Blues

by John Hersey

  S: How great. There seems to be wonderful enjoyment.

  F: You could certainly call it, anyway, a very strong urge.

  S: And rituals, all through nature.

  F: It appears so to us.

  S: But fish squirting eggs and milt into the huge wet sea doesn’t seem a very efficient way of achieving fertilization.

  F: Well, sperm have little tails and can swim, you know, and they’re attracted to the eggs by chemical messages the egg membranes broadcast in the water.

  [Stranger catches a big little one.]

  S: How long does it take for the eggs to hatch?

  F: Bluefish eggs have been caught in the wild and hatched in captivity. They are about one twenty-fifth of an inch in diameter; they have a transparent outer membrane and a colored yolk, and they contain a single globule of oil one eight-thousandth of an inch in diameter. (Remember the oil fields?) They hatch, out at sea, in a couple of days, in water at about 68° Fahrenheit, still attached to the yolk sac. They hover upside down at first, near the surface of the water, floating at an angle with head higher than tail. In three or four days they have absorbed the yolk and are righted and trimmed up to an even keel. They are now about an eighth of an inch long. Weak swimmers at this stage—O Lord, thy sea is so big and my vessel is so small—they wiggle their tiny rudders in short bursts but soon give up, each time, and let themselves be transported in the great northerly drift. [Stranger brings in another snapper.] Feeding on plankton, the little blues grow very fast. When they first arrive in northern estuaries, in the middle of June, they are about two to three inches long—“critters so small,” as Joe Allen once put it, “that it would take fourteen to make a dozen.” By late July, they’re three or four inches long, by the first week in August, four or five inches, and by mid-August, when they arrive here, from heaven knows where, they’ve grown, as you’ve seen, to five to seven inches long. I catch them here through September, when they’re seven to nine inches long, and by the time they leave in mid-October, they are eight to ten inches long.

  The speed and relentlessness of the blues’ growth—in size and ferocity—is more than impressive; it’s appalling, hair-raising. Ted Hughes has a poem about the somewhat similarly startling stages of life of another murderous fish, the pike; I’ll try to find it this evening.

  I should have said, those bluefish that survive grow fast. From the very first, from the moment the mother gives her million eggs to the sea, these creatures are mere numbers in Nature’s megadeaths lottery. Sudden changes in water temperature; plankton that eat plankton; carnivores of many sorts, from gemlike jellyfish to bloated bluefin tuna; quirky currents; mankind’s pollutants; birds with laser eyes; gluttonous and fratricidal blues; and you, Stranger, Thin Man, with your deadly quill-stroke rod—so many hazards! It’s a probability that from a spawn of a million eggs, no more than two or three bluefish survive to maturity. A delicate balance!

  [Stranger hooks another snapper. At first he plays it as he had the others, but then:]

  S: Look at that one run! It’s suddenly ten times stronger than it was at first. Can I put more drag on?

  F: No! The line will break. You’ve probably caught a tailor. A year-old fish has eaten the snapper you had on the hook, and now it’s hooked. Big brother. This is what I was talking about—two more numbers lose in the lottery, one gobbled, one hooked. You’re going to have to be patient, with that gossamer line. I’ll move the boat to follow the runs. Reel in when you can….I’ll net it….

  S: That was thrilling. I’m afraid I am being won over. How much would you say it weighs?

  F: Maybe a pound, pound and a half. It’ll be delicious….Shall we call it a day?

  S: All right….I’m haunted by the lovemaking of those three kinds of fish you were telling about. I know that to call it that is anthropomorphic thinking, but I can’t help it. I found it charming.

  F: That’s natural. As long as there have been fisherpersons—and there have been those since prehistoric times, as the fish skeletons in the middens in the caves of France testify—as long as human beings have gone fishing, they’ve associated fishes and fishing with sex. This may be because the fluids of human sex, if left unwashed, smell fishy. Whatever the reason, the dream has certainly gone deep. In ancient India the fish was a symbol of progenitive power. Plutarch writes that when Osiris was killed by Typhon, Isis searched everywhere for his remains, but she never found his penis, which had been thrown into the Nile and had been eaten by the eels, which thenceforth were sacred; she erected an obelisk to consecrate the lost and mourned phallus. Greek fishermen worshiped four gods: Poseidon, god of the sea; Hermes, because he was crafty; Pan, the goaty, sexy one, as deity of the animals of both land and sea; and Priapus, the god of horniness. Cupid is sometimes pictured holding a rose and a fish—ironic symbols of love, both prickly, one short-lived, the other untamable. In that fishing town Naples, to this day, pesce is dialect for the male organ.

  You thought those three kinds of fish sexy? Walton quotes some lines from a poem about the creation of the world, written in 1579 by Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas:

  The Adult’rous Sargus doth not only change

  Wives every day in the deep streams, but (strange)

  As if the honey of Sea-love delight

  Could not suffice his ranging appetite,

  Goes courting She-Goats on the grassie shore,

  Horning their husbands that had horns before.

