the
Le dge
More than a century ago, three lives were lost
on this ledge. A father, a son, and another
young boy spent the day hunting, but as the
tide rose, their boat disappeared, and they
were left to perish in the frigid December
water. This tragic event might have been
forgotten if not for a Bowdoin professor
who immortalized the dark tale in what is
undoubtedly Maine's most famous short story.
edgar allen beem
B y E d g a r A l l e n B ee m
a hunting party of five set out from Ash Point in South
Harpswell to go gunning for ducks between Eagle Island and
West Brown Cow Island. Only two made it home alive.
Fisherman Lawrence C. Estes, Jr., known to one and all as
Buster, skippered his boat the Amy E. with son Steven, 13, son
Maurice, 12, nephew Harry Jewell, 16, and fellow fisherman
Everett Gatchell on board. The thirty-seven-foot lobsterboat,
named for Estes’ wife, towed a pair of skiffs.
Near Eagle Island, Estes dropped Gatchell and son Maurice
off in one rowboat. They intended to row ashore and hunt from
Eagle Island, but the rough winter seas made a landing too
dangerous, so Gatchell and the boy spent a chilly day shooting
from the skiff.
Buster Estes and the other two boys motored on out across
Broad Sound, anchored the Amy E. near West Brown Cow, and
rowed to the half-tide ledge known as Mink Rock. The seaweedcovered ledge is under four to five feet of water at high tide, but
it makes an excellent perch for cormorants, seals, and duck
hunters when exposed. After the fact, it became apparent that
the Estes’ little skiff must somehow have drifted away, leaving
him and the two boys marooned on the ledge as the freezing
tide was coming in. All three perished.
No one knows what actually happened on Mink Rock that
day, but the late author and Bowdoin professor Lawrence
Sargent Hall built his literary career on his imaginings in his
short story, “The Ledge,” one of the most famous stories in the
annals of Maine writing. First published in the Hudson Review
in 1959, “The Ledge” was selected as the best American short
story of the year in Prize Stories 1960: The O.Henry Awards
and has subsequently appeared in close to forty anthologies.
“From first to last,” wrote author Wallace Stegner in the
introduction to the O.Henry Awards anthology, “ ‘The Ledge’
has an imposing dignity, obtained partly by the trick of not
naming the characters, and of keeping the point of view above,
brooding over the fisherman and the two boys, instead of
forcing us to the sort of identification that might have made the
story unbearable . . . In a brief record of human endurance and
suffering, a human possibility has been defined.”
In “The Ledge,” Lawrence Hall imagines the hunters firing
7 8 D ow n E a s t. c o m
Nobody really knows
what happened to
the fishermen on
Mink Rock in 1956.
But Bowdoin
professor Lawrence
Sargent Hall (above)
fictionalized the
events into a literary
sensation.
P o r t l a n d P u b l i c L i b r a r y ( n e w s pa p e r ) ; G e o r g e J . M i t c h e l l D e p t. o f Sp e c i a l c o l l . &
A r c h i v e s , B o w d o i n C o l l e g e L i b r a r y, B r u n s w i c k , M a i n e ( P o r t r a i t & M a n u s c r i p t ) .
On
December
27, 1956,
their shotguns into the gathering
darkness, trying to signal for help. They
would have been able to see lights in
cottages on Cliff Island and shots were
heard that evening on the island, but
they were not heard as cries for help.
When it becomes apparent to him that
there is no hope of rescue, Hall’s stoic
fisherman lifts his young son onto his
shoulders and stands there on the ledge
as the frigid water slowly inundates them.
“Freezing seas swept by, flooding
inexorably up and up as the earth sank
away imperceptibly beneath them. The
boy called out once to his cousin. There
was no answer.”
Everett Gatchell and twelve-year-old
Maurice Estes waited in their rowboat
until after dark before realizing that something had gone wrong. Maybe the Amy E.
had broken down. So Gatchell rowed all
the way back to Ash Point and instructed
Amy Estes to notify the Coast Guard.
The ensuing search involved three
Coast Guard vessels, a Coast Guard
search plane from Massachusetts, a helicopter from Brunswick Naval Air Station,
and more than a score of local
fishermen. The planes had to give up the
search because of snow and fog, but
Buster Estes’ friends and family
continued to search the icy seas. The
following morning, fishermen using
grappling hooks fished Estes’ lifeless
body from the waters near the ledge.
“We found the skiff. It was cold that
day. There was ice on everyone,” recalls
Ronald LeClair, one of the fishermen
who recovered Estes’ body. “We found
Buster. He was a big man. But we never
found the kids.”
