by Bill Heavey
I said nothing of my concern. Paula and Gordon had each been at this a good many years, still had ten fingers apiece, and weren’t complaining. Besides, I was determined to learn the skill of filleting. Learning to eat wild, I realized, involved more than just the acquisition and the eating. There was some important groundwork in between. Plenty of people can catch a fish. But filleting fish was a keystone in what I’d already come to think of as “separator knowledge,” my name for those skills or information by which one group of human beings distinguishes itself from others. I first formulated this idea right after college while working part-time in an after-school care program. I was twenty-two years old and was considering, among other pipe dreams, a career in teaching. For some reason, I prided myself on the notion—completely untested—that I had a knack for connecting with kids. One day a six-year-old boy on the playground approached. He said, “Bill, do you watch Dukes of Hazzard?” referring to a then-popular TV show. Almost before I’d finished answering in the negative—I’d intended to follow up by asking what he liked about the show—he was already walking away. He was interested in conversing only with others who loved a television show about two good ol’ boys and their extremely hot cousin, Daisy, as they evaded Boss Hogg, the corrupt Hazzard County commissioner, in an orange 1969 Dodge Charger R/T. If you did love that show, there was potential for a deep connection. If not, there wasn’t. In much the same way, I could see that my world was becoming a place where you fall on one side or the other of knowing how to fillet a perch or fletch an arrow or follow a deer trail.
The filleting tutorial, per Gordon, went like this: First, you got a safe grip on the fish, because a dead perch could hurt you. Its dorsal fin has nine spiky spines that can inflict nasty little puncture wounds unless laid flat against the body. You then clamped the head to your cutting board with your off hand, dorsal fin toward you, and, starting just behind the gill, you sliced into the body of the fish until you reached the backbone. Without removing the blade, you turned it ninety degrees in the direction of the tail and cut along the backbone, severing the rib bones, all the while keeping the blade as close as possible to the spine. The closer to the spine, the more meat you got. To get the best knife angle on the spine, the one that yielded the most flesh, it was best to position your cutting hand below the level of the fish, which meant moving the fish to the edge of the working surface. Most of the meat on a fish is in the upper half—measured lengthwise—of its body. The lower half mostly holds organs and viscera. If you were doing it right, you’d notice a convex bend in your blade as you pressed down to fillet, conforming to the humped shape of the fish’s body. Fillet knives are designed to be flexible for just this purpose, and that bend meant you were doing it correctly. After your blade exited at the tail, you flipped the fish and repeated the two cuts.
At this point you had two lengths of fish detached from the body, scales still on. The skeletal body and its contents went into the gut bucket—gently, as it was considered bad form to splash guts on your coworkers. Next you moved on to deboning and skinning. You laid the fish skin side down, looking and probing with your (numb) fingers for the ends of the severed rib bones. Then you slid your blade beneath them and cut them away. The last step was the greased pig contest of fish cleaning, removing the skin. The difficulty here arose from the fact that you’d already disposed of every part of the fish you could get a grip on. Paula solved this problem by pinning the skin to the board with the point of a second knife, but I had only one and had to manage as best I could with my fingers. I could find no good way to do this, and it was so frustrating I briefly considered using my teeth. If and when you somehow did get a grip, the counterintuitive trick, according to Gordon, was to move the fish rather than the knife. You pulled the fish against the blade. “You lose a lot more meat if you move the knife,” he said. “Don’t ask me why because I don’t know. But the best way is to keep the knife in place and just sorta saw that skin back and forth a little while you pull.”
After you’d deboned and skinned one fillet, you did the same with the other. And then, from a fish that came to the boat weighing three-quarters of a pound or so, you had two boneless slivers of alabaster flesh—either of which you could have swallowed in one large bite. And then you picked up another fish and did it all over again.
