The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  I have read since—in various articles and books—that the Algonquian Micmacs, the original people of the region, showed European settlers in the seventeenth or eighteenth century how to catch fish with brush weirs. Other writers see it differently, suggesting that the Micmacs—while expert at trapping fish with wooden fences in freshwater streams—learned from Europeans the craft of building weirs on the intertidal flats of the great bay. Upwards of a thousand years before Christ, Phoenicians in the Mediterranean basin were driving palm branches into the sea bottom forming traps for bluefin tuna. Before Europeans invaded the New World, weirs had been set up for centuries in the Breton flats where the river Rance enters the Gulf of Saint-Malo. The tide range there averages forty feet. To historians like Joleen Gordon (“The Woven Weirs of Minas,” Curatorial Report Number 73, Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, 1993), it seems probable that brush-weir technology was brought to Maritime Canada by the French—by the Acadians, the future Cajuns—who brought it from Mont-Saint-Michel.

  In the early nineteenth century, the brush weirs of the Minas Basin trapped as many as a hundred thousand shad on one tide. Salted and packed in barrels, a large percentage of the catch was exported to the United States. Drift nets entered the picture and became dominant after 1840. Toward the end of the century, two-thirds of Canadian shad landings belonged to the Bay of Fundy. The damming and the pollution of American rivers severely cut the numbers after 1900. And now, after another hundred years, seven or eight weirs remained in the Minas Basin. James Webb’s is one of two that are made entirely of brush. Some are combinations of trees and nets; and on others gill nets start from the bottom and—like the fencing of a golf driving range—reach twenty feet up tall poles. When the tide is out, shad are hanging so high in the air that fishermen climb long homemade ladders to pick them. If you don’t have a Honda, there’s always a horse. Mike Dadswell was greatly assisted in his studies by a fisherman named Gerald Lewis, whose pneumatic-tired wagon was pulled on the flats by his horse, Tom. Dadswell, seeking government money to pay for Lewis and Tom, figured that the official imagination might not be able to encompass fishing by horse and wagon. So he measured from the horse’s nose to the back of the wagon, and applied for money for a vessel of fourteen feet. The vessel’s name? Tom. Engine: one horsepower. Ottawa coughed up ten thousand dollars.

  In an ocean system more than two thousand miles long, tined with spawning runs far up countless rivers, anything local that harms this species will be broadly regional in its effect, especially if the locality is in the Bay of Fundy, where nearly all shad go. The tidal-power project conceived by Canadian engineers was an excellent idea in the abstract if not in the environment. The tides of the Minas Basin would yield about three times as much power as Hoover Dam—about five times as much power as a nuclear generating station—if a barrage were constructed from Economy Point to Burncoat Head, sealing off Cobequid Bay. This would be a dam five and a half miles wide with a hundred and forty-eight turbines inside it. They would not make power from the incoming flow of the rising tide. The whole apparatus would function like a pumpstorage project. After the incoming tide filled up the inner bay, gates would close, and as the tide ebbed a head would develop—a difference in water level on the two sides of the dam. From the high side, water would drop through the generating turbines.

  This was not the sort of thing that could be done just anywhere. You could do it at Mont-Saint-Michel. You could do it in the Solway Firth. You could do it at Turnagain Arm and Cook Inlet and somewhere in the White Sea. There are not many places in the world where the tide range exceeds fifteen feet, and foremost among them is Fundy.

  During the years when the proposed barrage was a bold dotted line on the map, it made considerable contributions to natural science, as the government paid for studies of its potential impact. Not only did they detail and illuminate the stories of great migrations (the intercontinental sandpipers, the continental shad) but also they suggested what might become of the migrations after the dam was in place. Turbidity would greatly decline, and with it the abundance of plankton. Amphipods would steeply decline, and with them the avian migrations. Softshell clams (steamer clams) would die by the million. A third of the Canadian clam harvest comes from the Minas Basin. “The day they close the dam, ten thousand acres of the coast of Maine is going under water,” Dadswell said. “In Marblehead, basements will flood. Damming the Minas Basin will change the resonance of the Bay of Fundy. The effect will be to raise tides in the Gulf of Maine.” Salt water would get into coastal wells, it would run through the storm sewers of Portland. In a world of thick fog, there would be thicker fog.

