It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  I do remember the dark days of 2005 when, after nine years of marriage and five years after Jane and I adopted Emma at birth, I left what had long been a contentious relationship. I left after realizing that I no longer believed that I could make the marriage work. I was miserable. We were always either recovering from a fight or sliding into the next one. We’d been to—by my count—seven relationship therapists. Each had a different approach or technique to help us communicate better and have greater mutual empathy. We never achieved this. Instead, we just learned new ways to play out the same struggle. I decided that I wasn’t ultimately doing anyone—me, Jane, or Emma—any favors by staying in an unhappy marriage. As the one who initiated the break, I was the one to move out. I found a drafty rental house I could barely afford a couple of miles away. It was only at that remove that the full force of what I’d done hit me. The deeper canyons of the human mind have no particular use for reason and logic. As the one who had left, I should have felt some measure of relief. Instead, I was all but overcome with grief, despair, and depression.

  One particularly overcast and colorless November day, weeks after moving out, I found myself sitting amid still-unpacked boxes, more alone than I’d ever been. I felt like a ghost, like I could walk down the muddy alley behind the house and leave no footprints. I’d stopped calling friends and they, understandably, had stopped calling me. Then after days of silence the phone rang. It was Paula, who, as usual, was already a good way into the conversation by the time I got the receiver to my ear. “They’re moving,” she was saying. November, the breeding season for deer, is like Christmas to deer hunters. The urge to mate causes wily older bucks that normally travel at night to lower their guard, sometimes searching for does in broad daylight. “The big guys aren’t working yet,” she continued, as if we’d last spoken moments ago instead of weeks. “They know the first does won’t cycle in for a couple more days. But it’s not gonna be long.” I don’t remember what else, if anything, she said. But she continued to call. During some of the darkest days of my life, it was Paula whom I spoke with more often than anyone else. Her calls during this time—short, always confined to what the deer were doing—were a lifeline, a reminder that I was not yet a ghost.

  For a long time, the means by which Paula made enough money to live on were a mystery to me. Her seasonal gig working the dock at Fletcher’s couldn’t have covered much, even given her Spartan lifestyle. At some point I finally realized that her main source of income was selling bait, specifically herring. Herring run up the Potomac in large numbers each spring to spawn. And this oily fish is widely considered the ideal bait for striped bass and catfish. Fish of both species weighing up to fifty pounds were not uncommon in this stretch of river, and a good number of serious anglers came seeking them. For years, Paula’s going rate was two herring for five dollars. Just last year she bumped that up to a flat three dollars per fish or—in a pricing strategy that only Paula could have thought up—seven fish for twenty dollars. She once confided that the only reason she kept working the dock was that it was the perfect cover for her business. Her customers, many of whom spoke little English, would wait off to one side of the dock, patient as smack addicts, knowing she would attend to them only after the boathouse’s legitimate customers had been served. Like any drug dealer, Paula touched neither money nor product in the open. All transactions took place one step inside the dock’s tiny wooden shack where the life jackets were stored. I never knew how Paula came by so many herring, and I knew better than to probe deeply. But she moved a lot of fish. Danny Ward, one of the guys who worked at the boathouse, once referred to her as “the Pablo Escobar of herring.”

  Paula’s force of personality is such that the young men working the boathouse counter, for example, never complained when calls came in asking if Paula had bait, even though her private enterprise was illegal and had nothing to do with the boathouse. “The correct answer to the bait question is, ‘I don’t know,’” I once overheard her instructing a new kid. “Don’t say ‘yes’ and don’t say ‘no.’ Make ’em show up and find out for themselves. I might not have any when they call but could get in a new supply before they get here. Okay?” The kid nodded meekly.

  I got to see her in action only once. I had come down to the dock to ask her what people were catching that day. As we stood talking on the dock, I noticed a Hispanic man standing in the shadow of the trees twenty yards away. He had several stout fishing rods and a bucket. Paula had seen him as well but didn’t let on. Several times the man tried to catch her eye. Finally she turned toward him and barked, “No más sardinas. All gone for today.”

  The man nodded to signify that he had understood, then asked, “Cuando?”

