The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  From the stern of the canoe, Marty Stewart was seeing shad in the river. From the bow, I was seeing water. It was tinted with tannins from the roots of spruce and other trees, washed in by recent rain, but for me—desperately trying to see the fish he saw—the river might as well have been house paint. I had been in this predicament before. I am as completely inept at seeing fish in a river as I am at reading brands on cattle. The author Thomas McGuane says you don’t look for whole fish; you look for parts—light on the tail, the flicking fin—or shadows or chimerical reflections. But Thomas McGuane is half magic and scarcely qualified as a halt leader.

  Offhandedly, Marty remarked that there seemed to be a good number of shad in the river. “There’s enough to look promising,” he said.

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re six feet in front of you.”

  “I can’t see them!”

  “There’s a whole school of them.”

  A few moments later, he said, “There’s one with a damaged tail.”

  I would have been happy to fish right then to the invisible fish, but Marty’s sense of shad makes catching them an evening occupation. Waiting for the light to fall—and with something else in mind—he moved on. He was looking for salmon. He probably could not imagine that anyone would seriously cross an international border to fish for shad. I guess he thought I ought to be given my money’s worth by taking at least a brief shot at a salmon. He had lived all his life on and around the Miramichi. He was a former fly-casting champion. He could keep a fly line folded flat in the air at his shoulder—forward cast, backcast—increasing its distance until he set it on the water ninety-six feet in front of him, leader not included. I had asked him to fish along with me; and he did some casting, but not a lot. He was smoother than a quartz pebble.

  At the head of a pool not far downriver, he swung the canoe around and told me to lower the anchor from its extending sprit off the bow. He handed me a nine-foot fly rod with a floating line and said I ought to cast at a little more than a forty-five-degree angle downstream—more downcurrent than crosscurrent, to keep the fly near the surface. Understand: I’m a roughcast fly fisherman, an empirical self-taught duffer. If I were to enroll in an Orvis school, I’d hate to think where I’d end up in the triage. I engage in the art no more than fifty days a year, which is enough, though, to groove a bad swing. And there, in the presence of a champion, in a twenty-six-foot canoe on the Miramichi, with no warm-up and an unfamiliar rod in hand, I felt unsure and untrained.

  There, and at several other stops, I cast for about an hour. My loops varied from flat to Ferris wheel. Not always, but not infrequently, my casts were pure terrible, the line settling in an embarrassing heap. Because I was trying to make a thin X with the direction of the canoe, the fly whistled past the anchor rope. As my nervousness increased through time, I went from mostly to all thumbs. Three times, the fly hit the rope and stuck solid.

  As we started back upstream, Marty said, “There was a salmon laying there and we didn’t quite get down to where he was. Shit.”

  We went around a couple of bends and came upon a man in waders, newly arrived and in the stream, casting. Two other men were on the bank. Marty noticed a big, holding salmon.

  “You cast this time,” I said.

  With a nod toward the fisherman, Marty said, “He’s obviously a paying client. I’m not going to torture him by catching a fish right beside him.”

  As dusk was beginning, we arrived again at the Shad Bar—three hundred yards of riffling water. We went right up into it and dropped anchor about forty feet from a long black slick on the surface. Marty changed reels, and strung up a high-density seven-weight sinking line. As he did so, he was saying, “A scallop in the river bottom creates a black slick on the surface, and there’s usually a roll or a depression there. Fish hold in the scallop. It’s a good place to cast. You read a big river differently from a small stream with boulders, ledges, and overhangs. You look for turbulence from sunken rocks. Fish might be below the rocks. You look for chop lines, created by two merging currents. The chop lines make a soft spot in the current, an excellent fish lie.”

  I had a box of shad flies. He said they were all too large. On a fifteen-pound tippet, he knotted a fly of his own design. It had a gold pheasant crest, orange bott, silver tinsel body, white polarbear wing, grizzly hackle, and two bead eyes. He said you tie heavy monofilament into the head, slide the beads over the monofilament, then melt it “so the beads will settle in firmly.” The hook was stainless-steel, size 8. On the Miramichi, no bait is legal but unweighted artificial flies.

