by John McPhee
Nature being in so many ways cyclical, it is not surprising that the twenty-first century brought more alarm than confidence to the likes of me. Despite the official figures—the twenty-year averages of three hundred and fifty thousand shad in the Connecticut River, four hundred thousand in the Delaware—it seemed obvious to shad fishermen that runs were again diminishing. The evidence was in large part anecdotal. George Bernard, co-founder of the Shad Museum, in Higganum, Connecticut, said he knew a commercial fisherman in Nyack, on the Hudson River, who used to take his shad to the Fulton Fish Market in a tractor trailer and now used a pickup. The number of commercial shad fishermen on the Connecticut River had rapidly dropped from twenty-five to four. Sport fishermen were spending more time casting and less time reeling in fish. My own fishing diaries were showing a marked increase in time on the river versus shad in the net, but I didn’t care.
Not only were the fish more scarce but also they were younger and smaller. In the Connecticut, which had known eleven-pound shad, a five-pound six-ounce roe had taken first place in the 1999 Shad Derby at South Hadley. In the Delaware, some roe shad were now in the two-pound range, and there were bucks of twenty-four ounces. The rogue roe shad I caught in Lambertville that took a hundred and fifty-five minutes to land was, as I have mentioned, only three years old, while the ages of virgin females coming in to spawn had long been four or five years. In that era (the early nineteen-nineties) the fact that she was three years old was even more unusual than her exceptional tenacity. She signalled what was to come. The number of three-year-old roes in the spring migration considerably increased in following years. “A population reduced in abundance needs to spawn earlier,” Boyd Kynard explained. “It’s a compensatory response to mortality. As populations decrease, they become sexually mature earlier. When populations do this, they’re not just doing it for the hell of it. One of the first signs of an overfished or otherwise threatened population is when the average age goes down. Somewhere in the shad life cycle, abundance is being affected. All the populations that we know of on the East Coast show this decline in abundance. Our run in the Connecticut River is down fifty per cent. There’s mortality happening somewhere.”
Ask a shad fisherman where the mortality is and you’ll get a strong, clear answer. Ask another shad fisherman, and you’ll get a strong, clear, different answer. This is topic B on the river. When shad fishermen are not talking about the fish they have caught, they are talking about who caught the fish of which they have been deprived.
“Portuguese.”
“There’s Portuguese fishing boats out there in the ocean stealing shad.”
“I don’t know if they’re Portuguese or Japanese, they’re gill-netting shad in the ocean.”
“They’re Americans. They’re commercial fishermen from the Chesapeake Bay who go out off the Virginia Capes and haul in shad for cat food.”
“They call it the ‘ocean intercept fishery.’”
“It’s not them. It’s sport fishermen who are really killing off the shad.”
“Striped bass are what’s really murdering shad. Stripers in the rivers in the fall eat millions of baby shad. Their bellies are bulging with juvenile shad.”
“It’s not the striped bass, it’s the algae blooms that are killing off the shad.”
The indictment of striped bass, also known as rockfish, might have been a little more airtight if people on the river had not been making the same complaint for a century: “The rock fish, in fact, comes into our rivers for the sole purpose of feeding upon the young shad,” said Dr. J. Ernest Scott, of New Hope, Pennsylvania, in a paper called “Old Shad Fisheries on the Delaware River,” read before the Bucks County Historical Society in 1908.
In 1998, the Shad and River Herring Management Board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission decided to phase out the ocean-intercept fishery. The commercial interceptors were getting only five cents a pound for shad, but the fishery filled an important gap for them. “Shad carry fishermen through the early part of the year—the time of year when other fish are not present,” said Jack Travelstead, Virginia’s Chief of Fisheries. Implying that ocean catches were indeed the cause of the decline in population, he added: “The offshore fishery harvests the greatest number of shad harvested—the majority.”
With regard to the diminished population, Boyd Kynard is not much moved by blooming algae, voracious bass, or floating interceptors from any nation: “There’s a lot of us who believe it’s not as simple as that, and what could be causing these decreases in abundance is not the traditional overharvest, because the data are in, and there’s no large foreign fishing fleet or sport-fishing groups that are causing this massive decline in abundance out there. You have to look to more natural cycles, about which we know very little. We know that the climate is changing. We know that the sea temperatures are changing. We know that areas which were previously very warm in the North Atlantic are now very cold, and very unsuitable for Atlantic salmon. The same sorts of things may be going on with American shad—that is, areas in the ocean that were formerly good places to overwinter, good places to feed, may now be colder and not have those food resources that shad have evolved a genetic homing to. When they get to those places, there’s very poor feed. This may be causing mortalities. There’s also striped bass. I am one of the school that doesn’t believe that striped bass are the sole contributing factor to the decline of abundance of shad on the East Coast. I certainly think they can be a factor. If you talk about the potential loss of feeding areas at sea and the increased predation by striped bass on a shad population, now you’re talking about two factors that—acting together—could possibly be responsible for the large declines in American shad in rivers all up and down the East Coast.”
