Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

As we eat, he gives the news off the marine radio: the relative calm won’t hold till evening. From the CB we hear the day’s prices for “flats” (flatfish): flounders (yellowtails or lemon sole, blackbacks, dabs or plaice, gray sole or witch flounder) are selling at thirty-five cents a pound on the New Bedford market, the earliest auction. Less abundant groundfish—halibut (a flounder), cod, haddock, hake, whiting—are going at forty to fifty cents a pound. What the fisherman will sell for a half dollar a pound, the supermarket will sell for two dollars after the fish passes through the trucker (add ten percent), the broker (another ten), and cutting house where the fish will become a filet. “In the winter when the weather cuts down on the fishable days,” Tom says, “the supply drops and prices will triple. But the catch is smaller, and we have to fish at twice the depth, so our income stays level.” “Do you sell your catch in Boston?” “Mostly, but it goes all over. Some of it, like the sand sharks, even goes to England for fish and chips. Flats that are too small to take to market—the ones we call ‘windowpanes’—those fish end up on the pier as lobster bait at six dollars a box.”