The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  On the Geneva quadrangle, he sketched in fence-line landmarks, made several X’s, and wrote “real popular area” at a lefthand bend near Cabbage Slough and Buzzard Roost, south of Route 46.

  I asked him the size of the Florida record shad.

  He said, “Five point two pounds. The average female is two and a half to three.” The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has an annual meeting in Titusville in February, he told us. Always, the conferees take an afternoon off to go shad fishing. “I’ll eat a meal or two of roe a year and that’s enough for me,” he went on. “Very few of us kill fish anymore. The shad’s popularity as catch-and-release, as a fly-rod fish particularly, has jumped tremendously. I wish y’all good luck.”

  Out of the building and into the car, we drove three hundred miles without stopping more than five minutes. Out of and back to Fairbanks, I once drove eight hundred miles in Alaska to fish for one day for king salmon. This trip was slitting the envelope—so far, six hundred and thirty miles one-way, to fish for American shad.

  We rented a flats boat, and cast conventionally as we made our way upstream. Around the first bend, we lost sight of the road, and in long stretches thereafter—as much as half or three-quarters of a mile—saw no houses or structures of any kind. The river was intimate, less than a hundred yards across, and edged with lily pads, hyacinths, and grassy cutbanks, not to mention cabbage palms—young bulbous cabbage palms, old columnar cabbage palms. Look up to cast and you saw water turkeys, eagles, hawks, ibises, crows, egrets, buzzards, Louisiana herons, great blue herons, herring gulls, kingfishers, and cormorants, identified by Sam. A pileated woodpecker. We were not in some everglade or even a state park. Around us were the St. Johns floodplain savannahs. We were twenty miles northeast of Orlando, and twenty west of the ocean. At frequent intervals, oranges floated by.

  We scouted the river to Lemon Bluff—firm ground ten feet higher than the river, and lined with cottages and small houses. We saw longhorn cattle there that looked head-on like sailplanes. We saw an ornamental citrus tree with lemons, grapefruit, oranges, and tangerines growing on various branches. Lemon Bluff is a storied place to fish for shad. We fished there, at the mouth of Le Fils Slough, and caught no shad. We drifted back down the river half a mile and anchored beside a high cutbank, which Fred Cross had marked with an X on the map. Flicking a dart from his ultra-light, Sam brought in a leaping buck shad. With a very small dart on a fly rod, I brought in a leaping buck shad. Sam got another. With a spinning rod, I tied on a rig I’d bought from the people who rented us the skiff—a spoon with a shad-dart dropper—and caught two roe shad on one cast. Then Sam had a buck that got off the hook. Under the cutbank the current was particularly evident. When an orange went by, it was moving smartly. We were reading line 1 in the ledger of the slow St. Johns: Where the current is most concentrated, so are the shad.

  On the end of our lines, racing crosscurrent, the bright silver fish looked red in the water—a dark herbal red, mainly from cypress tannins.

  Sam said, “That color is like Coca-Cola.”

  I said, “That color is like Pepsi-Cola.”

  Sam said, “Don’t mention Pepsi-Cola. This is a pretty spot.”

  On a canoe trip in Canada, he once told his children and mine that if you were to pour Pepsi-Cola on the roots of a spruce it would kill it to the ground. His children’s great-great-grandfather was the Atlanta pharmacist who developed the Coca-Cola Company.

  In settings much like this cutbank under the high grasses on the St. Johns, Sam and I had been in the company of alligators. They had swum under us fast as torpedoes, fizzing like ginger ale. Once, in a skiff on a tidal creek at low water, Sam, standing up, was about to cast a shrimp net when the grasses parted above us. We were right up close to the bank, and its slick mud wall rose five, six feet above our heads, the tide was so low. An extremely large alligator suddenly appeared there, almost directly overhead. It came down the bank fast, went into the water beside the boat and swam off. This cutbank looked so much like the cutbank in the tidal creek that I was waiting for the grass to part. Alligators were there. They were all over the savannahs in the places we fished, Fred Cross later told me on the telephone. But they were not evident, in part because of the mid-winter coolness, and in part because Florida some ten years earlier had opened an alligator-hunting season, allowing people with spears and gigs to kill them. He said, “The alligators have become a lot less aggressive. When they see a boat, they go into the grass and hide.”