  Meanwhile, back at the barrage, while the ebb tide fell through the twelve dozen turbines, fish would be falling, too. What would happen to them? In Dadswell’s words, “It isn’t pretty.” To find out, he studied a pilot barrage on the Annapolis River, which flows into the Bay of Fundy at about the latitude of Halifax and has a spawning run of a hundred thousand shad. The first hydroelectric tidal power station ever built in North America, it has one turbine. One was enough to show Dadswell what happened to the shad. It contained a propeller. Shad that were not chopped to pieces by the propeller had additional hazards to face. Off the tips of the blades was a zone where waters moved at differing velocities, shearing (like a wind shear) with force enough to tear off shads’ heads. From sudden pressure changes near the turbine, their eyes popped, they hemorrhaged at the bases of their fins, and their air bladders exploded. Since a shad’s air bladder extends into the braincase, the brains also exploded. Where air produced imploding vapors—the phenomenon known as cavitation—the effect on shad was severe bleeding and the pulping of body tissue, as if they were being killed by dynamite. Dadswell summarized his study, remarking, “Shad are not well designed to go through turbines.”

  In their ocean migration, individual shad linger in the Minas Basin something like fifty days. Dadswell figured that each fish would go through the barrage ten to twenty times. For every hundred thousand shad to go through the barrage, about thirty-nine thousand would be mutilated. That’s just “unacceptably high,” the resulting paper concluded. The government agreed. There is no barrage between Burncoat and Economy.

  On a freshwater stream about eighteen miles from Cobequid Bay is a small gray building with sides of corrugated metal and a red plywood gable on which is one large hand-painted word with exclamation point: FiSH! The fish, in spring, are fresh shad. Up the Shubenacadie River they come, and some run all the way across Nova Scotia to spawn very close to Halifax International Airport. Shoo-ben-ack-uh-dee-the accent is on the middle syllable. Shubenacadie. The small gray building FiSH is a short way up a tributary, and something like two dozen boats cluster on the bank, all but one of them square-ended, fore and aft. The shop belongs to Ralph Meadows, a shad fisherman for fifty years, rowing alone in one of the square-ended boats—twelve feet long, under five feet wide. This is what he does:

  He rows up to the big white pine by the 102 bridge, because that is as far as the law lets him go, and he sets his drift net in the water. The net is five feet from top to bottom and is held across the river, like a net across a tennis court, by two staff poles of spruce or fir, weighted at their lower ends.

  “Popple don’t work good. It sinks.”

  The net is held down by musket-sized lead balls, and up by orange floats. It is two hundred and ten feet long. He lets it go. It moves downstream on the ebbing tide. He rows.

  The stream bends. He rows to the right-bank staff pole. He pulls it even with the other pole.

  “The aim of the game is to keep it straight, but you can’t do that always. The currents are too strong. You’re going to have a bit of an angle.”

  He goes down the tributary and into the main-stem Shubenacadie. He rows to the left-bank staff pole to pull it even with the other. Seeing a fish hit the net, he rows to the net to pick it.

  “At bends, you swing from one staff pole to the other, swing the net. When you see a fish hit, you g
o get him. If you’re out there six hours, you row six hours. You never stop rowing.”

  He has been doing this since he was fourteen, and he used to go to Black Rock, at the mouth of the river, eighteen miles downstream; and then he would turn around and fish up on the incoming tide, rowing flat out from staff pole to staff pole, thirty-five fathoms apart, all the while rowing to pick the net-thirty-six miles a day.

  He is lithe—obviously—and he is matter-of-fact and softspoken.

  “It takes eight hours to go down to Black Rock, three and a half hours to come back. Nobody does it all anymore. They fish six to eight hours. The tide goes out slower than in. It will rise in one and a half to two hours, that’s why it’s so swift. The going out tide is much slower.”

  Racing up the reversible river, the tide is full of debris—branches, logs, whole trees. It is preferable to be travelling with them and not to be getting in their way, especially if you are tending a two-hundred-foot-long net. Past any given point on the bank, the debris that goes by in the morning will go by again in the afternoon, heading the other way. The tide reaches fifty miles up the Shubenacadie. On the day that I visited Ralph Meadows, a dead forty-foot whale was in the river with the branches, logs, and trees. A television news crew from Halifax was running up and down the small roads, trying to find it and tape a whale bite. Their attention span was about an hour, and they failed. If they had waited in one place all day, they would have seen the whale twice.

