Dave Krusa: An Appreciation

The obituary for Dave Krusa, who passed away at 75 from heart failure on January 4, that was published in last week’s local media referred to him as a “fishing pioneer and poet.” I didn’t get to know him as either of those things. To me, from the moment I met him, Dave was a prose writer, and a damn good one.

I certainly don’t mean to dismiss his achievements on the water. In case you missed it, the obituary published last week highlighted that he and fishing partner John Nolan “were the first captains in Montauk and among the first on the East Coast to exclusively target tilefish, a golden-skinned species that inhabits the ocean bottom near the edge of the continental shelf and now supports a multimillion-dollar industry.” Dave left being a full-time fisherman because of lymphoma two decades ago and became a woodworker. This left him time to pursue another passion: writing. Some of his poetry and fiction was published, including in the pages of The East Hampton Star.

There is a lengthy Dave Krusa story in “On Montauk: A Literary Celebration,” an anthology of writings connected to the hamlet that was published last year. An excerpt from my book “Dark Noon” is also in the collection, and there were several readings and other events to celebrate the publication of the book. However, that was not where I met Dave. In fact, he was by then too ill to participate, and he was much missed at those events that were held from Manhattan to Southampton to Montauk.

Even those who did not know Dave at all had to think they were in the hands of a true naturalist writer just by reading the two opening paragraphs of “Winter Trip,” which appears in the Montauk anthology: “The north wind funneled through the Montauk jetties. It moaned atound the fish house like a man in pain. Captain Roland could hear it from inside the pilothouse. The sound was formidable. If you listened too hard you’d not go fishing. Roland glanced toward the dock, hoping to see the youngest of his mates, Willy Dean. A swirl of dust spun from the empty parking lot and disappeared. He hadn’t seen Willy for two days and was worried; worried and annoyed.

“It was nine o’clock on a dark January night. A gust of wind whined through the rigging. ‘You won’t go,’ he thought, ‘you won’t go fishing if you stand there listening.’ The decision to cast the lines was a hard one on this storm-ridden latitude. It had broken many of his competitors.”

For several years, I had the privilege of conducting a writing workshop one night a week at the Fort Pond House in Montauk. I miss it, as I met fine people who shared their creative spirit and output with me. (Thankfully, a group of writers continues to gather at the renovated building.) One of them was Dave Krusa. It took some prodding to get him to read from his work, and when he did, it was not a short excerpt he offered but at times an entire story. There was no concern about the time he took because we were enthralled, suddenly and vividly out on the water with his indelible characters, assisted by the terse but dead-on descriptions that smacked of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Sometimes, I had the sense that Dave wasn’t sure if he wanted to be in the workshop. This had nothing to do with me or the rest of us but that the workshop was something of a public display of his deep-felt struggle to be a good writer of fiction, to be even better than he was, which he’d be the last to admit was true. He took writing and his drive to improve at it very seriously. It truly meant something to get it right.

My hope was Dave could be the next F.X. Toole. Obviously, I have to explain that obscure reference. Close to two decades ago a man named Jerry Boyd lived in Los Angeles. He had worked as a boxer and cutman, the guy in a fighter’s corner who between the rounds tries to close wounds. Approaching 70 and mostly retired and nursing a shaky ticker, Boyd had turned to writing realistic short stories about his experiences in and around the ring, using F.X. Toole as a pseudonym. They began to be published in literary magazines, and the agent Nat Sobel (who has a house in East Hampton) read one and tracked the author down. Eventually, six stories were joined into a book titled “Rope Burns” that was published to critical acclaim. Two of those stories were adapted into the screenplay “Million Dollar Baby,” which became the 2004 Oscar-winning film directed by Clint Eastwood.

As recently as a few months ago, I’d been hoping and getting word to Dave that if he would give me two to three stories they would get read (I am a Sobel client) and maybe lightning could strike twice. It didn’t happen. One reason could be that Dave couldn’t bring himself to believe that what he’s written is good enough. Or too much was unfinished. Years ago a writing teacher of mine was Mark Harris, mostly known for the novel (and film) “Bang the Drum Slowly.” He said, “Writing you deeply care about never seems complete, but at some point the author has to abandon it to its fate.” Perhaps Dave cared too deeply and was not the kind of man to abandon anything.

The end of “Winter Storm,” as the fishing boat and its crew return to Montauk during a storm, is only one example of Dave Krusa being a writer’s writer: “The jetties appeared to converge on the radar screen. The Captain clicked off the autopilot and steered by hand. He eased off on the throttle. The land seemed to swallow the boat’s image on the screen, and he dampened the gain on the radar while slowly feeling his way through the harbor. When he stepped out to the hauling station, the dark outline of the fish house appeared through the snow as though some errant hand had placed it in their path. He nudged the boat forward, slowly, apprehensively, as the crew scrambled to get the dock lines ready.”