Blues

by John Hersey

  S: Am I right that we’re getting farther out on Middle Ground today than last time?

  F: Yes, on an ebbing current the blues often move out to the west. Then they’ll work along the shoal against the current, so that at slack water, at dead low tide, they’ll be back up at this end.

  S: You said the other day that it would take me a while to see—I forget your exact words—what “beautiful machines” the blues are?

  F: Mechanisms. It was Dr. Baird who called them machines—“animated chopping machines.”

  S: What do I look for?

  F: I’ll tell you. But first let me get the lines out. Silversides have begun to show up as bait, so I’ll use these ounce-and-a-half blue Rebels for lures today.

  S: Is that what silversides look like?

  F: No, these are much bigger. They’re painted up to look like little herring—or baby bluefish, for that matter—more for human eyes than blues’ eyes, I’d say. What matters to the fish is a lifelike swimming movement of the lure in the water, not its cosmetic get-up. Do you remember I told you that when a blue is crammed full of small fry, it will hit larger fish? That’s why the Rebel so often works.

  Now. The beauty parts of blues. I guess we have to start at the beginning: The nations of fishes are far more numerous and various than the nations of man. And far more diversely and garishly embellished and fancified. Who among us would dare to go to the office dressed up like a blue and green and rose and silver-dotted and red-finned opah? The bluefish is not so brilliantly marked as that; it has other distinguishing gifts, though. There are about twenty thousand different species of living fishes in the seas—nearly twice as many as there are kinds of birds, and five times as many as there are mammals. To know which fish you’re talking about, you have to have noticed a whole series of progressively complex differentiating traits. Blues belong, first of all, to the class of teleost fishes: bony fishes, as opposed to others whose armatures are entirely of cartilage—sharks, rays, skates, mantas, chimaeras, and such; these have no skeletal bones at all. Next, blues belong to the very large acanthopterygian superorder, defined by such things as that its head bone is connected to its pectoral bone; its gill opening is in front of its pectoral fin; it lacks a duct to its air bladder; and so on. Next, blues belong to the order of Perciformes, or perchlike fishes, defined, again, by their common arrangement and placement of fins, and other shared physical characteristics; the order includes perches, sea basses, pompanos, dolphins, porgies, and many other fish families. And, finally, it happens to be the only member of its own family within the order, and it was given the Latin name Pomatomus saltatrix by the great taxonomist Linnaeus. When we catch one, I’ll show you why that name.

  Speaking of names, blues are called different things in different places. Around here, when they’re babies they’re called snappers, and when they’re about a year old some people call them tailors. Vineyarders call three- to five-pounders rats. Elsewhere the bluefish is called chopper, greenfish, snap mackerel, horse mackerel, skip mackerel, and skipjack—there are also other fishes called skipjack tuna and skipjack herring, which get their names from their habit of seeming to skim on the surface as they chase smaller fish, as blues sometimes do. In Africa the blue is called elf, shad, fatback, and anchoa, and by various African names, of course; all sizes are called tailor in Australia. The name tailor may have come from the fact that with their sharp teeth and powerful jaws they can cut their way out of fishermen’s nets.

  S: You said “elsewhere”—Africa, Australia. Are they in all the oceans?

  F: No, their distribution is spotty. They appear at different times of year on our east coast, from Nova Scotia to Texas. They’re caught off Cuba, Venezuela, and from Brazil down to Uruguay; off the Azores; from Senegal and Angola to South Africa; in the Mediterranean and Black seas; off the eastern coast of southern Africa and around Madagascar; off the Malay Peninsula and Tasmania; and along southern and western Australia. But never in most other places; never off the coast of northern Europe, never off the whole west coast of North and South America.

  S: Why not?

  F: No one knows. And think about this, Stranger. We know a bit about the life in the sea, but very little, really. There are great mysteries in the oceans. I don’t need to tell you that knowledge has exploded in this century. We know an astonishing amount about the structure of the atom. We’ve made it our business to find out a great deal about the atom because we think we may have some uses for the fire in its heart—in its nucleus, where an expectancy of great power constantly vibrates. We have isolated its electrons, its protons, photons, neutrons, quarks, “strong force,” “weak force.” Astonishing knowledge. We have taken understanding of many “practical” matters, as we think of them, very far. We’re spending billions on research about the heavens, for good and for ill. But our knowledge of our fellow creatures in the watery two-thirds of our earth’s surface: rudimentary, crude, maybe dangerously limited. It’s time we—

  S: Hold it! There’s a fish on my line!

  F: Steady….Easy….That’s good. Say, you learn fast.

  Let me just get the hook out. Now. Look here, while I hold this toothy thing down with my rubber glove. Pomatomus saltatrix. The first word is new Latin from two Greek words: poma, “cover,” and tomos, “cut.” Do you see this prominent dark line on the gill cover that looks like a scar? That must have been the feature that struck Mr. Linnaeus’s eye in 1754, when he was naming our friend. The other word—well, you’ve just seen the explanation for it. Saltatrix means “leaper,” “jumper.” The salt in that word isn’t sea salt; it’s somersault salt.