  I stood up, he handed me the rod, and I laid the bead eyes and the silver tinsel on the far side of the black slick, at least forty feet abeam. You cast for shad at right angles to the current. Marty said he liked to go a little higher. I went a little higher, hitting the current at eleven o’clock. The seven-weight high-density sinking line felt a little like a lead pipe and required more arm, but, again, it unrolled over the slick and swung downstream. Suddenly, I had changed into a totally different fisherman, about as nervous as a rock outcrop. I didn’t feel like a tentative bumbler. I was doing my thing. On the fourth or fifth cast, I hooked into a shad. It jumped and tail-walked and was all over the river. I worked it to the net—a little buck shad. Three casts later, the line was tight to another buck shad, and when he came in, looking small like the first one, I asked Marty Stewart, “What’s the largest shad you’ve seen?”

  “Seven pounds.”

  “What do you usually see?”

  “Three-pound bucks, five-pound hens.”

  Marty seemed to have relaxed a lot, too. He would never, ever have said it but he may have been feeling in less danger of having his ear torn off.

  Thunder was beginning to grumble, northwest of the river. We had gotten by one threat, only to receive another. I laid the fly on the water and watched it swing. I kept some extra line and added it to the cast during the swing. Marty—after a decent interval—made an oblique remark about feeding extra line in after the cast. He wasn’t talking directly to me, but I didn’t have to be handed a textbook to see that he felt it was like cheating at cards, that all should be included in the throw. I went on casting my way, and you couldn’t argue with the incoming shad. I brought in a five-pound roe. I made a dozen more casts, and—under the increasing thunder—brought in another buck shad. I foul-hooked one and lost a couple before we had to run upriver for cover. Marty had described the Miramichi shad run as a “very short evening fishery;” and that, as a matter of light and lightning, had surely been the case, but in one hour of shad fishing I had hooked up with seven shad.

  In 1757, a settler named John Witherspoon was captured by Indians in Annapolis Royal and sold to the French, who imprisoned him on the Miramichi. Furtively keeping a journal, he wrote on May 2: “Hear is a fine river in this place for fishen sammon, bearies, trout and what not. But the people are lazey, and lay up nothing for a rainy day.” In 1991, when Portland House, of New York, published “Greatest Fishing Locales of North America,” the book made passing mention of shad on the Miramichi, calling them “coarse” fish. In two hundred and thirty-four years, Miramichi shad had migrated from “what not” to “coarse,” and it seems safe to say that the trip was consistent. Scarce had “Greatest Fishing Locales” been published, however, when a lodge owner or two—impressed by the off-duty discoveries of the young fishing guides—took out ads and in other ways spread promotional word in an attempt to conjure a clientele shad season on the Miramichi, enriching that lull between salmon.

  While I was thanking Marty Stewart for our time on the river, I asked him how significant, over the years, guided shad fishing had become. Roughly, how many shad-fishing clients had come to the Miramichi?

  He said, “You’re it.”

  “It?”

  “It.”

  He said the all-time number of sports who had come there to fish for shad was one, was me.

  SEVEN

  THE SHAD
ALLEY

  It has not been long since the Florida peninsula was under water. Covered with sand, it is a limestone platform—like the Bahamas platform, the Yucatán platform. Now that it is up in the air, its topography and drainage patterns are somewhat bizarre. For example, it has an east-west divide and a north-south divide. The shorter one crosses the peninsula at the latitude of Tampa Bay. The longer divide, running down the axis of the peninsula, is known locally as the Ridge. Its high domains—the Apennines of Florida—rise to an altitude of two hundred and forty feet. For a hundred miles, oranges grow on the Ridge in a broad continuous ribbon. Florida is one of the two or three rainiest states in the United States. West of the Ridge, fairly numerous and short little no-fame rivers run to the Gulf—the Manatee River, the Braden River, the Withlacoochee River, the Pithlachascotee River, the Cow Pen Slough. East of the Ridge, however, is an integral world of fresh water that drains to the Atlantic through a single great river—St. Johns—which, in length, is essentially identical to the Savannah River, the Delaware River, and the Hudson River. It begins in St. Johns Marsh less than twenty miles from the open Atlantic and thirty south of Cape Canaveral. It flows north, and meanders, but is generally parallel to the coast for something like three hundred miles. It broadens into at least a dozen large lakes from Lake Hellen Blazes and Lake Washington to Lake Harney, Lake Monroe, and Lake George. As it approaches Jacksonville, it is a couple of miles wide, but narrows severely to bend right, left, right through the city and go twenty miles east to the ocean.

