The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  Some shad fishermen wear golfers’ clickers on their vests—plastic wheels that count up to a hundred. They call out to each other, in competition for numbers. They won’t go to lunch until they’ve caught a certain quota. Howell Raines’ friend Dick Blalock says to him, “I’m very much opposed to any kind of competition in fishing. I think that fishing should not be a competitive sport … I’m not in competition with you—ever, ever, ever.” By the third “ever,” you are getting the idea that Blalock is in Counters Anonymous. A guy I know as Harrisburg tells me about shad fishing beside a guy we know as Scranton. When Harrisburg arrived in mid-afternoon, Scranton had caught forty-one shad. Harrisburg caught thirty-two thereafter. Neither Harrisburg nor Scranton ever keeps a fish. They talk about the number they have caught, and are obsessed with those numbers. Is this the nobility of catch-and-release? Certain catch-and-release types speak of “meat fishermen” in the same tone that fly fishermen generally use for people who fish with worms. I’m a meat fisherman. I think it’s immoral not to eat a fish you jerk around the river with a steel barb through its mouth. I see no other justification for doing so. The whole panoply of barbless hooks and prestidigitational underwater releases leaves me ice cold. There’s no such thing as humane torture, and striking steel into a fish and pulling it into submission is torture.

  Yolanda Whitman appears to agree with me, but then fires a heavy shot across my bow. “Catch-and-release fishing is analogous in a general way to the form of ‘humane’ bullfighting that omits the kill,” she says, and I nod in eye-to-eye agreement. She continues: “If you keep your fish, it’s analogous to traditional bullfighting. The intention is to kill, and to extend the act of killing. Fishing is crueler than hunting, in that your goal is to have the fish fight for its life. That’s the ‘fun.’ Hunting, you’re trying to kill a creature outright; fishing, you want to ‘play’ with it.”

  “That is not a fair description of your husband.”

  “If you could just pull fish out of the water—boom—you wouldn’t be a fisherman. Don’t give me that, John.”

  If she thinks I’m so bad, she should read more Washington Irving. From “Tales of the Alhambra” (1832):

  I had repeatedly observed a long lean fellow perched on the top of one of the towers, manoeuvring two or three fishing-rods, as though he were angling for the stars. I was for some time perplexed by the evolutions of this aerial fisherman, and my perplexity increased on observing others employed in like manner on different parts of the battlements and bastions; it was not until I consulted Mateo Ximenes that I solved the mystery. It seems that the pure and airy situation of this fortress has rendered it, like the castle of Macbeth, a prolific breeding-place for swallows and martlets, who sport about its towers in myriads, with the holiday glee of urchins just let loose from school. To entrap these birds in their giddy circlings, with hooks baited with flies, is one of the favourite amusements of the ragged “sons of the Alhambra,” who, with the good-fornothing ingenuity of arrant idlers, have thus invented the art of angling in the sky.

  It would be nice to think that those idlers were fond of martlet breasts rubbed with garlic, dusted with flour, and sautéed in virgin olive oil. If you use a fishing rod, you are foraging, and a forager sees to it that what is collected is eaten. For me, nothing else is comfortable. I remember reading long ago that nothing else is comfortable to a German, either. When my friend Marc Fisher, who later wrote “After the Wall,” was working in Germany as the Washington Post’s chief correspondent there, I wrote to him asking what he knew about German sport-fishing regulations and the attitudes that informed them. Was it true that Germans forbid the practice of catch-and-release? Marc’s reply, with his unfailing humor, amounted to a guidebook to German angling (for Germans), here excerpted:

  Germany’s eternal quest to regulate virtually every aspect of life does not leave the weekend fisherman unscathed. You are correct: If you fish in Germany, you keep—and eat—what you catch, or you face painful fines. Each of Germany’s sixteen states has its own fishing laws, but according to Uwe Schuller, managing director of the Association of German Sport Fishermen, all state laws have in common the following elements:

  Before you head out for a morning of sport fishing in Germany, you must have passed a government fishing examination, which includes both written and practical sections. First, you must take a thirty-hour course prepared by the local fishing and water protection associations. The course includes sections on “general fish knowledge” and “specific fish knowledge,” focusing on the individual species you hope to catch—and eat. There is a heavy emphasis in the course on environmental safeguards. After the course, you must pass the exam by answering at least forty-five of sixty questions correctly. Then, you must pass the practical. Your examiner might say to you, “Please build a rod fit for catching eel.” You must then do this. The ordeal ends with the awarding of a fishing license (Fischereiprüfung).

