by John McPhee
Erwin shouts above the sound of the river: “Was you here yesterday? Yesterday I had eleven. Today I can’t catch nothing.”
I am shad fishing with a fly rod, not because of some holy reverence for the fly rod, but because sometimes in the milder currents it seems to work better than a spinning rod, somehow does a better job of finding the fish. Erwin shouts again: “I’m beating a dead horse.”
Just for the sheer science of it, I first used a chartreuse dart with a green head, then a white-and-red dart, then yellow-and-red, then orange-and-black, then green-and-black, then gold with white bucktail, then pink-and-black, and now green-and-white with more sequins than Elvis Presley—a dart I made six years ago and have hitherto preferred not to use. All have provoked strikes.
“I can’t pick my nose,” Erwin shouts. He had his eleven yesterday, and will no doubt double that tomorrow. But this is today.
I have seen odder forms of fly fishing. Once, in a single week in July, I connected with two smallmouth bass in the Delaware River and two king salmon in the Gulkana River, in Alaska, in water restricted to “fly fishing only.” On the Delaware, I was drifting, fly casting, and letting the canoe guide itself around rocks. The bass, which hit woolly buggers, came out from behind the rocks. Collectively, they weighed thirty ounces. The combined weight of the two salmon was around a hundred pounds. I imagine. I had walked several miles to the clear Gulkana, a tributary of the Copper River, which was opaque and swollen with glacial meltwater coming off the shoulders of stratovolcanoes twelve and sixteen thousand feet high. There were four of us, and we had come down from the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks. Frank Soos, a fictionwriting English professor, rigged up an authentic fly rod, but the rest of us conformed to the local interpretation of “fly fishing only.” We used rods big enough for surf casting with large-diameter spinning reels. The current was so deep and heavy that a lot of weight was needed to take the fly down, and the regional idiosyncrasy in this respect was pencil-thick plumber’s lead. You unrolled four, five, six inches of lead, cut it, and slipped one end into a tight-fitting sleeve of surgical tubing that was tied to the line. The fly was a pom-pomic wad of orange-and-black yarn around a hook that seemed large enough to hang beef. You heaved the rig a hundred yards. Or something near it. The long stick of lead bounced on the bottom. In seven hours, I had five or six hits and the two strikes. One salmon was on the line for about ten seconds, the other more briefly. The first, when I struck, came up, porpoised, and looked like a whale. I lifted the rod tip, and reeled in sinker and fly. The other salmon picked up the fly and immediately took off for the far side of the river. It felt like a dump truck. After it was gone, I retrieved the surgical tubing without the metal, the unravelled line without the fly. Hence there was some disgrace involved. Had those salmon stayed on the line and come to the riverbank, I would have smoked them, broiled them, and made gravlax. But they were not absent without leave. From time to time, all day, the running kings in the Gulkana broached and flashed their colors. Just the sight of them in their setting was catch enough.
In the Delaware one spring, I was fishing in waders in fast water when a big roe shad got on the line, and I walked her ashore, walked her out of the current into two inches of water, where she flipped, threw the dart, and went AWOL. Minutes later, I was out there casting again, and I felt something stop the dart, something that felt the way a large twig will feel if, in fast current, it intersects a dart. In shad fishing, from time to time, your dart hooks into a sort of inverse AWOL—a by-catch, a species other than Alosa sapidissima. After a time, I realized that what I thought was a small floating stick was actually something moving, slowly, lightly, in sinister undulation. Delicately, I reeled the thing in. When it was scarcely a rod’s length away, it came up into view—a sea lamprey, with a shad dart in its mouth. I don’t know if you have seen a lamprey’s mouth—known to Willy Bemis as the oral hood—but it is probably the last thing in this life you would want to touch. Large, annular, cuplike, suctorial, it has several rings of conical teeth. On its tongue it has larger teeth. A lamprey’s mouth would fit around your thumb. What to do? Three feet of cartilaginous snakebody were moving sinuously behind the dart, and there was no way in this universe that I was going to put a hand on either the body or the dart. I walked the lamprey ashore—out of the river and up the bank and onto a big flat sunbaked boulder, where the dart fell out of the mouth. I went back to the river. The lamprey never moved. Under the sun, its skin darkened from greenish-brown to carbon black.
