by John Hersey
S: What a weapon! I can’t say that you’ve eased my fear of the jellyfish.
F: I know. There are horrors in the sea, and some of them are astonishingly ingenious. I don’t want you to get the idea that human beings have a corner on amazing cruelties.
But to get back to business, we’ve got to be a bit more ingenious. That jig isn’t doing anything. Let’s try a different lure. I’ll put a Pencil Popper on. Look at it: It doesn’t look at all like a fish, does it? Just a tail-heavy white round piece of wood with a hook on it. But it works—floats, makes a fuss as you retrieve it, darts back and forth exactly like a wounded fish on the surface: an easy lunch for a blue, if we can tempt one to come up after it.
Are you bored with casting?
S: Never!
F: I went up last summer to the Stan Gibbs factory in Sagamore, on Cape Cod, where this popper was made. Wonderful New Englandy place. “Factory” is almost too grand a word for it. Just a couple of sheds in a backyard. Man turning plugs out one by one on a lathe, a setup for spray painting by hand, all very simple. As are the lures. None of the fakery of painting them up to look like scared fish. John Gibbs, Stan’s son who runs the firm, said the lures’ designs are all based on firsthand experience—the family going out fishing off the Cape, watching what fish were eating at various times of year, then figuring out how to make lures act in the water like the baits the fish were taking. The colors are—
S: Hey! There we are! Fish on!
F: On the second cast with the popper. Why didn’t I figure that out sooner? Listen: There’s much lighter line on the rod than when we troll. You’ll have to play it. The drag is set so it can take some runs and wear itself out.
S: There it goes. What speed!
F: Now gather it in some. Good. There it runs again. Take your time….
I’ll gaff it into the boat.
S: You were right the other day. It’s as if I’ve been hooked. My heart is beating so fast.
F: Here’s something strange: When a fish is under stress and fighting, its heart goes slower, not faster.
S: Now you have really given me something to envy in the bluefish.
F: Before I put your blue in the fish box, look at the way its body is countershaded, to be as nearly invisible as possible in the water: blue-green on top, just the color of the water as we see it from above, then tapering off down the body to almost white under the belly. In its world, all light comes from above. It moves like a ghost through its haunts.
S: Could I cast some more? Do you have one of these lures with the barbs filed off?
F: Sure. I’ll put one on.
S: You were saying about the lures—
F: Gibbs paints them in solid colors to simulate various fish—blue for mackerel, yellow for menhaden. You’d use the blue in the spring when the mackerel are around, yellow in summer and fall for the pogies. In general, the fisherman’s rule is: The brighter the day, the lighter in color the lure. Hence these white poppers today.
S [casting]: What sorts of bait do blues attack?
F: Early baits around here are mackerel, squid, herring, and sand eels. Then in summer, silversides, squid, menhaden, sand eels. And in the fall, silversides, menhaden, butterfish, sand eels, mackerel again, and their own young—snapper blues. Lure makers and fishermen want to “match the hatch”—present to the fish something similar to whatever they are eating at a given time. But blues, in case you haven’t already guessed it, are quirky. There are days when they apparently won’t eat anything offered to them by a human being, except it seems they can’t resist live eel, won’t eat the whole eel but just chop off a bit of tail. There are times when they’ll spurn their favorite bait, menhaden. At other times, when they’re swarming, they’ll take any lure. Joe Allen, our Vineyard tall-tale teller, vowed that one day he came up on a dragger on which a man with a wooden leg named Deuty Jones was confidently fishing for blues with rod and reel, his hook “baited with an old, used-up blue woolen sock.”
S: You’ve given me a lot of pleasure with poems you’ve shown me. What you’ve been telling me just now made me think of an old favorite of mine, John Donne’s “The Baite.” Do you know it?
F: Oh, indeed I do. It’s a favorite of mine, too—but of course it’s a lover’s poem, not really a fisherman’s poem.
S: Perhaps that’s why I like it.
F: I think it’s probably time to go in now. Do you mind?
S: Who could have imagined, before you hailed me on the dock that afternoon, that one day someone would have to ask me to desist from fishing?
F: It’s habit-forming, you know. It may even be addictive.
S: Thank you for warning me.
F [at the mooring, after having cut away one fillet]: Feel this stomach. Hard as a stone. It’s just packed. I’ll cut it open to see what’s in it.
Silversides. Look at them all. See here, some are half digested already. There wasn’t room for even one more of these little things in the stomach, yet the fish went for our popper, which is four inches long.
