The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  Above Washington Crossing that spring, we crawled through a storm sewer under Route 29 in order to gain exclusive access to a broad shallow stretch of featureless river, which we also flailed without result. We fished the quiet current at a friend’s house in Stockton, on the right bank of the river. We did as well as we would have done on the right bank of the Po. True, all shad in the migration go by any given point below the waters where they spawn, but when they are on the move the odds against a dart intersecting one are long to an extreme. Shad congregate below bridge piers, rapids, riffles, and islands, and fishermen do, too. Even a big boulder is enough to make shad stop, bunch up, and think. They collect in deep pools in the evening, and go up through rapids after dawn. Where white water flattens out, becoming slick and black on the surface of a pool, eddies tend to form on the sides. There is a distinctive seam where the southbound current and a north-drifting eddy touch. Shad cluster beside the seam, which is known as the eddy wall. After you cast crosscurrent and the dart swings, you connect with your shad at the eddy wall. You could make a long list of exceptions, but that in the main is where the fish are, and where the wading fishermen are, too—standing in the eddy, casting into the current across the eddy wall.

  Four or eight or even sixteen of them are standing shoulder to shoulder like bears in a river in Alaska. Sometimes their casts overlap and intertwine. This puts to the test the renowned politeness of shad fishermen. Ed Cervone tells a story about dropping his wallet near the Lambertville launch. He went home, realized what had happened, and returned with a flashlight. No wallet. Home again, there was a message on his tape from a young shad fisherman in North Philadelphia who had found the wallet. Cervone: “Only a shad fisherman would do that. If you were at a polo match, they wouldn’t do that. These are not just people catching fish. They’re a breed apart, all to themselves.” That’s true, Doc, they will give you your wallet back. But they will not give an inch of position.

  In a crowded situation, Buddy Grucela has seen a shad fisherman “k.o. a guy into the bushes,” and then go back to his position.

  Below the fast water at Byram, on the lower river, boats line up in echelon, anchored and still. The fishermen hold their darts in the river. When the fish are not there, which is most of the time, there is no movement in the boats. Against a backdrop bend in a stretch of river of amazing beauty, the scene is so peaceful it appears to be on stretched canvas. Then came a day of roiling high water when one of the boatmen nearly capsized and drowned. His anchor fouled, he needed to cut the rope, he had no knife, his life was in danger. No one moved to help him. To move meant to sacrifice position.

  One Memorial Day weekend at nine in the morning, I was fishing in a pool far upriver when a canoe overturned in rapids above me. A boy about seven years old, his father, two paddles, a cooler, a thermos, and other buoyant cargo spilled into the river. The boy was wearing a life jacket with a wide collar that reached above his head like a coif. He bobbed upright in the swirling currents, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Save me! Save me! Daddy, save me!” His father struggled to move toward him. Slowly, though, like an opening flower, the boy, the father, the paddles, the thermos, and the cooler were being spread farther apart as they were swept downstream. The father, helpless, could not swim across the current. The little boy’s jacket was doing its job, but he kept on screaming. “Daddy! Daddy! I’m going to die!” Standing about fifty yards from him in my neoprene space suit and my cleated heavy boots, I was helpless, too, as were other wading fishermen. Walking down to the river that day, I happened to glimpse a canoe stashed behind someone’s cabin. To leave the river, climb a bluff to the cabin, locate a paddle, and return with the canoe would take so long that the effort seemed pointless, but I started wading toward the bank anyway. Then I noticed that the boy was being swept toward an anchored boat. Two shad fishermen were in it with four rods. The boy was fast approaching them, still screaming, “Daddy! I’m going to die!” They would end his panic. They would pull up their anchor and go into mid-stream to intercept him. As he went by them, they watched, and did not stir.

  I continued wading to the bank, and was halfway up the bluff when I saw a canoe appear out of nowhere at a bend in the river. The two people in it had capsized earlier and must have been drying out. They picked up the boy.

  A submerged boulder can offer great position to a wading fisherman who is able to reach it and climb aboard. A guy on a boulder dropped his dart box in the river one day. He stuck his arm down in the water and tried to retrieve the box with his long-handled shad net but failed. The pool was deep, the current strong, and the box with its numerous darts was too far down. After observing all this, another shad fisherman stripped to his undershorts, went underwater kicking hard, came up with the box, and handed it to the flabbergasted guy on the boulder. Cervone is essentially correct: Shad fishermen are fraternal and are not customarily greedy, mean, belligerent, or coldly indifferent. Still, the topic we have at hand here is the importance of position in cleaning up marbles out of the ring, and consists of significant if isolated fragments.

