Blues

by John Hersey

  They boast of landing even one;

  They dare not wait for them to grow.—

  How altered are ideas and men,

  And fish; since fifty years ago!

  We can assume that bluefish have been evolving into their present form for—

  [The clock in the cuddy strikes three bells.]

  S: My God! I can’t believe this. I have a fish on.

  F: I can hardly believe it, myself. I’ve caught fish nearly on the moment of the expected time, but never had a hit announced by the chimes. Wonderful! Perhaps your clock, Stranger, and the boat’s clock and the fish’s clock were synchronized somehow….Nice work, you’re playing them skillfully now. For one who had such strong feelings about killing fish, you’ve turned out to be a natural fisherman, like my grandson Cannon. Maybe when you were born your mother threw your umbilical cord into the sea, the way Fijian women used to do, to make their sons good fishermen.

  S: I doubt it. We lived in Ohio. But thank you for the compliment. And I have to admit that having gotten up so early, I don’t really want to go back in yet. Could we try for some more, and give them back to the sea?

  F: Fine. Just let me put some water in the fish box, and change the lure.

  Middle Ground, now, is very young. The Pleistocene epoch, with its glaciers, began about a million years ago and lasted till about ten thousand years ago. It was very late, during the final spasm of the ice age, called the Wisconsin stage, a little more than fifty thousand years ago, that snow fell in the winters on the heights of Labrador much faster than it could melt in the summers. Gradually its own weight compressed it into layers of ice, and when these grew to hundreds of feet in depth, they began to spread to lower ground. The snow fell and fell, until the ice was something like ten thousand feet deep, and it pushed out over all of New England. Its forward edge, like a bulldozer’s blade, scoured bedrock (itself, in this area, possibly half a billion years old) and heaved it and ground it along the way. By this time so much moisture had been lifted from the sea into the snow and ice that the shoreline had moved out about eighty miles from where it is now. The ice at the farthest southern edge of advance of the Wisconsin stage lay dormant for thousands of years, and as it finally melted and pulled back, refilling the ancient reservoir, it deposited part of Long Island, to Montauk Point, and Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. The edge melted back some distance, then new snows fell and it moved forward a short distance again, this time dumping its till to form the north shore of Long Island, Fishers Island, the coast of Rhode Island, the Elizabeth Islands over there, the east rim of Buzzards Bay, and Cape Cod. Presumably it was during the complex depositing of the earlier moraine, which formed the Vineyard, that a minor perturbation of the floor of what we now call Vineyard Sound, a little wrinkle of glacial debris, was strung out here, and abracadabra! Middle Ground.

  S: Which would have been when?

  F: Let’s guess something like twenty thousand years ago, or perhaps a bit less. Very recent.

  S: Are there glacial boulders along the shoal, then? Do ships get wrecked along here?

  F: No. When the ice sheets melted and the sea returned, tidal currents in the Sound piled up soft sand on the underlying ridge, and the molding movements of the water have kept it there ever since. Late one afternoon two summers ago I had the most astonishing view of the shoal. It had been calm for a couple of days, and the water was unusually clear. There was not a whisper of breeze, it was slack tide, the water’s surface was the glass face of an aquarium. The huge lens of the sky had no filters. The sun was low, and its bright slanting rays were refracted downward into the water and shone like the light in a fish tank. And there the shoal loomed, ten feet down. Do you know what it looked like? It looked exactly like a great long dune, seen from above, in the Sahara Desert. The sand undulated and was ridged with ripples, formed not by moving wind but by moving water, and there were lips at the edges of the crests. At the “holes” there were scoops, dips. Here and there, as the shoal took slight turns, long drifts tailed away. And down on either side, deeper, where even that extraordinary light failed, there was—I could sense it, almost feel it, almost inhabit it—the dark lair of the bluefish. It was as if I were dreaming. I had the most amazing sensation, then, of gaining through that dream a particle of knowledge of what it meant to be a bluefish—and of what it meant, for that matter, to be myself, swimming through the dream in this upper realm of air and light.

  S: I envy you that vision. I have been haunted, myself, since I first started coming out with you, by what has seemed to me the impenetrability of the water’s surface, at least by my eyes. Each time I’ve come out, the sea has reflected the sky as if its surface were as hard as that of aluminum or polished marble, and this has made it difficult for me even to imagine what it would be like to be a bluefish, down under there. I remember that on that first day, in trying to get me to soften my bias against fishing, you urged me to bear in mind that in the act of foraging for food, we’d really be trying to find our appropriate place in the systems of life on earth. The many things you’ve told me have certainly begun to sensitize me. But ears can’t see. I blame this hard face of the water, and my consequent “blindness,” for my sense that I’m a long way from finding and accepting my relationship to the bluefish. I wish I could glimpse the shoal and that “dark lair” you spoke of.

  F: Maybe the conditions will be right one of these days.

  S: You said the shoal had been shaped by moving water. I’ve been wanting to ask you: How do you know before we come out what the current is going to be doing? You seem to know, each time.