I asked him if sport fishing could change the population.
He said, “Not unless the number gets way down. Then, any kind of mortality—sport fishing, problems with dams—gets to be a great deal more important.”
The twentieth century’s crenelated pattern of abundance and decline and then renewed abundance and recurring decline is generally taken as a textbook example of latter-day environmental stress—the world in its handbasket approaching its landing in hell. It is of interest, though, that in the nineteenth century this same anadromous species went through a crenelated pattern of abundance and decline and then renewed abundance and recurring decline—a result and example of environmental stress. The first dam in the Connecticut River was constructed, after all, in 1798. In 1822, Philadelphia blocked the Schuylkill, the city’s need for reserved water taking automatic precedence over the free-flowing nature of the river. In 1830 and 1839, dams were completed on the Susquehanna that pushed back the spring migration to within forty-odd miles of the Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, the Connecticut had been blocked in all but its first fifty miles. As demand increased and supply dwindled, commercial fisheries prospered where rivers still flowed free. All through the nineteenth century there were commercial shad fisheries in many places on the Delaware River. They had names like modern music groups—New Shaven, Quick Step, Snapjaw, Wool Cap, Jug, Crab, Purgatory—and they lasted in large numbers a hundred years. Many a “water haul” was made—that is, the seine came in empty. At the fishery at Betley’s Point one season, soon after the turn of the nineteenth century, thirteen consecutive water hauls were made. The fourteenth pass netted eighteen hundred shad. That—to a farethee-well—is shad fishing. One day in the eighteen-thirties, Dr. Samuel Ladd Howell’s Fancy Hill Fishery, on the left bank across from Philadelphia, hauled in a net containing ten thousand eight hundred shad. In the American Journal of Science and Arts (July, 1837), Dr. Howell praised both God and shad for their abundance and availability: “They afford a striking illustration of the goodness and design of an all-wise Providence, in making it a law of their nature that they shall thus annually throw themselves within the reach of man.”
In 1839, the Massachusetts Zoological and Botanical Survey reported: “The Concord shad hav
e almost entirely disappeared, their ascent having been cut off by dams.” Henry David Thoreau, two years out of college, was not unmindful of this development, least of all during the fortnight that summer when he travelled by dory with his brother, John, on the trip that resulted ten years later in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Thoreau and the aquaculturist Seth Green were the nineteenth century’s foremost defenders of American shad—Green the more practical, Thoreau the more passionate.
Thoreau was a sometime fisherman. He “caught white chivin of great size in the Aboljacknagasic, where it empties into the Penobscot, at the base of Mount Ktaadn.” But his hands-on relationships with fish went far beyond the imagination of an ordinary angler. He actually said, “I have not yet met with the philosopher who could in a quite conclusive undoubtful way show me the … difference, between man and a fish.” He could all but converse with river partridge, more commonly known as perch. In the evening at pond’s edge, he would ripple the water with his fingers, and perch would come to his side. He understood the chain pickerel—“the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes … stately, ruminant … lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon … still, circumspect … motionless as a jewel set in water,” and then exploding forward like a barracuda to eat whatever might swim into range. Thoreau continues: “I have caught one which had swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth. Sometimes a striped snake, bound to greener meadows across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the same receptacle.”
Wading in shallow water, he visited the nests of sunfishes.
I have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and seen them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached their ova, and have even taken them gently out of the water with my hand; though this cannot be accomplished by a sudden movement, however dexterous, for instant warning is conveyed to them through their denser element, but only by letting the fingers gradually close about them as they are poised over the palm, and with the utmost gentleness raising them slowly to the surface.
The thought of American shad in their thousands coming up against a new commercial dam—desperately trying to find a way to complete a reproductive journey their forebears had made since time immemorial—was just too much for Thoreau. It was in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” that he made his noted lament, “Poor shad! where is thy redress?” and pictured them approaching the continent to “inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter.”
He is radically and almost subversively anthropomorphic in his regard for the founding fish, asserting that American shad are “armed only with innocence and a just cause,” and suggesting that the dams that impede them will ultimately crumble, the shads’ “watery dream” will be fulfilled, and nature will take back her own, for these fish are “reserved for higher destinies.” Meanwhile, he urges them, “Keep a stiff fin and stem all the tides thou mayst meet.”
Thoreau was nostalgic about the “dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the riverside, from the tales of our seniors sent on horse-back in their childhood from the neighboring towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one bag filled with shad, the other with alewives.” He described certain fishermen on the Connecticut River suspended in armchairs from a high steep rock face, scooping shad with dip nets. One dipped shad, he reported, had a rattlesnake’s head in its stomach.