  S: It was a jumper!…You may be surprised by my asking this, but do we have to go in now? Can’t we try to catch another?

  F: I think their hook is in you, Stranger. We’re fishing for food, you remember. Are you so hungry?

  S: You’re right to ask. I’m surprised at myself.

  F: Don’t worry. I understand what you’re going through. Fishing, as I said the other day, is complicated. Yes, we can catch one or two more, and give them back to the sea. I’d like, though, to put on lures with the barbs filed off the hooks, so the fish will be less apt to be wounded, if we catch any more….Let out your line. We’ll run back over the hole where we caught that one.

  S: I like it that you’re chary about the number of fish you take ashore. I gather that striped bass are a threatened species. Are you worried because bluefish are in the same trouble?

  F: No. Right now they’re thriving. I just hate hearing sport fishermen boast: “We caught thirty-four blues in two hours.” In the fishing derbies around here a few years ago, before they started distributing extra fish to the elderly, contestants used to take scads of big fish—lunkers, ten-, twelve-pounders—to the dump each evening. Imagine it. My objection doesn’t stem from compassion for bluefish. Why should I have it when they have none for each other? It’s that I hate to see the world’s food supplies willfully wasted and mismanaged. I think of the recent famine in Ethiopia. When I was a child—starving Armenians. Hungry Americans today, for that matter, with an administration in Washington that seems to think that their only problem is that they’re ignorant or lazy. I have so far three selfish reasons for caring about the proteins of the future; the reasons are named Sierra, Cannon, and Eric: my grandchildren.

  S: You said blues are thriving “right now.” What did you mean by that?

  F: Bluefish come and go in a way no one understands—another of the mysteries. They were plentiful off the New England coast in colonial times, but then from about 1764 they totally disappeared and didn’t show up again until about 1810. There were tremendous catches from 1880 to about 1905, when they dropped off again for several years. There was a sharp decline again in the forties; in 1941 almost none were caught except for a few off Maryland and Virginia. I had a rotten year out here three years ago; last year was wonde
rful. A strange thing is that the abundance cycles of bluefish are reciprocal to those of striped bass; when one species is up, the other’s down. Stripers really are terminally threatened now, though. The difference is—

  S: Fish on! Fish on my line!…

  F: Good work.

  S: This one’s bigger than the other. Can’t we keep this one and throw back the first one?

  F: The other one wouldn’t survive. It’s alive in the fish box, but it has been out of the sea too long.

  S: Will this one live? Does your getting even an unbarbed hook out hurt it?

  F: It probably doesn’t make sense to talk about pain in a fish—anthropomorphic thinking again. If it means anything to a fish, it means a signal for safety. Fish have intense responses tied to survival. If a fish is wounded, the trauma will heighten its antipredator response, but this won’t affect its response to food. There’s an account of a Greenland shark—Somniosus microcephalus, used to be caught for its liver oil—allowing itself to be stabbed repeatedly in the head while feeding on a dead whale, going right on eating. As to the memory of pain, an angler who had caught a perch told of finding himself unable to remove the hook without taking one of the fish’s eyes out of its socket with it; he threw the fish back, baited his hook with the eye, and a few minutes later caught a one-eyed fish—the very same one.

  S: What gruesome stories!

  F: I told you, fishing is complicated.

  S: But you think this one will live?

  F: I do. There’s a famous poem by Elizabeth Bishop, in which she tells about catching a huge veteran of a fish which has five old fishhooks “grown firmly in his mouth”—it has survived five times to fight again. I’ll look for the poem tonight. I try to be careful in the way I handle a fish that’s going back in the sea. These blues are tough fish. This one will live.

  S: I’m glad.

  F: I guess we’d better head in—the current’s dying out, nearly slack water, no more rip. By the way, how big would you say your fish was that we threw back?

  S: About this big.

  F: Speaking of the “strong force” and the “weak force,” did you ever notice the mysterious force of nature that pushes people’s hands apart when they’re trying to tell how big the fish was that got away? I’m not accusing you—you did pretty well. Of course you’ll have to make allowance for some growth in the next few tellings. A Maine fishing guide once said, “The only difference between a hunter and a fisherman is that the fisherman expects to be branded a liar and therefore exercises some control over his imagination.” Not always, apparently. The National Marine Fisheries Service was forced to conclude that all of the surveys it had conducted up until 1979 of the number and sizes of blues caught by sportsmen, depending as they did on the word of the fishermen themselves, were nearly a hundred percent inflated. There was a splendid philosopher and teller of tall tales here on the Vineyard, Joseph Chase Allen, he’s dead now, who swore that as a boy he’d heard a ninety-year-old man named Heroditus Vincent tell about catching blues of more than a hundred pounds. If people doubted him, Joe Allen said, Heroditus would show them the dried skull of a blue which he used to pull off the shelf on Halloween and wear over his head like a combination cap and mask to spook the kids with. Then there was the famous Emperor’s Pike, caught in a lake in Württemberg in 1497, with a copper ring through the gill cover saying the fish had been put in the lake by Frederick II in 1230. It was supposed to be nineteen feet long, and to weigh five hundred fifty pounds. An oil painting of it was said to hang in the castle of Lautern in Swabia, and its actual skeleton was preserved in the cathedral at Mannheim. Nineteenth-century scholars found some flaws in the accounts, though, maybe the wrong Frederick, wrong date. A distinguished German anatomist finally examined the skeleton and found that it had many more vertebrae than a pike could possibly have—the skeleton had been lengthened to validate the story!

