by John McPhee
The largest Gloucester seine boats were sixty feet long and twelve feet wide. With eighteen men rowing them, they looked like uniremes. Some of the fishermen, moonlighting in two senses, were farmers by day. When the moon itself was not working, there were lanterns in the bows. Down the broad reaches of the river below Philadelphia lantern lights extended for tens of miles. There were drift nets, and nets strung between driven stakes. Holding pens were constructed in the state of Delaware so that shad could be transferred into tanks in freight cars and hauled alive to Philadelphia. Alfred Rice, a shad captain in the early nineteen-hundreds, had a crew of thirty-six and a two-mile seine. His customers for the most part were in Pittsburgh. In spring, so many shad boats would be on the river that ocean liners bound for Philadelphia failed to avoid them. In MotorBoat magazine, May 25, 1911, C. G. Davis described “a big Italian steamer … sheering up the Delaware” through fleets of shad boats that could not tell which way to move. They stayed put. “The steamer came head on,” caught a net in her screw, and pulled the boat attached to it stern-first up the river.
Annually in the eighteen-nineties, commercial fishermen took four million shad from the Delaware River. A “forty-cent shad” was the fattest and finest. In the Hudson River, shad were taken commercially from Troy to the sea—with drift nets down to Catskill, anchored nets to the Tappan Zee, and, on the New Jersey side opposite 125th Street, nets fastened to poles set in the bottom of the river. A similar sequence filled the Connecticut to Saybrook, where nets were fastened to poles set in the bottom of the river. A hundred years later, as the twentieth century ended, most shad marketed in the Northeast were being shipped from Georgia and the Carolinas. The number of commercial shad fishermen on the Hudson and the Connecticut was down to a remnant few. On the Delaware, of the tens of dozens of commercial fisheries in the hundred and twenty miles between tidewater and Port Jervis, only the one in Lambertville survived. Richard Holcombe began it in 1771, on the small New Jersey island just north of the New Hope bridge. William Lewis took it over in 1888, and was on the island more than seventy years. His son, Fred Lewis, long in years, runs the fishery now. He remembers fishing fifty-two hours nonstop in one of the fishery’s banner years. He calls it “the longest day I ever put in.” The day started at midnight Sunday and finished on Wednesday at four A.M. When his crew today starts a typical haul, they walk up the riverbank some two thousand feet, lining a U.S. Army assault boat of the type that crossed the Rhine. They carry the net. A crewman stays ashore, holding one end, while the others row much of the way to Pennsylvania, and then drift downstream before rowing back to New Jersey, making inches per sweep. Two are at oars, a third is poling. They wear hip boots, sweatshirts, watch caps. Only the assault boat would look different to Thomas Eakins. And maybe Sue Meserve, pulling in the haul. She is Lewis’s granddaughter-in-law. His grandson Steve Meserve is in the boat, too. Others in the crew are John Baker, who is Lewis’s grandson-in-law; Anna May Windle, Lewis’s niece, and John Isler, who is related to Lewis only in the sense that he has worked for him about forty years. Lewis lives where his father did—on the island, in a frame house whose relationship with the river is a good deal more intimate than it would be even on a floodplain. The front porch is eight feet above the water. The parlor windows are eight feet higher than the porch. The river from time to time has been higher than the windows.
To form a great C with the nine-hundred-foot net, the rowers and poler work harder than galley slaves. The guy at the starting point holding the upstream end of the net walks it down to close the loop. On shore, they and others lean into the haul, folding the net as it comes in, its pocket full of thrashing fish. By no means all of them are American shad. Many may be gizzard shad—a fish that likes vegetables and grinds them in a gizzard like a bird’s. The net has brought in a muskellunge more than a metre long, striped bass, black bass, trout, catfish, walleyes, and quillback carpsuckers. Six-foot sturgeons have been seen in New Hope but not across the river in Lewis’s net.
