The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  Since the main-stem Delaware, in its full three hundred and thirty miles of flowing natural river, presents more range and variety of shad fishing than exist anywhere else, the fact that two out of three Delaware River shad fishermen are in boats is less significant than the fact that the other third are on the banks. Imagine casting a shad dart at the 79th Street Boat Basin. Imagine casting a shad dart in the Tappan Zee. The Hudson River, for all its historic commercial shad fisheries, is even less generous than the Connecticut to the lone angler. From New York City to Troy, its average width approximates a mile. Shad fishermen do not line the banks of this river, notwithstanding the success of Richard St. Pierre on the ferry dock opposite Catskill. Bank fishing is possible mainly where the Hudson’s principal current—meandering like the jet stream—comes close to shore, as at North Germantown, Barrytown, Cheviot, and Coxsackie. For that matter, you need a lot of local knowledge to fish with success from a boat. There is a mid-river shoal about a hundred miles up, known as the Kingston Flats. It parallels the banks. The middle of the river may be two feet deep and the flanking channels seven fathoms. The shad go low under flowing tides and rise toward the shallows when the water is slack. Boats are waiting by the shoal.

  One April Sunday in my fourth year of shad fishing, I called Ed Cervone, at his home in Pennington, New Jersey, to explore the possibilities for the coming Tuesday. As we talked, Cervone’s absorption with the subject went into crescendo and we left for the river as we hung up the phones.

  Eighteen boats below the Lambertville-New Hope bridge. A light breeze and balmy sun. At no moment that I can remember was there not at least one shad on a line from a boat on the river. More often two or three. Rising from the boats, the rods were throbbing. The fishers were all men and their stiff rods were pulsating at the tips. I now understood the physics of shad. So intent is the man with filament engaged that you could cut off his foot and he would not stop fishing. Cervone hit into six. I was using the same size and color dart, same split shot, same jigging motions. I never had a strike, not a nudge. This is proof: there is a God—a God who knows what He is looking at and enjoys making decisions.

  In the territorial tensions that rarely but surely arise on the river, the aforementioned physics can’t help but be involved. Off New Hope another time, Cervone and I had scarce anchored and made our first casts when a fisherman near us reeled in his line, found a strange dart caught on it, and waved the dart at me angrily, shouting, “You’re fishing under my boat.” This was most unshadly. It was also corrupted fact. The thing he was waving was not my dart.

  Five days later, we were back in the same place and Cervone soon had a fish.

  He loses it near the boat, because his knot untied. Cervone is furious with Cervone. Klutz is not his concept of Haut Cervone. Frustrated by my own failure to hook into anything, I begin to cast across current and swing the dart in an arc. The strategy seems to work. I hook into something very big: the boat next to us. My dart is embedded in its anchor rope. I yank and pull and cannot break my line. I carry the rod to the far end of our skiff, and yank and pull as hard as I can. At last the line comes free. The dart is still on it. The hook is bent out straight. If nothing else—and nothing else is the term I am searching for—I am the knot-tier in this boat. Cervone has a fish on the line. He lands a roe shad. Cervone has a fish on the line. He lands a buck shad. That is the last fish that Cervone is ever going to catch on this blue earth unless my rod bends. The Lares and Penates of Ed Cervone hear this declaration. My rod bends. It bends for ten minutes over a racing fish, a sounding fish, an unleaping unrelenting deepwater fish, a netted fish, a buck shad.

  In New Hope one day in our sixth season, I got a fish on the line downstream right. It ran back and forth for a while, and then moved upstream until it was directly to my left, halfway to another boat. A man in the other boat had a bending rod, too. Our lines grew tighter and tighter, and eventually were aimed at each other. We were catching the same fish.

  He yelled, “Let your line go slack.”

  “My line?” I called, incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  I let my line go slack. He netted the fish. He unhooked my dart and returned it to the river.

  I said, “Thank you.”

