The Founding Fish
Page 2
Grucela owns a piece of undeveloped, parklike riverfront land, tight between the water and Pennsylvania 611. Under a red granite tombstone there is Redgie, his Doberman of fifteen years. Redgie died watching television with Buddy Grucela. Toward the end of shad season, a bright-red tulip blooms beside the headstone, on which are carved two fish, one bearing the date of Redgie’s birth and the other the date of his death. Etched above the fish is a dog bone bearing Redgie’s name. In the Redgie years, after Grucela hooked a shad, Redgie watched the action until the fish was beginning to lie on its side. Then Redgie went after it. He went into the river like a bird dog and retrieved Grucela’s shad. One day, a carp pulled Redgie under.
Gradually, I got some of my line back that evening by the bridge pier in Lambertville, but only to watch it go out again. After twenty minutes, I had not moved the fish two feet upcurrent. It didn’t come out of the water. It didn’t even come up in the water. It acted like a shad. It went to the right. It went to the left. It lingered in reaches broadside to the current. The fish was so strong it just would not come toward me, and it felt very heavy. I was using one of my Daiwa SS 700 lightweight reels, with no backing. They don’t carry much line. I was using six-pound test. Now thirty minutes had passed. The fish went downriver in another long run against the drag. Ed Cervone’s pebbly chatter was turning quizzical, his mind an open pamphlet. He was thinking, What is the problem here—the fish or the fisherman? Edmund Cervone, behind me, said nothing. Edmund was an instinctive, natural, absolute river fisherman. On various outings, fish had come to his line while avoiding his father’s and mine. You learned things from Edmund. You learned, for example, that small darts catch shad. The smaller the dart the more shad. Edmund was a college student, however, and could not afford much time on the river. His father and I, being teachers, were not similarly burdened. Many a day we had sat in the boat catching nothing but each other’s words, and pondering the psyche of the planet’s largest herring. We were sharing the river with half a million shad, whose interest in us was inverse to our interest in them.
Ed Cervone is the sort of person who, when he is fishing, might as well be chained among the shadows in a cave. No nuance of depth or color is too subtle to prevent his frequent adjustments of style. Chartreuse? Orange and black? Red and white? Gold? Low? Medium? High? He changes his dart, returns it to the water, and speaks: “In a field that is filled with ignorance, everyone is an expert.” In the education of secondary-school students with dyslexia and many other learning disadvantages, Ed is a highly reputed practitioner of a variety of effective techniques, many of which he devised. He is a pioneer in his field. But not in this one. His doctorate may be in psychology, but these ocean fish are too much for him. Groping for reason, he essays, “What they do today they will not do tomorrow.” For that one, I’d give him credit for a ton of insight. “You and I know as much as they do,” he offers. “Or as little.” Among other things, the fish are apparently aware of what Ed is thinking: “I was fishing two days ago. People covered themselves with shad—except for me. I can’t get desperate because it is transmitted through the line into the water and the fish know it.”
You can learn a lot about shad just from their appearance. Their bodies predict what they can do. Nowhere is this as emphatic as in the deeply forked tail—the caudal fin—which is tall, and, as seen from the side, narrow. It is not as tall, narrow, and deeply forked as a tuna’s tail, but it’s getting there. It has the high aspect ratio (span versus width) associated with extreme high speed. The dorsal fin, like a sail rising up from the shad’s back, is centered—midway from nose to tail. Dorsal fins in various fishes can be forward, or aft, or anywhere along the back. The centered ones speak of an ability to swim steadily, sustaining high speed. The range of the American shad is from northern Florida to the Labrador Sea, and within the range a typical individual will swim two thousand miles in a year. They return to their home rivers after four or five years. One look at that forked tail and you know that the fish is active in the middle of the water column and not sitting around on the bottom like a bullhead catfish, whose tail is so rounded it looks like a coin. A trout has a rounded tail as well, and, as a swimmer, is one notch up from a catfish.