  Do not go fishing at this point. You still need a fishing permit (Fischereierlaubnisschein). This document allows you to fish in a particular body of water for a particular period of time. Permits are granted only if you prove that you have a “sensible reason” to fish. For most types of fish, the only permissible reason is “menschliche Ernährung”—human nutrition. You fish to eat. If you attempt to fish without a permit, a friendly neighbor will be sure to follow the German tradition of filing a complaint against you, an experience you will not find pleasant.

  With a permit, you may now go fishing. But Herr Schuller wants you to be very careful: “You are never, ever to throw a fish back. We have none of this American style catch-and-release. That is verboten. That is a violation of the animal protection law and can be severely punished.” The animal protection law considers it an offense to injure fish for no good reason, and sport fishing in itself is no good reason.

  Nelson Bryant, in the New York Times, has expressed a certain weariness with published pictures of anglers cradling fish to be released after the picture is taken. In Bryant’s view, “it would be pleasing to see a photograph of an angler with a nice fish, legal to keep, under which the caption informs the reader that on the same day the angler filleted it, brushed it with a butter-herb sauce and broiled it over a hardwood fire.” I fish for American shad because they are schooling fish that come into the rivers wild. They are not an endangered species. They are not raised in hatcheries and brought as adults to the river in trucks. And above all, as a most savory food, they merit their taxonomic description. I catch to eat, and with that purpose am not troubled by the killing. As Jennifer Price observed in her book “Flight Maps,” “most of us do not personally snap the heads off the poultry we eat.” If you’re going to be a fisherman, you have to be prepared to kill fish, because you will kill them if you catch and release them, you will kill them with barbless hooks. You won’t kill everything, but you’ll kill. They are going to die after you release them, and they are going to die if you keep them to eat. You don’t need to develop a protective theology, as Ted Kerasote does: “We’re making choices—more spiritual than economic—about grounding our souls in landscape through participation, about becoming participatory citizens of a homeplace through the eating of what the landscape produces.” All you need is a stove. In the words of George Reiger: “The reason our fly-fishing forebears developed this technique was to catch trout so they could eat them. To characterize such sensible behavior as unenlightened is not only snobbish, it provides fuel for those who insist that the only purpose of angling is to torture fish.”

  In this at times acrimonious and always three-pronged debate—catch-and-release, catch to eat, don’t molest fish—it is not impossible to empathize with the widely varying points of view of a pair of brilliant Australians, each of whom acquired strong early attitudes in large part derived from their fathers. Peter Singer, who has been called “the ideological father of the modern movement for animal rights,” used to take long walks with his seriously asthmatic father along Australian riverbanks
past fishermen with newly caught fish beside them, gasping pathetically. “He used to say how cruel that was,” Peter Singer told the writer Sylvia Nasar. “He didn’t understand how people could think it was fun.” Robert Hughes, who grew up fishing and hunting in and near Sydney, was instructed by his father: “Never shoot anything alive unless you mean to eat it.”

  Of course, as is quite well established, there is nothing like a rod, a reel, a stream, and the privacy of nature to make a liar out of anybody. Not to mention hypocrite. I release shad sometimes, I confess. I prefer females to males. But, soon after recording my German attitudes toward catch-and-release, I went to the river and caught and released three roe shad as large as any I had seen all year. It was a test. Could I do it? Would I do it? I’m here to tell you, it was not easy. I returned to the river, in those living fish, about a million eggs. Or did I? That noble move was tempered by the odds-on possibility that the fish would die—as a result of my interference—before they had a chance to spawn.