  F: You see, there we have another kind of clock. The currents here are not like the hot Gulf Stream or the cold Labrador Current, which run forever like great rivers in the sea; here the currents seasaw back and forth, twice a day each way. They are caused by the water’s yearning for the moon and the sun as those two pass overhead each day; the waters rise and fall and, along our shores, tend eastward. When tides move in and out of narrows, their surge and suck set the waters in motion. In some places, these motions cause havoc. You’ll remember Charybdis; it’s in the Strait of Messina; its whirlpools are so powerful that they dredge up fish from the abyss with eyes dimmed out of existence by the depths, or with huge bulging eyes to see what they can in the morose shadows of their natal Hades. There’s a river in China, I think it’s called the Qiantang, where the tide advances upstream from the mouth twice a day in a “bore”—a single hideous foamy wave, ten to twenty feet high. And did you ever read Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom”?

  S: I certainly did. I read it when I was a boy. For years it made me afraid to flush our toilet, because the descending water had a kind of whirling motion. I thought if I wasn’t careful I might wind up in the sewer.

  F: We don’t have anything quite so disastrous around here, though where the currents run through very narrow gaps, as at Woods Hole and the other holes up the Elizabeth Islands, they can be extremely dangerous to any mariner who doesn’t know what to expect. And we’ve talked, I remember, about the violent water, sometimes, off the Chops. It’s a bit surprising that currents hereabouts have the force that they do, because the rise and fall of the tides around the Vineyard are only a couple of feet on the average; they’re as much as fifty feet in the Bay of Fundy.

  The moon’s influence on tides is twice that of the sun. Each circuit of the earth by the moon takes fifty minutes more than twenty-four hours. So it’s possible to predict what time each day’s tides will be high and low in any given place. Tides are not only inexorable—King Canute couldn’t stop them—they’re also dependably periodic. I have two ways of knowing when the best times to come out will be. One is a marvelous book of tide tables for the waters of this area, called Eldridge’s. You can figure from its pages the times of high and low tide at various places on Vineyard shores on any day of the year; what’s more
, it has a series of charts with little arrows showing the direction and velocity of currents in these waters at each hour of rise and fall. The other indicator is an actual tide clock. Some of our friends are amazed that I can have a clock to tell me the level of the sea, but of course it’s simple: It’s a regular clock with twelve and a half extra minutes (a quarter of the moon’s daily foot-dragging) squeezed into each six hours, and with a hand that points to stages—

  S: Wait! There’s one! Oh, this is a good one!

  F: The one you have to throw back always is.

  S: I think it’s off. The line’s gone dead.

  F: Yes, you lost it. Don’t worry. It happens. You have to keep a constant pull on the line, or the fish’ll shake the hook out. One thing I’ve noticed: You should keep the tip of the rod higher. The bend of the rod then helps keep the pressure steady.

  S: I’m disappointed. I thought I was getting somewhere.

  F: Put it out of your mind. I lose them once in a while. These fish aren’t stupid. They want to live.

  S: Can I try once more?

  F: I have all day. All of one short day. I’ll try the place where that one hit. You’ll have another one on in half a minute….

  S: God’s teeth! I have.

  F: Rod up. Good…there.

  S: And you have to throw it back.

  F: Yes. There is “a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal.” And “a time to keep, and a time to cast away.” And, for that matter, a time to fish and a time to go home.

  S: If we must.

  F [as Spray approaches the breakwater]: You look a thousand miles away. What are you thinking?

  S: I’m thinking about clocks. About how long it took for all the plankton to make the oil fields, and how fast we’re burning them up. Every time I drive to Cronig’s for groceries now I think, “My God, in those five minutes I just burned ten zillion copepods.”

  F: That’s probably a pretty good estimate.

  [At the mooring:] Look, do you see this spot behind the pectoral fin? It’s far brighter than normal. That’s a sexual signal—these blues are about ready to spawn. [Having taken one fillet off:] Aha. Yes, sir. A ready female. Look at this ripe roe.

  S: It looks awful—that orangy color. Is it edible?

  F: I tried it once. Didn’t think much of it.

  S: How many eggs would you say there are?

  F: In a blue of this size, somewhere between six hundred thousand and a million four hundred thousand. I’m told a female sturgeon ten feet long may carry more than three million eggs weighing altogether two hundred fifty pounds. At the price being charged for top-of-the-line caviar in New York right now, that load in one fish would be worth about sixty thousand dollars. Too bad fishermen can’t scoop money like that out of blues.

  S: As you say, fishing is complicated.

  F: We’d better go out again soon—in a very few days. After that the fish will be gone for two or three weeks, to beget.

  [They go ashore, and they part for the day.]

  F [at the door, in the evening]: Come in. Before we join Barbara, let me show you a chart of these waters made by a British naval officer in 1779.

  S: Look at that! Every house on all these shores is marked—Nantucket, the Vineyard, Newport.

  F: That’s not the point. The point is that the sands of Middle Ground are—at least within imaginable time spans—immutable. You could use the soundings on this chart out there today with absolute security.

