The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  For GEORGE HACKL, of the Roebling Flats, of Chicken Island and the New York Eddy, of Portofino and Trans-Keld, of High Lee, Middle Lee, Deep Lee, and, sine qua non, The Patch

  For RONNIE and ALAN LIEB, without whom not much

  For JIM MERRITT, the master

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ONE - THEY’RE IN THE RIVER

  TWO - A SELECTIVE ADVANTAGE

  THREE - AMENDING NATURE

  FOUR - FAREWELL TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  FIVE - SPAWNING AND THE OUT MIGRATION

  SIX - A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

  SEVEN - THE SHAD ALLEY

  EIGHT - THE FOUNDING FISH

  NINE - THE PORTABLE ROCK

  TEN - THE COMPENSATORY RESPONSE

  ELEVEN - ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE

  TWELVE - THE SHAD CITY

  THIRTEEN - INSIDE THE CAVITY

  FOURTEEN - CATCH-AND-DISSECT

  FIFTEEN - INSIDE THE HEAD

  SIXTEEN - CATCH-AND-RELEASE

  BY JOHN McPHEE

  APPENDIX - COOKING SHAD

  Copyright Page

  ONE

  THEY’RE IN THE RIVER

  I hadn’t been a shad fisherman all my days, only seven years, on the May evening when this story begins—in a johnboat, flat and square, anchored in heavy current by the bridge in Lambertville, on the wall of the eddy below the fourth pier. I say Lambertville (New Jersey) because that’s where we launch, but the Delaware River is more than a thousand feet wide there, and, counting westward, the fourth of the five stone bridge piers is close to New Hope, Pennsylvania. Yet it rises from the channel where the river is deepest.

  American shad are schooling ocean fish, and when they come in to make their run up the river they follow the deep channels. In the estuary toward the end of winter, they mill around in tremendous numbers, waiting for the temperature in the cold river current to rise. When it warms past forty Fahrenheit, they begin their migration, in pulses, pods—males (for the most part) first. Soon, a single sentence moves northward with them—in e-mails, on telephones, down hallways, up streets—sending amps and volts through the likes of me. The phone rings, and someone says, “They’re in the river.”

  No two shad fishermen agree on much of anything, but I would say that if a female takes your lure you know it from the first moments, or think you do, and you’re not often wrong. If you have a male on, you may be at first uncertain, but then he displays his character and you know it’s a buck shad. The roe shad is often twice the size of the buck shad. She may weigh five to six pounds, while he weighs two or three. Shad don’t exactly strike. First there’s a fixed moment—a second or two in which you feel what appears to be a snag (and might be); then the bottom of the river seems to move, as if you are tied to a working trampoline; and you start thinking five, six pounds, big fillets in the broiler, the grained savor of lemoned roe; but now this little buck shad—two and a half pounds—takes off across the river, flies into the air, and struts around on his tail. He leaps again. He leaps once more and does a complete somersault. He can’t be said to be cocky, of course, but he suggests cockiness and pretension. He’s all show and no roe. She doesn’t move. Her size and weight are not at first especially employed. Yet here is the message she sends up the line: If this isn’t bedrock you’d be better off if it were; if you’re in a hurry, get out your scissors. She stays low, and holds; and soon you are sure about the weight and the sex. Now, straight across the river and away, deep, she strips line, your reel drag clicking. She turns and moves back, an arcuate run. You’re supposed to keep things taut but often she’ll do it for you. When, rising, she rolls near the surface, she looks even larger than she is. She, too, can leap, can do a front flip, but she obviously knows that her shrewdest position is broadside to full current. It’s as difficult to move her as it would be to reel in a boat sideways.

  Like salmon, shad return to their natal rivers and eat nothing on the spawning run. Like salmon swimming two thousand miles up the Yukon River, migrating shad exist on their own fat. So why do shad and salmon respond to lures? Up and down the river, almost everybody has an answer to that fundamental question, but no one—bartender or biologist—really knows. A plurality will tell you that the fish are expressing irritation. Flutter something colorful in their faces and shad will either ignore it completely or snap at it like pit bulls. More precisely, they’ll swing their heads, as swordfish do, to bat an irritant aside. They don’t swallow, since they’re not eating. Essentially never does a hook reach the gills, or even much inside the mouth. You hook them in the mouth’s outer rim—in the premaxillary and maxillary bones and sometimes in the ethmoid region at the tip of the snout, all of which are segments of the large open scoop that plows through plankton at sea.

