by John McPhee
Baltimore Harry’s fish had come home to California, but by no means did all the transplants behave in the traditional way. They spread out. They rapidly invaded other rivers. They not only went up the Feather, the Yuba, the American, the Mokelumne, the San Joaquin, they also went up coastal rivers far from the Golden Gate. They went up the Russian, the Eel, the Klamath, the Trinity. In the words of the 1887 Report of the Commissioner, United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, they upended the “dictum of fish-culture that fish plants in a river would return to it when mature for the purpose of spawning.” Actually, one or two per cent of Eastern shad stray to other rivers, and a similar small percentage began the expansion in the West. Gradually, they spread south to and beyond San Diego and north to the Rogue, the Siuslaw, the Coos, the Umpqua, the Millicoma. They went up the Columbia (where they were also transplanted, in 1885). They went into Puget Sound. In Canada, they went up the Fraser River. They found the Alaskan archipelago. Eventually, they established home rivers in Siberia. Maybe they were looking for the Hudson. Less than fifty years after Seth Green crossed the continent with his milk cans in the train, an annual six million pounds of shad were being commercially landed in California.
The species took longer to attract Western anglers, but the sport accelerated in the years that followed the Second World War. About the first place that shad see a shad dart after coming through the San Francisco bays and into the Sacramento River is at the Minnow Hole—five hundred yards of the Sacramento River near the Sacramento Zoo. Most anglers are fishing from the shore there. Roughly one in four is in a boat. Collectively, in an average season, they might catch about forty thousand shad, half the number caught by anglers in the whole of the Sacramento River. They kill and keep ninety per cent.
Shad anglers from the East Coast are struck speechless when they encounter these Western numbers. Three million shad coming in at San Francisco! Five million shad on their way to Bonneville Dam! To find that many shad in the Delaware River you’d have to turn time back a century and more. On the Willamette River in Portland, they see boats side by side from one bank to the other. This is known as a hog line, according to Lenox Dick in his West Coast primer, “Experience the World of Shad Fishing” (Frank Amato Publications, Portland, 1996). Travelling East Coast shad fishermen have taken pictures of hog lines in Oregon and later shown them breathlessly—and a little wickedly—to Armand Charest at his shad-dart stand in Holyoke.
Lenox Dick is an M.D. who lives in Vancouver, Washington, and does most of his shad fishing in a boat in front of his house. The Columbia River is a mile wide there, but the channel is close to the Washington bank. Sometimes his Labrador retriever, for the sheer sport of it, swims in place beside the boat—a strenuous standoff with a mighty current. During the 2002 migration, I fished there with Dr. Dick and his friend Paul Johnston, an all-seasons, all-species Columbia River fisherman to whom the doctor—his shad book notwithstanding—deferred. To get down three fathoms in that current and flap something past the noses of shad, Johnston used a rig out of Rube Goldberg by Alexander Calder. It involved a swivel on one end of a drop line and, on the other end, a lead sphere about the size of a cherry tomato. His main line went through the swivel, which could slide up and down but was blocked by another swivel, from which his leader led to a small dart with a flexible tail of sparkling plastic. He called this mobile a “slider rig,” and summarized it, saying, “Your main line goes through your drop.” In the turbid river under gray cloud in morning rain, the shad were up in the water column and the lure seemed to be below them. They were within reach of the fly line I was using, with its long sink-tip and lead-core leader. When the sun came out in the afternoon, the shad descended—right into Johnston’s slider rig, one after another and another. To my surprise, they were twenty to thirty per cent smaller than Delaware River shad.
Tall and rangy, Lenox Dick had once been a medical missionary in Africa, had long practiced in Portland, and was now eighty-six years old. The next morning, he and I drove east up the Columbia Gorge and stopped off at Bonneville Dam. Nearly half a mile of fishermen, of two sexes and four colors, were lined up below the tailrace. Many were using poles ten feet long. We made our way down the riprap basalt to the edge of the surging river. With seven-foot rods, six-pound test, and split shot larger than chick-peas, we made some long heaves. Dr. Dick hung up his dart on his first cast. He tied on another, and soon was cursing a new snag. However, as he put it later, “the snag took off.” We fished there only half an hour, but I had some snags that took off, too. In the Columbia River at Bonneville Dam, Dr. Dick and I were catching shad. We also watched them swimming past picture windows in an indoor amphitheater at the top of the Bonneville ladders. They had climbed sixty feet.
