nothing so much as the remote fog banks of Nova Scotia. Their lives revolved around the bay. When its tides were flood, no matter what the hour, through the thick, damp mist, hip boots slung over their shoulders, caps pulled low over their eyes, they trudged to their weather-beaten little trawlers and crept out into the fog, returning hours later so heavily laden that only the bows and sterns of the boats were out of the water. They loved the bay’s sparkle in summer, its cool breezes; somehow they loved its treacherous shoals and tides and the hidden traps of swamp grass that tangled their boats’ propellers. Forced off it by winter storms, they settled down in taverns near the piers that jutted into it, drinking (they were famous for their drinking) and spinning legends about it. Once you were “bay salted,” they said, you would never leave. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 644

Categorization

• SHARE: Good detail for someone writing about vanishing coastal subsistence cultures or the Long Island barrier coastline.
• XREF: Reminds of the ‘island’ worldbuilding sensibility in the trees/sacrifice/grafting ADDENDUM essays’ colonial-coast material. Also evokes the insular coastal community archetype.