Blues

by John Hersey

  F: They are. Catches of blues by commercial and sports fishermen have never been higher—a hundred and fifty million pounds a year. A third of all the fishes, by weight, caught along the east coast by recreational fishermen in recent years have been blues. New Jersey has estimated that sports fishermen, what with their tackle, their boats, their marinas, their beach buggies, their electronic gear, their charter boats, bring the state half a billion dollars a year—and nearly two-thirds of those Jersey fishermen are after blues. One classic “careless human intervention,” as you put it, has been over-fishing. Two recent gimmicks—acoustic fish finders and enormous nets made of synthetic materials—have enabled man to reduce several worldwide fish stocks, such as those of herring and anchovy, to perilously low levels. The Pacific sardine has been all but wiped out off California. The yellowtail flounder has been overharvested around here. But the supply of blues, despite the annual kill, doesn’t seem to be threatened. In fact, when the Mid-Atlantic Marine Fisheries Council, set up under the Magnuson Fishery and Conservation Act of 1976, proposed, in 1985, a management plan for the bluefish, under which both commercial and recreational fishing of the species would be regulated, the National Marine Fisheries Service vetoed the plan, giving the reason, among others, that its cost couldn’t be justified, considering the plentitude of blues.

  This isn’t to say that bluefish won’t one day suffer the fate of the anchovy and the herring, if man goes on treating it and the sea with his habitual contempt. The blue is a tough fish, and so far its life-style has spared it hardships like those of the striper. But man is indeed careless; you were right to use that word. And the carelessness has a big reach, which the bluefish won’t necessarily outdistance forever. I think it was a mistake not to have a management plan for blues. Who knows when their bounteous stock may spontaneously and disastrously decline, as it has so often in the past?

  S: What you’ve been telling me today is so disheartening. It seems that carelessness is not a strong enough word; that there’s something wanton, wicked, and even suicidal in our not using wisely enough what little knowledge we have.

  F: Every time I come out here, I feel as if I’m on a voyage—to an unknown destination. Fishing has not all been easy: It has made me face myself, on these voyages, as a member of my careless species—to say nothing of myself as my self. I come out, sometimes, feeling that I am on my way to paradise, to a secret place on the water where I will be totally at home and at peace; then some reminder—a spate of that imported weed, or a dead gull floating, or garbage dumped from a sailboat—fills me with bitterness and disgust and shame. There’s a poem by W. H. Auden which uses the idea of a voyage in a way that speaks to what I mean: The poem makes me think about my relationship both with the creatures out here at sea and with my fellow human beings back on land, and suggests that despite the sad reminders here of human carelessness and cruelty, I may be able to get strength from my voyages on the sea to help me deal better with what’s left behind, on the land. I guess that’s what keeps me coming out.

  We human beings may damage the sea, but the sea seems to know how to take its revenge on us. The strange dynamics of the oceans’ cycles can upset our own delicate balances. The trading empire of the Hanseatic League around the Baltic fell apart after the supply of herrings in the Skagerrak disappeared. In 1982 and 1983, an erratic shift in weather and current patterns in the Western Pacific caused temperature changes in a current thousands of miles to the east, called by Peruvian fishermen El Niño, The Child; the fisheries off Peru and Ecuador were practically destroyed; there were violent storms on the California coast, which caused devastating beach erosion and mud slides; Tahiti suffered six typhoons; severe droughts hit Indonesia and Australia; torrential rains caused killing floods along the South American coast; seabirds were threatened on Pacific Islands; and the weather even darkened over northern Europe. There’s no telling—

  Ha! There’s one! Give me your rod and take the one out of the holder….

  S: This one has a lot of fight.

  F: A tough fish, right?

  S: Look! There’s another one following it as I reel it in….Did you see it?

  F: Yes, I did. That often happens, and I always wonder what it means. Is it a friend, trying to make out what’s wrong? A spouse? That’s what Bartas—to quote him again—thought in the sixteenth century, writing about fishing for mullet from a beach:

  But for chaste love the Mullet hath no peer,

  For, if the Fisher hath surprised her pheer,

  As mad with woe, to shoare she followeth,

  Prest to consort him both in life and death.