  Fish have been called into court in cases of human adultery. In Greece and Rome an adulterous woman was punished by having a mullet inserted in her vagina.

  S: How disgusting. What was done to philandering men?

  F: In those days? It was always the woman’s fault then, of course. I remember once in Paris, going after a long night of partying for a dawn brandy to a bar beside the great produce market Les Halles, where farmers who had brought their vegetables to the city were having one for the road home; and there was a man with a drawing of a fish pinned without his knowing it to the back of his dirty white tunic, to announce to the world that he was a cuckold. His friends were all drinking to him and clapping him on the shoulders, and he seemed a little puzzled by his sudden popularity and celebrity.

  Some Greek and Roman writers—Epicharmus, Varro, Plautus—considered fish aphrodisiac, required eating at wedding feasts. And maybe you remember how fish figured in foreplay in Cleopatra’s seduction of Antony. While they were fishing together from her barge, they bet on their catches, and Antony, thinking it would excite her, had some of his men dive and attach a live fish to her line. But she was wise to him, and she then had a diver hook a salt fish to his line. Plutarch told the yarn first, Beaumont and Fletcher picked it up, and then Shakespeare let us see what this fishy flirtation led to, as Cleopatra’s handmaiden Charmian, in Antony’s absence, recalled it to her. Whereupon the queen said:

  That time—O times!—

  I laugh’d him out of patience; and that night

  I laugh’d him into patience: and next morn,

  Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed.

  [At the mooring:] I’ll clean the snappers with a pair of scissors—inserting a blade in the anus, cutting forward to the forepart of the belly, then snipping the head, fins, and tail off. The guts slide out, and I trim them off. Simple. Have two for breakfast. May I have two? (Barbara doesn’t like fish in the morning.) Pan fry them. These are very sweet and need no herbs, though a sprig of fresh dill can’t hurt. I also like them with a bit of rosemary.

  Now I’ll clean the tailor in the regular way.

  Just for curiosity, let’s open both a snapper’s and the tailor’s stomachs, to see what they’ve been eating….Those are gobbets of bluefish flesh in both bellies. Cruel lottery, isn’t it?

  S: They’ll be in our bellies before long.

  F: True.


  [In the kitchen:] Tonight I’ll trim off the tops of the stalks of a bulb of fennel—and here’s a bit of outside rib that’s a bit tough; that I’ll cut away. Now, cutting down from the top, I’ll slice it into three-quarter-inch strips. I put them in this skillet, which is big enough so the strips can lie more or less in a single layer. I add a tablespoon of butter, a little salt, and three-quarters of a cup of water. I cover it over and cook gently for ten or fifteen minutes….I must check once in a while to make sure that the fennel isn’t burning on the bottom and that the pan hasn’t gone dry….Oops, it needs a little more water….Now the fennel’s tender. I make a bed of it on the bottom of this broiling pan and put the fillets on it. Salt and pepper, and dots of butter on the fillets. Then broil, with the rack on the topmost rests. These two small fillets won’t take more than six or seven minutes. Now I’ll sprinkle a half teaspoon of fennel seeds on them and put them in for another minute to brown the seeds. Then on the plates with a garnish of some of the feathery tops of the fennel, chopped up, and with wedges of lemon. Shall we try it?

  S: This is superb!

  F: Be careful. You’ll inflate me with hubris.

  I am in truth a God, I bring the dead

  By mere scent of my food, to life again.

  S: I wasn’t dead, sir. But I admit I hadn’t lived, till I tasted this.

  PIKE

  by Ted Hughes

  Pike, three inches long, perfect

  Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

  Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

  They dance on the surface among the flies.

  Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,

  Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

  Of submarine delicacy and horror.

  A hundred feet long in their world.

  In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads—

  Gloom of their stillness:

  Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.

  Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

  The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

  Not to be changed at this date;

  A life subdued to its instrument;

  The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

  Three we kept behind glass,

  Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

  And four and a half: fed fry to them—

  Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

  With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

  And indeed they spare nobody.

  Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,

  High and dry and dead in the willow-herb—

  One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:

  The outside eye stared: as a vice locks—

  The same iron in this eye

  Though its film shrank in death.

  A pond I fished, fifty yards across,

  Whose lilies and muscular tench

  Had outlasted every visible stone

  Of the monastery that planted them—

  Stilled legendary depth:

  It was as deep as England. It held

  Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

  That past nightfall I dared not cast

  But silently cast and fished

  With the hair frozen on my head

  For what might move, for what eye might move,

  The still splashes on the dark pond,

  Owls hushing the floating woods

  Frail on my ear against the dream

  Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,

  That rose slowly towards me, watching.

  September 1

  STRANGER [on the way out]: I see the laughing gulls are still patrolling for snappers.

  FISHERMAN: They’ll be there until the blues leave for the winter.

