NEW YORK'S CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY

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One business I would not venture into, though, is

commercial

fishing on Lake Erie. Even though the lake now has more fish than ever, the New York State legislature has passed a succession of laws restricting the way in which "the commercials" may ply their trade.

Gill nets were banned in 1986, in large part because 15,000 sport fishermen, like Paul and his customers, bombarded the state capital at Albany with letters pointing out that the indiscriminate gill net was inadvertently killing thousands of such purely sport fish as brown trout and rainbows. This confined the county's handful of commercials to "trap nets": bottom-set, stationary nets that simply serve as holding pens for the fish and from which the prohibited sport species may be removed and released without harm. But the two target species of commercial fishermen are walleyes and perch, and in a new law to take effect in 1988, no walleyes may be taken with a net of any kind, which further restricts the activities, and the profits, of these fishermen.

Sport and commercial fishermen, competing predators, are mortal enemies everywhere. But in a place as small as Dunkirk, that adversarial relationship becomes personal, and people choose up sides. Denny Frazier, 41, lifetime resident and crewman on the Mary S, one of only two commercial boats still working out of Dunkirk Harbor (last year there were three), bitterly denies the sport anglers' basic contention that commercial fishermen do serious damage to the lake's populations: "If they don't go out every day and get their limit," he says of the charter captains, "they come back and say, `Oh, the commercials are raping the lake!' And some people believe them. But they don't remember, like I do, that there used to be 15 or 20 commercial boats going out of here, so how could we be raping the lake with only two of us left?" He shakes his head. "You used to be respected in Dunkirk if you were a commercial fisherman. It was the same as if you worked in a steel mill. And a lot, a lot, of people raised their families that way. But these days, many folks look at you as if you were some kind of bandit.

" While it has three sizable villages—Jamestown, with 35,000 people, Dunkirk, with 15,000 and Fredonia, with 10,000—Chautauqua County has, by official New York State Department of Commerce definition, no "urbanized areas." Nor does it have anything that would qualify as a suburb, that most regimented but bland of all American places to live. Buffalo, the nearest big city, is considered by county residents as being too distant to commute to. So almost everyone who resides within the county also works within it—whether as professor at the state universities at Fredonia and Jamestown, secretary at the county seat in Mayville or security guard at the Chautauqua Institution-and drives from home to work on pleasant, two-lane roads past marshes and cows and brush lots, commuting for a county average of only 15.4 minutes each way.

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