A footbridge connects the island to Lambertville, and, not infrequently, a hundred and fifty people might collect to watch the net come in. I have seen hauls bulging with American shad, and a haul in the dearth year 1999 that landed one buck shad and one roe shad. The fishery in itself is a record and recapitulation of two and a half centuries in the life of the species, richest in detail in the Lewis years. In its peaks and valleys, the fishery’s success-and-failure chart resembles the stock market’s, with booms near the ends of the centuries and epic busts in the middle. Not to mention the decline as the twenty-first century arrived. In 1896, the Lewis fishery caught ten thousand shad. In 1949, it caught three. In 1953, as noted earlier, the total catch was zero. In 1956, the total catch was zero. The largest catch for any year in that decade was ninety. Then larger runs returned.
Before the mid-century crash, Lewis would fish beyond midnight and then take his catch to the big-city market downriver. After the depressed, pollution-block years, he changed his practice when the shad came back, keeping only what local people and local stores and restaurants ordered in advance. He returns the surplus to the river. It’s a biological decision, he says: “We figure the shad are better off going up the river than to Philadelphia.”
The fact that the main-stem Delaware is free of dams is attributable in large part to its shad fisheries. In 1783, Pennsylvania and New Jersey formally agreed to prohibit the building of dams unless both states agreed to repeal the treaty. In “Shad Fishing on the Delaware River,” a paper read in 1920 before the Bucks County Historical Society, Horace Mann reported that shad-industry opposition had steadily prevented the construction of dams. Anglers everywhere on the main-stem river, who owe so much to that 1783 treaty, are indebted to the Lewis fishery in more than an historical sense. The hotline of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen’s Association is in daily touch with Lewis, whose lone commercial fishery—more consistent and reliable than any hydroacoustical survey—is the antenna of the spring migration.
If no two shad fishermen agree on much of anything, Lewis makes a fitting third. He has worked with the biologists—Canada’s Mike Dadswell, New Jersey’s Art Lupine and Mark Boriek—but he can deliver an observation that would make a biologist blink. He says, for example, “Shad go to the sunny side of the river.” He should know. “I don’t care what theory you develop on shad, the shad will prove you wrong,” he concludes. “Dad always said, ‘You don’t know what’s out there until you put your net in the water.’”
THIRTEEN
INSIDE THE CAVITY
In the evening after fishing, I carry my shad to a flat boulder at the edge of the river, lay them out, and sit down beside them, my legs in the water. The light has softened. The river comes down through one lyrical vista and goes off into another. The upper Delaware is rich in big flat boulders—rich, too, in scenes of beauty. Since I am left-handed, my fish lie on their left sides. You open a shad not along the axis of its belly but a short way up, because a shad has a keel that is hard as bone and is covered with scutes—sharp plates that can cut you open while you are opening the fish. You cut above the scutes from the pectoral fins to the anus. Professional shad fishermen use a T-shaped knife with a hooking blade. I use German scissors. I buy them in New York City from a surgical supply company on Lexington Avenue. Near the anus, you pick up the bowel and tug. With whatever comes out attached to it, you toss the bowel in the river. If this is a female, roe sacs crowd the cavity, self-contained like sausages. You put both hands in the cavity and work your fingers around the sacs, lifting them, breaking the thin and transparent membrane that holds them in place along the cavity walls. It breaks easily but I help it with the scissors, especially at the tail end, snipping the roe sacs free. My hands are covered with bright blood. A shad is an unusually bloody fish. Cradling the roe, I lower my hands into current, which carries the blood away.
Thus begins a process that is as much a part of the fishing as the anticipation, the casting, the hooking up, the maneuvers with the
taut line, the netting, the eating, and the making of the dart. Only in part because I’m tired, I pause often to look up, down, or into the river. There’s a break in the surface, a splashing flip, dark forms-blood-attracted eels.
Often, a shad’s air sac—its swim bladder, a small linear balloon—peels away with the roe. Pulling all these pieces apart, which I have been doing in various kinds of fish since I was five years old, I used to lack a clear sense of their components, my vocabulary seldom rising much past “guts.” Remembering indistinctly a description I had read, I once asked Boyd Kynard what it is that connects the swim bladder to something in a shad’s head, contributing to its extraordinary sensory perception. Kynard, the fish behaviorist, said, “I don’t know. You need Willy Bemis for that.”
