Synopsis
An authentic voice for a disappearing culture and endangered environment, Merce Ridgway, in The Bayman, tells it like he lived it. Nowhere else has the New Jersey bayman's life been so accurately detailed, and no other account of a waterman's trade includes such scope of folklore and family.
A native son whose great-grandfather was the first keeper of records of the Barnegat Life-Saving Station, he shares an account that celebrates the bay and the traditions of the Jersey Shore and Pinelands in a more genuine and deeply felt creed than any of the region's contemporaries can evoke.
In his quest that we come to know and love Barnegat Bay, we discover secrets we could only learn from years of sitting on the docks and talking at the end of the day with those whose experience runs deep. The baymen and Pinelands natives of southern New Jersey's coast have become cultural artifacts, and most of the rural traditions are already lost to suburban development. But in a few locales, and in family histories, they live on.
As Merce leads us through the steps of building a garvey, the traditional Barnegat Bay work boat, he starts at the beginning, as a boy — hearing the sound of a bear growling beyond the sawmill. Describing the habits of the blue-claw crab, he speculates on how they communicate.
We discover by getting closer; by tracing the life of the scallop, by weathering a whipping nor'easter. We come to understand the fellow baymen's unwritten "code of the bay."
As you find yourself in the Pinelands' woods with young Merce, you'll smell the cedar chips as they fly freshly cut from his father's axe. You'll hear his father, a folk musician celebrated by the Smithsonian Institution, warbling through a radio that is powered by a car battery. You'll want to pull up a chair and join in as the Pinelands Cultural Society is born of Saturday night sing-a-longs.
The author laments not just the loss of an authentic American folk culture, but the decline of the environment and natural resources the culture survived on.
His experiences divulge some reasons for that. When a living came from the bay one clam at a time, or from each pull of 16-foot oyster tongs, baymen knew the water intimately and recognized when outside forces were doing wrong. Today, preservationists and environmentalists struggle to raise awareness of the connection between bay, salt marsh, upland woods and Pine Barrens; in Merce's experience, that integration was a fact of life.
Merce Ridgway, bayman, musician, and keeper of folklore and philosophy, opens our eyes to a beautiful, simple way of life barely imaginable to most Americans today. He shares with all who will listen a lifetime of wisdom, values, generosity, and truth — all of it bounty from the bay.
At times witty, candid and without nonsense, The Bayman presents a unique view. Whether or not Merce ever found his elusive treasure in the bay, he left us with one in this book that will be recognized for years to come.
“A wonderful book about a vanishing world.” — The Trenton Times
“… moving without being too sentimental..." — Whole Earth Magazine
"Merce Ridgway's book is a type of love story, full of poignant remembrances of young love, mature respect and righteous indignation over the pollution and habitat loss of Barnegat Bay …” — The SandPaper, Long Beach Island
“Enough charm, wit, and warmth to draw its readers into the whole story…” — The Beachcomber
"What distinguishes this book from other tales of ecological and cultural decline are the utterly persuasive details.” — The Star-Ledger
"Journey into an era of the bay that has all but disappeared. If you love the bay, don't miss this book." — New Jersey Fisherman
"A fascinating, salty work about a nearly lost way of life." — Wooden Boat
About the Author
An authentic voice for the folklife of New Jersey's Pine Barrens and the traditions of the Jersey Shore, Maurice "Merce" Inman Ridgway, Jr. is part of a culture that has virtually disappeared. Born in 1941, in the tiny Pine Barrens hamlet of Bamber in Ocean County, Merce's family roots stretch deep in the sand of southern New Jersey. Since 1679, generations of Ridgways have made their living from the traditional seasonal occupations of the pinelands and water. Merce worked as a bayman - catching clams, oysters, crabs, and fish from the vicinity of Barnegat Bay - and in the Pine Barrens. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1959 - 1963. Son of a musician celebrated by folklorist Dorthea Dix Lawrence, the author is well known in folk music circles as a songwriter and musician in his own right. In 1983, he represented New Jersey at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife in Washington, DC. After an end to sessions in the legendary Albert brothers' cabin in the Pine Barrens, Merce produced the "Sounds of the Jersey Pines" in 1974, a weekly folk music stage which continues to this day in Waretown. This led to the establishment, in 1975, of the Pinelands Cultural Society, of which Merce was a founder and first president. Deeply concerned about the declining environmental condition of the shore, he was first president of the Baymen's Association for Environmental Protection; member of the first executive board of the Commercial Fisherman's Council; and the Coalition for Survival. Performing at the New Jersey State Folk Festival in New Brunswick in 1995, Merce was honored by Rutgers University for distinguished contributions to the traditional arts of New Jersey. Ocean County named October 14 1995 "Merce Ridgway Day" to honor him for his work to preserve the region's traditional cultural heritage. He received the "Hurley Conklin Award" from the Barnegat Bay Decoy and Baymen's museum in 1996, honoring those who have "lived their life in the Barnegat Bay tradition." As Rutgers University American Studies Professor Angus Kress Gillespie says in his foreword to The Bayman, "what fascinated me most was that he was an exemplar of tradition."
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