Fish cleaning required the full engagement of those parts of the brain governing small motor skills and personal safety. While this left a lot of mental real estate open, it didn’t lead to much conversation. Except for Paula, of course, who is generally uncomfortable with silence in company, and thus kept up a running feud with the hornets that were invariably attracted to fish guts, and especially to those of the fish under one’s knife at any given moment. I ignored the wasps, hoping they would return the favor. With Paula, it was war. While friendly and fearless toward animals normal humans fear—I’d seen her pick up a nasty-tempered three-foot brown water snake with perfect equanimity—she hated hornets. Any landing on her cutting board or hovering close enough got flattened by a deft slap with the back of her hand, followed by a gleeful, “Take that, motherfucker!”
For me, cleaning fish—a task both repetitive and exacting—induced a trancelike state. Time flattened out and the world shrank to the cut I was making at that moment. There was something simultaneously gross and pure, sacred and profane, about the task. The blood and slime were predictably repellent, of course. But the meat itself had a purity that at times seemed almost holy. It was immaculate, fine, and absolutely uniform in texture. It was amazingly clean stuff. I knew this about fish, of course. Everyone who has ever eaten fish knows it. And yet it was as if I’d never understood how utterly the flesh of a fish differs from that of a mammal, with all of a mammal’s veins, fat, and connective tissue. Fish made meat seem gross by comparison. In the same way I was struck by the dichotomy of the ultimate destination of these fish, and of eating itself. On the one hand, of course, it was the most natural thing in the world. We emerged from the womb sucking and continued the habit until the end. Stomachs, like Neil Young’s rust, never slept. Our bodies required a continuous supply of other bodies, both animals and plants. It suddenly struck me as a disgusting little business, really, all this eating and excreting. It was a wonder we had any spiritual impulses at all.
Finally we could see the bottom of the cooler. We parceled out the last fish and piled the last fillets into the other cooler. Paula took the knives and cutting boards to hose them down behind the boathouse. I took the gut bucket and walked a hundred yards to the footbridge over the creek where it enters the cove. I hoisted it over the railing and dumped it. The water streaked red and the bones and skin swirled as they washed away and disappeared into the river. The first time Gordon had told me to go dump the gut bucket here, I thought it was a rare act of irresponsibility on his part. That was before he explained that fish guts nourished nearly every organism in the river. The fry of every fish ate them, as did a host of aquatic insects and microorganisms, all of which belonged in a healthy river. I’d since learned that one of the tricks biologists were using out west to repopulate salmon rivers was to “plant” carcasses of hatchery-raised salmon in them as food to nurture the few salmon fry that were born wild.
We divided up the fillets—we’d cleaned more than a hundred fish—and went our separate ways. It was still light out when I got home, but I felt as though I’d been awake for two days. Later I’d freeze the fish as Gordon had instructed. He and Paula caught fish when they were plentiful in order to eat them all year, and the process had turned them into zealots about freezing techniques. They packaged fish in meal-sized portions in pint ziplock bags. You put the fish into just enough salted water to cover them, squeezed the air from the bag, and wrote the species and date on the outside with a Sharpie. Bags were frozen in a cardboard box to achieve a brick shape, which made for space-efficient stackability. They were equally zealous about shelf life. Frozen fish less than six months old was treated as fresh. Fr
om six months to a year, the fish was still good but was usually combined with other ingredients and made into patties or—Paula’s favorite—fish loaf. After twelve months, you bit the bullet and chucked it. But I would deal with freezing tomorrow. For the moment, I stowed my rods and tackle, threw more ice into the cooler, and stripped naked at the top of the basement stairs. I threw my clothes down and headed for the hottest shower I could stand, trying in vain to scour the fish smell from every pore. The last thing I wanted was perch for dinner. I had a glass of wine and spaghetti with some microwaved Newman’s Own Five Cheese Sauce. Within half an hour I was asleep.
It was nearly a week later before I got around to preparing some of my own perch for dinner. The delay in cooking my catch had been that I wasn’t the only one who was going to be eating it. My daughter Emma, who lives half the time with me and half the time with Jane, her mother and my ex-wife, would be dining as well. And Emma, ten years old at the time, could be something of a tough sell when presented with new foods. I needed the time to ponder my approach.
