I was a Truro lifeguard the summer Jaws hit the movie theaters almost a half-century ago, causing instant pandemonium on the beach whenever an ocean sunfish or bass blitz passed our guard stand.
The movie’s debut coincided in an unfortunate way with the arrival of an abundance of dogfish, which had moved inshore, replacing the once-plentiful cod and haddock and becoming an easy target for trawlers working off the beach. The good news for fishermen was that a huge market was opening up in England, where dogfish had become a wildly popular replacement for cod on fish-and-chips menus. Alas, bottom trawling is a messy business, and, every night, wounded escapees from the nets would limp their way to shore, swimming aimlessly until they perished from their wounds.
The bad news for lifeguards was that dogfish are in the shark family, and while they never reach lengths of more than three feet or so, they do possess a shark-like dorsal fin. Every time one of them finned into the shallows, we would hear someone scream “SHAAAARK!” at the top of their lungs, resulting in mass exits from the water and an endless series of questions from the crowd.
To quell people’s nervousness, we would wade out, grab one of the struggling dogfish, and bring it to shore where people could see it had no teeth and posed no danger.
Things got bad enough that I would show up early every morning to make a quick patrol up and down the beach removing any unintentional marine terrorists.
One day I arrived at Ballston Beach and noticed a commotion 100 yards or so offshore. The water would be calm for a few minutes, then erupt in a choppy swirl a few yards away from where it had been previously roiled. I tossed the rescue board into the water and started paddling, trying to predict where the mysterious turmoil would next reappear. When, finally, it rose nearby, what I saw was a very large striper choking on a decent-size plaice.
I was able to drag the 20-pound bass onto the board. I jammed it between my knees and returned to shore wondering how I would keep the fish fresh for the next eight hours. Luckily, Norman Pope, who was soon to be my brother-in-law, had been watching the drama unfold. In exchange for the tasty plaice, retrieved from the bass’s maw, he agreed to take the bass to Wellfleet, where I hoped Cliff Hatch, then the owner of Hatch’s Market, would buy it.
Memories of that Jaws summer and my one and only hand-caught fish, came flooding back to me while listening to a recent interview on Boston Public Radio’s Morning Edition with Greg Skomal, the marine biologist and underwater explorer who heads up the Mass. Div. of Marine Fisheries shark research. He was discussing his new book, Chasing Shadows, published in July by Harper Collins, and which I heartily recommend.
I realized what a time of innocence the summer of 1975 had been, both in terms of our understanding of sharks and of the climate. Skomal, a tireless student of the Atlantic great white shark, has devoted much of his professional career to helping the public understand these apex predators’ critical importance in the natural order.
What particularly interested me was Skomal’s memory of speaking with Peter Benchley, whose novel had inspired Spielberg’s movie. Benchley expressed serious regrets about the terrible toll the book and movie had taken on sharks.
I had a similar conversation with Benchley in the mid-1980s — still long before great whites were common off Cape Cod — trying to persuade him to write an article for a yachting magazine I had founded. He told me then that, however much he enjoyed the success of Jaws, he hated the shark paranoia it had enflamed and the shark-killing madness that had ensued. “If I had it to do over again,” he told me, “I’d probably write it quite differently today.”
Benchley didn’t get to do that rewrite. He died in 2006. But thanks to scientists like Skomal; shark conservationists including Wendy Benchley, Peter’s wife; and numerous organizations including our own Center for Coastal Studies and Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, there’s a different attitude on the beach today.
When a great white is spotted by a guard, an aircraft, boat, or buoy, people line the sand, staring eagerly into the water for a glimpse. We’ve gone full circle from an era of gratuitous fear, felt at a time when sharks were not even common off Cape Cod, to curiosity about and appreciation of this extraordinary animal with whom we now share our ocean.
In a summer marked by lethal wildfires, choking smoke, lobsters dying in the overheated Gulf of Maine, and the scary reality of declining numbers of right whales, striped bass, and birds, the story of the Atlantic great white shark provides an example of how, with good science, willpower, and timely action, we can overcome even the scariest things happening in our world.