S: If we were blues, and if silversides were money, what would the bigger lure be?…
F [entering the kitchen]: Tonight, Barbara, I’m going to cook up something for the Stranger a little fancier than the other times. I was born in China, Stranger, so I’ll steam it this time, more or less Chinese fashion, with some Occidental adulterations. Since we’re going to steam it, I don’t need to skin the fillets; I’ll actually be adding oil. For each fillet, I cut up the white part of two scallions very fine, and cut the greens into one-inch lengths. Next I peel and chop fine a half inch of fresh ginger. (This is a smallish fillet, by the way; for a big one, from a seven- or eight-pound fish, I’d increase the ingredients proportionately.) I scatter half the scallions and ginger over a length of doubled aluminum foil big enough to take a fillet, put the fillet on it, and scatter the other half over the top of the meat. I put a tablespoon of sesame seeds in a small frying pan and brown them, just as they are, without oil, watching to make sure they don’t burn. Meanwhile, now, I mix three teaspoons of soy sauce, a tablespoon of dry sherry, a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of peanut oil, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and add half of the sesame seeds. I pour about a third of this mixture on the fillet and let it marinate for half an hour.
Shall we have a beer?…
Now I get water boiling in the steamer. Then I carefully lift the aluminum foil with the fillet into the steamer, cover, and steam over full heat, following the Canadian rule. While the fish is cooking I heat two ounces of peanut oil in a saucepan and add the rest of the soy-sauce mixture; I get this good and hot.
Fork-test the fish—perfect. I take it out, slide it on a platter, strew a few more chopped scallions and the rest of the sesame seeds over the top, and pour the hot sauce on it—with, finally, a sprinkling of coriander, which seems yearned for by the flavor of certain fish—and even, perhaps, by certain living fish. The ancient Romans used coriander seed as bait for parrotfish.
Can you eat with chopsticks? Barbara prefers a fork.
S: Chopsticks would be fine. Oh, Lord, this is wonderful.
F: Bu kechi. That’s the Chinese way of accepting compliments: “Don’t act like a guest.”
THE BAITE
by John Donne
Come live with mee, and bee my love,
And wee will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and christall brookes,
With silken lines, and silver hookes.
There will the river whispering runne
Warm’d by thy eyes, more than the Sunne.
And there th’inamor’d fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.
When thou wilt swimme in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channell hath,
Will amorously to thee swimme,
Gladder to catch thee, then thou him.
If thou, to be so seene, beest loath,
By Sunne, or Moone, thou darknest both,
And if my selfe have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.
Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legges, with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poore fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowie net:
Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest,
Or curious traitors, sleavesilke flies
Bewitch poore fishes wandring eyes.
For thee, thou needst no such deceit,
For thou thy selfe art thine owne bait;
That fish, that is not catch’d thereby,
Alas, is wiser farre than I.
July 12
FISHERMAN: Are you awake?
STRANGER: Not exactly. I’m not used to getting up at four fifteen. It’s pitch-dark.
FISHERMAN: Not quite pitch-dark. Anyway, the whole point of dawn fishing is to come out just before daybreak. The change from dark to light is what matters. During the lightening at dawn and the darkening at dusk, blues are especially voracious. They have complex clocks in them. Instead of being regulated by springs and gears, their timepieces are regulated for the most part by light and dark, and to some extent by heat and cold. Light is the strongest influence; the rhythms of their lives are set by the varying lengths of daylight through the seasons. We all have inner clocks. Yours rebels against being hauled out of bed at four fifteen in the morning. Are you a night person?
S: Yes, I most certainly am.
F: You’re an owl. I’m not. I’m a catbird. I’m at my noisiest in the morning, so this early start isn’t quite such a wrench for me as it is for you.
S: Everything on the boat is soaking wet!
F: That’s the sweet dew of the night. Wait a little while. The rising sun will cheer you up. Catching a blue will get your heart pumping.
S: I’ll believe it when it happens.
F: Look, the West Chop light is still on. The white flash out here in the “safe” arc comes every four seconds. And see Nobska over there, every six. Each in its rhythm measuring the time we have left to be alive. We must make use of it!
Bluefish use every minute. They don’t go to bed at night and go to sleep. They swim both day and night. They never stop. Tautogs—sometimes called blackfish around here—really go to sleep at night. They lie down on the bottom and sleep so soundly that you’d be able to dive down to a ten-pound fish and pick it up with your hands. But the bluefish, being a hunter, is ever ready. At night the blues’ school breaks down, and each fish swims alone, deep in the water, in a beautiful slow drift. If a light is flashed and it sees bait, it begins feeding right away. In general, though, the night is a time to save energy for the hunting of the day.
Look: There’s a glimmer of light to the east.
Now, here is why we’re out at this hour: During the night, fish of the size we’ve been catching glide drowsily along at a rate of something less than seven inches per second. They idle all night without eating. They become famished. A few minutes before dawn—just about now—their inner alarm clock goes off, and they begin to rove. In the first ten minutes after the onset of light in the sky there is a sudden upsurge in their swimming speed; they have started at once to range for food. Twenty minutes after daybreak they put on the greatest spurt of the twenty-four hours and swim between twenty and thirty inches per second; they’re capable of much greater speeds when attacking a prey. The sun will come up over there, about where Hyannis lies beyond the horizon, in just a few minutes, at five twelve. So we should be on the alert for some fast-swimming blues at between five twenty-five and five thirty. Just about when the clock down in the cuddy strikes three bells, we should hook a fish.
