by John McPhee
The fish was close now. When it saw the boat, it dived. After it came up, and saw the boat again, it took off for the bottom of the river, slowly to rise once more. At some point in the last five minutes, Edmund tried for it with the boat net and missed. I finally worked it up to the side of the boat. It was still swimming, unspent. It did not roll over. It never gave up. On the second try, Edmund got it into the net, and the dart dropped out of its mouth. He brought into the boat a four-and-three-quarter-pound roe shad.
I still have the dart—secured with monofilament to a small piece of cedar shingle. It was only the second dart I had ever retired. On a bookshelf, I propped it up beside a dart of the same weight and colors, with which, on an upriver day the spring before, I had caught seventeen shad without changing or losing the lure. The chemically sharpened hook was a novelty I had succumbed to in a catalogue. That shipment of hooks was uneven, to say the least. Some of them were so weak they were bent out straight by the force of tugging shad. But not this one. Despite two hours and thirty-five minutes in the shad’s mouth, the curve of the black steel looked as it had when I made the dart and festooned it with bucktail in a vise. At home, I studied the fish with a magnifying glass. It had not been hooked on the top of the head or in any other place on the outside. It was not foul-hooked. It was hooked in the roof of the mouth, very near the front, slightly off the midline, to the right. I saw a narrow hole there, and I put a toothpick in it, which did not come through to the outside. The connection of hook and shad had been something like a trailer hitch.
Mindful of the species’ paper jaw and its legendary fragility, I would one day lay a shad on a dissecting table at the University of Massachusetts and show Willy Bemis just where my fish had been hooked.
“How would you describe that, Willy?”
“It’s the ethmoid cartilage of the braincase. It’s the part of the braincase that everyone would understand as, regionally, the nose. One solid cartilaginous structure forms the braincase during early development. This is the anterior tip of it. The brain is back in the center of the head. Most of the braincase is protected by bone, which would make it a very tough place for a hook to latch on to. But once you’ve got a hook past the bone and into that little piece of cartilage, it doesn’t come out. If a hook goes through that, it’s going to hook on to the fish in a very serious way. There’s no way that fish is ever going to throw that hook.”
The monofilament line felt sandpapery. When I took it off the reel, it contracted instantly into coils from a hundred and fifty-five minutes of twisting. A thick mass of bunched contracted circles hopelessly intertwined, it looked like something an owl dropped.
I sent the reel to the Daiwa Corporation, in California, for an assessment. They wanted $54.40 to fix it, because the shad had bent the pinion gear, the shad had bent the drive gear, the shad had damaged the oscillating system and gone a long way toward wearing out the drag system. The reel required two new gears, a new pawl, a new worm shaft, and three new drag washers.
I still have some of the scales. They report the shad’s age as three. For a female that young to be on the spawning run is more than uncommon. It’s rare. The scales record strong growth in the river in the first summer, as the egg turned into a larva, and the larva into a juvenile. They record normal growth in the ocean in each of the following years. Then they show the shad coming back into the river—two years earlier than most females do.
Soon after that evening in Lambertville, I told this story to Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Headquartered in Harrisburg, on the Susquehanna River, he is a shad specialist, who has worked as a shad consultant on the Hudson River, the Columbia River, and the Yangtze. He said that it must have been a letdown for me to learn that the fish was not a striped bass or a sturgeon or a muskellunge “but just a shad.”
It was not in any sense a letdown, I told him. I’m a shad fisherman. I was fishing for American shad.
TWO
A SELECTIVE ADVANTAGE
The Connecticut River is rich in shad but not in places to cast for them. The fall line is above Hartford, at Enfield, where a rock ledge and the rubbled remains of a dam give pause to the annual spawning run, attracting boats in large numbers, and a density of wading fishermen to the right bank of the river. The fish slide by in thousands, and then go on to find eighteen easy miles before the thousands catch up with earlier thousands, which in turn have caught up with earlier thousands in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Holyoke Dam is thirty feet high and was built in 1849. The bucks stop there. And then the roes. Thomas Chalmers may have been slow to figure this out, but in 1871, secretively, he addressed himself to the river below the dam with a fly rod and a dry fly. In the twenty-first century, fishing for shad with a dry fly is regarded as an eccentric and essentially pointless stunt. On his millers, moths—dry flies—Thomas Chalmers caught upwards of a hundred shad. His story “leaked out”—according to The Turf, Field & Farm (March 13, 1874)—but in losing his private paradise Chalmers became a progenitor of American shad fishing.