  Or was the follower we saw just a hungry blue hoping to be in on the kill of a wounded fish? I’m afraid I’m inclined to think it’s probably that.

  S: Have a heart. I’m with Bartas.

  F [at the mooring, putting the catch on the trimming hoard, getting ready to clean it]: Look here. Do you see those two dark specks on the flank of the fish?

  S: Yes, I see them.

  F: Those are what we call sea lice. They’re among the many parasites that infest blues. We were talking about how tough the bluefish is. It carries around a tremendous burden of parasites and yet, as long as it can eat, it survives, and grows, and swims in good health. I’ve seen a list of the parasites that attack Pomatomus saltatrix—thirty-seven of them, sixteen of which are quite common.

  S: Thirty-seven kinds of lice?

  F: No. What I called sea lice are little crustaceans that find their nourishment in the protective slime on the scales of their hosts. Some of them are copepods. But there are also many internal parasites: several types of worms—flatworms, roundworms, spiny-headed worms. The blues pick up most of these from their food.

  S: And we pick them up when we eat them? I’ve had my last bluefish.

  F: No no no. The parasites are all either on the outside, and I scale them off, or they’re in their gills, or their intestines, hearts, kidneys, gall bladders, ovaries—their viscera—and we get rid of those when I sliver or gut the fish. They’re not in the meat. And anyway, I cook till done.

  S: Well, I’m glad to hear that!

  F: Actually, the scientists don’t know much about what these parasites may do to blues. If a bluefish succumbs to one or more of them, the fish is destroyed within a few minutes by its brothers and sisters. Unlike pathologists working on human ills, marine biologists never have bluefish cadavers to examine. There’s very little knowledge, either, about killers other than parasites—viruses, molds, bacteria. We just don’t catch badly sick blues. If PCBs can cause cancer in people, they doubtless can in blues, but in two decades of fishing I’ve only cleaned three fish in which I thought I saw abnormal flesh that might have been malignant. Healthy blues may kill and devour sick blues and so pick up parasites and other things along the way. The individual fish is a summation of its experiences in its environment. It’s a migratory fish, and it swims through zones of danger, picking up trouble as it moves. A scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory who specializes in parasites told me that some of the pests are beautiful. “You open up the fish,” he said, “and find these gorgeous creatures in there.”

  S: I’ll bet!…I’m not as hungry as I thought I was a while ago.

  F: Wait till you taste what we’re having tonight.

  [In the kitchen:] I’m going to put you to work this evening, Stranger.

  S: I’m glad. I hate just standing around.

  F: Good. Please wash and peel these five small potatoes, and then cut them into thin slices. Here’s a razor-sharp knife. While you’re doing that, I’ll clean this bunch of leeks and cut them diagonally, to make lots of little ellipses….Finished? Fine. Now I’ll put the potatoes and leeks in a saucepan and boil them in as little water as possible until they’re about three-quarters done. Meanwhile I’ll skin a fillet—see, I’m also taking out th
e stripe of dark meat but I’m leaving the flap of fat on tonight—good for your heart—and then I coat the meat side with mayonnaise. And melt a couple of tablespoons of butter….Now I take the potatoes and leeks off the stove and make a bed of them in the broiling pan. Drip the butter on them, put the fillets to bed, and broil close to the flame….Come, Barbara, dinner’s on.

  S: I’m telling myself: This is good for my heart….Hmm. This is plain good.

  F: As I said, if you enjoy it, it’s good for you. Pliny the Elder listed three hundred and forty-two ways in which fish could be used as remedies. For toothache, rub your teeth with the brains of a dogfish boiled in oil. Soak lint in dolphin fat and set fire to it to cure hysteria. Catch a torpedo-fish when the moon is in Libra, let it hang for three days, bring it into the birthing room, and the mother’s delivery will be easy.

  S: I’ll bear those suggestions in mind.

  A VOYAGE

  by W. H. Auden

  Where does this journey look which the watcher upon

  the quay,

  Standing under his evil star, so bitterly envies,

  When the mountains swim away with slow calm strokes

  And the gulls abandon their vow? Does it still

  promise the Juster Life?