  At the Shubenacadie’s more pronounced eddies, Ralph Meadows will vary his method, bending the net around the upstream end of the eddy, then straight downriver.

  “Fish are often along the line between the eddy and the current.”

  As any shad fisherman knows.

  When the tide is pouring in, he routinely looks up into what appears to be a rogue wave bearing down upon him, but a rogue wave is random and this one is there every time—the high, rapid flow that sounds like an express train and is known to science as a tidal bore.

  “You just meet it. Your boat goes right up into the air. It rides up on top of it. You stay in the middle, not by the bank. The wall of water could throw your boat six, eight feet up the bank, on the rocks. There’s places in the river rougher than the bore—whirlpools, breakers.”

  Drift-netting the Shubenacadie is now a closed fishery. There is a limited number of licenses. To get one, you have to buy somebody out. If you let your license lapse, nobody gets it. The number is down to twenty-five or so.

  Meadows sells to a wholesaler who sells to grocery stores. As he rows hour after hour, and fish keep hitting the net, he might pick and put in his boat as many as two hundred shad. Toward the end he is rowing eight hundred pounds of shad.

  “A good catch.”

  Like the rivers of Alaska, the rivers of Maritime Canada can run all day in the mind. Annapolis River, Cloud River, Cat Arm River, Great Rattling Brook. Restigouche. Tetagouche. Margaree. Cascapédia, Patapédia, Matapédia. The Petitcodiac River. The Shubenacadie River. The Miramichi. Emphasizing the final syllable, the people there pronounce it Meer-uh-muh-shee. The Miramichi has multiple branches flaring from its stem like the petals of an iris. Draining most of central New Brunswick, they flow to the Gulf of St. Lawrence at Miramichi Bay. The longest component is the Southwest Miramichi, which rises close to Maine and traverses the whole of the province. The Southwest Miramichi is the most productive Atlantic-salmon river in New Brunswiek—the Miramichi of the Miramichis.

  I had read years before in Fly Fishing Quarterly that shad run up the Miramichi, and that certain anglers were beginning to show an interest in them, but not yet enough to produce a specific shad fly, just a nameless attractor “in orange and silver tinsel pattern on a size 8 hook.” Field & Stream, at about the same time, mentioned Old River Lodge, in Doaktown, on the Southwest Miramichi, saying that in addition to its preoccupation with salmon it “caters to shad fishermen throughout June; guide Marty Stewart has been successfully pursuing shad on the Miramichi for several years.”

  Going up there to keep a date with him, I drove out of Nova Scotia and far up into New Brunswick, the last seventy-five miles or so through an all but unbroken stand of trees. You wouldn’t call it a forest. Even if they cover thousands of square miles, you can’t call trees a forest when they’re of uniform size. In differing zones they were of different heights, yes, but this was more farm than forest. Evergreen all the way, it was about as primeval as a stand of winter wheat. Staring into it league on league, I could all but see it rolling through a laser printer.

  Nonetheless, it was wooded country. If you were up in the air, you would have to be high to see beyond it. I felt as I moved north that I had left the temperate zone and gone into a cultivated taiga that might not end until I saw a white bear sniffing the edge of a sea. In time, though, the road descended, and descended, and descended more until it debouched into a domestic river valley that would have been at home in Pennsylvania, and a small town under church steeples, with mowed lawns around frame houses, multipump petrol emporiums, a curling rink, and an Orvis store. Doaktown. Some salmon fishermen are as familiar with Doaktown as they are with Rome or Paris.

  I crossed the river. A two-lane highway paralleled the left bank. Turning off it after six miles, I went down a long unpaved lane to Old River Lodge, and used what was left of the light of the day sitting on the porch of a cabin looking at the Miramichi. The stretch going by was completely flat and placid, softly bucolic. Add a bright poppy and Corot could have signed it. I wrote in my fishing notes: “This beautiful river in its incised valley is not only reminiscent of—it is much like—the upper Delaware in the general region of Equinunk and Callicoon. The flat water shines with reflection, black and green. It is about fifty yards wide. The meadows of the floodplain are like the meadows of Cochecton. Steep hillsides rise with mixed hardwoods and spruce. The spruce are in about the same abundance as the hemlocks of the Delaware. Route 8 runs near but not beside the river, like Route 97 in New York. Route 8 crosses the Miramichi on a long high bridge at Doaktown. A railroad bridge is there, too, and it much resembles the No. 9 Bridge where the Ten Mile River comes into the Delaware at Tusten.”

