The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  Betty and Joe’s son, Danny, moves back East from California, discovers his mother flagrante with fugitive. In visits that follow, Danny grows ever more hostile and crafty. After the drifter delivers fish to Danny’s apartment and Danny, arriving, comes upon him there, Danny suspects him of boffing his wife, Amy, as well as his mother. The parameters are now set for a family picnic featuring freshly boned grilled shad. In a park, under tall trees, Danny sets up a shad-boning race between his father and the drifter. Danny by profession is a stand-up comedian, and he easily slips into the role of sportscaster doing the play-by-play while his father and his mother’s lover bone two fillets of shad: “O.k., sports fans, our contestants are neck and neck and they’re in the home stretch. We’ve got Shadrach and Meshad Abednago, the world’s leading boners, in a shad fight to the death. Does the old guy still have it? Or the kid from nowhere, the young buck, our lucky leprechaun—will he take the day?”

  Meshad Abednago is the cuckold. He is the first finished. But wait a moment, Danny says, “Which shad’s got no bones left?”

  Meshad Abednago: “You find a bone in that I’ll give you a quarter.”

  The film has come to seem anchored in the thought that half the people in the human race, somewhere in their anatomy, have an expertly boned fillet of shad. Danny inspects his father’s fillet for bones—gently, slowly running his third finger within a slit in the fillet. He says, “Clean as a whistle.” Turning to the drifter, Danny says: “In this corner, the world champ’s challenger …” and he inserts his third finger into a slit in the other fillet, moving it slowly along. He finds a bone in the younger man’s shad, and waves the bone in his face. He takes hold of his father’s arm, lifts it, and proclaims, “The winner and still champion! The fastest boner in the East!”

  Danny tells his father, “It’s not just fish he’s been delivering, Dad. It’s not just shad that he’s been boning.” Dad dies of heart attack in the raucousness of a confession scene with his wife and her lover. “Like shad, some of us get caught, some get away,” Danny says, as he prepares to murder the drifter by slitting his throat with a boning knife. Under the closing credits, shad swim into a gill net.

  Now alone by the Delaware in falling light, having removed the fillets from a roe shad and trimmed off the rib cage, I pick up the detached head, and turn it in my hand. I’m contemplating the complexities of it, and remembering what Willy said while he held an essentially identical shad’s head in his hand in his lab. I look past the nostrils and the hard tongue far back through the wide mouth, where the several rows of very long gill rakers project like lashes from eyelids. Willy removed the gill arches, eight in all, and set them—with their long sweeping rakers, their harplike architecture—on a table. The gills, he reminded me, trap phytoplankton and simultaneously extract oxygen from water. Through the ventral aorta and branchial arteries the heart pumps blood forward into the gills. “In terms of an exchange surface,” Willy said, “it’s hard to imagine anything more wonderful than the gills of a fish.”

  Willy flipped out an eyeball and the lens stood alone on the table—spherical, a pure crystal pea. He remarked that a human lens is elliptical because of a change in refractive index between air and the watery cornea. Achieving focus, both the cornea and the lens bend incoming light. The fish lens must be spherical because there is no change in refractive index between water and cornea. The lens has to bend the incoming light by itself. The shad’s retina has twin cones—an unusual type of visual cell found only in certain teleost fishes. Cones are associated with high visual acuity and color vision, and the exclusive presence of cone cells in the retinas of shad is additional evidence, Willy said, that shad are very visual animals. “The huge optic tectum, the big optic lobes, the big cerebellum, tell you that this fish uses vision and hearing and lateral-line sense as the primary sensory modalities. Olfaction is not its primary sensory modality. The brain is relatively large for a teleost fish. This fish takes in a lot of sensory information.”