  “Maybe mañana,” she said irritably, exhausting her Spanish. “Who the fuck knows? Whenever the hell I get ’em.” She turned back to swabbing out boats.

  My knowledge of Paula’s story has accreted slowly over the years. She is not prone to trust or self-revelation. You wouldn’t be either if you’d had her background. She grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, the oldest girl of four children, with an alcoholic father and a mother who was less than fully engaged with her family. Home being such an unpredictable place, she spent a lot of time in the woods. Her grandfather taught her much of what she knows. “He knew every plant, every bird by its call alone,” she remembers. Her uncles took her fishing and hunting. But a lot of her woods sense came “just because I was there all the time. You learn to feel, you know, comfortable there after a while.”

  When Paula was thirteen, she once told me, she answered a knock on the front door to find a woman, the wife of her father’s business partner, weeping hysterically. Paula’s father had swindled the man out of every cent of his money. The man had committed suicide. Paula hadn’t known about any of it. “She was screaming, ‘Your father killed my husband,’” Paula said. She shrugged. I knew that shrug. It meant she had said all she had to say.

  During her tenth-grade year at a Catholic girls’ school she got expelled for organizing students against the war in Vietnam. She proceeded to do the logical thing, which was to enroll in public school. “Third day there, two cops showed up at my classroom and escorted me out. I got thrown outta public school for what I’d done at the private school! This was when Daley was mayor. Chicago was a different place back then. They could get away with shit like that.” Apparently, Paula was not the only student in the Chicago school system to be treated this way. Years later, she said, there had been a class action suit by a number of students who had been unjustly expelled. They’d been given some kind of settlement money. Paula, never much of a joiner, didn’t want any part of it.

  It wasn’t too long after this that Paula took a bus to New York. She’d meant to go for a short visit to a friend, but circumstances intervened. The bus somehow caught fire en route, destroying virtually every­thing in the luggage compartment. “They set up a table right by the side of the road and the bus company was handing out checks on the spot,” she said, her tone suggesting she’d just hit the lottery. By the time she got to the head of the line, the amount and value of Paula’s luggage had increased considerably. She walked away with enough to put down on a tiny apartment and decided to stay. She worked at all kinds of jobs, including exercising racehorses at one of the tracks. “It was either Aqueduct or Belmont, whichever one you could get to on the subway. I did that until I discovered it was a very good way to get hurt.” Then she got a job with a printer, and worked in print shops over the years before starting one of her own. By this time she had also succumbed to the family curse, alcoholism. What did she drink? “Everything, honey. Anything I could get my hands on.” Sometime in the 1990s, she ran afoul of the IRS. She’s sketchy on the details, other than to say that she was paying the agency $7,000 a month by certified check and thought that they had an understanding. “Then they seized my assets, my accounts, everything I had. So I said, ‘I don’t need this shit, honey. Sayonara.’” And w
ith that, Paula sort of rolled off the grid: no steady job, no house, no car, no driver’s license or government-issued I.D. of any form. There are times, even today, when I wonder if “Smith” is her real last name.

  One day, she simply stopped drinking. She’d lost one sibling to alcohol and another, her favorite brother, to AIDS and drugs. She knew she’d wind up crazy or dead if she kept on drinking, so one day she stopped. It wasn’t too long after that, she says, that she turned up at Fletcher’s. There she met Gordon, a retired federal fisheries biologist, who had grown up fishing at Fletcher’s and was one of the regulars there. Gordon’s father lived with him at the time. The man was dying and Gordon needed help tending him. In exchange for room and board, Paula helped take care of him. After Gordon’s father died, she stayed on, and she has been helping Gordon fix up the house ever since. It’s been nearly a decade now. On the surface they are an odd pair: Gordon is a gentleman of the old school, soft-spoken, upright, a courtly man who opens doors for women. Paula is pretty much the opposite in every way. But, as sometimes happens, their contrasting temperaments somehow make them compatible housemates. They both like to fish and to be out in the woods, and most days you can find one or both of them down at the boathouse.

