by John Hersey
Here we are at the end of the shoal—see the bell yonder? No luck today. I’m sorry. I guess you just had to experience what every fisherman must. We’d better head in.
S: Oh, well, it’s a fine sight out here. I’ve never seen Makoniky Head from this angle—look at that wonderful forehead of sandy bluffs! And that long stripe to the right must be Lambert’s Cove beach.
F: It is. All right, my friend, bring your line in. I’ll get the other one.
S: You mustn’t be—hey! Hey! I have one on!
F: Whoops. So have I….
S: This is unbelievable—two boated at once, and when we’d given up.
F: Which shall we throw back?
S: The one you caught, of course.
F: It’s bigger.
S: The one you throw back always is—you said it yourself.
F: I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me: Fish all afternoon, give up, and catch one on the final reel-in. Actually I often get fish when I’m bringing a line in during a run. The speeding up of the lure apparently excites an otherwise reluctant blue….
[On the mooring, cleaning the fish:] I’m not going to sliver this one, because I plan to bake it whole this time. I’ll gut it….It’s a male—no roe. Stomach’s empty. See how gaunt he is—he’s really horny, poor fellow. We have denied him the consummation of his urge to keep the great game of bluefishiness going.
[At the kitchen counter:] First, I’ll make a julienne of some vegetables—cutting them into thin strips: six scallions, two green peppers, one red pepper, three or four small carrots, and three or four three-inch lengths of celery stalks; mix in two ripe tomatoes cut into small pieces, and just the nubby tip ends of several branches of young broccoli and cauliflower, the latter diced a bit to make the pieces small; and add generous sprays of parsley and fresh dill. Deep in the hollow of the fish where the guts were I’ll lay four anchovies lengthwise, and then stuff in as much of the vegetable mixture as I can and still sew up the belly flaps tight with a needle and thread. I’ll melt two sticks of butter and add the juice of two limes. Set the oven at 350°. Next I cut another lime into very thin slices. I lay the fish on a bed of the rest of the vegetables in a baking pan, array the lime slices on the body and its bed, and pour the lime-butter over it all. Salt and pepper. Put it in the oven. The fish is a little more than two inches thick, so it will probably take almost half an hour. Baste now and then….Test with a skewer. Not quite done. The skin apparently slows things down a bit in baking….Now!…
S: This tastes so different from the other times. It seems a totally new kind of fish.
F: For reasons we’re not quite clear about, I think Barbara and I both prefer broiled bluefish to baked. But I thought we should try a baked blue, because this—it has many variants—is one of the more traditional ways of cooking fish in New England. The overhead broiler is a relatively recent invention.
By the way, now that the fish are going out to spawn, there won’t be any point in our trying to catch any till they return. They’ll be back in the Sound on August tenth. Save that afternoon.
From THE ODYSSEY: BOOK TWELVE
By Homer
translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Then Skylla made her strike,
whisking six of my best men from the ship.
I happened to glance aft at ship and oarsmen
and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling
high overhead. Voices came down to me
in anguish, calling my name for the last time.
A man surfcasting on a point of rock
for bass and mackerel, whipping his long rod
to drop the sinker and the bait far out,
will hook a fish and rip it from the surface
to dangle wriggling through the air:
so these
were borne aloft in spasms toward the cliff.
August 10
FISHERMAN: I’m going to ask you to wear a life jacket.
STRANGER: What’s that about?
FISHERMAN: There’ll be some danger out there today.
STRANGER: You must be pulling my leg.
FISHERMAN: You wouldn’t know it here in Vineyard Haven harbor, would you? You see, we’re on a lee shore. The island is a shield; the bay looks calm. But out there by the tip of East Chop, if you look closely, you’ll see whitecaps. The wind’s blowing from the west, up around thirty knots, with higher gusts, and the current is ebbing, running toward the west out on the other side of West Chop, against the wind, so we’ll have one of those nasty days on the Sound that I remember telling you about once.
S: Isn’t it foolish to go out, if it’s dangerous?
F: Perverse, perhaps, not necessarily stupid. If we’re careful. I promised you the blues would be back today: We’d better go out and see if they are. I went out both on Friday, by the way, and yesterday—nothing. They weren’t there. But besides that, I thought you might want to experience a rough day. Of course, if the idea frightens you—
S: It doesn’t frighten me if it doesn’t frighten you; I trust you. But what’s up? Is this some sort of rite of passage a “real” fisherman must go through?
F: I don’t think that what I have in mind has anything to do with manhood, if that’s what you mean. What I’m thinking of is an illusion that seems to be widely experienced by boat handlers of both sexes who go out fishing in rough waters. If you know what you’re doing and are cautious, earning this feeling is probably harmless and can be a source of joy. It’s a fleeting illusion that you belong to that hardy race of fisherfolk who for many centuries have risked their lives on the treacherous sea to feed their families. It’s a fantasy: You can imagine yourself in the noble company of the down-east sailors who went out, through thick and thin, to Georges Bank. You’re flying in the face of the woe of the sea. It is an arrant pretense, of course, because the time of exposure and the degree of danger are both strictly limited. This Spray, as I’ve told you, is a sturdy platform in the roughest weather. I’ve sailed since I was a boy, and I know the power of water, and how to be prudent. Yet this dream of gaining even spurious admission to a sacred company still excites me, whenever the wind blows up.
