by John Hersey
The first writing in English on fishing for pleasure, The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, is attributed to a legendary nun, Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of the Sopwell Nunnery, who, according to one of several dubious authorities on her authorship, “was a manlike woman endowed with brilliant gifts of nature. She was a Minerva in her studies and a Diana in hunting, lest by pursuing leisure she might be involved in the charms of Venus.” The treatise was printed in 1496; it had been written about seventy-five years earlier, and there is a partial copy of it, made by a scribe about 1450, in the Yale library. I like the line the good nun took. She asked: “What are the means and cause to bring a man into a merry spirit?” And her answer was: “They are good and honest sports and games in which a man’s heart takes pleasure without any repentance. Then this follows—that good and honorable recreations are the cause of Man’s fair old age and long life.” How can I, with my white hairs, not like that?
In the century and a half after Dame Juliana and before Izaak Walton, writers on fishing took a high moral line. The anonymous author of The Arte of Angling, in 1577, for example, attributed thirteen “gifts” to the fisherman: faith, hope, love, patience, humility, fortitude, learning, liberality, contentment, prayerfulness, fasting, memory, and charity to the sick and poor. And the inimitable Walton, who cribbed from The Arte without mentioning it, celebrated the moral superiority of anglers because of their love of “quietnesse and vertue.” Byron complained of Walton’s air of innocence in writing about a killing sport. And with Hemingway’s images, in our time, we come face to face with the underside of “good and honest sports and games”: the reeking blood of bulls, the shark-torn carcass of a huge fish.
Fishing is complicated, I keep saying. You’ve seemed to be asking me in various ways, with various degrees of irony in your questions, whether fishing is, as Walton told us, the contemplative man’s pastime. I wouldn’t exactly say so, anymore. Times have changed. We’re in the twilight of the twentieth century, when greed is the creed. There are assassins out here. Could a contemplative man catch a fish for sport, using its own eye for bait? A sport is defined by its rules. One rule on Middle Ground is that if a boat that is trolling with the current meets a boat that is trolling against it, the former will give way, dropping down into the rip to let the other freely pass. Once, when I was learning how to fish, I overran and cut another man’s line when he had a fish on; I hadn’t enough experience to know how far a strong blue could run. That fisherman’s tongue polluted the Sound from here to Gay Head! He was right. I had broken the rule—no defense that I had done it in ignorance. Older fishermen on Middle Ground, mostly native islanders, have the basic courtesy to follow the rules of fishing and “rules of the road”—as sailors call navigational rules for safety. But there are many nowadays who tempt a killing of other than fish. Rules? Shit, man, get out of my way, I paid for my gas, up yours, I’m fishing. We can generalize: The bigger and more expensive the fishing boat, the worse the sea manners. You can get skunked out here on any Sunday afternoon on the thirteen gifts of fishermen.
And yet…there is the magical resonance here in Vineyard Sound of ten-foot tides in Boston Harbor; the high-tech sensitivity of the lateral line; sea clocks of so many kinds; the veliger tucking in its tiny wings when danger comes—such a dizzying wealth of amazing things. And don’t forget the superb mechanism we have back there in the fish box, which you caught on a dangerous day. I am not religious, either, Stranger, but sometimes I am tempted to call the bluefish sacred. I almost think it so.
Fishing is complicated, isn’t it?
S: I think I’m beginning to understand what you mean by that refrain. For one thing, I’ve sensed how complex your own responses are to things that happen out here; I’ve seen your delight and, it seems to me, sometimes, your discomfort, your exhilaration and your doubt, your warning against applying human terms and values to fishes yet doing it all the time, and your being unafraid and also scared. Am I right?
F: I refuse to answer on the ground that it might incriminate me.
[At home, in the kitchen:] I’m going to grill these fillets. I’ll skin them and put them in a baking pan and squeeze the juice of a lemon and scatter a pressed clove of garlic on the “meat” side—the innards side—of each one; then we’ll let it marinate for half an hour, while we get the charcoal burning in the hibachi.
A beer? You can tell Barbara about what we pretended out there today…
Now melt a stick of butter. Spread out a sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil large enough to take both fillets, and using a pointed knife or an ice pick, prick a large number of holes in the foil. Then butter the foil and brush a bit of the melted butter on the fillets. Put them, meat side down, on the foil, and the foil on the grille. Spoon some melted butter on the fillets from time to time. The point of all this is that if you just put the bare flesh on the grille, it will flake and stick to the hot metal and break up; this way you’ll keep the integrity of the fillets and, thanks to the holes in the foil, the flavor of the dripped and burned butter will enhance the taste of the bluefish.
Charcoal’s so hot that I’ll skimp on the ten-minute rule….Test. Done!…Please pass the salt and pepper.