  He exposed the brain, removed it, and addressed it with the nosepiece of a microscope. It was like white marble with narrow red streaks. He pointed out and described the “two fine, fine projections—maybe half a millimetre in diameter—that go from the air sac forward into the back of the skull through openings called foramina.” There, in the head, is a wide space called the bulla, where a bit of air sac also expands. Anything that vibrates the main stretch of air sac in the body cavity causes vibration in the bulla as well—not only a passing train or a rock thrown into the water but also something as subtle as the pressure from a fish nearby. “This is the exquisitely sensitive hearing system that clupeids have,” Willy said. “Clupeids can hear high-frequency sounds, and sounds at greater distances. They are particularly aurally sensitive.”

  I asked him to review the biological physics of a train going past a school of shad, an event that causes them to turn into seismometers, register 8.8 on the Richter scale, and ignore the presence of shad darts.

  “The fish is detecting the train in three different ways,” he said. “The pressure wave that comes through the water is sufficient to move the body of the fish relative to its otoliths, the stony structures that lie inside the vestibular system in the ear. Those things are denser than the body of the fish, they have more inertia than the fish, and they’re just sitting there balanced on some little specialized hair cells—up on the tips of those hair cells. The body of the fish is hit by a pressure wave that moves the body of the fish, physically, while the otoliths stay in the same place, more or less. That’s detected through the hair cells. The brain can process that information as an impinging pressure wave. There are two other methods. The pressure wave hits the side of the fish and presses water into the lateral-line canals differentially on one side versus the other. Water flowing into a canal passes hair cells that lie in the neuromast organs in the canal, and the brain can interpret that as a pressure wave on the fish. The third way is through the air sac. Whenever you have a pressure wave passing through water, it will pass through the body of the fish, and the air sac will decrease in volume. As the wave passes, the air sac will increase in volume. It will increase and decrease in volume at the frequency of the sound. If it’s a thousand-hertz sound, the fish’s swim bladder is going to vibrate at a thousand cycles per second. The pressure wave from the train has been transferred to the water from the ground. If you bang on the side of a sink, you can generate a pressure wave. You haven’t touched the water. That’s what the train is doing. It’s banging on the side of the river.”

  The English anatomist Peter Forey, who works on fishes in the Department of Paleontology at the Museum of Natural History, in London, happened to be in the lab and watching while Willy dissected the head, and heard Willy remark that a shad’s lateral-line system is not under the skin of the body but entirely in the head, a characteristic of herrings that is most unusual among fishes. Peter Forey asked if he could borrow the head for a bit. Willy handed it over. Peter injected the bright-silver cheek with black ink. It filled the canals that comprise the lateral line—the supraorbital canal, the infraorbital canal, the preopercular canal, the mandibular canal, the otic canal. Now sketched in the bright-silver face was a black dendritic pattern—intricate, feathery, like a very good drawing of nerves. “These are the canals that respond to pressure waves,” Peter said. “The neuromasts in the canals are like the cells in our inner ear. They respond to sound and the vibration of other fishes. They are particularly important to schooling fishes, which have to keep contact with one another.”

  Finally, by the Delaware River, my fish “clean,” I hold up the head, and turn it once more in my hand. I give it the long Yorick, then throw it far into fast water.

  SIXTEEN

  CATCH-AND-RELEASE

  One hour without shad. Two hours. Fishing on the river, almost always alone, you have no difficulty finding enough time to talk to yourself. You cast, you think ahead, you cast, you remember, you cast, you argue. Under the metronomic motions
, you argue with yourself, and with others, in dialogue that rises through the mind on contradictory vectors. You remember things you have read. You will look them up later.

  On the Pennsylvania side, May 23rd, I bring in a fish—the largest so far this year. The big roe shad shines up my day, if not her own. Three hundred thousand eggs are out of the river. She has lived five years and was meant to end up spawning some reasonable percentage of three hundred thousand offspring; instead, she is on her way to a plastic bag, her eggs to a plastic tub.

  The roe that may go to the tickling of a single palate for one meal would be capable of development into thousands of lusty fishes that, even without a miracle, might feed the multitude.