S: Forgive me for saying so, but that idea sounds a little childish to me.
F: We’ll see how you feel about it an hour from now. Here, as we approach Nun Three: Look out there. See the waves running?
S: I do. I do. I see what you mean.
F: I’m going to let you cast with the big beach rod today, so we can keep a decent distance from the rip, which will be horrendous. I’ll rig it in here, while we’re still under the lee of West Chop, and let you take a few practice casts. I’ll put a Hoochie and some pork rind on.
Now. The principle’s the same as with the light casting rod, except it’s a longer swing and a bigger whip. Cast down wind. Good! Try again.
All right. Let’s go.
By the way, you’ll get wet. You’ll see how well named our craft is. I could lend you some foul-weather gear, but it’s cumbersome, and with the fine spray flying you’d get wet under it soon anyway.
S: Gosh, West Chop is choppy. This looks like one of the Scottish “roosts” you told me about.
F: I’ll stay close inshore. The passage I want to avoid is over the last big jog of the shoal. In these conditions, there’s a horrid, short, steep, and sometimes breaking swell along that stretch, which juts out a bit to the east, into the strongest current. We’ll loop around inshore and then cut out across the rip opposite Leroy Goff’s house.
S: Hurray!
F: This is nothing. Wait till we go through the rip.
S: I should think this pounding would break Spray‘s back.
F: Keep a good grip on the handhold up there in the corner of the windscreen. Do you see that t
here are two kinds of waves? There are long swells, which swoop us relatively slowly up and down; they’ve come, faster than the weather, from some storm way out in the Atlantic. Then there are these surface waves we’re banging on—fierce today because of the long fetch of a strong wind from the open sea straight up Vineyard Sound, against a three-knot current. What’s so hard to take in is that the water in the waves isn’t moving with the wind, as it seems to be; a copepod—one of those tiny shrimplike plankton I saw under the microscope that day in Woods Hole—a helpless copepod under the surface will oscillate in a big elliptical orbit as each wave form goes by, but it won’t move to the east. Only the shape of the wave moves. In fact, the water is actually scurrying toward the wind, toward the west, because of the current of the ebbing tide. The copepod will be off Tashmoo in ten minutes. It’s that opposition, water versus wind, that makes up this vicious sea.
S: God, it’s exciting.
F: Aha! You address the deity.
S: How can I cast from a bronco’s back?
F: On the other side of the rip from here, right over the shoal itself, the water rushing over the underwater dam levels itself out into an apron. You’ll see. It won’t be smooth, by any means, but it won’t be as bad as this. All right, now I’ll swing around, and we’ll go through the rip with the seas behind us.
S: Oh! Oh! What a ride!
F: There. We planed. Almost like skiing.
S: Coney Island! Shoot-the-chute!…
F: Now. You see. This is better. I’ll pull away to a safe distance. Take the rod. Plant your feet wide apart. Heave ho….Good cast.
S: Wait a second. I have a fish on. On the first cast!
F: All right. I’ll keep pulling away from the rip. Keep tension but don’t rush it in—don’t “horse it in,” as the islanders say—because both the boat and the current are putting pressure on the fish….Hoist it aboard….Fine.
S: I can’t get over it. On the first cast.
F: Postcoital gluttony. They’re eager now. I’m not even going to try to take it off the hook out here. I’m going to run around under the lee of West Chop. We can talk some in there, maybe go sightseeing up Lagoon Pond. Enough’s enough out here today.
Hold on. We’ll go straight into the rip this time….
[Near Nun Three:] Into the box it goes.
S: That was so exhilarating! I take it back—my skepticism about the rough-water euphoria you spoke of—with apologies. Can I dare say I shared the illusion?
F: If you did.
S: Glory be. You picked me up on speaking to God. I don’t happen to be religious, but to pluck a fish out of that wildness…
F: Fishing is sacred. It always has been.
S: You used that word before. But wait a minute. How in God’s name did you know the blues would be back today?
F: For many years I kept a log of every fish I caught on Middle Ground. I recorded the exact place on the shoal where I caught it—near which of its enduring “holes,” numbered in sequence from its eastern end; the size of the fish; the time of day; the phase of the current; the direction of the wind; the state of the weather; and anything else unusual—such as roe showing up, or odd bait in the stomach, scars, sea lice, whatnot. Before long, patterns emerged: of the blues’ arrival in the spring and departure in the fall, the midsummer gap while they spawned, and a truly interesting rhythm of catches linked to the phases of the moon.
I could calculate from the tables in Eldridge’s when the tidal currents would start moving one way or the other out on Middle Ground, and in fact I soon discovered that the changes in direction off the Chop end of Middle Ground roughly coincided with the times of high or low water in Boston Harbor, so I had a quick way of looking them up without doing any figuring. My logs told me, after a few years, that I caught the most blues in the first hour of flooding current; other good times, in descending order, were the last hour of the flood and the last and first hours of the ebb. Best fishing on southwest wind; at dawn and dusk; or, if during the day, under slightly cloudy skies. Wonderful just before a thunderstorm; not too good on a steadily falling barometer; rotten here in the rain. And so on.
