by John Hersey
S: Hm. Queer combination.
F: Some people love the idea of the gin. And the gin and the lime do cut the oiliness. However, each to his own.
S: You like modern poets. I like Chaucer:
These cookes, how they stampe and streyne and grynde
And turnen substance into accident.
F: Are you getting tired of bluefish?
S: Now you’re the one who’s sensitive about being teased.
TROLLING FOR BLUES
by Richard Wilbur
As with the dapper terns, or that sole cloud
Which like a slow-evolving embryo
Moils in the sky, we make of this keen fish
Whom fight and beauty have endeared to us
A mirror of our kind. Setting aside
His unreflectiveness, his flings in air,
The aberration of his flocking swerve
To spawning-grounds a hundred miles at sea,
How clearly, musing to the engine’s thrum,
Do we conceive him as he waits below:
Blue in the water’s blue, which is the shade
Of thought, and in that scintillating flux
Poised weightless, all attention, yet on edge
To lunge and seize with sure incisiveness,
He is a type of coolest intellect,
Or is so to the mind’s blue eye until
He strikes and runs unseen beneath the rip,
Yanking imagination back and down
Past recognition to the unlit deep
Of the glass sponges, of chiasmodon,
Of the old darkness of Devonian dream,
Phase of a meditation not our own,
That long mélée where selves were not, that life
Merciless, painless, sleepless, unaware,
From which, in time, unthinkably we rose.
September 15
FISHERMAN [as Spray reaches the shoal]: Look at the weed in the water.
STRANGER: Seaweed? I don’t think I see it.
FISHERMAN: Those dark ghoul shapes roiling along under water. And the strands of eel grass floating on top.
STRANGER: Ah, yes, I see them now.
FISHERMAN: I brought you out too early today. The tide is still ebbing strongly. That northeast storm we had earlier in the week churned up a horrible harvest, and the current still carries it around. I’m sorry. Trolling will be messy for a while. We’ll have to clear trash off our hooks very often, till the weed temporarily settles to the bottom at slack tide. Besides, the blues don’t seem to like trying to concentrate their minds on bait with all sorts of Rorschach blotches flying across their field of vision.
S: You can’t blame them. Must be confusing.
F: As confusing as it would be to us to see a lot of fish in a downpour of rain.
S: Who ever heard of fish in the rain?
F: I’ve seen a sixteenth-century engraving of a “Downpour of Fishes in Scandinavia.” And it seems such rainfalls have happened, now and then, when tornadoes over the sea caused waterspouts, which hoisted schools of baitfish into the sky and then dropped them over the land. They have been reported all the way from “De pluvia piscium,” in the Deipnosophistae of one Athenaeus, in the third century A.D., to an account in the Northern Whig and Belfast Post, on May 30, 1928, of a fall of fish from the sky during a violent thunderstorm at a village near Comber, County Down.
S: I guess I have to believe you.
F: I’ll put Hoochies on, this time. With their single hooks and their skirts of plastic, they are less liable to be fouled by weed than Rebels or Rapalas or other “swimmers” that have two or three sets of exposed treble hooks.
In the two decades since I began fishing here, the weed has multiplied alarmingly. Much of the bay between the Chops used to have a bright sandy bottom; now it’s three-quarters dark, mostly with horrid, spongy, tubular green algae, a seaweed called Codium fragile. That weed is a newcomer to the northeast coast; it was first found in 1957 by a couple of nature-lovers wading off East Marion, on Long Island. It’s a greedy monster, which has several nicknames: sea staghorn, spaghetti grass, sputnik weed, oyster thief, and—the one I favor, also used for a kind of coral—dead man’s fingers.
S: Oyster thief is an odd name. How come?
F: Oystermen hate it. Codium anchors itself in masses on oyster beds. Like all plants, sprays of Codium manufacture oxygen. They accumulate it in their sponginess and eventually become so buoyant that they rise like hot-air balloons and lift oysters right out of the beds and carry them away on currents. Around here they pick up sea snails by the hundreds of thousands; northeasters wash great heaps of the weed onto facing beaches, and eventually, when the weed has rotted away, we’re left with banks of snail shells a foot deep. The worst of it is that the storms push the weed through the openings to within the breakwater. It rots under water there and releases a stinkbomb gas, which floats into town, like some malicious intestinal message from Neptune, on onshore breezes.
S: How could seaweed just suddenly appear in 1957?
F: Someone brought it here from Japan. I’ve heard it said that the Japanese eat seaweed, and perhaps some Nipponophile gourmet thought to introduce a new delicacy to American palates. The trouble is, this Japanese import is now outgrowing and crowding out other weeds, sea lettuce and rockweed and kelp and the rest.
S: The Honda of the sea. Or is it the Toyota?
F: You’re right. This seaweed is part of a larger story. The Japanese are finally winning World War Two.
S: The first day we came out, you said that we are killing the sea. If a seaweed can flourish the way this one has, how can you say that?
