by John Hersey
S: I’m coming to be. Yes, I am. So let’s catch one!
F: The sun’s low now. We’ll be getting a strike soon.
When I was a child in China, we used to go for the summers to a place beside the sea. I often chased minnows through shallows. My brothers and I fished off Tiger Rocks and sometimes caught puffers, which blew themselves up like holiday balloons to scare us and astonish us. Once a British submarine came and anchored off the shore, and some other boys and I swam out—quite far, it seemed to me—to look it over. While I was treading water out there, in deep soundings, I suddenly saw, close by me, an octopus. It was about two feet (it seems to me now) from crown to fingertips. I had read about octopuses and submarines, before that, in The Book of Knowledge and in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and, treading water there, I was able to be both afraid of these two and thrilled by them: man’s brutal metal imitation of the fish, and the sea monster, with its pale head, more bald even than my father’s; its eight waving arms like those of Siva, the god of destruction; and its two rows of sinister suckers running down each arm, like concave buttons. I remember that while I swam (fast) for shore, I felt wildly exultant—partly because I knew that I had escaped, and a torpedo was not going to sink me and the buttons were not going to be fastened to me; but partly also because it was so wonderful to have had two pictures from printed pages come to life in the sea; and partly, I believe, because I felt (in the proportions of my fear at the time) that the two monsters out there were fairly evenly matched, and if it came to their fighting each other, it would be hard to say whether man’s creature or the sea’s would win. I’m not telling you this story to psychoanalyze myself but rather to offer you its naive metaphor. Because now, as I drift toward my second boyhood, my amazements at the wonders I see—and don’t see—in the sea are tinged with the same mixture of fear and surprise and exultation, and I am haunted by something like the same question about the precarious standoff between the urges of humankind and the needs of the manifold life of the sea.
S: Fish! Fish!…
F: Nicely brought in, from beginning to end….Don’t look it in the eye.
S: Say, I caught that fish just at sunset—the way I caught one exactly when the clock struck, that morning.
F: Yes, just as the sun fell into the hill at Cuttyhunk, like a coin into a vending machine—out comes the bluefish.
S [at the mooring]: I’ve been thinking about those strange sea creatures you were speaking of. I remember going to dinner one evening in the city at the apartment of some friends, who had set up an elaborate aquarium, ostensibly for one of their children, though I believe their real motive had more to do with interior decoration—the brilliantly lit tank made a striking centerpiece for some bookcases. In it, a dozen varieties of tropical fishes lazed back and forth. The father joked ruefully about how expensive some of them had been. I was told their names, but I don’t remember any of them. They made a stunning, unforgettable sight. Then one day I heard, maybe a month later, that the small son had forgotten for several days to clean the filter, and the parents hadn’t reminded him, and the fishes had all died. I remember that hearing that made me angry—at the parents. I didn’t know whether to be sorrier for the boy or for those rare, exquisite fishes.
F: Yes—another version of the standoff, with a sad ending—sad for everyone. There’s a poem by James Merrill that your story reminds me of; let me see if I can find it after supper.
[In the kitchen:] Tonight we’re going to try a variation of the basic mayonnaise treatment we used back in June, the second time we fished together—Barbara’s favorite way. I’ll make a mayonnaise glaze with mustard built into it.
First I set some water to boil. Then skin the fillet, salt it and pepper it, and squeeze the juice of a lemon on it and let it marinate while I cut the rind of half the lemon into thin strips. I blanch these in boiling water for three minutes, pour them into a colander, freshen them with cold water, and pat them dry in paper towels.
Now. Two egg yolks into the blender, till they’re slightly thickened. Then I add a half teaspoon of salt, a pinch of cayenne pepper, a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and a tablespoon of powdered mustard, and a half teaspoon of dried chervil. Whip up briefly in the blender and then, with it still running, add one cup of olive oil, dribble by dribble. Good. Spread the mustard mayonnaise on the meat side of the fillet, and broil, six or seven inches from the flame, according to the Canadian rule….A minute before the end, I scatter the strips of lemon rind on top, and then finish cooking….
