"Up In the Old Hotel" - 'The Bottom of the Harbor'

It's hard not to romanticize hunting-gathering activities after reading this.

• His pots are still there, rotting; generations of morning-glory and wild-hop vines are raveled in their slats and hold them together.
• They pick herbs, they pick wild flowers, they pick wild grapes for jelly, and in the fresh-water creeks that empty into the salt-water creeks they pick watercress.
• The twigs must be cut from willows that grow beside water, the buds on the ends of the twigs must be unblemished, and the leaves must be green and flawless. For generations, most of the willow bunches (used during Roshanna Rabbah) have come from black willows and weeping willows in the Staten Island tide marshes.
• People looked after things in those days. They patched and mended and made do, and they kept their yards clean, and they burned their trash.
• Funerals were much sadder when they had horse-drawn hearses.
• While (the seals) were breeding the skinners would creep out from behind rocks and brain them by the dozens as cleanly as possible with clubs made of polished Connecticut oak; bullets would have marred the skins.
• Another day, what came only only a woman's  pink lace shimmy... It has roses and butterflies on it. We tied it to a stay and flew it like a flag all that summer. Johnny Bindloss said no doubt some mermaid off Newport lost it.
• He is a matchless lobster chef. ..Most often he boils. He puts a tub of fresh sea water on the little coal stove in the cabin and heats it until it spits.
• "You not only have to paint his boat as accurate as a blueprint, you have to put it in a storm, a terrible storm... It's got so if I was to paint a boat that looked as if there was a remote possibility it might make port, the captain would take offense.
• (Block Islanders:) They were called wreck hooks. Everybody would line up down there and hook... The competition got so thick that they all agreed on a standard-length hook.
• I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls that sometimes last as long as half an hour.. it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.
• Cooked shad-bake style by an expert, shad is crusty on the outside and tender and rich and juicy on the inside.. and fully justifies its scientific name, Alosa sapidissima ... "good to eat to a superlative degree".
• It was one of those balmy days that sometimes turn up in the winter like a strange bird blown off its course.
• Sometimes they'd have to jump for hours to get a pole down far enough. Sometimes more weight would be needed and two more men would get up on the crosspiece. The two on the inside would hold on to the pole and the two on the outside would hold on the two on the inside, and they'd jump and grunt and jump and grunt, and it was a strange sight to watch.