Either baking or broiling was the healthy choice, of course, but frying seemed the way to go with a girl who routinely begged to be taken to McDonald’s. Frying it would be. I thawed some fillets and patted them dry. It was easy identifying the ones I’d filleted. Mine were the ones that looked as if they’d been hacked to death in a knife fight. I shook them all up in a bag with cornmeal, paprika, onion powder, salt, and pepper. I poured canola oil into my biggest skillet and stuck a candy thermometer in it, waiting until the thermometer read 370 degrees. I knew this was the magic temperature from having observed Joe Fletcher at the boathouse’s annual fish fry. He’d have twenty gallons of oil on a propane burner that sounded like a fighter jet taking off. No fish went in until the oil hit 370. You certainly couldn’t argue with the results. There had never been a bit of leftover fish at the event. The skillet was sending out little searing droplets of oil when I laid the fillets in. When they were the right shade of brown, I tonged them out onto paper towels. I mixed up my own version of tartar sauce, an ever-changing ratio of mayonnaise to ketchup with lemon juice and minced sweet pickle. Somewhere I’d read that James Beard said that Americans would eat anything if it was the right shade of orange. This was true in my case. I was a sucker for whoever did the food engineering behind Cheetos, for example. When the tartar sauce looked like a festive paint choice for a bathroom I pronounced it ready. Emma and I sat down and I plunked a crisp piece of perch on my daughter’s plate. She took one look and and announced, “I forgot to tell you I’m on a diet where I don’t eat fish.”
I knew better than to take the bait. “You know the deal, Monkalula,” I told her. “No dinner, no dessert.”
“I don’t care,” she said. We said grace and she picked up a fork and began creating a line of peas in perfect parallel with her carrots, all the while ignoring her fish. I forked up a bite of fish and dredged it in the tartar sauce. It was sweet, crunchy, and amazingly tasty. I quickly ate every bit on my plate. “You sure you’re not eating yours?” I asked. “Just try one. They’re really good. Almost like Chicken McNuggets.” She shook her head. I helped myself to hers, then got the remaining three fillets on the paper towel. By this time I was eating them with my hands. Ordinarily, I would have persisted in trying to get my child to eat. The fact that I’d never won that particular power struggle had never stopped me from engaging in it. But that night I didn’t. For one thing, I remembered something from one of the many books about “oppositional” children I’d read, which was that if you already knew that the child wasn’t going to do her homework or eat her vegetables regardless of what you did, you’d both be happier if you skipped the fight. I wish I could say that was what made the different. It wasn’t. I just wanted all the fried perch I could get.
We skipped the fight. I ate the perch. Life was good.
The white perch run ended during the last week of April. The speed (overnight) and extent (total) of the exodus was stunning. That day with Dickie and Paula was not my only big one—on another outing I had boated forty-two keepers and released at least that many undersized perch from the hole known as the White Sign, named after an old and illegible placard on a tree by the water’s edge. Three days after the big haul with Paula and Dickie, though, I went back to the scene of our triumph—same hole, same outgoing tide, fishing the same Dickie jigs—and got nothing. I pulled anchor and dropped downstream to the next hole, and the next. I might as well have been fishing my driveway.
Nobody knows how fish do this, how a multitude of creatures not known for their intellectual rigor, scattered over a wide, powerful river, coordinate their departure so precisely. It was as if all Morone americana in the Potomac had but a single mind among them, and that mind had decided to skedaddle. The desertion hurt my feelings more than I wanted to admit. I’d barely processed the revelation that these delicious fish were right under my nose and, if you put in the time, could be caught in large numbers. I’d been intent on laying in a supply that would last the summer. I’d had visions of holding a perch fry for one of the dinners that I and three other guys, friends for more than thirty years, held every month or so. I’d imagined how impressed they’d be upon learning I’d caught, cleaned, filleted, and fried the delicious fish they were enjoying. And now, nothing. “That’s perch fishing,” was all Gordon said. Easy enough for him, with sixty seasons under his belt.