We crossed into Oregon and went up the Deschutes River, where he has a shack on the left bank, approachable only on foot or by boat. The Deschutes, in its canyon, describes itself in flights of white water. The river at the time was exceptionally high. After loading up a McKenzie boat with piles of gear, Dr. Dick at the oars fought across at an angle and then continued upstream, muttering all the while about his failing strength now that he’s in sight of ninety. I’m not a trout fisherman, not a dry-fly fisherman, anywhere, let alone in a big Western river crowded with brush, deep near the edge, and racing wall-to-wall. Author, also, of “The Art and Science of Fly Fishing” (Amato, Portland, 1993), Dr. Dick was full of tactical and tactful suggestions. He teaches the subject to organized groups. Thanks to him, I caught five rainbows. A day or two later, he left for Wyoming to fish the Green River. In three weeks, he was off to Iceland in pursuit of Atlantic salmon. Fish or no fish, when I grow up I want to be like him.
In Oregon’s storied Umpqua River, shad come in after the steelhead run, like ninth-inning pitchers coming in to finish. In the Russian River, in California, fly fishermen make their way upstream from the Hilton pool to the Summerhome Park pool, as Carl Ludeman once did, to cast for shad with a red-white-and-silver fly of his invention, known today as the Ludeman Shad Fly. Using a No. 22 Ludeman fly, a really brilliant caster can hook and land a five-pound shad. A 22 hook is the size used by fly tiers on which to imitate a mosquito.
Bump-net shad fishing developed in the California delta, and has not been adopted by the rest of the world. The California delta itself is a rare phenomenon. It is the common delta of two big rivers—the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. Moreover, it has formed in the Great Central Valley, in the middle of California, and discharges its flow into the San Francisco bays. Of world rivers with common deltas, there seem to be no more than the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. The deltaic landscape—west of Lodi, east of Pittsburg, thirty miles south of Sacramento—is a polderland of high dikes and low orchards, where you look up at big ships sliding by above the trees. If you were driving on the dikes, you looked down over fields of corn, fields of asparagus, fields darkened by multitudes of sandhill cranes. You passed Chinese towns with false-front stores. You passed Al the Wop’s restaurant and bar, famous for its steak with peanut butter. In this milieu, someone figured out that a slowly moving boat could be much like a pregnant shad. With nets made of chicken wire on long handles, bumpers went out in small outboards, notably on the North Fork of the Mokelumne River off Dead Horse Island and Staten Island, not far from where the Mokelumne joins the San Joaquin. When shad spawn, they will often swim high in the water, breaking the surface in a movement known as washing. Males will sometimes turn and butt the females, possibly to help express some eggs. Among the bumpers of the California delta, this process was not ignored. The wash of a slowly turning prop attracted shad. The long-handled, stiff nets were held in the water near the wash. Buck shad came along and bumped the net. They thought the boat was a roe shad. They were spawning with the boat. The person on the handle had about a tenth of a second to react perfectly and flip the fish aboard. Not as many people are as good at it now, but at th
e meridian of bump-net shad fishing they caught, in a season, ten thousand shad.
Shad fishing is good in the Yuba River, the American River, the Feather River, with darts, spoons, or flies, and even naked flashing hooks. Going up the Yuba River the shad run is blocked by Daguerre Point Dam. In the American River the shad run is blocked by Nimbus Dam, in the Sacramento by Red Bluff Diversion Dam, in the San Joaquin by Mendota Dam. In the Feather River, the shad run stops at a fish barrier close to Oroville Dam.
Driven by desire to place their offspring as far upstream as they are able to, the shad that migrate by ladder into Columbia waters above Bonneville Dam are looking up a river that is further plugged by The Dalles Dam, John Day Dam, McNary Dam, Chief Joseph Dam, Grand Coulee Dam.