  Paula thinks of the area north and south of Fletcher’s as “her” woods. She keeps track of the various people who frequent the area, like the striper addicts who sleep in their cars in the boathouse lot to save money. A man she referred to only as “Mudcat” was one such soul. “Guy was in the mason’s union making thirty-seven bucks an hour,” she told me. “But he’d rather chase rockfish. He used to borrow money from his own mother so he could stop working and just fish, and when he ran out of that he started sleeping in his car. He’s like a rockfishaholic. He’ll go hungry but buy fresh lobster tail for bait.” Paula knows the homeless people. She knows the cops. And if she doesn’t know the individuals who poach deer along the river, she knows their habits. She studies the kind of treestands they put up and the blinds they build of sticks and leaves. By the location and type of blind, she can tell whether they’re using bow or gun and whether they prefer day or night. Sometimes she wrecks their blinds and steals their stands. Other times, she places a telltale vine or another piece of vegetation that they can’t help disturbing, the better to ascertain when and how often they return. She buttonholes cops at the boathouse and keeps them up to date on the poaching tally.

  Once, when we were out hunting shed antlers, she showed me some sticks amid the undergrowth and explained that it was a poacher’s ground blind. I looked at it carefully. Having hunted for nearly twenty years, I have made and used ground blinds. I consider myself fairly woods savvy. For a ground blind, for example, you cut and place branches so they obscure your human shape and look like part of the landscape. You leave small openings, shooting lanes, where you think a deer or turkey will appear. I was pretty sure the fallen sticks Paula was looking at were not a blind and told her so. “Trust me, honey,” she said. “The smart guys, they don’t cut vegetation; they arrange it.” She walked in the direction the blind faced and kicked at something. Sure enough, fifteen yards away, right in the middle of a tiny opening, was a forty-pound mineral lick, the kind farmers put out for cattle. It was brown and hard to spot. Deer are just like cattle, constantly seeking out salt and minerals, which can be in especially short supply in the city. I looked around for Paula but couldn’t find her until she called to me. She stood fifty yards farther on, hunched over the desiccated carcass of a deer, hide and all, probing it with a stick. It was months old, heavily scavenged, now little more than bones, hide, and small mounds of hair. From the pile, Paula lifted a crossbow bolt, which is like a normal arrow only shorter and heavier. The tip’s three razor-sharp blades bore a light coat of rust. “Trophy guy,” Paula muttered. “All he took were the antlers.” She showed where whoever it was had sawed off the antlers and the front part of the skull. The cut started just behind the eyes, went two inches back and two inches up. It was eerily precise work, a shelf of bone surgically removed from the skull. You had to have done the procedure many times to be any good at it, and this guy had obviously put in the time. If I needed proof that Paula knew more about deer and the innominate poachers who hunt them right in downtown D.C. than the cops—or anyone else for that matter—this was it. I no longer question Paula when she tells me about deer and poachers.

  Not long after the perch run ended I went fishing with Paula to help replenish her herring supply. We were armed with rods carrying a Sabiki rig, a diabolical little gizmo consisting of a length of fishing line with six dropper lines attached, each carrying a tiny gold hook dressed with a colored bead and an iridescent hackle. Just getting a Sabiki out of its plastic packaging and onto your line is a feat. The hooks seek each other out as if magnetized, and I’ve turned many a Sabiki into a useless bird’s nest of tangles in a twinkling. Fortunately, Sabikis are cheap. And if you can get the thing into the water intact, a Sabiki rig is a baitfish-catching machine. You drop it right next to the boat, using just enough sinker to hold bottom in the current—usually an ounce or two. Once it reaches the bottom, you animate the tiny dressed hooks by popping the rig up with your rod tip and allowing it to fall. Strikes usually come on the fall, when the lures seem most vulnerable. Herring feed on zooplankton, so nobody knows why they hit Sabiki rigs. Maybe it’s a chance to try something new, maybe there’s something about the gold flash of the hooks that aggravates them. Whatever the reason, when the fish are running thick it’s not uncommon to have two or three on the line at once.