I am indebted for these descriptions primarily to Willy Bemis, an anatomist of fishes, who is a professor of ichthyology at the University of Massachusetts.
A shad in clear water, seen from above, is very dark greenishblue, with an almost metallic lustre. Its flashing sides are silver, its belly white. The body is deep, meaning that in outline it more closely resembles a zeppelin than a snake. The body is laterally compressed, meaning that in cross-section it is not fat. The largest shad I’ve ever caught weighed a little over six pounds and was two feet long, a not uncommon size. The scales are deciduous, diaphanous, and the size of dimes. In their treelike rings and other markings a practiced eye can discern the age of the fish and whether it has spawned before. Chemical analysis of a scale will reveal—among other things—what river the fish was born in. A deciduous scale is loose and comes off easily. A fish with the mobility and flank speed of a shad needs a loose-fitting scale in order not to be constrained. The fins, taken altogether, are like the stabilizing feathers of an arrow. The spines of the pectoral fins are right-angled levers. The pectoral fins are steering mechanisms, anti-roll devices, and brakes; and when they are not in use they are faired into the body, like retractable landing gear. A shad is supremely streamlined—a concept that came into hydrodynamics in the nineteenth century and was also known as “fish-body form.” Under broad, shieldlike, adipose eyelids, the eyeballs are faired into the head. You can predict from a shad’s large eyes the effects on its behavior of vision and light.
When the fish had been on my line forty minutes, dusk had begun to gather. Forty minutes was twice as long as any shad had been on my line anywhere before. The bridge above, with its open-grate steel roadway, was humming with tires—cars in rhythm like breaking surf. On the bridge walkway were prams, strollers, couples on their way to dinner. In the festival ambience of New Hope and Lambertville, babies never sleep. People stopped to lean over and watch. They shouted encouragement. They hung around to see the fish. No fish. Just a taut line, a rod tip high, an occasional plunge or lateral dash, a stripping run downriver. This was a scene from the nineteenth century below the old green bridge over the wide river between the two steepled towns, with narrow streets among riverine houses. Downriver past rapids was a stone tower—Bowman’s Tower—rising from the top of a hill. And just above the bridge, off Lewis Island, Lambertville, a crew rowing a small boat was hauling a nine-hundred-foot seine in a great circle in the river, making—as the Lewis family has since 1888—a commercial catch of shad. I had essentially no time to look around, however. Past my rod and line, I was getting an increasingly concentrated, Warholian look at a small swatch of New Hope—sightseeing pontoon boats shutting down for the night, the many-windowed wall of the Club Zadar, the mansard roof and high-rising fly of the Bucks County Playhouse. Other shad boats were weighing anchor and departing. The boat next to us was about to leave, but its three occupants changed their minds and decided to stay and watch. More people collected on the bridge above. Because I’d been dealing with this fish for three-quarters of an hour, Ed Cervone—not for the first time—referred to me as “the Old Man” and to the river as “the Sea.” He would be saying that again, and again, as the sky turned a deeper gray, and then black.
It’s a bad idea to horse a shad. That is, if you become impatient or for any other reason try to shorten the story by muscling the fish into submission, you’ll almost surely lose the fish. In the words of Buddy Grucela, “Shad have paper-thin mouths and under no circumstances will they allow themselves to be railroaded.” The maxillary and premaxillary bones, which constitute a large percentage of that big open mouth, run down its sides like a drooping dihedral mustache, and are very hard at the leading edge. A hook often wraps around that leading edge, penetrating the insubstantial membr
ane that lies behind. The hook is like a coat hanger swinging from a bar. The longer the shad is on the line, the greater the opening the hook will make in that thin membrane. Suddenly, the fish is gone. A fisherman doing everything right loses many shad. It’s a basic component of shad fishing. Not all shad are hooked in just that way, but most seem to be, and when they are netted—or the tension on the line otherwise drops—there’s usually no need to detach the shad dart; it just falls out of the mouth. The lower extremities of the premaxillary bones widen out like strips of durable plastic. If the hook lodges there, your chances of netting the fish are considerably larger. Of course, while the fish is in the water you’ve got no idea where the hook is and your only rational strategy is finesse.