In major rivers of East Coast America, the migrations are blocked by seventy-eight dams. The first ones up from the ocean tend to concentrate shad fishing, as in New England at Holyoke Dam. The Hudson, drowned in its fjord to Albany, is dammed at Troy, and the migration piles up there. The Susquehanna is blocked ten miles from its mouth and shad fishing is illegal in the Susquehanna. Alone, as noted, is the Delaware, with its two hundred miles of shad fishing above tidewater at Trenton. In several places, there are wing dams, also called pier dams—walls that reach into the river from the two sides but don’t meet. Angled downstream, they concentrate and deepen the channel, and were built in the nineteenth century to help float rafts of logs. High in Catskill tributaries are three dams built to enhance New York City’s water system, but from mile 1, at Hancock, New York, to the sea buoy at Lewes, Delaware, the river flows free. When you come home to the Delaware from the confines of other rivers, you feel a patent sense of relief as you move about in the absence of dams.
For some years, shad were picked up below Conowingo Dam, in the Susquehanna River, and put in trucks full of water that was swirling in circles to create in the fish a sense that they were migrating inside the truck. And they were. They rode fifty-eight miles, passing four dams, and were let back into the river. This was known as trap-and-transport. There were as many as ten trucks. One year, they carried fifty-six thousand shad. The Susquehanna dams now have elevators.
On the Rappahannock River, in Virginia, brigades carry shad in buckets from tailrace to pool around Embrey Dam. In April, 2000, Virginia’s United States Senators—John Warner and Charles Robb—were among some fifty people carrying the buckets. They were there to help proclaim the imminent removal of Embrey Dam at a cost to the federal government of ten million dollars, opening a hundred and seventy miles of spawning ground in the Rappahannock’s main stem and tributaries, such as the Rapidan. The fifty-odd people in the bucket brigade carried twelve American shad around the dam. You have to start somewhere. Senator Warner was wearing a fishing vest. His own.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the once unthinkable notion of destroying dams went through a surprisingly swift trajectory from the quixotic to the feasible. As I began collecting material on this one anadromous species, and became ever more aware of historic migrations and the extent to which they had been stifled, reduced, or absolutely cut off, the most obvious of solutions never seriously occurred to me: Get rid of the dam. What had seemed unthinkable, however, rapidly arose as a groundswell of voices, all across the country, calling for the riddance of dams. After the federal government ordered the destruction of a significant dam in the capital of Maine—at the head of tidewater, in a nationally venerated river, restoring spawning grounds above—I decided to go up there and watch the dam go out, and return soon afterward to the rejuvenated river.
FOUR
FAREWELL TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
With John McPhedran, I carried a canoe around a ballfield in Waterville, Maine, and on into woods. The terrain fell away there sharply. The boat was heavy but its skin was indestructible, and we dragged it, bumping on roots. So much for the loving care reserved for canvas, bark, and Kevlar canoes. This one had no need of it. Its makers promote its type with pictures that show one being thrown off the roof of their factory in Old Town. So we twitched it downhill like a log. On the threshold of the year 2000, this was just one of the countless ways of saying farewell to the nineteenth century.
A few days earlier, we would not have had to choose a model so tough. We put it into Messalonskee Stream, which carried us into the Kennebec River, which, in this stretch, had suddenly lost about five million tons of water as a result of deliberate demolition. Fifteen miles downstream, in Augusta, Edwards Dam, two stories high and more than nine hundred feet wide, had been breached on the first of July.
There were rapids at the mouth of Messalonskee Stream, but they had been there in pre-Columbian time. Just above the dam’s impoundment, they suggested what its depth had concealed. A blue heron tried to lead us through the rapids, or seemed to, in a series of short, nosy flights down the left bank. A kingfisher watched. The Augusta Water Power Company blocked the river in the year that Martin Van Buren replaced Andrew Jackson as President of the United States. It was the year of the Panic of 1837, when real estate collapsed, banks failed like duckpins, and homeless people died in the streets. The first steam railroad was nine years old. Oberlin, the first coeducational American college, was four years old. If you could afford Buffaloe’s Oil, you used it in your hair to fight baldness. In Augusta, primarily thanks to the new dam, some people could afford Buffaloe’s Oil. The dam powered seven sawmills, a gristmill, and a machine shop. Incidentally, it had a fish ladder.