Beside Holyoke Dam today are two large elevator cars that much resemble their counterparts in office buildings. The analogy extends, as shad are lured in there by a concentrated current and lifted five stories in such numbers that the cars contain more fish than water. During the spring migration, several hundred thousand shad go up in the elevators and swim on out to the north, first passing glass walls and the flattened noses of Massachusetts schoolchildren, who come there by the busful. All that notwithstanding, the water below Holyoke Dam is still what Thomas Chalmers figured it would be: the hottest spot in New England to fish for American shad.
A thousand feet wide, the dam connects Holyoke, on the right bank, to South Hadley, on the left. Urban Holyoke is a fossil American Venice, with mile-long canals running like streets through the city, delivering power to industries that flourished in the century before the century before. In ten places, water shoots down penstocks from the high canals, turns turbines to make electricity, and plunges into the Connecticut River. Confused shad mill around these plunge pools, and fishermen do, too. South Hadley, Massachusetts, across the water, is wooded. Trails come down to the river from suburban streets. A narrow unpaved lane drops through the trees to a clearing made for launching boats. During the spring migration, many schools of shad choose the South Hadley side when the Connecticut is running high over the dam—when “the river is just honkin’.”
The speaker is Boyd Kynard—plaid shirt, dark-blue watch cap, the numbers on his Massachusetts fishing license so large that a fish-and-game warden could check on him and not get out of a car. Kynard is sinewy, square-jawed, dark-haired, compact. His eyes are bright, and quick to notice things. He appears to have been indoors on scattered occasions in the past. He has come to the river in South Hadley so early in the morning he’s the first on the scene—earlier even than Armand Charest. Kynard lives in Amherst, twelve miles away, and works in Turners Falls, thirty-three miles upriver. He remarks that he is not only the first fisherman on the scene on this May, high-season day but the first person to show up here, every year, at the start of the spring migration—earlier even than Armand Charest.
A van of some age rumbles down to the river, swings around, backs, and parks among the sycamores, ironwoods, and locusts. The driver does not step out but instead disappears into the back of the van and begins a series of activities visible only in the rocking of the chassis. Something like origami is going on in there, as hooks and hinges link unfolding parts and the van turns into a store. A sunroof pops up, as vent. Paired doors in one side fold back against the body, each bright with shad darts, striper jigs, willow-leaf blades, and other lures. A sales counter spans the opening—Armand Charest at the counter, ready for business. All around him are shelves of shad darts—varied, variegated, in great numbers and in every size and sparkling color. Charest is alert, incisive, weightless, and wiry. Even his glasses have wire rims. You will never see better shad darts than the ones he has in that van
. They’re all of his own making. “Willow-leaf blades” is Connecticut River dialect for flutter spoons.
Of shad caught by sport fishermen in the Connecticut River, eighty per cent are caught in Massachusetts, and at least eighty per cent of the shad caught in Massachusetts are from Thomas Chalmers’ paradise, here in the purview of Armand Charest. Opportunely, Charest’s trade has expanded into striper jigs, because striped bass have lately become populous in the river. Personally, I have to admit that I would be less inclined to fish for stripers with jigs than with trinitrotoluene. I look upon stripers as I look upon the worst ilk of editor. Stripers eat the young of shad.
Kynard asks Charest if he notices much difference between shad fishermen and striper fishermen.
Charest says, “Shad fishermen are polite.”