  —DR. J. ERNEST SCOTT, Bucks County Historical Society, 1908

  Has it ever occurred to you, sir, when you eat one of a pair of fried shad-roes for breakfast, how many shad you consume in embryo? If the roe is from a good-sized fish, certainly not less than twenty-five thousand. O thou piscivorous Leviathan! thou has devoured in germ, at a single meal, and merely as a relish to thy coffee, a hundred thousand pounds of fish … But quiet thy conscience, gentle monster, for with all the chances of hatching, and the dangers to which the shadlings are exposed, it is doubtful if the eggs thou hast swallowed would have produced more than two or three four-pound shad at the end of three years.

  —THADDEUS NORRIS, Lippincott’s Magazine, 1869

  Keeping a single female may mean reducing the spawn by a half-million eggs! Fried shad roe is delicious, but nothing tastes that good.

  —ROBERT ELMAN, Fly Fishing Quarterly, 1992

  I have a suggestion for Dr. Scott, Mr. Elman, and Uncle Thad. Don’t fry it. Place it on a bed of bacon in a cast-iron skillet. Cover. Cook very low and very slow.

  Cast. Remember. Cast. React. Why am I standing here doing this? Robert Hughes has reminded us that fishing is a jerk on one end of a line waiting for a jerk on the other. Thomas McGuane has called it “an act of racial memory,” evoking the atavistic mission of the hunter-gatherer. Howell Raines has written that the ethos of the hunter-gatherer does not always travel well, especially if it is flying to Jackson Hole with a three-hundred-dollar rod. “In my view, the people who fish do so because it seems like magic to them,” Raines says—magical enough to have inspired him to call his book “Fly Fishing Through the Mid-Life Crisis.” It is like “pulling a rabbit out of a hat … Fish in the water represent pure potential … To get them to bite something connected to a line and pull them into our world is managing a birth that brings these creatures from the realm of mystery into the world of reality. It’s a kind of creation.” One might prefer the hunter-gatherer. In any case, Raines is crafting rationale, a challenging assignment for a catch-and-release fisherman. If you like to eat fresh fish, you might like to catch them yourself. That and the fact that fishing has the driving force of a treasure hunt is enough to put you in the stream. You don’t need patience—the trait with which anglers are said to be most endowed. When I go fishing, I don’t take patience with me, having none to take. My daughter Martha is without patience, too, yet she can write novels because her desire to complete the composition overrides her impatience. I can stand in the river three hours catching nothing. Anticipation keeps me there, never patience—anticipation, and the beauty of the scene. Raines ventures also into fishing as religion, the fish as the symbol of Christ, and he says, “I begin to wonder if having fish shapes around me is a way to stay in touch with the ideas of Jesus without having to go near the people who do business in his name.”

  Mainly, people seem to fish for the fight—shad fishermen manifestly included. In videos and in print, they mention primarily “the fighting ability of the American shad,” carried out in “drag-defying escape attempts highlighted by aerial displays.” Releasing a videoed shad, a fisherman says, “Go back and fight another day,” and refers to it fondly as “the fightingest fish on the East Coast.” From the New York Times to New Jersey Outdoors, shad writers across the seasons, in myriad publications, pile up the fight montage:

  “Shad have seemingly limitless energy. They make screeching runs and spectacular jumps and dogged, throbbing dives into the depths of the river.”

  “ … a hard-fighting species available to all who can afford a freshwater fishing license.”

  “Hard-fighting game fish.”

  “ … when fighting a shad …”

  “They make hard drag-sizzling runs, and perform aerial acrobatics similar to the prestigious salmon.”

  “The shad is a great rod-and-reel fish, a really strong fighter.”

  “Shad are hard and determined fighters that do not come easily to net.”

  “The sea-run spawner’s fight was sparked with all the desperate, procreative amperage of springtime.”

  “She had put up a typically beautiful fight.”

  “They battle valiantly.”