S: It comes out a bit drier than with your other ways of cooking, doesn’t it?
F: You can’t have everything. You can’t have idle daydreams on a rough day.
S: Oh, but it’s good.
F: So was the day, wasn’t it?
S: I’ll never forget it.
THE DRUNKEN FISHERMAN
by Robert Lowell
Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.
A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?
Once fishing was a rabbit’s foot—
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale’s spout—
The fisher’s fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.
New the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody water into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale’s rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.
Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher’s sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term…
On water the Man-Fisher walks.
August 14
FISHERMAN: I brought along some frozen squid for bait. We’ll have half an hour of slack tide, before the current starts to flood, and I thought we could while it away with some bottom fishing in the bay, just for a change.
STRANGER: What do we catch?
FISHERMAN: We never know what we’ll
catch till we’ve caught it—which puts us in a fix a little like that of the old lady E. M. Forster wrote about, who said, “How can I tell what I think until I hear what I’ve said?”
STRANGER: Will we catch Picasso fish?
F: No, there wouldn’t be any flounder or fluke inside the Chop. There’ll be little fishes in here, if we catch any, small sweepers of the floor of the sea. Let’s try our luck near Nun Three.
S: Luck? It hasn’t looked to me as if you rely too much on luck.
F: Well, I’ll admit I’ve found a few breakfasts around the skirts of my friend the nun. I’ll bait up this little bottom rig. Now. Let it run out till it hits bottom. Then just wait.
S: Oh, right away! A delicate trembling on the line.
F: That would be scup. Some people call them porgies—not to be confused with the blues’ favorite food, menhaden, or pogies. Scup are pickpockets; they’ll mumble your bait cleanly off the hook while you’re thinking about what a nice breakfast they’ll make. No, don’t jerk like that. You have to let the little criminal make a mistake and run off with hook and all, then cop it, keeping cool, as if you’d taken out a warrant….There!…
S: That was a spunky little perpetrator.
F: I’ll put it in the bucket; later I’ll clean it, and you can take it home for breakfast tomorrow morning. Dredge it in flour and pan fry it three minutes on each side, with a little lemon juice and rosemary in the butter. Tasty….All right, let’s try again.
S: Whew. I’m so glad to be out on the water. This muggy weather gets me down.
F: August doldrums. We might get some fog later on, if the breeze drops, because the air is so much hotter than the water. On a day like this I like to run a check on my ship-to-shore. Excuse me a minute.
[Fisherman speaks into radio microphone:] Coast Guard. Coast Guard. This is yacht Spray.
VOICE: Woods Hole Coast Guard Station. Come in, Spray.
F: Yacht Spray. Radio check, please.
VOICE: Roger. I read you loud and clear.
F: Thank you. Over and out.
S: That was easy.
F: Maybe you think I should apologize for calling this fat little boat a yacht. That’s just regulation ship-to-shore chatter.
S: Have you ever had to use your radio for real?
F: I’ve been towed in several times. Engines are fickle friends. A cracked distributor, a ruptured hose—anchor and call for help.
S: There, that’s a stronger bite. It’s on, too.
F: Good….That’s a young tautog, or blackfish. Makes splendid chowder. Mind if I keep it?
S: Not at all. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
F: There’s your bait. Try again.
S: I’m amazed. It’s just as much fun to catch little fish as big ones.
F: Ah, now you’re saying that fishing is “fun.” But what you say is true. I went out once for bluefin tuna, out of Wedgeport, at the southern end of Nova Scotia. My son Martin, who was then about twelve, had a six-hundred-pounder on the line; a shark took a seventy-five-pound bite out of its belly before we could get it into the boat. The young man and the sea!
S: That’s the kind of fishing I despise.
F: You anticipate me. I was about to say, catching tiny snapper blues eight inches long for breakfast is more satisfying for me than that kind of fishing could ever be. Snappers have all the courage and fight of their big brothers and sisters. The baby bluefish usually come in here about August fifteenth—that would be tomorrow. We’ll try for them in a few days.
S: Another bite. Feels like another of those blackfish….Good Lord, what’s that?
F [laughing]: You’ve caught a sea robin.
S: That’s the worst-looking animal I’ve ever seen. It looks prehistoric. Side fins like wings. And what kind of an excuse for a head is that? It looks like a box to keep paper clips in. And holy smoke, it’s got six little legs.
F: They aren’t exactly legs, though they do use them to crawl on the bottom. They’re independent spikes of its pectoral fins.
S: Is that it, making that horrible grunting sound?
F: Yes, it’s a talker. It makes that noise by vibrating some muscles that are attached to its air bladder.
S: What’s it saying?
F: It’s saying, “Throw me back before you throw up.”