  He said, “Thank you!”

  Cervone thought it was my fish. When I related the story to the editor C. Patrick Crow, Crow told me that what the man meant was “Thank you, sucker.”

  Crow was in a position to know.

  May 24: In my canoe, I have a shad on the line. Crow, wading opposite, casts over my line. His fly slides down to the fish. He hooks into it, tries to hang on to it, and the fish breaks off. Crow accuses me of interfering with his fish.

  After seven or eight years, I at last developed enough moxie to fill a reel with four-pound test. Its advantage is that it sinks rapidly and gets down to where the shad most often are. Its disadvantage lies in trying to bring in a fish known to break line twice as strong. The elemental requirements are experience and finesse. I caught a buck shad on the four-pound test. Next I got a big roe on the same line, and maneuvered it for fifteen minutes. There was a sense of expansion under my vest. I was thinking, Herewith I graduate to the subtleties of four-pound test. It’s more difficult to use. It will catch more fish. I am turning pro. Gradually, I drew the roe shad closer and closer to the canoe. When it finally saw the boat, it power-dived. Explosively, the line broke in my face.

  It took about ten seasons for me to shed enough humility to appear—even in a diary addressed to myself—insufferably pedagogical:

  May 23: A lightly jigged swing, a quick retrieve, a new cast flowing right out of the retrieve: your dart is back in the water, where it belongs. The variables count, surely, but there is nothing variable about the fact that shad do not swim in air. A dart in the air will not catch a fish. When your dart is in the water, show it. Give it the twitch. You’re trying to irritate a fish. Which is not hard to do if you’re in the right place at the right time. A shad could not care less about your dart, and will not go looking for it. Show it to the shad. Uninterested in food, the fish will snap at it only if it’s in its face. And where in the river is the face? That’s for you to guess. With a few exceptions, you are not fishing to visible fish.

  May 26: In the A.M., I fish in relative discouragement, netting two fish while a man from Reading with a thin alchemical mustache gets fish on his line in more than half his casts. Fish after fish after fish after fish he hooks into while the rest of us—four or five, on either side of him and opposite him—helplessly watch. One guy leaves, because he is so disheartened. Hackl, on the other hand, the eternal academic, apprentices himself to the Reading Rifle, and learns at the master’s hip. He learns that he is using four-pound line with a six-pound leader. He is using a black-and-orange dart with a plastic tail. Of bucktail, he says, “Shad are not interested in that stuff.” He points his long flexible rod low over the water in exact conjunction with the swing of the dart—leaning forward intently, sighting down his line, a subtle lifting every few seconds, the ghost of a jig. He is not taking in line. A finger is on the filament, lightly touching its tension, like the curling fingers of a cellist. He tells Hackl that the shad were so thick near Foul Rift a week ago that he could feel the line go over their backs, could feel the line go over one fish while another came up for the dart. Hackl later compares him to a safecracker, and says that very few people can feel the tumblers fall. The man from Reading reels in another. He is an adroit horser but a horser nevertheless. He nets a fish in two minutes. Hackl asks him if it is a roe or a buck. He has no idea. Moreover, he would never eat such an orthopedic mess. He says he tried shad roe once. And how was that? Awful, he says, reeling in another shad. He says he has no idea why he always catches a great many more fish than do the people around him. He says that shad take lures into their mouths and back away from them in the same instant. All you need to do is sense the crucial moment and lift the dart. As hours pass, no one present catches much of an
ything, except the Reading Rifle, who is rarely without a fish on the line. The weather has turned cold. The temperature of the river is dropping. The fish are becoming hypothermic. The superstar does not return in the evening. Fools return in the evening. Old fools, cold fools. This one feels nothing in two hours.