  So far so true, if not correct. A shad, right enough, is a five-pound tarpon.

  What all those writers were aiming to say has been put this way by Thomas McGuane: “The fish burned off fifty or sixty yards, sulked, let me get half of it back, then began to run again, not fast or hysterical, but with the solid, irresistible motion of a Euclid bulldozer easing itself into a phosphate mine.” When McGuane, in “The Longest Silence,” says of sea trout that “they bring an oceanic rapacity to the smaller world of the river,” he could as well be describing shad.

  “Fighting: This is the fun part,” writes Peter Kaminsky in “Fishing for Dummies.” “Having a fish on is the fun part of fishing. That tug. That pushing and head-shaking and throbbing. These are the prime thrills of fishing. It’s you against the fish, and the fish is in his element … Win or lose, the fight is always a thrill. Learn to savor it.”

  In the Toronto Daily Star, on June 10, 1922, there was this from Ernest Hemingway: “If you are lucky, sooner or later there will be a swirl or a double swirl where the trout strikes and misses and strikes again, and then the old, deathless thrill of the plunge of the rod and the irregular plunging, circling, cutting up stream and shooting into the air fight the big trout puts up, no matter what country he may be in.” In “Islands in the Stream” (1970), Hemingway described a hooked dolphin: “He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. It jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear …”

  The acrobatics of its fear.

  Enter the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—the campaigners, protesters, and writers of Internet pages that say, among other things, “Scientific reports from around the world substantiate the fact that fish feel pain.”

  Although they may not be able to scream out in pain, fish have the same capacity for suffering and the same right to our compassion as do dogs, cats, and other human beings.

  The poet Byron said it best: “[T]he art of angling [is] the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended sports.”

  Driving toward a river, you might pass a large billboard featuring a dog with a fishhook in its lip, and the message:

  IF YOU WOULDN’T DO THIS TO A DOG, WHY DO IT TO A FISH? FishingHurts.com

  FishingHurts.com is a production of PETA.

  Driving toward another river, you pass the six-foot block letters of another PETA billboard:

  FISHING: THE CRUELEST FORM OF HUNTING

  It has been asserted that PETA has been behind scuba-diving saboteurs who drive fish away from fishing tournaments, behind vigilantes who flail river pools with lengths of bamboo, behind strongarms who heave rocks to delete an angler’s presentation. Bill Hilts has written in New York Sportsman, “PETA has alleged ties with the Animal Liberation Front, a group that’s being investigated.”

  PETA has campaigned against “the hidden cruelty behind Britain’s traditional Fish and Chips.”

  Watching television news, I saw a PETA representative tell an interviewer that Fishkill, New York, 12524, should be required to change its name. There were sc
enes of central Fishkill. Incredulous barbers. But in every sense the campaign was deadly serious. The PETA person was young. She was slender to the point of endangerment. She had a firmly downturned mouth that may never have smiled. The interviewer said earnestly that Fishkill, on the Hudson, was a seventeenth-century Dutch settlement; in Dutch, the word “kill” means “channel,” “creek,” or “stream.” On the young woman’s face, there was no change of expression. Kill meant kill at PETA.

  It could be said that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are in flat-out disagreement with God, for did God not say “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea”? That is what translators said, says PETA. When translators chose “dominion,” the word they were seeking was “stewardship.” PETA’s home page includes the link Jesusveg.com and the headline JESUS WAS A VEGETARIAN. While PETA claims that “there is strong evidence suggesting that Jesus was a vegetarian,” the loaves and fishes story might suggest otherwise. Before this thought can cross your mind, PETA moves in to say, “There is strong evidence that this story did not originally include fish.” In Matthew 16:9-10, Mark 8:19-20, and John 6:26, Jesus refers only to bread. Jesus spoke in Aramaic. The Gospels were written generations later. The oldest that have come down to us are fourth-century versions in Greek, and the Greeks added the fish. Saith PETA.