  S: How big do blues get to be?

  F: Eighteen- or nineteen-pounders win the Vineyard derbies. The record blue caught in America by rod and reel weighed thirty-one pounds and twelve ounces, taken one night in 1972 off a pier at Cape Hatteras. Most blues that anglers catch weigh from three to five pounds. Off Australia blues are said to grow regularly to four and a half feet and to twenty-five pounds. As to that, there may be a little Australian enthusiasm worked in there somewhere. Unlike birds and most mammals, fish continue to grow after they’ve reached sexual maturity. This gives them a fantastic geriatric advantage. The older and larger a fish grows, the faster it can swim, so it can devour the younger of its kind. Aging birds and most animals have to face being shoved aside by more vigorous youngsters. I’ve come to a time of life when I envy old blues. Bluefish start to spawn at age two, when they’re about fourteen inches long. If the Aussies aren’t just jawing, blues grow to fifty-four inches down under. Now, if a human being continued to grow at a comparable rate, he’d get to be more than twenty feet tall and weigh half a ton. Would the Chicago Bears be interested?

  S: Would you like me to pick up the mooring?

  F: Thank you.

  S: But I thank you. These days on the water have meant a lot to me. I think back to the afternoons when I used to stand on the dock looking out and just guessing about the various kinds of life in the sea. These have been marvelous trips.

  F: Here, I’ll show you something to marvel at. Before I sliver [pronounced with a long “i”] your fish—that’s an old New England term for filleting—I’d like you to look at this: Do you see this delicate line that runs the whole length of the fish from its shoulder and along its flank to its tail? It’s called the lateral line, and it’s something that seems almost unbelievable to me. It’s a composite sensory organ. It gives the fish a sixth sense, rather like a cross between hearing and touch. What you see on the surface, if you look closely, is a series of pores through the scales, giving access to a long channel underneath, in the skin. Within the channel, which is filled with mucus, there’s a row of many clusters of tiny hair-like antennae, which send continuous messages along nerve fibers to the brain. There are, besides, similar channels on the head and face of the fish, not so easy to see.

  S: What are they for?

  F: You may well ask. Ichthyologists have been asking themselves that question for a long time. The lateral line remains an implacable mystery; human beings can only guess at its use. Marine biologists know the physiology, from dissection and observation; they can say, for example, that the sensory buds of the lateral line connect with the vagus, or tenth, cranial nerve. Marine behaviorists know from experiments that lateral lines are sensitive to vibrations in the water of extremely low frequency, about six per second, and even slower. Thus the lines are delicately responsive to tiny changes in the movement of the water around them. So the guesses are several. That the lateral lines let the fish know about the approach of predators, even from the rear, where its eyes can’t pick up the threat. Or about its own approach to prey, or to obstacles in the water—you may have noticed that fishes in an aquarium don’t bump against the glass, unless they want to. Maybe the lines help the fish in orientation. Tell it about its relation to colleagues in schooling, and let it take advantage of motions within the school to save energy, as birds flying in a V take advantage of the turbulences set up by the wing flaps of their friends. Perhaps serve as a speedometer. Perhaps help the fish to “see” in the dark. It is possible that swift messages imparted to a community of lateral lines help to cause the instantaneous shattering of a large school when a predator approaches one part of it. These gadgets are a wonder. They are unique; there are no solid analogues to them in the outside world. The sonar system that enables flying bats to judge their distance from objects in the dark differs from the lateral line in that the bats have to issue outgoing messages—squeaks which are echoed—in order to make it work. Human beings invented the so-called degaussing girdle, the electrified belt certain
ships wore in the Second World War to demagnetize them and protect them from magnetic mines. But sonar and degaussing are crude by comparison with the lateral line; they are devices with a single function. The lateral is so much more versatile and sophisticated—so much higher tech.

  S: I’ve certainly never noticed those lines on a fish before.

  F: Almost all fishes have them….

  All right, we’re ready to go in….

  [In the kitchen:] Tonight I’m going to cook the fillets by the second most basic method, and a good one it is. I skin the fish. Now I’ll make some mayonnaise in the blender—though I must admit I often just use boughten mayonnaise; but then, you’re a guest. I put some butter and chopped chives in the broiling pan and put the pan under the broiler to melt the butter and let it soak up the chive flavor—but not too long, careful, it gets black. Meanwhile I coat the meat side of the fillets with a generous slavering of the mayonnaise. Under the broiler, five inches from the flame. While the fillets are cooking, I’ll use a pair of scissors to cut up fine some frond ends of dill….Ten-minute rule….Scatter the dill fairly generously over the fillets….Le diner est servi!…

  S: Oh my!

  F: Yes, it’s good, isn’t it? The mayonnaise keeps the moisture in. Of all the ways to cook blues, Barbara likes this one best.