F: Maybe killing was not quite the right word—though we have in fact succeeded in killing significant parts of large bodies of water, such as Lake Michigan. Let’s say at least that we’re meddling dangerously in the affairs of a vast organism—I think of the sea as a living being—about which our knowledge is still very much in a formative stage. The man who was entranced with the thought that Codium might taste good with a little teriyaki and so was moved to bring some home from his travels—if there was such a man—was, as things have turned out, a dangerous meddler with the ecosystem of the northeast coast. Reel in your line. I’ll wager there’s some of his import on your hook. There, do you see? Human beings have caused great havoc in nature by introducing exotic flora and fauna, on whim, into unsuitable settings. For reasons that are unclear to me—perhaps it was his idea of a practical joke—a Vineyarder brought a pair of skunks to our then skunkless island some years ago; the island is host to no natural predators of that animal, and the consequence today is a nearly unbearable plague of skunks. Man, with his retinues of hogs and horses, sheep and goats, dogs and cats, mice and rats, has ravaged many a paradise. When the astronomer Halley, the comet fellow, visited Trinidad, about 1700, he put a few goats ashore; soon, since the goats ate all seedlings, the island’s noble forests died out, and a naked island began to wash down into the sea. Rachel Carson tells how the introduction of rabbits onto the tiny Pacific island of Laysan stripped it of its forest of sandalwood and fanleaf palm, and the Laysan rail, which existed only there, “a charming, gnome-like creature no more than six inches high, with wings that seemed too small (and were never used as wings), and feet that seemed too large, and a voice like distant, tinkling bells,” was wiped out on the island. It happened that in 1887 a ship captain had taken some of the rails to Midway, some three hundred miles to the west, and the species might have survived there, but in 1943 a heavy traffic of Navy ships and transports put rats ashore on the island, and a year later the world’s last Laysan rail was sighted. W. H. Hudson was right: “The beautiful has vanished and returns not.”
We’d better reel in and clear the lures.
You’ve be
en able to see, over and over again out here, how all the living things have their places in an interconnected network of existence, and how delicate the balance among the various forms of life is. Man comes charging in with his idea that the ocean is just a convenient big cistern, after all, into which all water eventually runs, including, of course, that in the reservoir tank over the toilet after you’ve pressed the little lever. My first home in New York City, many years ago, faced on the East River, and when the breeze came off it we were often practically knocked out by the passing of the “honey barges,” as they were called, laden with raw sewage being towed out to be dropped—flushed—right into the summer living room of the bluefish, out in the North Atlantic bight. The honey barges no longer ply that route, but in many places, raw sewage still goes straight into the sea—as, for instance, does that of the whole city of Key West, out through a pipe to a place several hundred yards off one of the few decent swimming beaches on that island. Human wastes seep into the sea from the septic-tank drainage fields in sandy soil all around the shores of our Vineyard, and though the Coast Guard issued regulations a few years ago that toilets on vessels must all be “closed”—incapable, that is, of being flushed directly into the sea—enforcement has been impossible, and many elderly yachts visiting our small harbors still have open heads. (Toilets are called heads on vessels because sailors used to relieve themselves from the nets under the bowsprit, next to the figurehead. Maybe you thought they used the poop deck; not so.) Fecal matter will ferry disease here and there in estuarial waters—raw clams or oysters, anyone?—and it serves in the sea just as it does on land, as fertilizer. Codium and other algae thrive excessively on the spate of sewage that we give to the sea. Thus the delicate balance gets tipped.
Our sewers spew out, among other things, dissolutions of Ivory and Dove and Duz, which do no great harm, since soaps are biodegradable. Synthetic detergents, on the other hand, are both lethal and, since they cannot be broken down by bacteria, durable. An experiment at the Sandy Hook lab showed that one pound of detergent took only four days to kill half the fish life they had placed in a tank there, and that it kept its virulent toxicity for three months.
[Dead man’s fingers foul the lures. The two clear them. Fisherman continues:]
This mischievous trickle into the ocean from bathrooms and kitchens and washing machines is of course nothing to the obscene excretion into our rivers and bays of the toxic wastes of industrial plants. Reports of these make their way onto the evening news broadcasts when, on account of them, human beings from neighboring places come down with leukemia and bone cancer and kidney failure. As to what happens when these poisons run down off the continental shelf into the oceanic abyss—who knows? Who cares about deep-sea life? Newspaper readers may be dimly aware of the threat of these effluents to the striped bass: sportsmen have raised hell about it. Even you, Stranger, who had never been fishing, said on the first day we went out that you’d heard of the trouble stripers are in. Bluefish are spared their particular fate because they go out to sea for sex, rather than into estuaries and rivers like the Chesapeake and Hudson.
But blues don’t get off scot-free. The little snappers come in from the spawning grounds to shallows in inlets and at river mouths along the coast, and there they are liable to ingest various industrial chemicals that have settled in bottom sediments and have found their way into the food chain. Polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly called PCBs, which are suspected of causing cancer in human beings, aren’t thoroughly degraded in a fish’s body or excreted from it; some of them accumulate in the skin and in fatty tissues. Mature blues eat the chubby menhaden, and probably pick up PCBs from them. The federal Food and Drug Administration has recommended that two parts of PCBs per million parts of fish flesh be considered the most that is safe, and one bluefish in ten caught around here has been found to have that much in it.