Three years after the river trip, during the period when Thoreau was reorganizing his journal notes into the more tightly structured composition that was published in 1849, his brother, John, cut himself slightly when a razor he was stropping slipped in his hand. He developed tetanus, and died. The scholar Linck Johnson, author of “Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” noted Thoreau’s predilection for shad among all familar species and pointed out the ways in which Thoreau associated them with his brother: “Like John, who was ‘cheery still’ when confronted by the seemingly cruel ‘fates’, the shad confront their ‘stern Fates’ with equanimity.”
Thoreau mentions a revolutionary militia unit known as The Shad, which stood bravely at the bridge in the Battle of Concord, prepared in every way except training. A day had been scheduled for military drilling, and the militiamen had all showed up, but their captain’s sense of duty had been overcome by his sense that shad were in the river. The captain went shad fishing. The soldiers learned nothing. The name Shad was applied to the unit, and later, according to Thoreau, to “all the irregular militia in Christendom.”
George Edward Pickett, who was a cadet at the United States Military Academy when Thoreau was writing “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” may never have read or heard of the Concord militia unit known as The Shad but he would live to cause an army to deserve the name. This was, of course, the Pickett of the charge—the Confederate general, fifty-ninth in his West Point class of fifty-nine, who helped end the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania when he ordered his troops to scramble up Cemetery Ridge under heavy Union fire on July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg. Pickett followed the charge, while two thousand seven hundred of his soldiers fell. That was not, however, the scene reminiscent of the Concord militia. On April 1, 1865, in Virginia, Pickett was defending an intersection known as Five Forks, six miles south of the Appomattox River and a good bit closer to the Southside Railroad, the last remaining supply line to Richmond. While thirty thousand Union troops led by Little Phil Sheridan approached from the southeast, Pickett’s twelve thousand, spread two miles wide behind fences and in ditches, braced to meet them. Pickett’s supreme commander, Robert E. Lee, was headquartered ten miles away, near Petersburg. Should Pickett fall to Sheridan, Lee would be forced from Petersburg, the Federals would capture Richmond, and the Confederate cause would be lost. Someone mentioned shad. The spring spawning run was in full penetration of the continent. The fish were in the rivers. Tom Rosser, another Confederate general, had caught some, and on the morning of April 1st ordered them baked for his midday dinner, near Hatcher’s Run, several miles from Five Forks. He invited Pickett and Major General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, to join him. Pickett readily accepted, and rode off from his battle station with Lee. The historian Shelby Foote continues the narrative (“The Civil War,” vol. 3, p. 870): “Neither told any subordinate where he was going or why, perhaps to keep from dividing the succulent fish too many ways; with the result that when the attack exploded—damped from their hearing, as it was, by a heavy stand of pines along Hatcher’s Run—no one knew where to find them. Pickett only made it back to his division after half its members had been shot or captured, a sad last act for a man who gave his name to the most famous charge in a war whose end was hastened by his threehour absence at a shad bake.”
Pickett’s lust for American shad was not an eccentricity in his time, as John Graham could have told you. John Graham? Honored guest at a dinner at Buena Vista House, in Gloucester, New Jersey, April 17, 1864, at which the menu listed Shad la Bordage, Shad Rôti sur le qril, Shad Rôti en entier, Shad Friture, and more Shad Rôti. No other entrées were offered. Just Shad, Café, Pain, Beurre, Dessert. Bordage was ship’s planking. The Shad Rôti en entier might have required a very large platter. Roe shad of more than thirteen pounds—exceeding by two and a half pounds the greatest specimens in modern angling records—were not uncommon in the Delaware in that era. With fish of such size in the river, it seems incongruous that “as thin as a shad” was a cliché in vogue at the time. True, when shad spawn out they do become thin to the point of rigor mortis. In any case, Abraham Lincoln knew the expression. One day, in the winter of 1862-63, he used it as a springboard for what his biographer David Herbert Donald called “an atrocious pun.” It was, in fact, a pun so bad it was good. A light eater and not a drinker, Lincoln was consuming
even less than usual in those grim, anxious days—an apple and a glass of milk for lunch, an analogously hearty dinner. He had become very thin—“cadaverous,” according to Donald. Told that he looked “thin as a shad,” he said he was worse off than that. He said he was “thin as a shadder.”
Two years later, after John Wilkes Booth murdered President Lincoln on the fourteenth of April, Booth fled south, hiding in woods, looking for ways to cross the Potomac River and the Rappahannock River and fade into the former Confederacy. This was at the height of the 1865 spring migration. Booth was assisted at both rivers by shad fishermen. The Potomac was two miles wide where he crossed, in a twelve-foot flat-bottomed boat that had netted seventy shad some hours before starting out with Booth. The party lost its way at night on the wide river, but made it across on a second try.