Three shot guns and the spent casings
were found on Mink Rock. There were
plenty of dead ducks and decoys
attesting to a successful day of hunting,
but the skiff had broken up in the waves
and the Amy E. had snapped its anchor
line and drifted eight miles toward
Portland Harbor.
Buster Estes’ shrouded body was
towed home in a dinghy behind the
lobsterboat that found him. The next day,
the Coast Guard called off the search for
Steven Estes and Harry Jewell.
“They were never found, neither
Harry nor Stevie. I was only nine years
“The Ledge” lives on
The story was reprinted just
about every year of his life
for fees ranging from two
hundred to four hundred
dollars. And it has had an
afterlife not only in
anthologies, but also in
other media, including:
In 1962, Voice of America
radio broadcast a rather
cornball version of “The
Ledge” in which a live
starfish is found inside the
son’s boot frozen beneath
the fisherman’s arm.
In 1971, Maine educator
Nancy Pulsifer wrote a song
called “Ballad of Buster”
and commissioned film
maker and movie critic
Marty Meltz to make a short
The Estes’
little skiff
must
somehow
have drifted
away,
leaving him
and the
two boys
marooned on
the ledge as
the freezing
tide was
coming in.
film that interpreted the
1956 tragedy and the 1959
story in scenes that never
showed the actors’ faces.
In 1988, Thomas Hussian, of
Minneapolis, Minnesota,
purchased the film rights to
“The Ledge” and worked
with Hall to make a film
that was never finished.
Most of the aborted film
was shot on Lake Superior,
but Hussian did hire a local
fisherman to take him out
to Mink Rock to film the
ledge itself. Hussian’s
lasting impression of the
spot where Buster Estes
and the boys drown was
that “It’s almost
inconceivable that you
couldn’t swim the distance
that was required.” True,
the Mink Rock ledges are
only a few hundred yards
from the high hump of
West Brown Cow Island,
but when his son asks
“Could you swim it?”, Hall’s
fisherman replies
truthfully, “A hundred
yards maybe, in this water.
I wish I could.”
As recently as 2006, “The
Ledge” was performed as a
one-man show at the
Sanford Meisner Theater in
New York, earning actor
Mike Houston a 2007 New
York Innovative Theatre
Award for outstanding solo
performance.
old at the time,” says Harold Jewell, Harry Jewell’s little brother.
He had stayed behind in South Harpswell that fateful day with
his aunt, Amy Estes, and his cousin, Theodore Estes.
Curiously, or perhaps not so, neither Ronald LeClair nor
Harold Jewell has ever read “The Ledge.”
“Around my house it wasn’t much talked about,” says Jewell
of the loss of his brother. “My mother went into a tailspin. She
went to psychics. It’s just one of those great unknowns.”
Lawrence S. Hall ( 1915-1993 ) was a 1936 Bowdoin College
graduate who returned to his alma mater to teach from 1946
until his retirement in 1986. In 1961, he won the William
Faulkner Award for his first and only novel, Stowaway, but his
literary career was largely predicated on the success of “The
Ledge.” In 1956, the year of the tragedy in Harspwell, Hall was
not only living on Orrs Island and teaching at Bowdoin, he was
also operating what he once described as “an old Downeast
Gothic boatyard.”
“This way,” he explained in 1988 to a filmmaker working on
a film of his story, “though I was primarily a college professor
I achieved a secondary occupational kinship with the local
fishermen, who made up the center of what was then a maledominated society, and accepted me with wary courtesy at their
regular post-suppertime gatherings at the local grocery store.”
Hall knew Buster Estes only slightly, but he knew the
makings of a good story when he heard one. Within a year of
continued on page 102
DECEMBER 2012 79
The ledge
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 79
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the tragedy, he had written “The
Ledge.”
Having written his PhD thesis at
Yale about fellow Bowdoin graduate
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hall must
have been aware that the opening of
“The Ledge” resonated of
Hawthorne’s short story “Young
Goodman Brown,” both writers
imaging their protagonists leaving
the warm beds of their wives who
try to persuade them not to go.
There is also a peculiar melodrama
about Hall’s use of language (“The
old fierceness was in his bones.”)
that echoes Hawthorne’s.
Hall’s literary agent shopped “The
Ledge” around for over a year. Not
everyone loved “The Ledge.” Esquire
rejected Hall’s story as “badly overwritten.” The New Yorker also turned
it down, finding Hall’s distinctive
style “a bit too elaborate” and
observing that “the story itself seems
somehow an unlikely one.”