  Alone with his heart at last, does the traveller find

  In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave,

  Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place,

  Convincing as those that children find in stones

  and holes?

  No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.

  His journey is false, his unreal excitement really

  an illness

  On a false island where the heart cannot act and

  will not suffer:

  He condones the fever; he is weaker than he thought;

  his weakness is real.

  But at moments, as when real dolphins with leap and

  panache

  Cajole for recognition or, far away, a real island

  Gets up to catch his eye, his trance is broken: he

  remembers

  Times and places where he was well; he believes in joy.

  That, maybe, his fever shall find a cure, the true

  journey an end

  Where hearts meet and are really true, and crossed

  this ocean, that parts

  Hearts which alter but is the same always, that goes

  Everywhere, as truth and falsehood go, but cannot suffer.

  October 10

  FISHERMAN: I wanted you to have a chance to fish at sunset, and now it has turned out to be overcast.

  STRANGER: The water’s like mother-of-pearl.

  FISHERMAN: Or more like a silver tray that could use a buffing. October evenings here are either still and hushed like this or wild-eyed with a northeaster. Maybe the cloud cover will help the fishing, anyway.

  [Off the Chop:]

  STRANGER: Look! A shark! Look at that huge fin!

  FISHERMAN: That’s exactly what I thought, the first time I saw a fin like that. Let’s see if we can get close to it and take a look at what’s under water….No, it won’t work in this light. Well, you get a good view of the tip of the fin, anyhow. It’s rounded, you see, not sharp like a shark’s fin; and it isn’t cutting the water with a shark’s perpetual motion. Just flopping back and forth.

  S: It’s enormous. What is it?

  F: Wait a sec, while I put some Rebels on….

  The first time I saw one of those fins was in mid-afternoon, one summer’s day that was just as calm as this evening is. The water was a sheet of Plexiglas. The sun was veiled by an August haze. The blues were deep and coy. There were five of us aboard. Someone yelled: “Jaws!” Where? Then we all saw it, and everyone chattered. I steered toward the fin. “That has to be a sick shark,” another passenger, one of the world’s volunteer experts, said. “Sick, the way that fin wobbles.” I idled the throttle and glided parallel to the “shark.” The tip of the fin went under. We could see a majestic sharp turn toward Spray. “It’ll capsize us,” the expert said. We were all assembled along the starboard cockpit coaming. Now, looking straight down, we could see, as clearly as if we were in an aquarium, a water-colored head about a foot and a half wide, aiming for under the boat. It had what I can only call a cute little face, with big teddy-bear eyes and a tiny thumb-sucker’s mouth. It went on and on, for about eight feet, and then there was the great fin we had seen, which must have been three feet tall. I expected thirty feet more of fish to follow and began to think perhaps I’d better give Spray the gun, lest the expert’s prediction of our being turned turtle might prove him, for the first time I’d ever run across, to have been right. But there was no more fish. After the fin, nothing. Our eyes couldn’t be deceiving us; the water was as clear as that of a mountain brook. The fish just ended after the fin.

  I couldn’t wait to get ashore and make a call to a friend of mine who really is an expert. He laughed and said we’d seen an ocean sunfish, Mola mola. How big could it have been? They grew, my friend said, to ten feet long and can weigh six to eight hundred pounds. Yes, right, there was just nothing there, abaft the dorsal fin, nothing but a shriveled-up, scalloped, rudimentary tail. The beast had a three-foot anal fin underneath, matching the one above, and its only means of propulsion was a feeble slow sculling of these two floppy oars. Very chubby—from a side view, deeply oval. It had a leathery skin. In hot weather, he said, full-grown sunfish will float on their sides, lolling, almost as if dead. They have poorly developed skeletons, and one of the weirdest things about this weird giant is that its spinal cord, which in most fishes runs the whole length of the body, is less than an inch long.

  S: Are there many of them around here?