  Jim Merritt watches shad going past a given rock and goes upstream to cast back to the rock. Merritt is an almost pure fly fisherman. He eats his fish sometimes, and uses bait in the ocean. Tall and very trim, he can shoot a fly line seventy feet with a motion so slow it looks lazy. We are friends, neighbors, colleagues in New Jersey, and fish together on the upper river. Author of “Trout Dreams” and other books, he writes for many publications, including Field & Stream. Merritt, I should pause to say with unlimited appreciation, is my ichthyotherapist. In addition, he has watched over this book with brotherly concern. He has made fly rods for me and tied flies to go with them. Merritt knows the zip codes of fish. If he is bored and shadless, he goes up the river and fishes for trout. He says he knows where they like to hang. He returned one afternoon with a two-pound rainbow caught on a weighted size 4 black girdle bug. He had damaged the trout, so he kept it. Merritt is not a serious shad fisherman. Imagine taking off up a river to make twenty-metre casts to rainbow trout when you could be fishing for shad. He spends no more than two days a year getting what he calls his annual “shad fix.” He got it up in Equinunk one season, fishing around a boulder to a school of shad he could see. He said he noticed “that instant when the dart was inside the plane of the open mouth.” That was the moment when a fisherman should strike. The books say that shad hook themselves, and this does not contradict either Merritt or the Reading Rifle. The fish’s movement up, down, or sideways may, with luck, do the trick. Knowing or feeling the key moment, though, will greatly increase the percentage of hookings, and, even when fishing blind (as most shad fishermen routinely do) the superstars seem to be aware of the moment. How? Merritt says they would not really know. That sixth sense is something they just have—an innate or experiential talent—and in all likelihood a person with such a gift will not be able to articulate what it is that is felt. This I know for sure: I do not have it. In the lower river, people in anchored boats set their lines in the river and don’t even hold onto the rods. They wait for the fish to do it all. I’m afraid that’s analogous to what I do with rod in hand upriver. I jig randomly. I’m waiting for the fish to act. A superstar reacts to every swing, and knows what is where, and when.

  June 4: Off to the river in waders on a Sunday morning, late. It is seven A.M., and the incomparable Erwin Dietz has been here catching fish since ten minutes after five. I haven’t run into him in several years and have wondered what happened to him. The answer is “Nothing,” as the shad could tell you. Erwin invites me to join him on his rock. I hesitate and move toward other water. Erwin insists, says he often fishes with his son, side by side on a rock. We cast, Erwin hooks into a shad. I watch him bring it in. We soon cast again. Erwin hooks into a shad. He says he can feel them bump the dart in the center of the current, bump it again, and then go for it. With a third fish on his line, Erwin tells me to move around behind him and keep casting, in case there’s another where his was. I fire my dart. Shad! “Doubleheader,” says Erwin. Fish netted, we are soon casting again. Another doubleheader. I am so high on adrenaline and vertically high on the rock that when the shad comes in and I scoop low with the net I poke it in the head and free the dart. “Quick release,” Erwin says. For thirty minutes beside Erwin, I am matching him one for one, for two, for three, four shad. Five for five shad. Muggsy Bogues could just have hit me with a nolook bounce pass, setting me up for a back somersault while sinking an underhanded flip shot from downtown.

  The citrus king I interviewed in 1965 was Ben Hill Griffin, of Frostproof, Florida. His beloved granddaughter, then seven years old, was Katherine Harris, who grew up to become Florida’s Secretary of State, and to fulfill a crucial role in the disputed election of George W Bush as President. Position counts. She cleared up some marbles out of the ring.

  TEN

  THE COMPENSATORY RESPONSE

  When a river sorts out its sediment load—its boulders, cobbles, gravels, sands, and silts—the lighter things are carried farthest and the heavy stuff stays high, like placer gold in the first riffle of a sluice box. The upper Delaware is a big freestone stream, and some of the stones are the size of cabins. Many are not a whole lot bigger than armchairs. Wading on and among them can be difficult, especially where the currents are shoving you at ten thousand pounds per square inch. It helps that the water is clear. Except after long heavy rain, the water is clear. This is the Delaware River going past you at fifteen hundred cubic feet per second, and you can look down into it and read the label on your boots.