  Next day, I spent the morning on the porch, in part because it was illegal for an alien to fish without a guide. Marty Stewart appeared in the early afternoon. Young, athletic, of middle height and trim, he was a good deal less imposing than his green canoe. As the two of us set off downriver, bow and stern, we had to project our voices to be heard. Living rooms are shorter than that canoe. It was twenty-six feet long, twelve inches longer than the fur traders’ canot du nord that opened the Canadian West. It had a thirty-nine-inch beam, and the planking of the hull was eastern white cedar. The ribs were cedar, too, the gunwales eastern spruce. The canoe was covered with fiberglass cloth. The thwarts were hardwood—birch or maple. I saw the name of the maker on the bow deck and called him a few weeks later—Doug Sharpe, Tide Head, New Brunswick.

  “Why twenty-six feet?” I asked him.

  “The shorter the boat, the more water you draw.”

  True. The thing went down riffles as if they weren’t there. With that broad beam, the boat was plenty stable.

  “You can walk right on the gunwales.”

  When Marty Stewart and I came to Dean Bar and its worldrenowned salmon pool, he said, “This is where we first started experimenting with the shad fishery.” Some years back, he and Bill Page and Michael French, all licensed guides, had decided to fill a hiatus in salmon runs by fishing for pleasure for shad. Every spring, they had seen the schools running as much as eighty miles upriver from Miramichi Bay. Dean Bar seemed an ideal place to intercept them. The channel was next to the left bank, and the bar reached on across the river at an angle downstream. It forced the shad into a narrow space as if they were entering a funnel. The guides had no idea if shad would take a fly. They tied white-and-orange combinations, and gave the flies no names. They used tapered leaders nine or ten feet long, down to eight-pound test, which sh
owed a lot of respect for shad. Empirically, they picked up the first fundamental of shad fishing. In Marty’s words, “Let the current take the fly downstream, most strikes come as the line becomes taut.” To Marty, Bill, and Michael, the sole purpose was “fun.” They were not trying to set up anything commercial. “Michael researched it through the U.S. What he read called for long-shank sixes. They didn’t work well here.” Nothing worked well here, at Dean Bar. “The shad were just moving through, not holding.”

  We went on downstream, and before long came to the Sutherland Pool, another frisson-maker in the Atlantic-salmon world but not on every lip as (probably) the best place for shad on the Miramichi, where, in mid-June, Marty Stewart and his companions would see “four or five thousand shad milling around, spawning, between eight and ten in the evening—fifty or sixty shad chasing on the surface, the bucks chasing the hens.” In the guides’ own nomenclature, the place became the Shad Bar. They discovered that “the shad went after small flies—size 8 or 10—and would take them in the mouth.” He said, “Before then, it was just a dip-net fishery—a couple of local ladies, right here on the Shad Bar.” The women drifted downriver in canoes at dusk scooping up shad in big salmon nets. The canoes had to be drifting or the bag of the net would pop out in front of the hoop. They collected as many as a hundred and fifty shad in one evening. They sold them commercially, or salted them for their own consumption, or used them for fertilizer. A little farther down the river, dipnetters use flatbottom boats at night with a light that attracts the shad. In markets in Moncton and Fredericton, you see whole, dressed shad. The dipnetters transport them in forty-five-gallon drums and sell them for a dollar and a half apiece. Like Ralph Meadows, of the Shubenacadie, Marty Stewart eats shad baked with turkey stuffing. Marty stuffs a whole fish and bakes it thirty-five minutes at three-fifty. Then he lays it open, and lifts the backbone out, and serves it as an appetizer to be eaten from fingers. He thinks a knife and fork make an awkward approach to the shad’s multiple bones. Some people in Doaktown prefer their shad split, sprinkled with paprika and sugar, and smoked.