  Two of the two things I have in common with Cotton Mather are that he fished in canoes and that he evidently fished to eat. If he was not the first American to tell exaggerative and mendacious fish stories, he missed the honor by a narrow margin. In 1712, Mather wrote “The Fisher-mans Calling. A Brief ESSAY to Serve the Great Interests of RELIGION among our Fisher-men; and set before them the Calls of their SAVIOUR, whereof they should be Sensible, in the Employments of their Fishery.” He told of thirty ocean fishermen who, after being frustrated by foul weather, went fishing on a day that they had previously reserved for the “Exercises of Religion.” Five other fishermen did not join them but “tarried” to worship Jesus Christ. “The Thirty which went away from the Meeting, with all their Craft could Catch but four Fishes; The Five which tarried, went forth afterwards; and they took five Hundred.” On Wednesday, August 15, 1716, near Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cotton Mather fell out of a canoe while fishing on Spy Pond. After emerging soaked, perplexed, fishless, he said, “My God, help me to understand the meaning of it!” Before long, he was chastising his fellow clerics for wasting God’s time in recreational fishing.

  Not a lot of warmth there. Better to turn to the clergyman Fluviatulis Piscator, known to his family as Joseph Seccombe, who was twenty-one years old when Cotton Mather died. Beside the Merrimack River, in 1739, Piscator delivered a sermon that was later published as “A Discourse utter’d in Part at Ammauskeeg-Falls, in the Fishing-Season.” There are nine copies in existence. One was sold at auction in 1986 for fourteen thousand dollars. The one I saw was at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Inserted in it was a book dealer’s description that said, “First American book on angling; first American publication on sports of field and stream. Seccombe’s defense of fishing is remarkable for coming so early, in a time when fishing for fun needed defending.” Fishing for fun and food reached a high level at Ammauskeeg Falls, where Manchester, New Hampshire, is now. It was a rite of the spring migration, of the arrival of American shad, with Indians and colonists dancing, writing treaties, feasting, fishing. When Fluviatulis Piscator came into this scene, he was famous for his work as a missionary in Maine, an assignment that could only have advanced his development as a sport fisherman. He reminded the Ammauskeeg festival that the apostles were not only fishers of men but fishers in the first place, and they fished not only on business but also at times for diversion, and that the “Lord not only appoints the Leisure, but supports them in it, by giving them a lucky Draught of Fishes.” He further said, “Fishing is innocent as Business or Diversion … Diversion is the turning aside from Business, in some proper Period, to refresh ourselves, and fit us for a more chearful and lively Discharge of Duty.” Shifting his address to people concerned for the ethical treatment of animals, he said,

  Some among ourselves fear whether we ought to take away the Lives of Creatures for our own Support; and are positive that we should not for Diversion. Many have a great Aversion to those whose Trade it is to take away the Lives of the lower Species of Creatures. A Butcher is (in their Apprehension) a mere Monster, and a Fisherman, a filthy Wretch … He that takes Pleasure in the Pains and dying Agonies of any lower Species of Creatures, is either a stupid sordid Soul, or a Murderer in Heart. He that delighteth to see a Brute die, would soon take as great Pleasure in the Death of a Man. But here, in Fishing, we are so far from delighting to see our Fellow-Creature die, that we hardly think whether they live. We have no more of a murderous Tho’t in taking them, than in cutting up a Mess of Herbage. We are taking something, which God, the Creator and Proprietor of all, has given us to use for Food, as freely as the green Herb. Gen. IX. 2, 3. He allows the eating them, therefore the mere catching them is no Barbarity. Besides God seems to have cary’d out the Globe on purpose for a universal supply … and he has implanted in several sorts of Fish, a strong Instinct [or Inclination] to swim up these Rivers a vast Distance from the sea. And is it not remarkable, that Rivers most incumbred with Falls, are ever more full of Fish than others? Why are they directed here? Why retarded by these difficult Passages? But to supply the …

  Thoreau went through an arc with respect to treatment of fish. In 1839, in the notes that would evolve into “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” he mentioned “the Common Eel … still squirming … in the frying pan.” And “the Horned Pout, Pimelodus nebulosus, sometimes called Minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes when drawn out of the water, is a dull and blundering fellow, and like the eel vespertinal in his habits, and fond of the mud. It bites deliberately as if about its business. They are taken at night with a mass of worms strung on a thread, which catches in their teeth, sometimes three or four, with an eel, at one pull. They are extremely tenacious of life, opening and shutting their mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut off.”