Before long, I was standing at a dissection table in a lab at the University of Massachusetts, opening a shad with an audience of one: the anatomist Willy Bemis. Willy, like Boyd, had led me in multiple ways through the chambers of natural history. Willy is not specifically a shad biologist, but if you live in Amherst, Massachusetts, and are known far and wide for your knowledge of fish anatomy, it would be hard to overlook the anadromous migrations in the nearby Connecticut River. When I met him, a couple of years before the turn of the century, he was scarcely forty—a dark-haired dark-eyed life-loving hedonist in sandals, always moving mountains of research, post-deadline, with the air of a distractable tactician. His lab had a snake in it, reagents in glass jars, lungfish dating from his doctoral dissertation, stereo microscopes, vacuum jars filled with scanning-electron-microscope specimens, print dryers, water stills, light tables, cameras, and more than enough clutter to represent the cutting edge of science. In more than a thousand square feet, there was no working surface that did not need to be cleared before working. In a fresh and modest clearing—muralled in petri dishes, books, bottles, and flasks—I did what I do at the river, and asked him to describe what I was doing, while Sony preserved his voice.
“John is starting his incision by moving aside a few of the scales below the right pectoral fin. He makes a small opening. He’s above the level of the scutes, maybe half an inch. He inserts the blunt side of the scissors into the body cavity and cuts backwards, caudally, along the top edge of the scutes.”
I roll the shad onto its back, so that gravity will create a space between the roe sacs and the cutting.
“His right index finger is in the incision, lifting, as he goes on with the slice. He continues the cut to the anal fin. The egg sacs are unbroken. Now he’s stripping out the gut tube, and pulling it forward. It comes out nice and cleanly, with the pyloric caecae.”
The pyloric caecae look like a clump of angel-hair pasta. In the digestive tract, they follow the stomach, and always break away with the gut tube.
“They’re little blind-ended diverticula, off the intestine at the level of the pylorus, which is the bottom end of the stomach. Pyloric caecae in fish are a way to increase the surface area for digestion and absorption.”
As I remove the roe, Willy narrates: “The next step is to pry open the body cavity a little bit further, and gently reach around behind the egg sacs to free them up from their mesentery connecting them to the wall of the body cavity there—and then gently, gently, free them up from the back. John is using his finger to free that up, and now a scissors cut in the mesentery that’s carrying the egg sacs. He’s cutting them free. Now a last couple of cuts, in the caudal end, and there they are—two lovely, lovely egg sacs.”
I am slow, fastidious, and amateur. A commercial worker can remove the contents of three hundred shad in an hour, just reaching in and deftly scooping out everything at once, a guts-and-roe ensemble.
These roe sacs will, alas, not end up under bacon. Not under my bacon, in any case. We did not catch this specimen on a dart in the river but instead picked it up at the top of the elevators in Holyoke Dam, where Willy anesthetized it with methanesulfonate salt. Truth be told, we fished side by side without a strike for several hours on the left bank of the river, and then went into the dam, where we learned from a bulletin board beside the powerhouse door that the elevators were lifting shad at the rate of three thousand a day while we were catching nothing. Issued hard hats, we put them on and watched a car rise five stories jammed to the gills with American shad, not to mention other species. Near the top, a lamprey’s tail stuck out and was guillotined. Behind the observation window—beheld by a decibel of schoolchildren—was a mass of woven silver, enough shad to rattle the glass. Well beyond the public area—after we went down and up a steel complex of stairs—we came to a vertical chamber, vaguely similar to a navigation lock, known to management as the Fish Trap. Doors open, shad swim in. The doors close. The floor of the trap rises, lifting shad. They start flopping as the water drains away. This is how Edgar Allan Poe fished.
Gene Lavoie, the bearded and barrelly lift manager, weighed the trapped shad and measured them, picking them up by pressing his fingers into spaces below and behind the eyes. “Luckily these fish come with a built-in handle,” he said. After rubbing off some scales with an inverted knife blade, he gave four roe shad and two buck shad to Willy, who anesthetized them in buckets, and then put them into a big plastic bag. The anesthesia notwithstanding, the bag pulsated with contained shad. It sounded like heavy rain.