Beside the second rip we came to was a sofa bed, its skirts showing the stains of fallen water. We expected more of the same. We expected grocery carts. This, after all, was not Township 13, Range 11, of the North Woods, where nearly half the State of Maine consists of nameless unorganized townships. This was settled, supermarket Maine, but in the fifteen river miles upstream of Augusta we would see one beer can, no grocery carts, and three tires. Now we saw a mallard, a pewee, goldfinches. We heard song sparrows, a wood thrush, a veery. I wouldn’t know a veery from a blue-winged warbler, but John McPhedran is acute on birds. I had known him since he was seventeen, seventeen years before. Since then, he had become a botanist, a general field naturalist, and a freelance water-quality consultant working for the Maine Department of Transportation. We saw sticking up from a large and newly emergent river boulder an iron bolt fully an inch and a half in diameter and capped with a head like a big iron mushroom. I knew what that dated from—the log drives of the Kennebec, which began in colonial times and came to an end in 1976. Put a chain around that bolt and you could stop a raft of logs.
We saw no white pines, very long gone as the masts of ships. Or spruce, for that matter. We saw deciduous trees. In fall, the river’s walls would be afire in oranges and reds, but now, in summer, the leaves seemed too bright, too light for Maine. Among them were few houses—in fifteen otherwise uncivilized miles, a total of three nervous houses peeping through narrow slots in the trees. This seemed to report a population that had turned its back on the river, which it had, for the better part of a century, because the river was cluttered with the debris of log drives, becessed with community waste, spiked with industrial toxins. Square-rigged ships once came up into the fresh Kennebec to carry its pure ice down the east coasts of both Americas and around Cape Horn to San Francisco, and even across the Pacific, but by the nineteen-forties and fifties the Kennebec had developed such a chronic reek that windows in unairconditioned offices in the Capitol of Maine—six hundred yards from the river—were kept tight shut in summer. After the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Kennebec, like so many American rivers, steadily and enduringly cleared, and the scene was set for the dam destruction of 1999 and the restoration of this part of the river.
We looked down through clear water, color of pale tea, at a variously rocky and gravelly bottom. In Maritime Canada, I had recently fished over a scene like that in a place locally known as the Shad Bar. Shad like to spawn over that kind of riverbed. In this river, 1837 was not a good year for anadromous fish. Something
like a million American shad came up the Kennebec before the dam at Augusta stopped them. Immemorially, the Kennebecs themselves speared Atlantic salmon below falls upriver. The fish ladder at the Augusta dam may have helped to some extent, but it disappeared in a flood in 1838, not to be replaced.
We saw and heard three crows charily screaming at a redtailed hawk—a sedentary drama enacted in a dying tree. A spotted sandpiper watched as well, from a newly dried rock in the fallen stream. Like a scale model of the Yukon River, the Kennebec was unfolding before us not in multiple twists and turns but in sizable segments, long reaches—a bend, a mile here, another bend, two miles there. They quickly added up to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered over by the rising impoundment in 1837, and until just a few days ago had been an engulfed series of bedrock ledges under the still-water pool. In 1826, the United States Engineer Department surveyed the Kennebec River and mapped Six-Mile Falls, so named because they were six miles downstream from Ticonic Falls, at Waterville. The engineers’ report (1828) would preserve that name, if nothing else, while the surf-like sound and the roil of white water were taken away for a hundred and sixty-two years. Six-Mile Falls, the army engineers reported, were “three ledges of rock forming three distinct pitches.” Downriver, we heard them now—that sound of gravel pouring on a tin drum. You don’t need Sockdolager, the Upset Rapid, or Snake River Canyon to pick you up with that sound. Any riffle, let alone a small rapid, will do. I can feel adrenaline when I fill a glass of water.