  [In the kitchen:] This afternoon I made a marinade of five tablespoons of vermouth; a tablespoon and a half of soy sauce; a half inch of ginger root, peeled and diced fine; a half dozen sprigs of fresh dill, cut up; and a clove of garlic that I’d put through a press. I skinned the fillets and cut the meat into one-inch cubes, and marinated them for three hours, turning them from time to time.

  Now I make some straightforward pancake batter, following a recipe in The Joy of Cooking. I add an extra egg to it.

  Next let’s heat some vegetable oil in a deep fryer. Watch it for me, would you please, to make sure it doesn’t froth up; if it starts to, take the fryer right off the fire. Fresh vegetable oil shouldn’t boil, but you never know. Meanwhile I’ll dredge a number of cubes of the fish in flour, and put a platter in the oven to warm it up….

  I think the oil’s good and hot; it’s smoking. Now, using a skewer, I spear a cube at a time and dunk it in the batter, making sure it gets completely covered, and then quickly pop it into the hot oil, pushing it off the skewer with a fork—careful not to splash. I’ll do about a half dozen in the first batch. Cook for not more than five or six minutes. Remove with a spoon with holes in it to the hot platter. Do a second batch. And a third. And serve.

  S: Oh my, this is swell. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed these dinners of fish.

  F: Yes. “Fish suppers will make a man hop like a flea.”

  THE LUNG FISH

  by John Ciardi

  In Africa, when river beds

  crack, the lung fish

  squirms into mud deeper than

  the two feet down of wrath, and

  sleeps, its tail over its eyes

  to keep them from drying blind, its

  snout at the blow-hole blueprinted

  in the egg, too small to read,

  but read. No one, the lung fish least,

  knows how long it can wait. If no

  creature is immortal, some

  are more stubborn than others.

  If all sleep is a miracle, consider

  (through the poking lenses

  of unraveling science) what

  miracle this is: The lung fish

  digests its own tissues. Its wastes,

  which are normally an ammonia

  safely dispersed in water, would

  in its cocoon, choke it. Therefore

  it changes them to urea, which

  it can live with. Lung fish blood

  is known to have six different

  hemoglobins—four more

  than Moses took to God’s desert.

  Like Moses, it has gone to legend

  in Africa. It is said to be

  half fish, half croc. It is called

  Kamongo there (but does not answer).

  If you cut off its head

  (whether in fact or legend, and who

  knows which?) its jaws will snap

  two days later. (Which

  we do know, all of us, about

  what we cut off.) When

  Dr. Brown, an ichthyologist

  of Seattle, put Kamongo

  into a mud bottom aquarium

  and lowered the water level, as God

  does at whim, this egg-born

  instinctus of survival slept

  seventeen months. When it woke

  in the reconfluence of time

  and whim, it seized stones with its mouth

  and dinged them against the world’s walls

  till it was fed—dinged them so hard

  the doctor thought the walls might break

  between him and his creature. He drained it

  back to sleep for time to build a world

  strong enough to hold both sleep

  and waking. If anything can be. If we

  can learn sleep whole and not choke

  on what we are while we learn it.

  July 16

  FISHERMAN: We might get skunked today.

  STRANGER: Skunked?

  FISHERMAN: Come home without a fish. I would have to lie to Barbara about “the ones we lost.”

  STRANGER:
 YOU have a wife. You may lie. Bachelors never lie.

  FISHERMAN: Of course not. Now that you’re such a good and honest angler, you put me in mind of the philosopher who gave us the claim of truth that could not possibly be true: “I lie when I say I lie.”

  STRANGER: Thank you for calling me a good angler, but my tests of truth, as you know, are those of a person who is used to having his feet on solid ground. Why, though, might we get skunked?

  F: You saw that ready roe the other day. Schools of blues apparently spawn in series along the coast, with the peak in this area coming in July and August; and while they seem to go out in relays from Rhode Island and Massachusetts waters, it has been my observation that the schools that hang out in Vineyard Sound usually vacate all at once, and we have a period of three weeks or so each year when they just aren’t on Middle Ground at all. On the other side of the island, off Katama, or down near Nomans, in that time, fishermen may still be catching a few blues; not here, most years. But maybe the locals haven’t altogether cleared out by now. We’ll see. I just suspect that we’ll have to work a bit harder than usual to find them.

  S: How do you mean, work?

  F: Well, even if they’re here, they won’t be very hungry. Here’s one time we can ichthyomorphize: Just like bluefish, human beings who are in love and ache for sex get picky about food.

  By way of work, we’ll troll awhile up here at the West Chop end, and maybe try the hole off the Goff house, and if those places don’t work, we’ll go out along the shoal, maybe even right out to the other end, three miles out. Sometimes they move out to the west along the shoal in the last few days before they go trysting. We’ll try different lures, sometimes on the surface and sometimes deep. We’ll just keep at it, that’s all.

  S: I’m game.

  F: Good. It’s sunny today, so I’ll put on a blue Rebel and a yellow one; maybe the lighter one will work in this brightness.

  While we get started, may I tell you about an experience I had last winter that was almost as exciting as the one of seeing the plankton through the microscope?