Now, in the university’s Merrill Science Center, in Amherst, I open the shad’s empty stomach, as I do routinely at the riverside, testing—always positively—the established thesis that shad do not eat on the spawning run, and finding only bits of vegetation or, more commonly, nothing, perhaps hoping for a rattlesnake’s head to support Thoreau in his claim that a Connecticut River shad swallowed one. A study in the York River by John Walter and John Olney, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, showed that shad eat mysid shrimp and copepods while still in the estuary making the salt-fresh transition, and, rarely, eat water fleas upstream. Water fleas, like mysid shrimp and copepods, are plankton. George Bernard, of Wallingford, Connecticut, who is a hundred per cent shad fisherman and zero per cent biologist, is of the opinion that shad on the spawning run do feed. On a wall of his Shad Museum, in Higganum, is a photograph that would not shock a surgeon, but might startle almost anyone else. A shad’s head has been largely severed, and swung out like a door on the remaining hinge so the camera can see into the sliced-open stomach, where a flutter spoon is hooked solid.
Willy encapsulates my next move: “John reaches around and pulls at the liver and the rest of the viscera in the anterior part of the body cavity—pulls those all out—and then uses his scissors to cut the esophagus. Now he breaks into the pericardial cavity and pulls out the heart. There you go. If this were not happening in a university building, an eel would be lucky enough to get that heart.”
“Look around,” I suggest.
After snipping the esophagus, I usually break open with my thumb the chamber in the front of the body that contains the heart. The heart pops out. Smooth and firm, it resembles a chicken’s, but is without fat and curiously bloodless.
“With cold running water, he washes out the body cavity.”
When the cavity is empty, one organ remains—isolated high behind the cavity’s membrane—its soft, dark-mulberry material covering and concealing the backbone. All my fishing life, I’ve been scraping it out with my fingernails in sunfish, perch, pickerel, rock bass, trout—giving little thought to what the material might be. In a shad, the covering is too tough for fingernails and I use the surgical scissors. Sometimes the air sac clings to it, and I have to pull it off beforehand.
“Now he is using the scissors again to cut into the retroperitoneal space there, where the kidney is. It’s called ‘retro’ because it’s behind the peritoneum, the layer that lines the body cavity. First he peeled away the air sac, which adheres very tightly to that peritoneal membrane.”
One season, after catching a remarkably undersized female, I asked Willy what would cause a young adult shad—a year, and even two, before its time—t
o leave the ocean and come into the river to spawn? He answered, “I don’t know. For that you need Boyd Kynard.” Now, in the lab as the air sac peels away, Willy is saying, “The air bladder of these clupeids is highly specialized. There are ducts which lead forward from the air bladder to the posterior part of the skull. They transmit vibrations of the swim-bladder wall directly to the inner ear of the fish. This is a way these fish have of detecting high-frequency sounds under water, or sounds that are far away. These swim-bladder-to-ear connections have evolved many times in different groups of fishes, and it’s one of the specialized sensory devices that we see in many groups of teleosts.”
Acoustical experiments at the University of Maryland have shown that American shad are sensitive to sound at very high frequencies (a hundred and eighty thousand hertz), far beyond the known range of any other fish. In seeking prey in the ocean, certain echolocating cetaceans (dolphins and porpoises) make clicking sounds at that level. Dolphins and porpoises prey on shad, which evidently hear the clicks and either cluster for protection or scatter for freedom. Videos made in College Park record the explosive scatteration when sounds in those frequencies pass through tanks full of shad. In the words of an e-mail from Arthur N. Popper, one of the Maryland biologists, “American shad can hear ultrasound, and, indeed, they probably have a wider hearing range than any other vertebrate.”
The shad in Willy’s lab, its cavity emptied from the lower right side, is now lying on the table as a shad does in a fish market when a professional with a knife is about to remove its scales, head, fins, and bones. Like other fish, shad are shipped intact—minus only their innards—to avoid deterioration. I remark to Willy that when people in fish markets see my fish—as they sometimes do when I shamelessly appear for help in removing the bones—they usually say, “You’re left-handed.”
