OutintheSort.docVIP

Out in the Sort John McPhee In an all but windowless building beside the open ocean in Arichat, Nova Scotia, a million lobsters are generally in residence, each in a private apartment where temperatures are maintained just above the freeze point. In a great high-ceilinged room known as the Dryland Pound, the lobster apartments are in very tall stacks, thirty-four levels high, divided by canyonlike streets. The size of the individual dwellings varies according to the size of the inhabitants; and there in the cold dark, alone, they use almost no energy and are not able to chew off their neighbors antennae or twist off their neighbors claws, as lobsters will do in a more gregarious setting. The cold water comes down from above and, in a patented way, circulates through the apartments as if they were a series of descending Moorish pools. Beguiled into thinking it is always winter, the lobsters remain hard, do not molt when summer comes, and may repose in Arichat for half a year before departing for Kentucky. They belong to a company called Clearwater Seafoods, which collects them from all over the Maritime Provinces, including Nova Scotias Cape Breton County, where Arichat is, on an island called Madame. Clearwater has a number of offshore licenses, its deep-sea trawlers fifty to two hundred miles out, tending mile-long lines of traps, and enhancing Clearwaters catch of lobsters that weigh three to fifteen pounds. A twenty-plus-pounder is rare but not unknown. Sixty people work in the Arichat plant, sometimes around the clock. The manager is a big rugged guy named David George, who was wearing an N.Y.P.D. T-shirt when I met him and who summed up his operation, saying, We go through a shitload of lobsters in a two-month period. From Clearwaters headquarters in Bedford, beside Halifax, I had driven up to Arichat with Mark Johnson, manager of Clearwater Lobster Merchants, New Covent Garden Market, Battersea; Dominique Bael, of Clearwaters La Homarderie, Quai des Usines