Eventually the Hudson Review
agreed to pay $125 to publish it in its
Winter 1958-59 issue. Even then, the
magazine insisted on a few changes,
including the deletion of what
Hudson Review editor Frederick
Morgan called “a very mysterious
reference to a ‘lover,’ which makes no
sense and detracts from the ending.”
“If it is meant as a metaphor, it
doesn’t work; if it is meant literally,
it seems absurd and pointless,”
wrote Morgan of Hall’s reference to
the fisherman’s wife having a lover.
“In either case, it should come out.”
Hall obliged, but he subsequently charged that Hudson
Review had “tampered with the
story as I had written it, to what was
clearly its detriment” and insisted
that several other deleted passages
be restored in subsequent reprints.
When Bowdoin College president
James “Spike” Coles read “The
Ledge” in the Hudson Review, he
wrote a January 15, 1959, note to
Larry Hall, which reads, “Grim, it is,
but good and powerful. Not only
does it meet the high standards you
set for yourself, but I think it will
hold up well in any company.”
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Indeed, when John Updike, one of
America’s finest short story writers,
edited the 1999 The Best American
Short Stories of the Century, he
placed Lawrence Hall in the company
of such greats as Saul Bellow, John
Cheever, William Faulkner, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
Bernard Malamud, Vladimir Nabokov,
Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty,
and himself.
“‘The Ledge,’ by Lawrence
Sargent Hall,” wrote Updike, “is
timeless — a naturalistic anecdote
terrible in its tidal simplicity and
inexorability, fatally weighted in
every detail.”
In 2009, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “The
Ledge,” Bowdoin magazine asked a
1995 graduate of the college to
account for the enduring interest in
Hall’s short story. Anthony Doerr,
himself a four-time O. Henry Award
winner, wrote, “The best stories are
like dreams. They convince you they
are real, they fold you into their
worlds, and then they hold you
there.”
Doerr, who lives in Boise, Idaho,
today praises “the harrowing nature
of the read when you encounter the
story for the first time.
“Can you still create that time
bomb that ticks toward zero?” asks
Doerr rhetorically. “Hall did it with
the tide, the water level rising.”
When Down East reprinted “The
Ledge” in its September 1960 issue,
it prompted a letter to the editor
from an elderly woman who
complained that Hall’s fisherman
gives the teenaged boys a drink of
whiskey to ward off the cold.
“Any references in the story to
bottles or giving the boys a drink are
not true and never should have been
allowed to be printed,” insisted the
irate reader.
The letter writer’s failure to
make a distinction between fact (the
1956 drownings) and fiction (the
1959 short story) was something
Lawrence Hall faced constantly.
“I always get asked whether the
story is based on a ‘true’ incident,”
Hall wrote to an editor in 1988.
“Just about everything is wrong with
this question. Worst of all, it
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assumes that truth is equated with
fact. . . . True fiction is controlled,
self-sustaining, complete. A true
incident is not.”
The ending of “The Ledge” has
the fisherman’s wife looking upon
his drowned body. In the original
version, she “saw him exaggerated
beyond remorse and belief, taller
than time itself.” In the final edit,
Hall changed the last phrase to
“absolved of his mortality,” and
added that he found these words
“appropriately abstract.”
And that is the key to understanding the difference between the
death of Buster Estes and “The
Ledge.” The short story is a work of
Hall’s imagination inspired by real
events but not bound by them. He
saw “The Ledge” as “an abstract of
all humanity marooned in space on
its little planet.”
Filmmaker Thomas Hussian
wrote to Hall in the 1988 and asked
how he conceived of his fisherman,
Hall said, “I can best answer by
saying he is what an old Warrant
Bos’n of mine would have described
as ‘a hard man to shave.’ ”
“On the esthetic level,”
explained Hall, “I saw him as
elemental and monumental, one of
the last descendants of the heroes of
Greek tragedy, a little larger than
life-size, with hubris and a flawed
virtue. To domesticate him would be
too reductive. He gives, symbolically
unwasted, the last full measure of
fatherly devotion.”
Larry Hall, too, was a hard man
to shave — a man remembered as
turbulent, spirited, impatient, and
salty. And it’s a good bet that there
is at least as much of Lawrence S.
Hall as there is of Lawrence C.
Estes, Jr., in the fictional hero of
“The Ledge.” For that is one of the
finest feats of art — the ability of
both writer and reader to project
themselves into a world woven of
imagination and words and to
extrapolate a universal truth from
very local particulars. In the case of
“The Ledge,” they are very Maine
particulars.
Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer
from Yarmouth who has been contributing to Down East since 1983.
1 0 6 D ow n E a s t. c o m