More time went by. I’d had the fish on the line for an hour, and then an hour and a half. The guys in the boat next to us—now the only other boat—finally pulled anchor and left, mentioning something about their wives. There were people on the bridge who had been watching earlier, and had gone off to dinner, and now had come back from dinner and were watching again. One of them shouted, “Are you still catching that same fish?” I nodded without looking up. In the darkness, I was staring instead at the black vertical rod against the disco lights of Club Zadar, which had grown ever brighter with the fall of night and were flashing colors on the river. While the fish moved and sounded, and came up a little, and then sounded again, it almost hypnotized me as I concentrated on the swaying rod against the whirling colors. Gingerly, I worked it to the left and the right, trying to move its head to one side and then to the other side, to confuse it, and try to get in charge of it psychologically. But I’ll tell you, I never got in charge of that fish psychologically. At nine-thirty, completing two hours on the other end of the line, it made the reel scream as it took off downriver like a tarpon.
Tarpon? Well, hardly. But the Delaware is a river of prodigious fisheries, and for the past hour we had been doubting, speculating, wondering. What species could this fish be? It had been on the line more than five times as long any of us had ever required to bring in a shad. We now decided that it was not a shad. It felt like a shad in strong current, but the passage of so much time made us think elsewhere. The Delaware is the premier wild-rainbow-trout river in the eastern half of the United States. Ed Cervone and I had watched a shad fisherman catching a rainbow only ten miles north. The big native rainbows, though, were two hundred miles up the river. Besides, no rainbow could ever qualify to be this fish. Once, after I threw a shad dart into the current far upriver, the dart swung into a fish that felt like a shad with a bad cold. It moved around like a shad, but it just felt, by comparison, weak. It turned out to be a fat native wild rainbow, a beautiful fish, not much under two pounds.
There were numerous alternative possibilities. Edmund mentioned the muskellunge. If an alligator had the swimming skills of a barracuda, that would be a muskellunge. Muskies are lone ambush hunters, as much as six feet long, and are not uncommon in the Delaware. With two hours behind us, Ed Cervone dismissed the notion. “They give up,” he said. “They roll over.”
A walleye? Never. “A walleye would be fatigued in five minutes.”
A striped bass? Never. “A striped bass would be fatigued in ten minutes. Stripers fight very, very strongly—savagely. However, after a certain point they fade. They exhaust themselves. They use up their oxygen. Once you control the first few rushes it’s awfully hard to revive them. They give up. They roll over.”
A carp?
Edmund: “Whatever it is, if we catch it we’re going to eat it.”
Ed: “A carp wouldn’t fight like that.”
Me: “Oh, yes it would.”
I remembered shad fishing one evening at the Trenton power plant when a guy had a carp on four-pound test. Carp can be three feet long, and his was not far off it. He struggled more than an hour. The power plant is on Duck Island, below the Trenton fall line, and the tide was coming in. The best shad fishing from Trenton downriver is said to be on the incoming tide. Duck Island is as far as you can drive along the river down Lamberton Road in Trenton. Then you put on your waders and walk at least half a mile around a high chain-link fence to an artificial bay at the edge of the river—a square bay, where the power plant discharges its cooling water. The water is warm, and fish collect there. More than two dozen fishermen were present that Monday evening, some in boats, some closely spaced along the shore, fishing in the effluent pond, the warm, man-made eddy. A kid caught a big roe shad while I watched. The same kid had a shad on his line every ten or fifteen minutes. I caught nothing. I was going too low—amateurishly using a quarter-ounce dart. It was sinking fast, and travelling under the shad, which were at the surface, where the warmth was. The kid was using a small green dart. I had nothing but the big darts. As dusk came, the shad were breaking water, hitting lures, working up a frenzy. But I could not hook one even while rods all around me were bending. The man with the carp at long last landed it. He used my net. The carp probably weighed twenty-five pounds. I was discouraged, walking back to the car. I was discouraged by my own failure and discouraged by the scene I had just left: a bay of right angles raked with lures and fed with hot water that brought in the fish.