  I have been crowded by a woman spin-casting in a bathing suit. I have edged close to a woman with piled red hair whose soft and nonchalant backhand cast came up with a lot of shad. She competed with the guy next to her, to whom, it turned out, she was married. One day, when I had asked him a question, she said, “Keep him talking, I’m catching up.”

  From time to time, I have encountered a small, slight shad fisherman from Philadelphia whose eyes are oscillating beads. If, arriving on the scene, he sees you with a fish on your line, he will wade straight to you and all but climb your back to see if he can cast from your shoulders. In my fishing diaries, he is called Snopes.

  May 13, P.M.: While I have a four-pound roe on the line, two men enter the river and stand virtually between me and my fish. One is Snopes McShad, an annoying and aggressive little ferret who fishes with a very light rod. I net the shad, and cast again. Snopes and his friend are so far out in the river below me that I am crowded and inhibited. As my dart swings toward them, I think it might snag them in the waders, a development that would in no way dismay me.

  The first time my nephew Angus ever fished for shad, he arrived at the river, walked down the bank, observed all the fishermen lined up in an eddy, and waded into fast water far above them. He had never even seen a shad. Alone there—looking, maybe, foolish—he began to strip out line and send false casts in drapefolds over the river. His name is Angus Burton. At the time, he was president of Trout Unlimited in Baltimore. Who knows what fly he finally laid on the river, but it swung down into the eddy-sided pool and he had a shad on the line. It ran up and down and jumped twice. Angus’s reactions were louder than the river. You could hear him redefining his sense of unlimited. When the fish was at his side in the water, he flicked out the hook and cast again. Downstream, Snopes McShad had pulled out of the line-up. After splashing ashore, he ran upriver, reentered the water, and was soon within inches of Angus’s casting hand. Angus is nothing if not polite, but you could see him wondering. This, after all, was not his game. He cast. He connected with another shad.

  May 16, P.M.: Snopes showed up with a friend in a red hat. Red Hat caught a shad within ten minutes, and put it on a string. It swam like a dog on a leash. After an hour, he let it go—almost surely to die. He just walked away. When Red Hat got the fish on the line, Snopes moved to his side, like iron to a magnet. Detestable.

  Once, when Hackl and I were hitting into fish, Snopes waded into the river eleven inches upstream. He said, somewhat testily, “I know where the school is.” As if we were hiding it. I caught a buck shad, which I intended to eat, and I turned to set it on the bank. Snopes said, “Don’t worry too much. I’m not going to take your place.”

  I looked around at him and slowly asked, “What did you say?”

  He said, “I know where the school is.”

  Suddenly, the shad stopped hitting. Activity ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Hackl and I went on castin
g, but we were just throwing darts into an empty river. Five fishermen spread out below us were also catching nothing. Snopes vanished.

  Snopes reappears far downstream, a speck in the river, and he instantly connects with shad. He may be the greediest, most aggrandizing, highly skilled fisherman in Pennsylvania. He knows where the school is. We know where the pool is.

  A late afternoon in our second year, I stood in the river until dusk while a northwest wind blew my darts off course in the air. Others around me were catching fish, and I was not. They caught fish after fish. I did not feel so much as a bump. The embarrassment was becoming an inflammation. I was standing on an underwater boulder, but evidently not a well-chosen boulder, and also not a very large boulder. A little after four, I slipped. I slid down the rock into the river. The water was cold coming into my waders, and when I stood up the wind felt colder. After sloshing ashore, I drained the waders, turned them inside out, and hung them on a bush to dry. In my undershorts, I went back to the fishing, and went on catching nothing while surrounded by success. I did not feel a strike that day. Slowly, my two-digit I.Q. wrapped itself around a conclusion: I was in the wrong place at the right time. The ring was full of marbles but I was not close to the ring. Position is everything. I could use a canoe. A canoe would be a portable rock.