  With the Nain coast of Labrador, this river brackets the historic range of the American shad, north of which the water is all year too cold and south of which the water is always too hot. The St. Johns schools are one rare race of shad—odd, undersized, ineffable, bizarre. Willy Bemis thinks they may be genetically isolated. The distance from the Bay of Fundy to the mouth of their river is fourteen hundred miles. Making the round trip for several years, they swim well over ten thousand miles. When, for the last time, they arrive off Jacksonville in the fall of the year, the ocean there is cooler than the river, and they do not begin the spawning run. Temperatures in the St. Johns in summer are as warm as human blood. While the river slowly cools, the shad mill around and wait. Elsewhere, American shad are biding their time while American rivers warm up. These individuals have a different chip in their heads. Just to get to Jacksonville they have seriously depleted their energy reserves, and when they reach their spawning grounds—a couple of hundred miles up the river—they will have used up as much as eighty per cent. In the Connecticut River, at spawning time, shad will have used up half their energy and have a fifty per cent chance of surviving. That is why in Florida a hundred per cent of them die.

  For some reason, in the St. Johns, they hit best in the middle of the day—in bright sunlight, from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. In the subtropics, shad behave like people on vacation, deliberately doing things in a different way. They’ll hit a shad dart on a trolling fly line. In the Northeast, I’ve never seen anybody trolling for shad with any kind of rig behind a moving boat, let alone a fly line. In Floridian shad fishing, trolling evidently is what the majority do. In January, I went to Coweta County, Georgia, to help Sam Candler lift his canoe to the top of his car. It was already there. In his mind, he was halfway to the St. Johns. I had been in that canoe with him on other rivers. On the Cemocheckobee, he teased a cottonmouth up onto the blade of his paddle. When we went to Florida to fish for shad, we had actually known each other more than thirty years. While Jimmy Carter was Governor of Georgia, he created a Natural Areas Council to identify landscapes that ought to be protected while they were still there to protect. He appointed Sam to the council. In that era, I made an eleven-hundred-mile trip with Sam and his colleague Carol Ruckdeschel, episodically moving around Georgia from one swamp to the next, and from an isolated valley in the mountains of North Georgia to a sea of pitcher plants in the south, before going down the Cemocheckobee. On this shad trip, as it happened, we drove farther than that.

  After all these years, he still calls me LYB, short for Little Yankee Bastard. I call him Mr. Candler. We left his farm, near Sharpsburg, and went down through western Georgia into Alabama, stopping on the way at a state park called the Grand Canyon of Georgia, where a visitor center and railinged lookoffs hang precipitously above gullies over a hundred feet deep that are completely unnatural and the result of agricultural erosion. After crossing the Chattahoochee River, we went down through Alabama and across the Florida panhandle to the Gulf Coast at Panama City.

  We were there to see Fred Cross, the State of Florida’s shad scientist, who, in a textbook example of the subtle ways of government, had recently been transferred from the St. Johns River to the northwest regional office of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission—three hundred miles from the nearest shad. The regional offices were in an estuarial setting under pines and palms twelve miles from the Gulf. We had scarce shaken hands with Fred Cross when we discerned that he was an experimental and practical scientist of the sort Sam and I would be if we were in his shoes—that is, a fisherman. He said, “The shad come through in waves. You can go half an hour without a bump.”

  I said, “I can go all day.”

  He said, “Typically our fishery is a middle-of-the-day fishery—a gentleman’s fishery—you don’t have to get up before dawn. If the fish run strong, you can catch ’em earlier. You get four or five fish a day. Ten or twenty is not unusual. Fifty to sixty fish used to be a good day.”