  More oranges were floating by, roughly at the rate of one orange per shad. You might have thought you were fishing in the Indian River. It occurred to me that someone reading this might think we were indeed on the Indian River, the two bodies of water being so nearly parallel and close. Deservedly celebrated for the high-sugar oranges that grow near it and eventually bear its name on their skins, the Indian River reaches a hundred and twenty miles from Turnbull Hummock above Cape Canaveral to St. Lucie Inlet near Palm Beach, and is in no sense a river. It is a tidal lagoon—a saltwater bay behind a barrier beach. Sam was outwitting another leaping buck. By now, we were down in the prime of Shad Alley, its principal thoroughfare—a mile and more with a very gentle bend, populated by half a dozen shad fishermen, who were all trolling in long oval loops, counterclockwise. We had caught the rhythm, and had joined them, catching fish. It was like group skating in a rink. The Alley was six or seven feet deep, with holes eight or ten. The shad were just downstream from sandbars. Now and again we cast, but mostly settled into the trolling mode—both ways getting bumps, hits, and shad galore, losing many as well. Going round and round—upriver, down—we became familiar with the people in the other boats. They were of many ages, all male. One called out, in the universal jargon of piscine lust, “Are you killin’ ’em?”

  My fly rod and fly line were particularly effective as trolling devices, a setup Sam regarded as funny until he noticed that the fly rod more often was bent over than straight. The shad were surely hitting in the brightest light, which would not be the case in the north. I remembered reading a piece by Robert Elman in Fly Fishing Quarterly and have since looked it up. He said, “Slightly turbid water is ideal; very clear or muddy will curtail strikes. An odd fact, which I can’t explain, is that shad in Southern rivers hit well in bright sunlight, yet their Northern relatives hit best on overcast days, in light rain, early in the morning, or just before sunset.” With their extreme sensitivity to light, shad in Canada relish the turbidity of the Bay of Fundy. In Florida, evidently, they are protected and contented by the dark-hued water, as any shad would be in a river of Coca-Cola.

  In scientific papers Fred Cross had given us, I had read that anglers on the St. Johns in the previous season spent four thousand seven hundred and sixty-four hours catching five thousand four hundred and thirty-four shad. Two-thirds came from the Shad Alley. The anglers released eighty-nine per cent, and kept about six hundred shad. One season in the nineteen-fifties, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initiated a creel census on the St. Johns, they discovered that sport fishermen caught sixty-five thousand two hundred and forty-six shad. There had once been a large commercial harvest. In Palatka, in 1875, a single gill net caught eleven thousand shad. The peak period was 1888 to 1908. The peak year was 1908, with two million eight hundred and thirty-three thousand netted shad. They were not sold locally. Most were shipped to New York’s Fulton Fish Market. Gill nets were eventually banned, but not until the nineteen-nineties.

  In all, we hooked up with three dozen shad in Shad Alley. We also fished in what Fred Cross had called the Puzzle Lake stretch, fifteen miles upstream from Shad Alley, where flats skiffs were not available. We unstrapped Sam’s old Grumman canoe, started off from a boat launch beside a bridge, and paddled south into a scene as broad, spare, and open as the Shad Alley had been lush and confined. This was savannah on a far-reaching scale, widefloodplain river in Florida’s expression of the term—a view, even from canoe level, two miles in one direction across panic gra
sses and bullwhips to cattle under hardwoods on enlofted ground, and in the other direction a mile to the nearest tree. The river was all but lost in its own channels, islands, meanders, and braids. In all that open space, we had to hunt to find it—to choose channel over dead water, mainstream over slough, sometimes guessing the difference. Exactly like the migrating shad, we were trying above all to sense current, which in places was easy to do but in others was baffling, and we lacked their neural equipment. The speed of the current was less than a mile an hour. Eel grass helped, bent along the bottom, pointing. This vast, serene world just enveloped the canoe and sent us into a separate existence. We came to a fence line that Fred Cross had pencilled in on our map, and to the “real popular area” opposite, where the current curled against a strip of hard ground. Lacking an anchor, we tied up to some cattails at its downstream end.