  You could also read the Clean Water Act of 1972, whose effect is everywhere in the big free-flowing river. As it passes cities, of course, the narrative intensifies and in Philadelphia becomes one of the signal chapters in the ongoing chronicle of the environmental movement. The twentieth century was not a great one for anadromous fish, lord knows, and before it was half over the spring shad runs in the Delaware River had been stopped all but cold by municipal and industrial pollution. Unnatural sludges were three metres thick, the edge of the river a film of refinery waste. From mines above Reading on the Schuylkill came acidic coal silts by the tens of millions of tons. Added in were the effluents of paint-and-dye works, tanneries, chemical factories, paper mills, and slaughterhouses, and the flushed raw product of human bodies. A clean, green shad coming in from the ocean had about as much chance of getting past Philadelphia as it would have had surviving in a septic tank. Bacteria in the river consumed the water’s dissolved oxygen. A thirty-mile reach from a little above Philadelphia to well below Chester was anoxic to the point of notoriety and acquired a litany of names: the black water, the pollution barrier, the pollution block, the Philadelphia sag, the d.o. sag. Ferries crossing the Delaware between Camden and Philadelphia plowed through dead fish. If shad made it past the barrier to go on upriver and spawn, their offspring faced the barrier coming down. In the summers of those years, shad schools in the Bay of Fundy commensurately declined.

  The first fillip of environmental action came in the nineteen-thirties when the Interstate Commission on the Delaware River went to court. The industrial prerogatives of the Second World War undid the effort. In the late nineteen-forties, the federal Water Pollution Control Act somewhat lightened the sag, but commercial shad harvests that had reached many thousands of tons at the turn of the century were now under forty thousand pounds. In Lambertville, Fred Lewis netted about four thousand shad in 1939, about two hundred in 1945, and zero in 1953. Curiously, the resurgence of the shad run in the Delaware River was stimulated by environmental action that had nothing to do with people or legislation. In August, 1955, came two hurricanes so close together that their eyes were almost like double yolks. Called Connie and Diane, they attacked and flooded eastern America. Far upriver, where I read the labels on those boots in water going fifteen hundred cubic feet per second, local gauges, as a result of Connie and Diane, produced readings of a hundred and thirty thousand cubic feet per second. Exponentially gaining momentum on the way downstream, the waters plucked millions of pumpkins off the floodplains and spewed them like birdshot far into the Atlantic. When these same waters reached the filth and deep sludges of the pollution barrier at Philadelphia, they scoured them out like a blown nose.

  In 1963, in Lambertville, Fred Lewis seined six thousand shad. Meanwhile, a vanished figure—the recreational shad fisherman—had returned to the river. According to Dennis Scholl, a past president of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen’s Association, the spring shad run first came back significantly in 1960, and by 1962 the river was laced with anglers. Joe Kasper, a fishing guide in the Trenton region, has described the sixties revival as “a marginal reappearance,” however. Enough remained of the pollution block to keep the runs modest, and another natural
event—a prolonged drought—lowered the volume of the river and with it the levels of dissolved oxygen. After 1972, the enduring effectiveness of the Clean Water Act ever widened the way to the large migrations of the last quarter of the century, and to descriptions like this one by Anthony Brandt in American Heritage (April, 1994). “ … the rocky bottom of the river is visible at depths of up to eight feet. You can also see the trout, which are plentiful, poised among the stones, and the pods of shad, twenty, fifty, one hundred fish moving upstream.” The shad were counted at first by extrapolation from the results of tagging programs, and later by hydroacoustical instrumentation attached to the pier of a bridge. In the eighties and nineties, according to the instruments, there were spring migrations in the Delaware exceeding seven hundred thousand shad. In summers in the Bay of Fundy, the schools commensurately increased.