  STRANGER: From here it looks as if they’re skating on the surface, like a lot of busy little water striders. Every bug for himself.

  FISHERMAN: Not at all. Those birds are social animals. They’ll call to let each other know where bait is near the surface, and it’s amazing how quickly they’ll gather from a distance when one of them suddenly announces a heaping plateful.

  One afternoon last summer when I was casting for snappers, a laughing gull flew across my line as it was settling toward the water, and the monofilament looped around one of its legs. The bird flopped onto the water and began flapping and screaming. Within ten seconds all the gulls in the area had stopped fishing, and there must soon have been fifty of its concerned fellows wheeling right over it in a tight circle. They seemed ready to attack whatever was harassing their friend. Luckily the loop around the trapped gull’s leg was some distance from the lure, so there was no question of its being hooked. I reeled it in very slowly, and the wheeling gulls came toward me over it, and they began swearing at me. I felt as if I were dissolving into some footage of Hitchcock’s The Birds. I was able to lift the gull up on the deck with the line. It gave me a shriveling dose of eye contact and called me all sorts of gull names. I tried to tell it in a quiet voice that there’d been no intent, the whole thing was an accident. It didn’t peck me, nor did the attack helicopters hovering overhead open fire; perhaps by now all the birds sensed that I was trying to help the captive. I gently looped my hands around its deck-dusting wings, then held its body—as lightweight as a candle flame—with one hand, and unlooped the line with the other, and it flew off with a lawsuit in mind, throwing a few last imprecations over its shoulder. Within three seconds the community of compassion was adjourned and the birds were all fishing again, including the one I’d caught.

  [Off the tip of West Chop]

  S: What are the big black birds over there on those rocks?

  F: Those rocks, by the way, are the remains of a breakwater that used to be there to shelter the lighthouse keeper’s boats, before the light was automated; in some terrible storm, water broke the breakwater’s back. Waves—soft water—can be bulldozer blades, moving rocks weighing many tons. Some people think they’re qualified to buy and steer a boat by having a driver’s license; sooner or later waves will bang sea sense into them, if they don’t drown first. Head-on collisions can come every ten seconds on liquid roads. The sea is a scythe.

  S: Oh, I realized it on that rough day.

  F: The birds you asked about are cormorants. The name’s a corruption of the Latin corvus marinus: the sea crow. As you can see, they’re ten times as big as a crow, but anyway—

  S: Look at that one holding its wings out! It’s like a noble eagle on a coat of arms. Azure an aquila volant sable, sur bar sinister. Or something like that.

  F: Seabirds have an oil gland near the base of the tail, and you’ll often see them getting oil on their beaks from back there and spreading it systematically on their feathers, so they’ll shed water—“like water off a duck’s back,” you know. For some reason cormorants are deficient in supply of that oil, so when they’ve been diving they have to spread their wings, as sailors spread their sails after a drenching, to dry them out.

  There’s one swimming up ahead. Low in the water, like a loon on a lake, with only its head and neck showing.

  S: Oops, it’s gone.

  F: They tumble forward from a sitting position, like drunks out of chairs, and fish under water. They have short, stubby legs, far back on their bodies, on which they can barely walk. But their big webbed feet give them ocean-liner propellors, which drive them at plenty of knots when they’re fishing in rocks and weed; in clear water, over sandbars or a mud bottom, they’ll use their wings as well as their feet to swim with.

  S: Do they catch blues?

  F: They may fish for snappers. They fish a lot on the bottom. Around here, they eat what we caught that day by Nun Three.
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  S: Not sea robins, I hope, grunting up belly rumbles.

  F: I wouldn’t be surprised, baby ones. Cormorants sometimes team up and herd their prey. You probably know that the Chinese and Japanese use cormorants for fishing. They loop a lasso on a very long leash around the birds’ throats. The cormorants dive and catch fish with their hook-tipped beaks and then can’t swallow them because of the chokers. Of course the fishermen reward the cormorants now and then to sweeten the labor. Mediterranean fishermen use remoras—the sucker fish that attach themselves to hosts and ride along, feeding on leftover scraps from the hosts’ meals—in a similar way. The remora fishermen, like the Chinese with cormorants, use leashes; the remoras slurp their suckers onto bigger fish and when they’ve made fast, the fishermen drew them in, loudly thanking the remoras for their help. It seems that remoras, like authors, respond happily to praise from human beings.

  S: Folks will go to any lengths to catch fish, won’t they?

  F: Well, yes. Aristotle says that the balletomane skate can easily be caught by a pair of fishermen, using a net, if one plays music and the other dances on the deck. A Roman writer named Aelian cribbed from another writer named Oppian a formula for catching the fattest of all eels, in the river Eretaenus, wherever that is: You attach several cubits’ length of sheep intestine to a long hollow reed; let the free end of the sheep gut, which is tied off, down into the water; when an eel seizes it, blow on the reed; the gut inflates in the eel’s mouth; the eel gags and can’t let go; you haul it in.