When you look up from the river, you see bald eagles waiting to feed on dying shad. You do not see the timber rattlesnakes up the bank. One afternoon, when I had finished fishing in the canoe, I paddled toward shore and saw a fresh green willow branch blocking the small landing place I had left two hours before. A fat beaver, its back toward me, was feeding on the branch. Silently, over the flat water, the canoe approached it like an arrow. When the canoe was within inches, the beaver turned, tail-slapped the river, and submerged. I saw it stretched out in the shallow water to my left, like a long-haired fish. It poked its head up, saw me, slapped, dived, and shot away for the deep river. Soon it was up again, head out, swimming back and forth, back and forth, its eyes on me. I held up the willow branch for it to see, and flung the branch in its direction.
In addition to rainbows and smallmouths, I’ve caught dace on shad darts, and chubs. One time, my friend Hackl, fishing in waders near two other shad fishermen and opposite me in my canoe, overheard this dialogue while my rod was bent and throbbing:
“That guy across the river is really catching ’em.”
“What does he know that we don’t know?”
This is what I knew that they did not know: the fish on my line was a sucker.
The strangest catch I have ever reeled in on a shad dart was a shad scale and a gypsy-moth caterpillar. For a couple of seconds, I felt a shad on the line in the middle of the river. Then the shad was gone. As the dart came in through the fast current, it felt odd—the smallest bit heavy. Up out of the water came the impaled shad scale, the caterpillar alive and clinging to it. The shad had been foul-hooked, nicked in the side. The hooked scale, coming toward me through the water, had been seized by the caterpillar, swimming in the river.
One morning around the end of May, I was fishing a brightpink dart and quickly netted three roe shad. A fourth strike came, a succession of thumps on the line. It felt just like a shad, so I was really surprised when it came in close: a writhing American eel. American eels are not lampreys. Long narrow fish with gills, fins, backbones, air sacs, and ribs, they are delicious. Nevertheless, they look like snakes and have razor teeth. The hook was in firm and I had no inclination to remove it. After hoisting the eel into the canoe, I picked up a pair of scissors and snipped the line.
Eels are everywhere in the river, in and around the big rocks. A drop of blood will convene them. That evening, cleaning shad, I was sitting on a flat rock surrounded by flowing, shallow water. I had dropped the giblets into the water. Now, with the shad on a filleting board, I slid a knife blade along the backbone, slicing off a fillet. I leaned over, reached into the river, and began to wash the fillet. Like a flash of lightning, an eel came up and grabbed it, tore it right out of my hands, and started off with it. I picked up the filleting board, leaped off the boulder, and smacked the eel. The eel gave back the fillet.
TWELVE
THE SHAD CITY
My grandfather was a publisher in Philadelphia who bought his shad from a street vendor and took them home wrapped in the morning Inquirer. Some of the vendors were women who carried shad in osier baskets on their heads. Others had carts and wagons. As they moved along the city streets, they cried out, “Shad-e-o! Shad-e-o!” It was the Philadelphia yodel. This was before and after the start of the twentieth century. Shad skiffs, powered by oars and sails, worked the nets of the Delaware estuary, and sold their fish to lay boats, which took them to Philadelphia. Farmers in their wagons with teams of horses were among th
ose who picked up fish at the river and carried them into town to sell. In New York City, vendors carrying tin horns sold Hudson River shad out of two-wheeled pushcarts. They would sound the horn three times and then yell, “Fresh shad!” De Voe’s “Market Assistant” (1867) claimed that Connecticut River shad were “known by their superior size, length, square-shaped back, and a fatter fish.” But appreciation in greater Philadelphia seemed to soar a little higher than it did anywhere else, with the result that the American shad related to Philadelphia as the cod did to Boston.