  I drove down the river three hours home to New Jersey. I spent two days chipping at a living. And then, from a rack in the back of the garage, I took down my sixteen-foot Mad River Malecite, my ash-gunwaled, cane-seated, Kevlar-covered chocolate canoe, a boat so responsive to the touch that a single stroke could cross a river. Or so it had always felt. I put it on the car and went back to the upper river with a formulated plan. I would drive down the railroad on the New York side. With my extensive jetsam, not all of which was flotsam—my rod tubes, vests, rain gear, pack basket, tackle bag, hoop net, anchor, fillet board, hand scale, Rapala knife, carrot juice, paddle, extra paddle, and uneaten lunch—I was better off going up a flat glide to a pool below white water than I would be heading downstream through rapids. If I spilled all that gear in the river, just the thought of the money it had cost might cause me to yell louder than a child in fear for his life. Some days before, I had driven along the edge of the railroad, on ballast the size of grapefruit. It was a little more than bumpy but the vehicle survived. And now, at the end of the journey north with the canoe, I went down into the river gorge to the grade crossing and began to turn onto the railroad’s right-of-way. Beside the tracks, a pennant-shaped steel barricade, bright lemon chrome, had been erected by the railroad during the two days I had been gone.

  I laid on the horn in sheer frustration. The point on the river that I wanted to reach was half a mile away, no more, but the portage was uninviting, and would surely require repeating twice to transport all that gear—not to mention a whole lot of time. The day was waning. I was primed to fish. There was only one thing to do. I went straight down to the river, parked the car, put the canoe in the water, filled it to the gunwales with all my gear, rigged up the anchor, and shoved off. The water level was a little high but that was all right, there might be more cushion over the rocks. Almost like a sled dog, the canoe seemed to sense where it was going and to leap forward toward the rapids, even while they were still out of sight around a bend. Their sound came first. And then all quickly we were right on top of them and sliding through a boulder field of chutes and souse holes, haystacks and swirling eddies. I did not do a whole lot with the paddle. The canoe seemed o.k. by itself. I looked down at the rod tubes, the vests, the rain gear, the pack basket, the tackle bag, the hoop net, etcetera, and marvelled at what had possessed me not even to tie them down. At the foot of the rapids, head of the pool, I saw fishermen on the Pennsylvania side. I peeled off the opposite way and into the New York eddy. You would not see a wader in the New York eddy. It was too broad, too deep. No wader could get out far enough to fish. It bordered the deep main current. I let the canoe get sucked up close to the white water, beside the eddy wall, where I lowered the anchor from its sprit on the stern. I turned and knelt against the center thwart, the river channel on my right. It was an awkward position for a right-handed caster, but I did not have that handicap. I picked up a rod. On the second cast, I caught a roe shad. I caught three more roes and two bucks with an attentive audience on the Pennsylvania side. As dusk came on, I hid the canoe in a sea of ferns.

  I returned to the river soon after dawn and already three men were fishing. There was mist over the river and developing rain. What on earth did those fishermen think, at 5:45 A.M., when suddenly there slid out past them the lowfreeboard dark-brown canoe? On the opposite side of the river, I went high up the eddy, and dropped the anchor. Roe. Buck. Roe. Roe. Buck. Roe. They leaped. They ran in wide circles and would not be turned. The line passed through curtains of mist. They stayed on for ten and fifteen minutes. One rose straight up like a rocket off a pad—the tail well clear of the water, the head three feet in the air. It leaped five times. It ran into the shallows and back into the channel. It swung the rod through ninety degrees. When it came into the net, the dart fell from its outer lip. My hands were cold and I warmed them in the river. Last night and this morning, I had thirteen shad on the line. Soaked in steady rain, I carried the canoe back to the car.

  Now, years later, I fish in a canoe about half the time. Not all conditions are right. But it opens up the river—lets you drift down upon any rock or riffle, however inaccessible the banks might otherwise be. In the hundred and thirty-five river miles from Hancock to Foul Rift—from the start of the main-stem river to its preëminent rapid—there are at least five hundred riffles and rapids distinctive enough to stop migrating shad. The drop at Foul Rift is twenty-two feet in nine hundred yards—enough to shake the confidence of a muskellunge. You don’t need a Foul Rift to find a shad. Any good riffle will do, not to mention other obstructions.