  Sam lost a somersaulting buck. Failing to land hooked shad may be a norm of shad fishing but Sam and I seemed to be particularly good at it. I netted two, but lost two more. I caught a largemouth bass, a crappie, and a blueback herring—all on small shad darts. I used the fly rod more than the spinning rod. I lost another shad right at the boat.

  Losing a few fish was hardly in a league with what we lost now. The weekend had come, and, with it, squadrons of jet skis. They came up the river in echelons—four, now five, now six—and bore down on us like Hornets, like F-18s strafing. We paddled hard for cover. They were harmless, of course, just “personal watercraft” flashing metallic colors, flown by sitting wetsuits. Materially, they changed nothing but the water in a temporary way, but in their sustained burst of decibels they deleted all serenity.

  Then airboats came and outdecibeled the jet skis. Even from a mile away, off in the dead-water sloughs, the airboats—with their five-hundred-horsepower automotive engines, their fenced-in propellers whirling at supersonic speeds—made a blitzkrieg of the whole savannah, the spoken word inaudible from bow to stern in a canoe. From the Everglades northward, the airboat is the Florida state amphibian, its little brother the jet ski. It is said that when rain is plentiful, and water high, airboats coming down from Jacksonville could cross the north-south divide between St. Johns Marsh and Lake Kissimmee, and then continue to Key West. The peninsula emerged in the Pleistocene, when so much water was locked up as ice on the continents that sea level dropped a hundred fathoms. The sea has come back up a good way, but the glaciation in no small quantity remains on Greenland and Antarctica. When that melts, Florida is going back where it came from. On this eruptive day in the floodplain savannah, there was something to be said for global warming.

  Later on, we moved downstream a mile or so to some firm ground close to the current. We beached the canoe. In knee-high boots, we walked along, casting from the bank. Jet skis in front of us, airboats behind us, we would make these casts and call it a day. A roe shad responded. She was no shadeen. She weighed about three and a half pounds.

  Toward the end of afternoon, paddling north, we were passed by returning jet skiers, and, overhead, by crows on their way to roost—a ribbon galaxy of crows, three miles long. At the boat launch, the crowd was considerable. Up from the river we carried the canoe through a jam of pickups, SUVs, and boat trailers. After we set it down, a man with a Bronco, addressing me, asked, “How did you do?” It may be hard to say that without a smile, but it came across with a certain cumulus rumble. At first, nonetheless, I thought he was a fisherman. I said, “Fine. And how did you do?” Then I looked beside the Bronco and saw his jet ski. He had changed out of his wetsuit. Back there on the river, I may have seemed to have been signalling him with a part of one hand. He snarled: “I had fun.”

  EIGHT

  THE FOUNDING FISH

  The Schuylkill rises northwest of Reading and flows about a hundred miles before it bends right to run closely parallel to the Delaware River, framing the old city of Philadelphia—Independence Hall, the tree streets, etcetera—in a mesopotamian isthmus. At Long Ford on the Schuylkill, near Valley Forge, settlers in the early seventeen-hundreds fenced the river in various ways to intercept the spring migration of American shad. They constructed rock dams, V-shaped weirs of piled stones, and fish racks. A rack was an underwater picket fence with gaps narrow enough to stop shad and wide enough to accommodate the current. Shad piled up against the racks like driftwood. Shad that got past the racks were driven back into them by men on horseback beating the water with bushes. Weir, rack, or fish dam, the methods were so effective that farmers upstream complained. Fresh shad in spring and salt shad the rest of the year were basics in a farm’s economy. In 1724 and 1730, the colonial legislature passed acts forbidding such obstructions and calling for removal of the ones that existed. The fishermen of Long Ford ignored these laws. Meanwhile, the settlements upriver had even greater cause for grievance than deprivation of fish. Coming downstream in loaded canoes heading for the markets of Philadelphia, they were swept into the weirs, racks, and dams. Here are some examples just from 1732. Isaac Smally and partner, with a hundred and forty bushels of wheat in their canoe, “stroke fast on a Rack Dam and in order to save ye Load from being all lost, he was much against his mind oblieged to leap into ye River, the water being to his Chin frequently dashed into his mouth, where between whiles he breathed, and both he and his partner held ye Canoe with great labour: whiles a young man there present ran above a mile to call help to gett off.” Marcus Huling “striking on a fish dam … took in a great deal of water into ye wheat, by means whereof his wheat was much damnified.” In the “Extream Cold” of February, Jonas Jones “stroke fast on a fish Dam, and to save his Load of wheat was obliged to leap into ye River to ye middle of his body and with all his Labour and Skill could not get off in less than half an hour, afterwards proceeding on his journey with ye said wet cloaths they were frozen stiff on his back.”