S: You’ve been feeding me all this carcinogenic meat!
F: You and I are not going to die of cancer from eating a few blues. In the first place, since PCBs accumulate over time, the greatest danger comes from the largest fish, and the ones we catch on Middle Ground are relatively young. Besides, most of the PCBs lodge in the fish’s skin and in the narrow median strip of dark flesh just under it, and in the flap of fat at the bottom of the belly, all three of which I usually take off when I skin the fillets. To tell the truth, on second thought, I don’t always cut away the flap of fat, because it has been found that the kind of fish oil it contains is good for your heart. Cardiologists came on this fact when they wondered why Greenland Eskimos, many of whom eat fish three times a day, seven days a week, have such a low rate of coronary heart disease, and they discovered that fish oils supply fatty acids that can lower cholesterol levels in the blood and reduce the chance of blood clots in one’s arteries. Bluefish are notoriously oily. Their fat is practically medicine! I’ve come to the conclusion that almost everything we eat, these days, is both good for you and bad for you. My philosophy is: enjoy.
S: I guess I’ll survive.
F: You will not survive unless you enjoy yourself.
[They clear the lures.]
Industrial pollution is bad enough, but ever since Hiroshima we have been slowly adding one more taint to the sea—that of nuclear poisons. There’s irony in the fact that the technologies of modern naval and air warfare—those that emerged during the Second World War in particular—gave mankind its greatest incentive to study the profound peace of the deeps. During the war, oceanographers began to chart the contours of the abyssal bottom; to trace the strange movements of ocean currents, which sometimes mysteriously run in opposite directions, one atop another; and to study the sea floor, with its astonishing resources of sediment and of unexpected life. Those studies have continued, and scientists have begun to pierce our fathomless ignorance about the waters of the world. The policies of naval and military planning, however, are set not by oceanographers and marine biologists, but by men whose primary instincts are for power and the defense of power and the propagation of more power. Just as those who decided to drop the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave no thought to their long-term radiation effects on human victims, so those who later made decisions about testing nuclear weapons over the seas, and about flushing wastes from nuclear power plants into them, did so with little or no thought of the subtle long-term effects of their actions on the delicate balances of oceanic life. Oceanographers traced the drift of tritium from the fallout onto the surface of the sea from atmospheric tests in the Pacific in the 1960s, and found it five miles deep in the Eastern Atlantic, off Norway, in the early seventies. Atomic wastes have been spilled or have leached into rivers, and have run into the ocean for further delivery to distant deeps by currents. So far three atomic submarines—two American and one Soviet—have been lost at sea and lie on the bottom of the Atlantic. In the fifties and sixties, radioactive rubbish—so-called low-level waste matter—was packed into barrels and dumped into the sea, sometimes as close to shore as only twenty miles off. The Atomic Energy Commission conceded that these barrels were liable to be ruptured by deep-water pressures; even if they didn’t implode, they would eventually rust out. The Department of Energy, studying various plans for the disposal of highly radioactive nuclear fuel waste under the earth, has also looked into casting these long-lasting embers into solid spikes, ten feet long and a foot in diameter, and dropping them in mid-ocean, on the theory that after falling three miles through water they would be diving fast enough to sink a hundred feet beneath the ocean floor. I’ve told you about how plant plankton convert minerals in the water to living matter; they also convert active radioisotopes of minerals into “grass,” which goes up through the animal food chain and eventually into the stomachs of the men who make decisions about nuclear wastes, among others. Long after the atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons over Bikini, tuna fish swimming within the million square miles of the sea around the atoll were found to harbor in their flesh a radioactiv
ity very much higher than that of the ocean water around them.
After damage has been done, it has sometimes seemed necessary to the decision makers to find out its extent, and they have obliged marine biologists to turn aside from pure research to look into the havoc that hasty actions have wreaked on the environment. For example, the scientists at Sandy Hook had at one point to abandon their patient studies of the natural life of the bluefish in favor of a hurry-up investigation of how much stress from high water temperatures a blue could withstand—a study which the Atomic Energy Commission hustled them into because hot-water discharges directly into rivers by nuclear power plants were bringing some unforeseen consequences.
S: How did the blues react to the hot water?
F: Just a second. Let’s check the lures again. The current has let up quite a bit. Maybe we’re about due.
In heated water the blues swam faster and faster. (They also did in other experiments with chilled water.) Naturally. They wanted to escape—as they do in the wild, seasonally, migrating as the water cools or warms. And they schooled at night, which they never do under normal circumstances, and which suggested that they felt unusually threatened. When the tests were over, their swimming speed was slower than normal for quite a while, and they were off their feed. Evidently with prolonged exposure to too warm water they would become sickly and be less hunters than hunted.
S: Yet in spite of all the careless human interventions you’ve been talking about, blues, you told me one day, are thriving.