This was, after all, the city of Stewed Shad à la Mode de Touraine, of Shad à la Soyer en Bordure, of Shad à la Sainte-Menehoulde , of Shad Pittsburgh Vert Pré. In “The American Angler’s Book,” published in Philadelphia in 1864, Uncle Thad Norris had noted that “the shad is held in greater estimation by the epicure than by the angler,” and had gone on to say, “It is considered by many … the most delicious fish that can be eaten. Fresh Salmon, or a Spanish Mackerel, or a Pompano may possibly equal it; but who can forget the delicate flavor and juicy sweetness of a fresh shad, broiled or ‘planked,’ hot from the fire, opened, salted and peppered, and spread lightly with fresh May butter?” He might have added that an undershirt would taste good prepared in that manner.
In 1901, Louis N. Megargee, author and publisher, wrote in his Philadelphia periodical Seen and Heard, “A Philadelphian has a right to talk about shad, because only in and near Philadelphia are the delights of the fish appreciated, and only in and near Philadelphia is it ever properly prepared for gastronomic delight … There’s only one way to cook a shad. Take her squirming out of the water, run with her to an open fire, clean her quickly, nail her on a thick hickory board, stand her in front of a fierce blaze and continually baste her with the finest gilt-edge butter until she is of golden brown color. That is the whole story; nothing remains but the eating.”
In his 1908 paper read before the Bucks County Historical Society, Dr. J. Ernest Scott said, “Do you ask why the shad of the upper Delaware are the best in the world? It is largely because this stream has no mud. It is practically rock bottom from its source to its mouth.” Calling the Delaware’s shad “a gastronomic luxury” preëminent “in all those qualities that please the eye and tickle the palate of the epicure,” he described the feverish anticipation created by “the approaching spring campaign against the finny hosts when the vernal sun shall have begun to take the chill from the waters of this fitful river.”
In his December, 1916, article in the “Transactions of the American Fisheries Society,” Charles Minor Blackford of Virginia reflected Uncle Thad Norris’s theme minus the Philadelphia prejudice, praising the taste of red snapper, pompano, bluefish, weakfish, Spanish mackerel, hake, haddock, and cod, before saying, “Without disparaging these or the equally luscious fishes of the Great Lakes and the Pacific, it may be safely said that the veritable king of food fishes is a denizen of our waters, for there is probably no fish on earth that surpasses the shad in all the qualities that go to make up an ideal food fish.”
By then my mother, who was born in 1897, was in college, and all those spring evenings when she had greeted her father coming in the door with his bundled shad were essentially in the past. In the future, though, were grandchildren, and more wrapped shad. My cousin Billy Russell hated shad. Grandfather said to Billy, “The density of thy ignorance is appalling, child. Don’t worry about the bones. Forget them. The fish is good.” Billy didn’t forget them. But he liked shad roe with bacon, as we all did, I think. My grandparents had a son and four daughters, whose children grew up on shad roe and shad.
If I may digress for a few paragraphs, the inside of my grandparents’ house can be said to have resembled the interior of a shad, with cattle horns protruding everywhere as if they were the curling tips of bones. If someone like Daniel Boone had come into my grandparents’ house and hung up his powder horn, he would have had a very hard time finding it when he was ready to leave. Their place was a Philadelphia Victorian at the edge of the city, with a vestibule that led into a kind of atrium—a squarish hall, in part a sitting room, through which other rooms opened. You might not have noticed the ruby-glass window, the coal-burning fireplace, the grandfather clock, the stairway bending around the clock, because the furniture in that most trafficked part of the house—the American box settle, the library table, the sofa, the clothespole, and miscellaneous stools—had been lovingly handmade with such a liberal use of cattle horns that the vestibule, atrium, and front parlor had the combined effect of a condensed stampede.
In a chair beside the arch to the dining room, my grandfather sat in the evening, reading the Evening Bulletin. The legs of the chair were cattle horns, tips down, touching the floor. There were no armrests, but behind his head and shoulders was an intricacy of multiple horns. Next to him was the library table, its two levels separated and supported by horns, its four legs concatenating so many horns that they looked like gill rakers. Across the back of the sofa in the front parlor were tier on tier of horns. In the vestibule was the American box settle with a mirror above the bench and protruding horns running up the two sides and across the top. You hung your hat, your scarf, your powder horn on the horns. A clothespole that had horns coming out of it like bones from a shad fillet was just inside the atrium door.