  Below the Lambertville-New Hope bridge that evening, I was using a shad dart of my own making. A small metallic cone, it trailed bucktail tied on in a vise. Its body was chartreuse. Its base was dark green. It was coated with clear gloss. Extending with the bucktail from the tip of the cone, its No. 2 hook was black and chemically sharpened. Because the hook shaft includes a right angle and the eye emerges from the side of the cone, a shad dart is hydrodynamically hapless. It flips and flops and buzzes around like a fly that needs killing. If it snags, you’re likely to lose it. Snags happen often. Held in the water column by the driving current, my dart was out about seventy feet.

  Three of us were in the boat, close and tandem. I was in the middle, fishing over the shoulder of the skipper, Ed Cervone. Fishing over my shoulder was Ed’s son, Edmund Cervone. Each of them had caught several shad, varying in sex, notable in size. I had caught two roe shad. The sun was setting. It was seven-thirty. Quitting time was upon us, but the rod in my hand was suddenly pulled by a great deal more than the current. The Cervones reeled in their darts and stowed their rods. They would wait and watch, as people do when someone else in a boat has a fish on the line.

  It felt heavy. It maintained for some time a severe tug without much lateral movement. “Female,” I said. “Six pounds.” Cervone the Elder, who has a doctorate in psychology, seemed unimpressed—seemed to be suggesting, through a light shrug, that he knew bullshit by its cover. He knew he wasn’t fishing with Buddy Grucela. He knew he wasn’t fishing with Erwin Dietz or Gerald Hartzel—living figures in the Cooperstown of shad. He knew that in my seven years as a shad fisherman I had risen steadily into a zone of terminal mediocrity. And he was well equipped to empathize. Ours was one of twelve boats below and around the western bridge piers. Nearly all the others had been doing well, too. When that fish of mine came on the line toward the end of the day, a guy in the boat next to us looked over and said, “It doesn’t get any better than this, does it?” At that moment, thirty feet of line came off the reel against the drag. I thought the line would snap.

  Dietz and Hartzel are waders, bank fishermen, and you’d usually encounter them far upriver—at least three hundred miles above the sea buoy—where the Delaware is narrow, is punctuated with riffles and rapids, and has cut a deep gorge in the Pocono-Catskill plateau. The night air, cooler than the water, makes a thick early mist there. If you wanted to fish near a monumental figure like Dietz, and possibly be there ahead of him, you had to be on the river before dawn. As the light came up, it revealed a dark silhouette in the drifting vapors, standing on a rock catching fish. He always knew how many. “How many is that?” “Eleven.” I could fish near him until the sun was high, doing everything he did, and catch nothing, or one or two. Nearing retirement, he was a mason then, in New York City construction. He lived in Queens. Somewhere in my fishing diaries I wrote: “He recovers his dart and casts anew faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. He brings fish in rapidly, and swiftly releases them. Then his d
art is in the air. He is very sensitive on the jig, his rod tip high, his twitch minimal. While I am fishless, Dietz’s rod is electric with excitement. Two. Three. Four. He works fish. I watch. And watch. He loses a dart to a snag. Cool. He is idle. Out of it. I am casting—two, three, four. The numbers refer to casts but not to shad. At last he finishes tying on a new dart, and he flings it into the river. It swings through the current, and his rod is bent by another fish. How … Does … He … Do … It? After he casts, he holds his rod at a forty-five-degree angle. His wrist flicks almost imperceptibly at a consistent rate of about once a second. He says he can feel the shad bump the dart in the center of the current, bump it again, and then go for it. His line and his lures are identical with mine. I imitate him as precisely as I can. He hooks fish, I hook water.”