S: With pleasure. And just in time.
F: The current’s making up. Let’s go out and harvest our supper.
S: Yes, please, back to normalcy.
F [approaching the hole off Goff’s house]: We’re in luck. See that broad place over there on the water where it seems oil has spilled?
S: Someone with a bad engine-oil leak?
F: Not if it’s what I think it is. Let me get over there, downwind of it….Sniff. What do you smell?
S: Hm. I’d say it smells like a fresh-cut watermelon.
F: That’s exactly what I would say. We call it a slick. A school of blues has been feeding and cutting up so much fat bait that the oil and other liquids from the victims have surfaced to make that smooth skin on the water, shiny and pearly as the inside of an oyster shell, which the breeze can’t ruffle. The melon smell comes from the fruity odor of the plankton the bait has fed on.
S: You said the first day that some people think bluefish tastes oily. Is it part of a taste chain, an odor chain?
F: I guess you might say so. The blues are oily because pogies and silversides are, and they are because the plankton they eat are. You remember about the oil fields.
S: Would the chain extend on from us? Would we taste oily to a lion or tiger, after we’d eaten blues?
F: Maybe. I don’t know that that’s ever been tested.
S: You said we’re in luck because of the slick. Does it mean the blues are right under it?
F: Probably not. That chopping took place a few minutes ago. The school will have moved on. But it means they’re around. The most ferocious phase of their feeding may be over by now, but there’s a good chance, on account of their inability to turn off the feeding response, that we’ll be able to attract one or two of them. The current isn’t strong yet. Would you like to cast?
S: Yes!
F: I’ll put the Pencil Popper on—it worked for us that other time.
S [casting]: I can’t get those surly growls of the sea robin out of my mind. Can blues communicate somehow under water? I’ve heard a recording of whales singing to each other.
F: Poets may sing of the silent sea. It isn’t. Far from it. Water conducts sound much more efficiently than air does, and the oceans are alive not only with plankton hut also with racket. To begin with, there are the sounds of the transactions of the water itself, the electric fizzle of combing waves, the fracture of breakers, the brabble of wash on the shore. At anchor in deep darkness at night I’ve heard—up where I live, here in the air, but the sound is under water, too—the rip along Middle Ground chattering as loud as a flock of starlings. Then there are the noises we make, and very strange they seem, as if there were a translation for alien ears that goes on just beneath surface tension. A distant outboard motor sounds under water like a spoon being tinkled on a plate. Then, creatures talking. You heard the sea robin. There’s a whole family of fishes called grunts. Toad-fishes burp the songs of their eponyms; one sort of toad-fish is called the singing midshipman. In the spring of 1942, the navy hydrophone network that had been set up to detect enemy ships or submarines at the mouth of the Chesapeake was jammed each evening by a shattering interference, described as the noise of “a pneumatic drill tearing up pavement”; it turned out to be the uproar of crowds of conversational fish called croakers—a noise that engineers were eventually able to filter out of the sound systems. You must be aware of the eagerness of dolphins to break through the language barrie
r and give human beings advice on how to live more playful lives. Barbara can’t stand the sounds of whale songs because they seem to her so dreadfully mournful; I say, who knows, whales may moan when they’re happy and giggle when they’re sad. Several kinds of fishes—carp, chub, barbel, loaches, and others—release gas bubbles from their air bladders through ducts into their guts, and when they do, they squeak like mice. Among many other fish sounds are tomtom bumps, chicken clucks, dog barks, foghorn moans, wrestlers’ grunts, and the noise made by a wet finger rubbed on a balloon. Oyster beds rattle. In many places there is a sizzling sound, like that of bacon frying, or that of a short circuit, made by myriads of a small variety of shrimp clicking their claw joints. Once the Atlantis, the research vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, lowered a hydrophone into very deep waters near Bermuda and picked up weird cat’s mews, shrieks, and groans, like those on the sound tracks of a horror movie, which have never been accounted for. Fish make sounds just by moving through the water—veering, streaming, flexing their tails. Ghanaians fishing for herring and other fishes lower a three-pronged paddle into the water, rotate it slowly, hold an ear to the upper end, and listen for the direction and distance from them of the swimming sounds of schools.
We have it on the authority of Aristotle that fishes can hear, “for they are observed to run away from any loud noises like the rowing of a galley.” Once, on a sailing trip down the Windward Islands, I saw men and women out at dawn, hip deep in shallows under the lee of Pigeon Island, off the northern tip of St. Lucia, beating the water with long poles to drive fish toward their seines, and I’ve read that English fishermen, working from the ports of Whitby and Scarborough, fishing with deep nets, used to drive herring down into them from the surface by banging on the sides of their vessels with shovels, buckets, and tin cans.