The Herring Net

“Don’t stand up.” “I’m not standing. I’m kneeling high.” “Kneel low. She’s taking water on the swell. Take them as I give them, and don’t count.” “I wasn’t counting.” “You were moving your lips.”

The man in the bow has the net in both fists and leans out over the side, so far that the whole dory tips toward him and the gunwale nearly kisses the sea. The herring come up through the mesh in a hanging curtain, each one a sliver of wet light, the net stretched by their weight into a sagging sack. At the other end of the boat the boy, if he is a boy, works the catch loose and drops it into the bottom of the boat, where it slithers around their boots.

“Where’s the schooner?” “Where she was. Off there in the murk. She’ll find us.” “What if she doesn’t?” “Then we’ll be the two richest men ever to row home to Prouts Neck.” A wave lifts the bow and sets it down. The red float bobs on the near side, the only warm colour for a mile. “Mind the oar.”

That conversation never took place, or took place a thousand times in versions nobody wrote down. Winslow Homer painted The Herring Net in 1885 at Prouts Neck, Maine, where he had settled on the coast. In 1881 he had spent time in the fishing village of Cullercoats, near Tynemouth, in the north of England, and afterward his painting turned almost wholly to the contest between people and the sea. He had started out as an apprentice at a Boston lithography shop and was drawing illustrations for Harper’s Weekly by 1857, before he ever reported on the Civil War. The illustrator’s habits stayed with him: the decisive silhouette, the instant chosen for maximum strain.

Here that instant is a lean and a counterweight. The two figures in their sou’westers and oilskins are nearly faceless, brown shapes against grey fog, and the painting gives them no heroics beyond the obvious one, which is staying in the boat. Their bodies make a single machine. One pulls, one sorts, and the dory stays upright only because each knows where the other is without looking.

“How many, do you think?” “I said don’t count.”