  As Gerald Hartzel stepped into the upper river at five-thirty of a June morning—after driving more than three hours—his shad net would be holstered on his back so that its hoop rose above his head like a circular antenna. He reached for it often. He used a five-and-a-half-foot rod with four-pound line and an ultra-light reel. He had a long wooden staff that floated on a tether beside him. He was slim. Six feet. Polaroid glasses. On his brown hat were two fishing licenses. Sewn on both his hat and his vest was the orange-and-green emblem of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen’s Association. He cast with a short direct punch from eye level, as if he were throwing a dart not so much at a fish as at a tavern wall. As one such morning began, he caught a shad, and then another, but not rapidly, and he seemed puzzled. Then, arms up, he began to hold the rod high before him, as if he were reaching for a shelf; and, in quick succession, he flipped up the tip, up again, up once more—fish on the line. Rooted in fast water, apparently tireless, he caught shad after shad after shad, always with his arms extended high. His darts were very small. Across the morning, they were in the water an amazing percentage of the total time. He was efficient in the rhythm of his casts. Page 1, line 1: If your dart is not in the water you are not catching fish. Jigging—twitching—the line, he gave complete attention to each moment of every swing, his eyes swinging, too, like a long-ball hitter’s. After fishing downstream from him, I quit when he did. In four and a half hours, I had caught six shad, including one roe that I kept. In the four and a half hours, he had landed twenty-one shad. Wearily rubbing a shoulder, he said, “Did you see what I had to do?”

  Hartzel had been shad fishing more than thirty years. He spoke of fifty-shad days. Since page 1, line 2 of this enterprise is “Position counts”—that is, a person in the right place can bring fish in steadily while a neighboring line is scoreless—I said as he was leaving that I thought I would fish awhile just where he had fished. “Good idea,” he said. “Be careful. This is a treacherous river. Start in that little eddy behind the rock there, and then move out a little.” With my arms above my head, twitching, I started in the eddy behind the rock there, and soon edged out closer to the channel. I fished for two hours just where he had fished. I caught nothing. I felt no hits. My fishing diary from that day says, “When I played basketball, I was very much less effective when I went to the right. When I dribbled, I sometimes had to glance at the ball. I had no reverse pivot. I didn’t roll. I sucked. And if I didn’t know it before, I know now that there are Larry Birds in the river. Joe DiMaggios. Ben Hogans. Reds Grange.” The annual run was about over, and as I was leaving the river another fisherman asked me how I’d done for the year. “About fifty,” I said. He said, “That’s quite a season.” By that standard, Gerald Hartzel has a new season every time he leaves home. The diary continues: “There is more to the association of Delaware River shad fishermen than a bunch of people whose success uniformly depends on the presence and mood of the fish. If it’s the last thing I do on this earth, I’m going to have a fifty-shad day. It’s that or live forever.”

  The great Buddy Grucela, whose domain of the American shad runs from Easton to Portland, Pennsylvania, was a bank fisherman when he was young and often had fifty-shad days. He is the author of “The Original Guide to Better Shad Fishing on the Delaware River” (Grucela, Easton, 1980), of which I have six copies, one of them covered with shad blood and puffy from river and rain. It’s on a shelf between C. Boyd Pfeiffer’s “Shad Fishing” (Crown, New York, 1975) and Henry B. Bigelow and William C. Schroeder’s “Fishes of the Gulf of Maine” (United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1953). When Grucela was thirty-five, he was more or less forced to get a boat, because shad fishermen had become so numerous that he needed to get out onto the water to find a position that counted. In a manner of speaking, he had to accept a cut in pay (“I caught more shad from shore than ever from the boat”), and, while he wasn’t exactly hemmed in by other floating fishermen, they were pretty close. His favorite anchorage was two hundred yards upriver from the tributary Martins Creek. A lot of people followed him there. One morning, he had a buck shad on his line running upstream, running downstream, leaping, tail-walking. It jumped into another guy’s boat.

  Grucela: “I knew the guy. He’d been catching nothing for three days. He wouldn’t give me the shad. He said he needed it to prove to his wife he was shad fishing. Some guys can fish in a hatchery and catch nothing. He was one of those guys.”

  Buddy Grucela did not require another experience like that one to cause him to arrive at the river routinely before dawn. “The shad aren’t stirred up yet,” he explains. “The more they’re stirred up, the spookier they get. At daybreak, it’s just you and the geese, man.”