  During a lull in the action, I idly asked whether herring were any good to eat. “Oh, yeah,” Paula said. “Kinda bony, but I like ’em. You can’t fillet the bones out but they soften up when you cook them.” Why, then, didn’t she eat them? “You kidding? I get three bucks apiece for a fish that has maybe two bites of meat on it. They’re worth a hell of a lot more to me as bait than food, honey.” She said she liked herring roe better than the more popular shad roe. And while nobody today fishes for herring except for bait, a hundred years ago people came from all over for the Potomac’s herring run. “Gordon and his family used to catch them like crazy when he was a kid.”

  This was a minor thunderbolt. Here I was helping Paula load up on fish she would sell for bait—bait I could be eating. How had a local, readily available protein source escaped my notice? I regularly hunted deer, but that involved driving an hour or more each way. Herring were almost in my backyard, a fifteen-minute drive. I remembered eating creamed herring as a child and fancying myself something of a connoisseur because I liked it. But I was like most Americans. Herring had simply fallen off my radar.

  Gordon confirmed that his family used to fish herring for food. “Oh, it was a big deal,” he said. “There were tackle shops on either end of Chain Bridge where you’d rent snagging poles. Fourteen- or sixteen-foot pieces of bamboo with a length of heavy carpenter’s plumb line and a weighted treble hook on the end. You’d stand out on a rock and rip that thing through the water, snag the fish, and throw them into a basket. I always thought a dip net was more effective. Stick it in, scoop ’em up. As boys we’d catch until our arms wore out.” Buyers paid boys a penny apiece for the fish. When the first herring showed up in late March, Gordon’s mother would always fry some with eggs for breakfast. The season lasted two and a half months, mid-March to the first of June. When the family had finally had their fill of fresh herring, Mrs. Leisch preserved them in ceramic crocks for use during the year. “She’d put down a layer of salt, a layer of fish until she filled it up, then start on another.” When she wanted to cook the fish, she placed that quantity in fresh water overnight to draw the salt out.

  The more I found out about herring, the more they seemed a locavore’s dream: an abundant, potentially sustainable, extremely local fish. Human consumption of herring dates back at least 5,000 years, and they were a staple in Europe from the Middle Ages on. Even today, in some cultures herring is kn
own as “two-eyed steak.” The Swedish, Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians consume vast amounts, eaten raw, pickled, smoked, and—for those exceptional individuals straddling the thin line between true connoisseur and certifiable whack job—buried under­ground until the fish have fermented.

  For most of American history, the fish were hugely important, an abundant and inexpensive source of protein. Among the rivers most famed for their herring runs was the Potomac. George Washington, never one to pass up a quick buck, was an early participant in the commercial fishery. A May 1772 entry in his ledger records the sale of 11,000 herring. In 1895, the New York Times wrote, “In the Maryland and Virginia regions adjacent to the Potomac, salted herring holds about same place in the domestic commissariat that salt pork does in New England.” The article ends with the observation, “No well-regulated household in this region finds it convenient to do without herring at this season, and there is always regret when the savory little fellow returns to the sea.” In 1891 the herring take from the Potomac alone surpassed 7 million pounds. The world’s largest haul seine was in use on the Potomac at Stony Point on the Virginia shore at that time. It was two miles long and took a team of horses to haul it in.

  The day after learning of herring’s edibility I was back out in the river, busily embedding Sabiki hooks in my hands, neck, pants, hat, oars, and anchor line (the hardest to get out) and—eventually—in the mouths of a few herring. I eventually figured out that keeping the line under tension at all times, even when letting the raised rig fall to the bottom, reduced tangling. I was soon sliding herring into the basket at a steady rate. Almost upon dropping the rig, I would feel the electric wiggle of a herring. The fish average a quarter to half a pound and are on the menu of virtually any swimming thing that exceeds them in size. Herring seem strangely resigned to their fate as baitfish. Each one not slipped directly into the basket fell to the deck of the boat and then flapped from bow to stern and back again, one hand clapping madly in a bid to return to water. The display lasted less than a minute, however, and then the fish lay down and died as if practiced in it. In death, a herring lacks the stunned and vaguely accusatory look of a perch. It looks pretty much the way it did alive. In short, a great starter fish for the squeamish locavore. It’s all but impossible to feel more than a passing twinge of guilt at the death of a herring. Something was bound to get it sooner or later.