I was reminded of something that happened the previous summer. Jane and I, wanting to model that divorcing parents could still be cordial toward each other, had taken Emma to the last day of the Arlington County Fair, one of Emma’s rites of summer. Tickets in hand, Em was waiting in line to get on the rickety little roller coaster. For reasons she can’t articulate, that ride has been a touchstone of Emma’s childhood, the one ride she never misses. The small mob of waiting children was about to swarm the coaster’s cars when a distant rumble sounded. Thunder. Within seconds, the fire marshal had closed the roller coaster and all other outdoor rides. Emma’s face went red and hot tears raced down her cheeks. Jane and I tried to divert her with the Ping-Pong ball goldfish toss, the petting zoo, even funnel cake—something we’d agreed beforehand to veto. She remained inconsolable. Next we did something so dumb it bordered on child abuse: we tried to reason with her. Thunderstorms, we explained, are part of nature, and nature is beyond the control of any person—her parents, the man who ran the roller coaster, even the fire marshal who closed the rides down. “I don’t care!” she wailed. “I hate nature!”
I hadn’t really empathized at the time. If anything I’d been amused by her words, which seemed to imply that nature had feelings that could be hurt. Suddenly, I understood the depth of her sense of betrayal. The white perch had been my roller coaster, and when it suddenly shut down, I hated nature, too. Little did I know that another obsession, equally potent, was swimming my way.
FRIED PERCH
8 fillets from white or yellow perch*
(*This is the part where your typical recipe says “or similar, white-fleshed fish.” That’s bullshit. Nothing tastes like perch and if you’re not making this recipe with it, you might as well give up and go with Mrs. Paul’s Crunchy Fish Sticks. In that case, you’ll be eating pollock, a few spices, and the requisite load of chemicals: Sodium Tripolyphosphate, Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamine Mononitrate, MSG, and something called “Tbhq,” aka Tertiary Butylhydroquinone, a form of butane used as a preservative. I’ve never tried to light a frozen fish stick, but it might be worth a try the next time you’re short of candles.)
2/3 cup unbleached flour
1/3 cup cornmeal
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon milk
Old Bay Seasoning or salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika (to taste)
Peanut oil (enough to fill your favorite skillet to depth of ½ inch)
Pour oil into skillet and heat over medium-high flame until a candy/deep fry thermometer reads
370 degrees F. Getting the oil to this temperature is key.
While oil is heating, mix flour, cornmeal, and Old Bay, or seasonings of your choice in a ziplock bag. In a bowl, beat egg thoroughly with the milk.
Pat fish dry with paper towels. Dip each filet first into egg and let the excess “slide” off before placing in ziplock bag. Overly “wet” fish will not fry up crispy.
Place half the filets in the bag and double-check that the zipper is indeed closed (I speak from experience.) Shake and rotate the ziplock bag until filets are coated. Remove filets from bag, shake off excess and—carefully—place into the hot oil. (Tongs, gloves, and safety goggles are recommended for this.) Cook for a couple of minutes on each side or until desired color is obtained. Remove, drain on paper towels. Eat immediately with pre-made Bill’s Beyond Tartar Sauce, an ever-changing ratio of mayonnaise, ketchup, and sweet pickle relish.
Chapter Two:
A “Savory Little Fellow” Rediscovered
“Odd” hardly begins to do justice to my relationship with Paula. We bonded over a shared love of deer, and that has been a constant. Paula knows more about deer than anybody I’ve ever met. She’s also a “character” and has been fodder for any number of my Field & Stream columns. She’s aware of all of this and feels free to ask for favors in return. She’ll ask to be driven somewhere—Paula doesn’t drive and for a long time didn’t even have a photo I.D. Once, she called on a Saturday, told me to stop what I was doing, drive to Fletcher’s, pick up a forty-pound box of frozen herring, and store it in my freezer for a few months. Which I did. This element of mutual exploitation is, paradoxically, what allowed us to become close. It afforded a safe boundary for the relationship. Our closeness is a prickly thing, studiously unacknowledged, not exactly intimacy and not exactly not. Call it a certain understanding. Whatever it is, we’ve been present in each other’s lives for so long now that I’m no longer sure exactly when we met.