S: Why three bells at five thirty? Isn’t there something wrong with that arithmetic?
F: Ships’ clocks are chimed every half hour to the rhythms of the lives of sailors at sea, who work and sleep in watches of four hours apiece. Each watch is relieved at eight bells on the clock, which comes at the hours of four, eight, and twelve. At four thirty this morning, then, the clock struck one bell; at five, two; and at blue-catching time, it’ll ring three bells.
I’ll use dark brown Rapalas this morning; they’re “swimmers” like Rebels. Dark lures for dim light. Here, you let your line out.
S: I would find it awfully hard to have to work and sleep in four-hour stretches.
F: You’d adjust. Sailors do. Bluefish do. Some years ago, having established the normal rhythms of blues’ swimming in response to daily flooding and ebbing of light, experimenters subjected some blues in a tank to a skewed cycle of light, delaying light and dark by seven hours. The fish lagged in their swimming patterns in a sort of confused protest against the shifted cycle—just like us with our jet lag. And rather like you this morning, Stranger. By the fourth day they had adapted themselves to the new schedule. Maybe, for your sake, we should come out for four dawns in a row.
S: Thank you. That will not be necessary.
F: Next, the observers subjected blues that had been on a normal daylight schedule to a constant dim light, never changing, and then do you know what happened? The daily rhythms persisted, hung on, which suggested that the blues’ inner clocks were fairly closely set to the light changes of the days and nights of that phase of the season.
Speaking of changes, the tip of the sun is just about to show itself, probably right over the Kennedys’ compound at Hyannis Port.
S: How superb that sky is.
F: Ah, good, you’ve begun to come to life. Five twelve. There’s the rim of Apollo’s chariot now. Look ahead, you can begin to see the rip along Middle Ground.
S: I’m glad the day is coming at last.
F: One short day. We’ve been talking about clocks, but we haven’t mentioned the big one.
S: What do you mean?
F: Do you know how old the sea is? Stranger, you worry about whether you get up at four fifteen or nine fifteen in the morning of one day: Do you know how many days the oceans have existed? Geologists, who can calculate the age of rocks, have found some in the Karelia Peninsula in the Soviet Union and in South Africa which suggest that the earth may have arrived on the scene something like four and a half billion years ago. Allowing for cooling and aeons of steam and then unthinkable millennia of freshets of rain, we can guess that the oceans may be four billion years old.
The first living things to appear in those seas, how many ages later we cannot know, were probably tiny complexes of organic matter in the water, not quite plants, not quite animals, something like certain of today’s iron and sulphur bacteria, that could somehow live on inorganic food and replicate themselves. When the sun finally broke through the clouds, the miracle of chlorophyll must have come along—so that the diatoms I saw in the microscope that day in Woods Hole may have been the second order of living things. Then multi-cellular creatures: animal plankton. We’re talking about passages of hundreds and hundreds of millions of years.
The most ancient vertebrates were armor-plated fishes in the Ordovician period, more than four hundred million years ago. Back in the 1930s, fishermen netting in the depths off South Africa astonished scientists by catching a fish called the coelacanth—a creature that until then had been observed only in fossils from the Devonian period, more than three hundred million years ago. Here it was, still alive, having outlived the dinosaurs, among other animals.
The second oldest surviving fishes are the lungfishes, off Australia, South America, and Africa; they have lungs and can breathe air. They represented a bridge to land animals—to us. They live in shallows that dry out for par
t of the year, so they have to be able both to take oxygen from the water and to breathe air. When the water table falls, they make a vertical burrow in the mud bottom and retreat into it, finally secreting a cocoon and lying dormant within it, in the dry clay, until rains come again. I’ll show you an amusing poem tonight, with quite a bit of marine biology in it, which John Ciardi wrote about this persevering creature—our link with antiquity.
The most ancient sea beasts we can see around here with the naked eye are horseshoe crabs; you may have seen them copulating, little male atop big female, along our beaches, still out for a bit of fun after two hundred million years.
By the way, it’s five twenty-seven. The blues ought to have worked up to pretty good cruising speed by now—let’s say twenty, twenty-five inches per second. Maybe you’ll get a hit soon.
The bony fishes—which blues are—didn’t appear until the Mesozoic era, and weren’t numerous until the Cretaceous period, perhaps a hundred million years ago.
S: So bluefish may have existed for a hundred million years?
F: Blues aren’t necessarily among the older bony fishes. We don’t know exactly how long they’ve been around—one of the mysteries. Like the mystery of the periods when they’re not around. I told you about the way they seem almost to drop out of existence from time to time. Joe Allen, who liked to crank out light verse, wrote some lines about one of those times, fifty years ago, when the oldsters, remembering earlier days when they had plowed under tons of huge bluefish as fertilizer because they’d caught so many the markets were glutted, lamented that “never more/Such fish again would head this way.” But fifty years later, he wrote, they were back, and anglers swarmed out to catch them.