  If, say, three hundred thousand shad come up the Delaware River, three hundred thousand shad come to Buddy Grucela. Or something near it. Shad are long-term spawners, doing it nightly for many nights, and they seem to prefer to be well above Trenton. Easton to Portland is twenty miles of river. A claim could be made that those twenty miles relate to the American shad as the Doaktown pools of the Miramichi relate to the Atlantic salmon. To the Delaware River Shad Fishermen’s Association—a conservation group that tries to keep the river healthy—Easton to Portland is, by and large, where the dues payers are in April. Halfway up the reach is Foul Rift, a quarter mile of haystacks and standing waves, the preëminent rapid among the several hundred in the Delaware. A few miles south—close to Martins Creek, Pennsylvania—is a ledge of white water that slants downstream from right bank to left, its base the base of Buddy Grucela.

  He grew up in Martins Creek, to which his grandfather (originally named Grutzela) had emigrated from Poland to work in the cement plant. Buddy’s father worked in the cement plant, and so, eventually, did Buddy. When he was a kid, he saw big silver fish in the river in spring and had no idea what they were. In his twenties, he was catching so many shad he carried them home on a tree limb. After the cement plant closed, in the nineteen-sixties, he worked in a mill that was generous with vacations. He took them when the shad appeared, and, as long as the run lasted, spent all day every day on the water. Later, working as a traffic director on a Delaware River bridge, he was rebuked for fishing on the job.

  No piece of tackle is more effective for a fisherman than his own daily data: weather, water temperature, water volume, lure, line weight, line density, and many an etcetera. Just the act of recording such things imprints them in cumulative memory, and you move forward learning where to be and what to do when. Grucela’s sense of the run and the river is so refined in this respect that he envisions in his season a single apex day. Not that he wouldn’t go out on the Ides of March or give it a try on the Fourth of July. At the latitude of Martins Creek, though, if his season were somehow restricted to just one day the day would be the twenty-fourth of April. Year upon year, it has been his best day. In the off season, just thinking of April 24th will cause him to smile like a winning coach, and say, “When you’re fishing, nothing beats catching fish.”

  On the twenty-fourth of April, above Easton, the roes are in the river—April 24th and a week or two on either side. “The roe run comes in two parts—the early roe run and the late roe run.
Then you get a late buck run—real small and too young, precocious bucks.” Shad are not always swimming near the bottom of the water column, as some shad fishermen inflexibly believe. Grucela starts low, then removes weight incrementally until he finds the level of the fish. All that notwithstanding, he will state summarily, “The secret of shad fishing is depth.” And he adds, “That’s why they kill them with downriggers.” Grucela spurns downriggers—devices that pinch your line far below your hull and keep the dart at depth. He prefers to do the fishing himself. “I just throw my dart and let it rattle in the current.”

  He uses two rods, a dart on one line, a flutter spoon on the other—no droppers, no doubling up (two lures on one line). A flutter spoon has the slim shape of the leaf of a white willow. He pays it out behind his boat and leaves it in the water, fluttering. The dart he casts repeatedly, retrieving it after its swing through the current. A machinist custom-made his dart mold. If Buddy Grucela were a golfer, he would not be attracted to an iridium driver. His gear is conventional, starting with six-pound line. He keeps a small split shot within twelve inches of the dart, so minor debris will collect on the shot and not on the hook. When the river is full of aments, also known as catkins (flower clusters of willow, birch, or alder), the split shot catches the catkins.

  Record American shad have been caught in the Delaware River (eleven pounds, one ounce) and the Connecticut River (eleven pounds, four ounces). Buddy Grucela is certain that he had one heavier than that. After the dart stopped in mid-swing, and the moment of stasis was over, this fish, close to the surface, went straight up the river. Grucela watched it go, wondering what would happen next. This happened next: “He swam right by me like a shark. He was going upstream and he saw me. He looked me in the eye. Then he came right at the boat like a torpedo. He’s coming right at me, and I’m reeling fast. He went under the boat, right under me. He bent the rod tip under the boat. He broke the rod off. All I had in my hand was the reel and the handle. That fish—I’m telling you—was a record shad.” It was also, beyond doubt, a female. Shad fishermen can’t seem to help virilizing gender when they tell stories about big, powerful animals.