  F: No. We see one or two or three a summer. Mostly they live out in the open ocean. But sometimes they get caught in currents which carry them here and there, into and out of Vineyard Sound—almost as if they were plankton.

  S: In the company of all those microscopic things?

  F: Like them, it’s a helpless wanderer. We were talking the other day about blues’ parasites. The ocean sunfish, being so huge and clumsy and slow, seems especially subject to various kinds of sea lice on its leathery skin. There are certain fishes, members of the wrasse family, one of them called the senorita, that obligingly hang around these big babies, constantly cleaning them, vacuuming the water-to-water carpets of their hides.

  S: You told me, that first day, when you were encouraging me to come out with you, that I’d see wonders out here. I was skeptical. You win, Fisherman. They’re here.

  F: Oh, Stranger, I’ll never get enough of the sea. I dream of the wonders I’ll never be able to lay eyes on. I wish I owned a bathysphere.

  I wish that just once in my life I could see the deep-sea dragonfish. Grammatostomias flagellibarba. It is not as long as my hand, yet—believe me—it’s a monster. At home in black depths a mile down, dark itself, it flashes an array of luminous organs on its tapering body—like a liner seen on the horizon in the night. Its mouth is big enough to swallow a fellow as big as itself; its needle fangs are so long that it can never close its lips. But look (I wish I could) at the whip of its utter strangeness: a single sinuous tapering barbel, a superwhisker, hung from its lower jaw, five times as long as its main self, with bumps toward the end that light up. What for? Who knows? A lure for its dinners? Or for its lovers? Or an antenna to send and receive messages to…from…?

  I wish I could see a gulper. Eurypharynx pelecanoides. A mile to two miles down, black, two feet long, a fish, you could say, in the grand oral tradition. Mr. Mouth. A pelican’s gaping suitcase up front. That’s about all. Nothing else but a narrow ribbon attached to it as a mingy excuse for a body, with a red light bulb on the end. Poss
essing a mouth that could get around creatures ten times its size, it eats pinpoint deep-sea animal plankton. What will Nature think up next?

  I have never seen a sargassum fish. Histrio histrio. Back up near the surface. Seaweed metamorphosed into fish, or vice versa, who can tell? It looks like a hunk of its home, which is sargassum weed. Brownish-yellow, mottled with black, lumpy and ragged-finned—in a word, weedy. It seldom swims; it crawls around in its other self, using its sargassummy fins as limbs, inching up on its prey and then suddenly opening its mouth and sucking in such a swift rush of water that the victim is swept within.

  Nature must have had strange dreams as she made fishes. I wish I could see the ancient lungfish. Do you remember my telling about it—that primitive link between sea creatures and land creatures that John Ciardi wrote about?

  I wish I could see the oldest fish of all, the coelacanth.

  I wish I could see a male tilapia incubating eggs in its mouth; a European weatherfish wiggling because the barometer is falling; a yellow-nosed wrasse spontaneously changing its sex from female to male because of a temporary shortage of guys; a twenty-foot oarfish, tubular and eelish and writhing, with a red fin atop the whole length of its body, and with a crimson crest on the head as wild as a samurai’s rage—a creature to have made mariners think they’d seen a sea serpent.

  I wish I could see a spotted trunkfish, a longnose gar, a celestial goldfish, a forceps butterfish, a black-devil, a John Dory, a lookdown, a lionfish, a hogfish, a roosterfish, every living kind of angelfish, and all the ravishing beauties on all the reefs in all the tropical seas.

  S: I’d like to go with you to see them. Every one of them.

  F: And yet, wait a minute, Stranger. When all is said and done, I’ll settle for the bluefish. I’ve seen it. Many times. I’ll see it again, many times, I hope. It alone is wonder enough for me. Compared with all the eccentrics of the salt sea and of land-locked lakes, it’s so normal. So noble. It has such an elegant hull. It is so wicked and wild when it’s hooked. It has such a cruel eye and such passionate jaws. It makes love out in the deep sea, where no peeping-Tom human being will ever pry into its dearest secrets. It’s so full of life! And it’s true to life; there is nothing fake or soft about it; life is harsh. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m deeply in awe of the bluefish.