Charest looks out on the river, and up toward the widespread dam, where the water is falling in discrete curtains like an immense roaring bar code. Then he amplifies his comment, saying, “Shad fishermen are polite. They’re educated. They include a lot of women. Striper fishermen are rude. They’re obnoxious. They’re meat fishermen. No women.”
Kynard says, “They’re basically your wrestling crowd.”
Charest says, “They have missing teeth.”
Kynard says, “They’re kick-ass fishermen.”
I purchase half a dozen very small roundhead darts by Armand Charest. He looks me over with approval. The colors I choose are miscellaneous. Kynard wants to know what colors have been working well in recent days in the river. Charest mentions red-and-yellow. I give it as my opinion that the fish are hitting or they aren’t—color doesn’t matter.
Through Charest’s wire-rims comes the look that Carl Gustav Jung would have had if Jung had sold shad darts. Armand Charest says, “It matters to the fisherman.”
Nearer the dam, Kynard and I pull on chest waders and enter the river. We’re up to our waists, casting. After an hour, I’ve caught two little blueback herring, but I can’t get near a shad. It must be the color. I change darts, from chartreuse to red-and-white-to no effect—and watch cormorants riding the current. I catch, and grudgingly release, a beautiful young striper scarcely a foot in length, but I still can’t get near a shad, while Kynard’s darts, on four-pound test, are flying. They seem to go halfway to Holyoke, and he’s hooking into roe shad. Whatever else he is, the man is all fisherman, and, if it can be said of certain people—in Norman Maclean’s phrase—that they are able to “think like a fish,” the description is tailored to Boyd Kynard.
He’s had a roe on the line for twenty minutes. She bulldogs in the current, jumps, bulldogs again. My admiration of his skill is somewhat diminished by green corrosive envy. He looks around laconically while the fish races crossriver. He says, “The settlers called them white salmon, because of the way they leap.”
I ask, “What color you using?”
He answers, “Red-and-white.”
His fish jumps again but does not interrupt his train of thought. “When it’s early in the season and there’s a lot of turbidity, I want something really flashy and silvery, or gold, that catches whatever light it can. Later on, as the water clears up, I think what makes the biggest difference is the size. You see guys out here throwing great big darts in clear water—they’re not going to do any good.” As he handles his rod, his interest seems high but his level of concern low. If the fish breaks off, the fish breaks off. This is not his first prom.
“They’re beautiful fish,” he remarks, as the present one rolls, flashes, and dives. “Especially the first wave to come up. With their big silvery scales, they’re lovely animals.”
It was to Boyd Kynard that I sent scales from my two-hour-and-thirty-five-minute, three-year-old roe shad—and, from time to time, to Boyd Kynard that I have shown other scales from shad that behaved unusually or seemed anomalously small. Shad scales, like overlapping shingles, are only about twenty-five per cent exposed. The exposed part is the opaque silver. The hidden, anterior part is translucent and bears the tree-ring-like annuli that—in the late nineteen-nineties-began to yield enhanced information through new techniques in the chemical analysis of microelements. For example, different rivers contain differing quantities of selenium. The selenium in an annulus of a shad scale can be used to identify the home river of the shad. “Even areas within the same river,” Kynard has told me. “They’re doing this with Atlantic salmon now. They can actually tell you where in the river—or in which tributary—a particular scale was grown. The scale is a growing tissue that is affected by the environment around it; so when we take it, we have a book. It has a freshwater and a saltwater part. You can follow a shad to the Bay of Fundy. You can relate the chemistry of the scale to the environment that the animal did its growing in—the actual spatial location. Biologists in Canada tag fish and get letters from Connecticut, New Jersey, and so forth. The shad is carrying the same story on its back.” In close approximation, the scale records the date of birth and the date of ocean entry. The successive annuli record the successive years at sea. Then comes the spawning mark on the first annulus that records a return to the river.