  I was fishing one year on a cool spring day a short distance up from a sweeper. A big roe shad straightened and stiffened the line. There was no doubt about her gender. She turned sideways in the fastest water and engaged in a relentless tug-of-war. She was as big a roe as I would encounter all spring. I didn’t have to see her to know that. I worried that something would snap, but I took my time and just held on. Unfortunately, the anchor was not also holding on. It bumped across the riverbed rocks, held, and moved again. Entering the equation between anchor and current, the roe shad was changing the balance. She was pulling the canoe downstream, ever closer to the sweeper. What to do? On brooks in New Jersey, as in the Brooks Range, in Alaska, I have been capsized by sweepers lying in wait for canoes. A sweeper is a toppled tree that looks like a broom in fast river current. A sweeper draws in a vessel, holds it broadside to the current, and inexorably rolls it over. Now, with this shad hauling me downriver, was I going to break off or not break off the line? The finest fish of the year versus almost certain disaster. I was locked stiff with indecision. This was the situation Jack Benny was in when the holdup man put the gun to Benny in his savings vault and said, “Your money or your life.” Benny fell silent, unable to make a choice. The sweeper was now about fifteen feet away. I was unable to act. Suddenly the shad sounded, and then bolted crossriver. The leader broke. She was gone. I picked up the paddle, had time for one stroke, and barely missed the sweeper. The shad had tried to kill me. The shad had saved my life.

  Sometimes, I have forgotten to take an extra paddle, a mistake that can become precarious if you are dumb enough to rest the paddle you do have across the gunwales while you fish. Once in early May on cold water I watched a lone paddle slide down a gunwale and away in the current. What to do? I pulled up the anchor and tried to paddle with the shad net, which was like trying to eat soup with a ring that blows bubbles. To extend the shad net’s length, I had fitted it up with a broom handle. I paddled furiously, and broke the broom handle. I went on whisking with the shorter version, and, some distance downstream, finally reached the bank. The lost paddle was a lifetime favorite—an old one o
f light spruce. I borrowed another paddle somewhere, went back to the canoe, took off downriver hugging the edge, and found the spruce paddle in an eddy.

  That sort of thing does not happen every year, or even every decade, and my canoe is so involved with the angling endeavor that I would never abandon it in fear of more mistakes. Sometimes, wearing knee-high boots and not waders, I look for a submerged, flat-topped rock, and get out of the canoe so I can cast standing up. In breeze or current, the anchored canoe will swing on its rope, and before long move upstream in the eddy below the rock. It bumps gently against my leg. It bumps again. Too much of that and I give it a shove, to put it out of my way. I cast, concentrate. At the end of the swing, I bring in the line and cast again. The canoe has returned, and is nuzzling my leg.

  One afternoon, I was fishing in this manner from a big rock covered with not much water and situated almost in the middle of the river—in effect a small submerged island. Deciding to leave and fish elsewhere, I pulled up the anchor and set it in the canoe. I had meant to change lures before leaving, and had forgotten to do so before lifting the anchor, so I sat down on the bow seat with my feet on the rock in the water. I removed a shad fly from the leader, and tied on a -ounce dart. I stood up with the fly rod to try out the dart, and forgot all about the anchor. Slowly, while I cast, the canoe turned and drifted away. I was too late when I realized what was happening. The shad net fell off the canoe and stood upright under water, buoyed by the air trapped in its hoop. The canoe drifted past the shad net and on toward Cape Henlopen. What to do? I was marooned on a mid-river rock, in fifteen-inch rubber boots with deep fast water around me. This was embarrassment on a new scale. The dart on the fly rod was extremely small. I cast it into the canoe and made a slow retrieve. The dart maddeningly slid over everything—over the tackle bag, over the life vest, over the paddles, over the stern painter. It somehow missed a tote bag and even a large wire fish basket, as it climbed each thwart and dropped on the other side and made its way through the whole canoe. Coming over the gunwale, it fell into the river. I cast again. The dart missed the canoe. I cast again. The dart landed in the bow. Gingerly as I stripped it in, it hopped, skipped, slid over everything, and went back into the river. The canoe was gaining momentum and was almost out of range. I cast again, landed where I hoped to, but failed to connect. How can fishhooks get hung up on every twig and pant leg while this one intersected nothing? There might be space and time for one more cast, and that would be all she wrote, hoss. I stripped out more line, backcast twice, and sent the dart on its way. It landed in the canoe. As it made its way toward the stern, its barb lodged in the coiled painter. The painter came over the side of the canoe and steadily straightened. A great deal of tension developed against that tiny dart but I couldn’t just stand there, I had to pull. Ever so slowly, the canoe began to move upstream, and a little less slowly when at last it felt the draw of the eddy. In the end, it bumped against my leg. On the way downstream, I picked up the shad net with the blade of a paddle.