Edmund: “Maybe it’s a catfish.”
Ed: “That is a distinct possibility.”
While fishing for stripers, Ed had caught a “huge blue cat” in Trenton. The biggest catfish I’d ever seen—far larger than any I’d seen in the bayous of the Atchafalaya—came out of Lake Carnegie, in Princeton. Eventually, we agreed all around that the fish on my line was probably a big channel cat—a catfish with a head at least the size of a basketball. Two hours, fifteen minutes. By now, that’s what it felt like.
When Edmund mentioned a sturgeon.
Ed: “Yes! Yes!”
Me: “A sturgeon?”
Ed: “A spawning fish that goes up the river and has tremendous energy.”
Me: “I know what a sturgeon is.”
Ed: “That’s it. Completely possible. They never give up. Eventually, you have to go in and wrestle them. You don’t land them, you capture them. I saw one by the 202 bridge a few years ago.”
Looking up the river in daylight from New Hope, you can see the 202 bridge.
For that matter, a man I once talked to had seen a six-foot sturgeon in New Hope. Eventually, we agreed all around that the fish on my line was a sturgeon.
When a shad is foul-hooked-caught in the tail, or another fin, or any part of the body other than the mouth—the shad loses its grip on reality, sprints away in total rage, and thrashes the river on erratic vectors. It is very difficult to hold on to a foul-hooked shad. This fish, of course, could be a foul-hooked shad.
Among the spectators on the bridge, a cop appeared. He shouted, “Does one of you guys down there own a green Jeep?”
Ed Cervone shouted back, “Yes, Officer, I do.”
“Well,” the cop continued, with the slightest pause. “Your wife called. She wants you home. She thinks you’re dead.”
Laughter on the bridge—9:50 P.M.
It was not true that Marian Cervone was concerned about her husband. By her own account, the man is too unpredictable to worry about. She wasn’t worried about Edmund, either. It was my wife, Yolanda Whitman, whose mind had been crossed by the ultimate possibility. This was a few years before the sudden bloom of cellular phones. I had no way to tell her why I was late, and deliberately breaking off that fish never crossed my mind.
Yolanda seems to remember the evening with total recall. For one thing, it was my turn to cook. “By nine o’clock, I was just plain mad,” she has said for the record. “You were dithering too long. I was waiting for my dinner. You were taking your sweet time, failing in your responsibilities.”
Yes.
“At some point after that, I shifted from mad to concern. You had fallen out of the boat. Gone through the rapids.”
The rapids, not far from the bridge, cross a diabase ledge and are tumultuous in spring.
Marian must have marvelled that someone could seriously use a phrase like that about a husband. Marian said she would call back if she learned anything. After hanging up, she called the Lambertville police. She said her husband and son and a friend were out in a boat and had not returned “way beyond the time” she expected them. Would the police check the boat-launch parking lot and see if a green Jeep was there? The woman on the other end of the line said the police surely would.
A while later, the police called Marian, and Marian called Yolanda, who continues the narrative: “While I waited, a tear or two actually squeezed out. I had let myself wander into the impossible. Perhaps I was madder at Ed than at you—who knows? After Marian called back, I was again spitting mad. She said, ‘They’re still fishing.’”
Two hours, thirty minutes. At last the fish had come up enough in the river so that the people on the bridge caught glimpses of it as, now and again, it canted—silver flashing—and changed direction. We heard them go “Ooh!” We heard them shout, “Wow, what a huge fish!” When we, in the boat, finally got a glimpse of it, we thought it enormous, too. Toward the end, I kept pressing it, tightened the drag even more, a risky, foolish thing to do. I just hoped it would not make a sudden run. If it did so, at least I had turned off the anti-reverse button, and the reel could spin free. Buddy Grucela, page 22.