  Across the seventeen-thirties, similar things happened to the freight-laden canoes of Jacob Warren, Walter Campbell, Jonas Yeokam, Richard Dunklin, George Boone, James Boone, John Boone, Joseph Boone, and Samuel Boone. All lived upriver from Long Ford. All crashed into racks and dams. Official law enforcement was ineffectual-to-nil. So on April 20, 1738, upstream farmers came downriver in a fleet of canoes to enforce the law themselves. They deracinated fish racks and destroyed dams and weirs, but failed to get away before downriver settlers in their own fleet of canoes came out on the river and counterattacked. Big swinging “clubbs” broke a bone here, bashed a head there, and left John Wainwright “as Dead with his Body on the Shoar & his ffeet in the River.” The fish-dam defenders were superior in numbers and they dispersed and chased the upstream canoes, and wrecked them beyond repair after they were beached and abandoned.

  All those Boones on the losing side were siblings or close relatives of three-year-old Daniel Boone, whose Quaker parents, Sarah Morgan and Squire Boone, had settled in 1731 in what became Exeter Township. A story from Daniel Boone’s later childhood, for which I am indebted to the biographer John Mack Faragher, shows that the fishing war was not a total loss for Boone’s family and neighbors. In what must have been the early seventeen-forties, Sarah Morgan was cleaning newly caught shad at the edge of the Schuylkill one warm spring afternoon while her idle son Daniel lay on his back with his hat across his eyes. Two girls came along, picked up a bucket of shad guts and overturned it onto Daniel. He got up and smacked both of them, bloodying their noses. They ran off crying, and came back with their mother, who heaped scorn on Mrs. Boone as well as her son. Sarah looked inquiringly at Daniel. He said, “They are not girls. Girls would not have done such a dirty trick. They are rowdies.” Mrs. Boone then said to the rowdies’ mother, “If thee has not brought up thy daughters to better behavior, it was high time they were taught good manners. They got no more than they deserved.”

  The Schuylkill was to become the most storied river in the American history of American shad. This honor could have gone to almost any river of the eastern continent, so relatively abundant were the shad runs of the eighteenth century, b
ut in the winter of 1777-78 George Washington elected to bivouac his army on the right bank of the Schuylkill.

  It was the spring shad run in the Schuylkill that saved George Washington’s army from starvation at Valley Forge.

  The local shad run on the Schuylkill came as a godsend.

  Then, dramatically, the famine completely ended. Countless thousands of fat shad, swimming up the Schuylkill to spawn, filled the river. Sullivan’s men, accustomed to treading out fresh-water mussels in the stream, were astonished to see the water almost boiling with the struggling fish. Soldiers thronged the river bank. Then, at the advice of Pennsylvanians accustomed to the yearly fishing, the cavalry was ordered into the river bed. Carrying huge bushes, broken tree boughs, and long sticks, the horsemen rode upstream, noisily shouting and beating the water, driving the shad before them into nets spread across the Schuylkill at Pawling’s ford, where the Perkiomen flows into the river. So thick were the shad that, when the fish were cornered in the nets, a pole could not be thrust into the water without striking fish. Thousands of the tasty, rich shad were netted at each haul. The netting was continued day after day, with more than a hundred horsemen continually beating the water, until the army was thoroughly stuffed with fish and in addition hundreds of barrels of shad were salted down for future use. The lavish fish feast was a dramatic close to a long period of privation.