  By 1854, in Walden, he was saying, “I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect … Always when I have done it I feel it would have been better had I not fished … With every year I am less a fisherman … At present I am no fisherman at all.”

  If you were growing up in Philadelphia in the eighteen-fifties, odds are that you were under the influence of a children’s book called “City Characters; Or, Familiar Scenes in Town.” It said: “You may take your hook and line some summer afternoon, and sit by a stream in the country under some shady tree, catching sunnies, perch, roach, and other little fish. Do not do so, however, merely to throw them away again; for that is wasteful and cruel. If you take them home, they will be cooked, and make a nice supper for you.”

  In early-colonial and pre-colonial time, certain bands of the Lenape fished at the mouth of Brandywine Creek during the spring migration. Upstream a few miles, on more agreeable ground, they set up camp. Brandywine Creek is the next downstream tributary after the Schuylkill on the right bank of the Delaware River. The site of the ancient fish camp is in the heart of downtown Wilmington. According to A. R. Dunlap and C. A. Weslager’s “Contributions to the Ethno-History of the Delaware Indians in the Brandywine,” an article in Pennsylvania Archaeologist (1960), the Indians planted corn in fields to the west and then came down the creek to “fish and turtle” at the river’s mouth. When the braves returned to camp with shad and turtles, a fire of deep coals was waiting. They grilled the shad. They turned the live turtles upside down and set them on the red-hot coals. A while after the turtles stopped struggling, the Indians removed them from the fire and ate them from their bowl-like shells, a procedure you will understand if you like lobster.

  And still another season nears an end as the shad swim into June, the spawning month of exhaustion. This will be my last day, my last afternoon, a set piece of two hours in fairly high water. I’m in my canoe. I just want one fish. I’m fishing for my dinner. The first cast, well into the retrieve, is hit hard. But there’s no follow-up. No fish. I reel in the dart. It has impaled a shad scale. Deciding that the shad are close to the canoe, I pick up my fly rod and get one no-fault AWOL, but no other strikes. Back to the
spinning rod.

  An hour and a half has gone by. If I don’t catch a fish, I’ll be boiling pasta.

  Five minutes to go. No strikes. I’m getting ready to quit, when a shad hits.

  She is on the line fifteen minutes before she is anywhere near the boat, but she is nearing it now. I reach for and lift the long-handled net. A snake is in the net. Pinhead. No rattle. Nonetheless a snake. In my left hand is a fishing rod with my dinner on the line. In my right hand is a boat net with a snake in it. The handle of the long-handled net is two feet long. The snake is longer. I lack the sense of companionship that some people seem to have with snakes. This snake has obviously been in my canoe with me for two hours, and I’m just now detecting its presence. If a snake is in my canoe, I feel crowded. When snakes come into Yolanda Whitman’s greenhouse, she picks them up and carries them outside, even if they are longer than she is tall. I may be married to her, but not to those snakes. Or this one. It has woven itself into the mesh of the net. Over the left side of the canoe, I try to keep the shad on a taut line. Over the right side of the canoe, I shake the net hard, trying to force the snake to drop into the water. The snake is having none of it. The snake stays in the net as if it were sewed there. The shad takes off on a run against the drag. My arms are beginning to weaken. Leaning right, I plunge the net straight into the river. The snake receives the message and is cured of indecision. Away from the canoe, across the water’s surface, it races like a snake. I swing the net around and land my dinner.

  BY JOHN McPHEE

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