All these pieces were made by Joseph Palmer, a farmer at Doe Run, thirty-five miles west of the center of Philadelphia, whose daughter Laura was my mother’s mother. His farm was all-purpose, self-sufficient, with horses and cows and cannable crops, a smokehouse, chickens. Doe Run was dammed to reserve the water that turned the wheel of the mill. Joseph Palmer was, among many things, an energetic woodworker in various genres. Who knows when he became interested in horn furniture, but it was at least by 1892, when he made that Evening Bulletin chair as a wedding present for his daughter Laura and her husband, John Williamson Ziegler, who gave me the John and was called Will. Whittling mahogany, Joseph Palmer made pointy tenons to reinforce the horns from inside. The horns were from Texas, long and short. He evidently had them shipped to him, and may have obtained others locally. He was working in a tradition that reached into the Middle Ages, had some modest popularity in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, was shared by others in America in his time, and attracted no followers.
In the mill, Joseph Palmer also made bookboards—the hard parts of what are now called hardcover books. He sold them to Charles Ziegler, my great-uncle, who owned Franklin Bindery, and whose best customer was the John C. Winston Book and Bible Company, where my grandfather Will Ziegler was second in command. Winston published more Bibles than anyone else in the world, and at the other end of their list was my grandfather’s specialty, the hardcover equivalent of the newspaper extra, now known as the quickie. In 1912, he published a book on the Titanic while the bubbles were still numerous and the ice had yet to melt.
He would have been sitting in his chair, supported below and behind by two dozen cattle horns, when he read that the great ship went down. Being a publisher, he naturally kept a pair of pearl-handled .44-calibre Colt Peacemakers in a velvet-lined box upstairs, but even they, in the persistence of memory, are no match for the horns—the functional horns, the decorative horns, the functional-decorative festoons of horns.
No wonder he did not mind a fish festooned with bones. Somewhere in the evolution of fish-eating in America there came a moment when the inconvenience of a mass of bones generally overcame the appeal of the flesh they supported. If I had to find the moment, I would look for it in the gap between my grandfather and Billy Russell—more or less the nineteen-thirties. Before then, there were plenty of jokes about the topic but people unfussily ate the shad. In an appendix to his book “Domesticated Trout” (1872), Livingston Stone reprinted an article called “A Dissertation on Shad.” Its anonymous author not only called shad “nature’s pin cushions” but also included this general statistic: “It is calculated that during the shad season a good shad-eater will get from ten to fifteen bushels of bon
es from what shad he eats. After the last shad is destroyed, he tears off his shirt, sandpapers off the ends of the bones which are sticking out through his skin, dons clean linen, and is himself again.” And McClane’s “The Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery” says of early American settlers: “It had been wryly observed that in spring people couldn’t get their shirts off without help, because of the shad bones which stuck out of their skins like porcupine quills.”
In 1588, an English traveller reported that he saw herrings in American rivers “some of the ordinary bignesse of ours in England, but the most part farre greater, of eighteene, twentie inches, and some two foote in length and better … and in best season were found to be most delicate and pleasant meate.” He was describing Alosa sapidissima, the bones of which, evidently, were not considered offputting in 1588. If you take a shad out of a river and cut the fillets off the shad and presently broil or bake them, they will rise, aromatic and golden, like fresh bread. The spiny tips of the intermusculars emerge. You eat your way down the clear middles in the orchard of bones. Picking the bones is the time-consuming part of the process. In Washington County, Maine, and elsewhere, when people say “You’ve been eating shad,” they mean “You’re late.”
Thomas Eakins of Philadelphia (1844–1916) was a photographer as well as a painter and sculptor, and he pursued photography not only as an end in itself but as a sketchbook phase in the evolution of a work on canvas. Independence Seaport Museum, in Philadelphia, has about four dozen Eakins photographs of commercial shad fishing, for the most part on the left bank of the Delaware opposite Philadelphia—hip—booted men, oared boats, haul seines flashing silver. While still in his thirties, he moved through the photographs into drawings and watercolors that culminated in oil-on-canvas as “Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River,” which is ranked—with his oarsmen in shells and his operating surgeons—on the highest level of his work. Eakins and family were very fond of planked shad.