After fishing until noon that day in South Hadley, we went up the wooded slope and into a small restaurant of the type that stakes its reputation on unique meat loaf. Like all other shad fishermen, we discussed—as we had before and would again—the behavior of American shad. With this difference: Kynard is a behaviorist at the S. O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center, in Turners Falls, the only laboratory of its kind in the world. He is the author of numerous scientific papers on—among other things—sturgeon and shad. His early-season, cold-weather visits to Holyoke Dam largely have to do with the fish elevator and what may be coming into it, but he always has his rod in the car.
“They’re fish with emotional problems,” he said. “You can lift them out of the water a matter of seconds and they just die, the stress is so great. I’ve never handled another species like that. It may be that their potassium level goes down. In any case, some sort of chemical imbalance occurs and it’s irreversible. They literally die of fright.”
Since they’ve been in the ocean maybe five years, and were only about four inches long when they left fresh water after their first summer, I could not imagine what goes on in their heads when they come back and take on the rush of a river—its sudden variations, its limited range of depths, its floods, its blocking structures. “What do they think when they come upon a riffle or a rapid?”
“They never keep going. They look it over. They’re going to bunch up any time anything confronts them. Rapids. A bridge pier. Otherwise, they’re strung out in a line. They’re afraid of variation. They’re afraid of the unknown. They get used to a particular environment, and if it changes they have problems. They’ve had this nice river with uniform laminar flow; it’s deep, the light is the same. They’re down near the bottom. That’s where they swim—in the bottom third. I’ve done some studies on that. They’re down where they have just a little bit of light but everything is very predictable. They go right up the channel. Now they get to a shallowwater area with riffles, white water. Everything is changing. And they have problems. Different fish respond differently to variation. Salmon move very cautiously. When they get to something like that, they will delay, too, but they figure it out a lot quicker. Shad—they’re like the extreme for having an adverse reaction, for stopping when presented with change. They swim around in circles. Even a half-submerged log will create a riffle in the water, and, when shad come up to it, it stops them. They just circle around, thinking, Oh my goodness, I’m in such big trouble. I’m so confused. I’m so confused. They’re a schooling species and very flighty. They don’t like to do things on their own. From the moment those guys are hatched until the day they die, they are always in a school.”
Their schooling is more than mass hysteria. It has hydrodynamic advantages. Like geese in their V formation, like bikers in a pack, the schools get along on less energy than their individual members would expen
d if they were swimming on their own. Vortices that come off bird, fish, and biker help draw followers along in the way that eddies behind rocks in rapids will pull a canoe or a fish upstream. “Their individual oxygen consumption is lower when they’re in schools,” Kynard said. “If a school becomes small, the amount of oxygen they use per individual is going to go up. But I think it’s mostly psychological. They’re really reactive as a school.”
A railroad runs along the Delaware in the seventy-five miles where the river is the border between New York and Pennsylvania. I told him I had never felt a shad hit a dart while a train was going by. I have waited out the tremor of as many as five engines pulling upward of a hundred and forty cars—many of them double-decker—while my casts were limp in the river. The shad sense the presence of trains through their lateral lines—networks of pressure-sensitive tubes on either side of the head. Kynard said, “When a train is going by, that lateral line is just jumping—sending messages, Help! Help! Help! Avoid! Run! Run!” When you’re standing in the river, shad will swim right into your leg. They’re not afraid, because they think you’re a rock or a tree. But a masked friend of mine who swims in the river shooting fish with a speargun—killing rainbows, walleyes, and bass for his table—tells me that he has never been able to approach shad close enough to hit one.
They are sensitive to any type of change, from a passing shadow to a developing storm. When a full moon rises over spawning shad, as soon as the light hits the water they stop spawning. Light—more than anything else except temperature—prompts their behavior. Without it, they are disoriented, but with those big absorptive eyes they don’t need much. “When it’s dark, these guys will be almost immobile. They’ll hold where there’s no current, or very slow current. If light intensity gets above a critical threshold—about ten lux, which is less than a candle—they can begin to use it for orientation, and they will move into swifter water. They have a zone in which they can function—too little or too much is outside the zone. By the middle of the day, you will find them avoiding bright light and staying over in the shadow.”