But then I began to observe something else much more fascinating. As the moon waxes and wanes, the rise and fall of the tides, too, vary in intensity. The strongest tides, called “spring tides,” come twice each month when the sun, the moon, and the earth are almost in line with each other—at full moon and dark of the moon. In Boston Harbor, tides vary with the phases of the moon from spring tides of about eleven feet to “neap tides,” the weakest ones, of about eight feet, measured from mean high to mean low water. My logs showed me that I was most apt to catch bluefish on Middle Ground shoal in Vineyard Sound in those times of the month when the rise and fall of tides in Boston Harbor were ten feet or more. In other words, blues were most apt to hit in those times of the month when the currents were running relatively strongly in the Sound, as they would be at the same times in and out of Boston. On the other side of the Vineyard, off Wasque, the experience is just the opposite: better catches come on relatively slack currents. But what struck me as so strange was that it was just that certain cutoff point in the variance of tides at Boston, the ten-foot mark, that determined my “luck” on Middle Ground.
After several years of logging, I noticed something else—that the blues came back in from spawning on or about the day in early August when the ten-foot cutoff was reached. Actually, on what I think of as my end of the shoal, there seemed to be a slight lag: They usually arrived the day after the first ten-foot tides in Boston. Notice that I said “usually.” There are no rules in fishdom, only likelihoods, which sometimes thin out to bare possibilities. So I banked on one of them in predicting when the fish would be back, and yes, I was a bit lucky. They turned out to be here.
S: They did indeed. Doesn’t sound like luck to me.
F: Most “luck” is having noticed—though it’s chancy even then.
S: The first day we came out, you spoke of how you value hours of lonely thought out on the water. You couldn’t do much quiet thinking on days like today, could you?
F: No, but you and I have been out days when we glided on glass. And danger doesn’t rule out thought.
S: What goes through your mind when it’s so foul out there? Sacred company. You used the word sacred. Why?
F: The word comes to mind on rough days. It has a relevant anagram, you know: scared. When a wave is chasing your boat with a breaking crest that is higher than your transom, deep thoughts occur to you. As you’ve noticed, there’s death out here—the death of our catch. Salmon fishermen don’t talk of catching fish; they say, “I killed a nine-pounder.” I don’t think we need feel guilty about the killing we do; we do it for life’s sake: our own. But I guess for that very reason the killing may put a scared and thoughtful fisherman in mind of his own span. There’s a rather harsh tale of our times in a poem by Robert Lowell about a drunken trout fisherman who, while casting in a stream, vents his rage at aging and the approach of death, and expresses his hope that “when shallow waters peter out” he will be able to “catch Christ with a greased worm” and—by inference—save his soul.
Lowell was a Christian, and he was probably right to resort to the metaphor of fishing for his purpose. Christianity is an aquarium, you know. In the fourth century, the cross was not the prevailing symbol for the Man-Fisher; the fish was. The Greek word for fish, ΙΧΘΥΣ, ichthys, was an acronym of the Greek words for “Jesus Christ, God’s son, savior.” Izaak Walton, the great moralist of fishing, writes that Christ gave precedence among his disciples to the four who were fishermen, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, and that when he rose from the dead and went up on the Mount, he took with him only three, all fishermen. A cichlid in the Sea of Galilee that has a dark spot on each side was thought by early Christians to bear the marks of St. Peter’s thumb and finger,
placed there when he took a coin from the fish’s mouth. In the tenth century fishermen were advised to catch limpets and inscribe on their shells a so-called Gnostic formula, Iαω Σαβαωθ, “Jehovah, Lord of Hosts,” whereupon fish would swarm to them, and the haul would be amazing. In New England folklore, centuries later, the cod was sacred because it was believed (mistakenly, of course) to be what Christ used when he multiplied the fish and fed the multitude. The haddock, on the other hand, was thought to have got its stripes from the devil.
Christians were by no means the first, or the only ones, to have made fishes and fishing sacred. Three kinds of eel in the Nile were hallowed by ancient Egyptians. The Sumerians revered Nanshe, goddess of the craft, who was envisioned as clothed altogether in fishes. The ancient Assyrians worshiped a mermaid goddess named Atargatis, sometimes called Derketo, and the principal god of the Philistines was named Dagon, “Little Fish.” The Hindus Vishnu sometimes took the form of a goldfish. The dolphin was consecrated to Aphrodite and the tunny to Poseidon, and Venus turned herself and Cupid into fish to get away from the Giants. The lobster was venerated in Seriphos; the crab was deified in Lemnos. In the Talmud the scaled fish is symbolic of innocence. The Japanese picture a traditional fisher god, Ebisu, with a porgy in one hand and a rod in the other, and, to this day, whenever a boy child is born they fly a carp kite from a pole over the house, to assure worldly success. The Hurons married two girls each year to their fishnets, in ceremonies even more solemn than those for the marriage of two human beings, and they made long addresses to the fish to propitiate them.