  Fred Cross was nearing fifty. He had a mustache and dark, thinning hair. Over Ben Franklin glasses, his regard was guileless and steady, and his bearing at his desk suggested he’d be happier if it were a boat. As early as Thanksgiving, he said, the river could be cool enough for the fish to decide to enter. For Florida shad, cool enough Fahrenheit is around sixty. The run is under way in December. By mid-January, the water has gone down into the fifties. In a rare year, it may drop through the forties, while orange growers turn on their protective microsprinklers. Then the water warms back to spawning levels, and the height of the shad run occurs in what is still the middle of winter, when the flat water of the upper Delaware is frozen over, and ice wrecks the weirs of the Minas Basin.

  Fred Cross told us that tides affect the St. Johns as much as a hundred miles upriver, and considerably farther if water levels are low. Even in the stretch that is locally called the Shad Alley the river can be reversible, turning around to flow back toward the south twice a day. The river was low at the moment, he said, but not that low.

  The salt-fresh line is not as distinct in the St. Johns as it is in other rivers, largely due to salt deposits near its source—a result of the peninsula’s submarine history. In and near the Shad Alley, he told us, the amount of salt in the river water is usually about one part per thousand, or one thirty-fifth of the average amount of salt in the ocean. Even so, that was roughly thirty times as much salt as you would find in most freshwater rivers, imposing one more difference on the physiology of the species, and enhancing the impression that the shad of Florida are a race apart.

  The fishery is very popular in the state, Cross said. The Orlando Sentinel used to sponsor shad derbies. His dad took him to them in the nineteen-fifties, when he was a kid. The shad were bigger then. Cross was born and raised in Eustis, in Lake County, among the myriad lakes that lie in limestone sinks along the summit of the Ridge. He began his studies in limnology at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, and went on to earn his advanced degree in the subject at the University of Central Florida. “Limnology was the closest thing to fisheries science Florida had,” he remarked. In addition to shad, his work as a fisheries biologist has been mainly on centrarchids and sturgeons.

  Sam, who had said nothing so far in the course of this interview, stirred slightly in his chair, his beard elevating until it pointed at Fred Cross. Nothing in his soft, rural voice, and nothing in his easeful manner, revealed his cyclonic desire to be on the St. Jo
hns River. “That Shad Alley y’all mentioned. Where exactly was that?”

  Sam had guided me to northern pike in Canada, and I him to bass in Pennsylvania. This time we were guiding each other—a zero-sum situation if ever there was one, since neither of us had ever been where we were going. I had with me a roll of maps in the United States Geological Survey’s 1:24,000 series—the largest scale of any standard series, one inch equals four-tenths of a mile. I unrolled them in front of Fred Cross. He leafed through the stack, and pulled out only the Osteen quadrangle and the Geneva quadrangle, setting the others aside.

  He said, “There are two major areas—the Mullet Lake stretch, from Lake Jessup to Lake Harney, where it’s all troll fishing; and the Puzzle Lake stretch, from the discharge end of Puzzle Lake to the Highway 46 bridge, a distance of about four miles. The Shad Alley is in the Mullet Lake stretch. People fish from boats or from the bank wearing knee-high boots, using fly rods or ultra-light spinning rods. In the Puzzle Lake stretch, when the river is at flood stage it’s two miles across, and when it’s down you can throw a rock across it. Right now, it’s normal low water. Last fall, the water was into the oaks.”

  While speaking, he had drawn an arrow on the Osteen quadrangle at a place where the river touched a road. He said we could rent a flats skiff there, with outboard. Then he shaded in the Shad Alley—with its S-shaped meander bends and a cutoff oxbow—from the rental dock to Lemon Bluff and Le Fils Slough, less than four miles of the river. Refining things further, he made a series of small X’s in spots where shad are sometimes only a little less dense than they would be in the hold of a canning ship. Or so I imagined Sam was imagining. “The St. Johns is a low-gradient river,” Cross remarked as he moved his pencil, adding that the Shad Alley is only eight to ten feet above sea level, but the gradient increases there and with it the current. Shad, as lotic spawners, need a certain amount of flow. The river’s highest altitude is twenty-five feet. He said the migrating schools were stopped only by a low-head dam near the source. In Florida, the juveniles are called shadeens.