It’s ready. Let’s try it.
S: Oh, yes. This is wonderful.
F: Yes, a wonder—bluefish.
THE PIER: UNDER PISCES
by James Merrill
The shallows, brighter,
Wetter than water,
Tepidly glitter with the fingerprint-
Obliterating feel of kerosene.
Each piling like a totem
Rises from rock bottom
Straight through the ceiling
Aswirl with suns, clear ones or pale bluegreen,
And beyond! where bubbles burst,
Sphere of their worst dreams,
If dream is what they do,
These floozy fish—
Ceramic-lipped in filmy
Peekaboo blouses,
Fluorescent body
Stockings, hot stripes,
Swayed by the hypnotic ebb and flow
Of supermarket Muzak,
Bolero beat the undertow’s
Pebble-filled gourds repeat;
Jailbait consumers of subliminal
Hints dropped from on high
In gobbets none
Eschews as minced kin;
Who, hooked themselves—bamboo diviner
Bent their way
Vigorously nodding
Encouragement—
Are one by one hauled kisswise, oh
Into some blinding hell
Policed by leathery ex-
Justices each
Minding his catch, if catch is what he can,
If mind is what one means—
The torn mouth
Stifled by newsprint, working still. If…If…
The little scales
Grow stiff. Dusk plugs her dryer in,
Buffs her nails, riffles through magazines,
While far and wide and deep
Rove the great sharkskin-suited criminals
And safe in this lit shrine
A boy sits. He’ll be eight.
We’ve drunk our milk, we’ve eaten our stringbeans,
But left un tasted on the plate
The fish. An eye, a broiled pearl, meeting mine,
I lift his fork…
The bite. The tug of fate.
October 28
FISHERMAN: We may be too late.
STRANGER: How could you say that, in a light like this?
FISHERMAN: I didn’t mean too late for the sunset. You’re right. On a fall evening like this one, when there isn’t a feather’s weight of wind and there are cotton clouds to soak up the afterglow, we’re in for an enchantment, when the sun goes down. Wait and see. No, I mean a much worst tardiness.
STRANGER: What are you saying?
FISHERMAN: I caught easily out on the shoal on Monday. Tuesday I had to work like the dickens. Then I skipped a day. On Thursday I was skunked. They were not there. I think they’ve left Middle Ground—for good.
S: The season’s over?
F: Oh, Stranger, this is a bad time of year. To me, the drifting away of the bluefish is the falling of leaves—the shoal becoming as bare and sapless as a stripped branch—another harvesttime marked off, one more winter of a frigid and hostile sea to come, too soon. What
I hate most is when Spray finally has to be hauled, and she lies in her cradle in the railway in the shed, out of her element, almost like a blue in the fish box.
But I don’t want to give up yet. I won’t believe that it’s over. We’ll try something today. Each fall, some time early in October, a school of big blues moors itself awhile inside the tip of the Chop—fish probably from east of here, from off Monomoy or Tuckernuck or Muskeget or one of the shoals like Horseshoe, blues that have been triggered to migrate and have stopped off for a couple of weeks to have a nice fat feast in here between the Chops.
S: A feast? On what?
F: On a calm day like this you can see for yourself. Do you see those wide rings of ripples on the water? Three or four of them, scattered around? Dark wheels going nowhere?
S: Yes. Yes, I see them.
F: Those are the tracks made by the dorsal fins of big schools of pogies—menhaden—which have the habit of going round and round in tight circles like that, the myriad triangular spiny knives that they carry on their backs cutting through the satin surface of the bay. Look, now there’s a ring close by. Can you make out the hundreds of fins? In here at this time of year we don’t often see a mass slaughter by hordes of blues, with birds working over it; rather, big free-lance blues—and also biggish solitary weakfish, or sea trout—lurk under the schools and occasionally dart in for a kill.
S: And you fish by the rings?
F: The meat fisherman does. He’ll catch a menhaden for a lure; he’ll cast a bare treble hook into a rotating school, bring the line in with sudden jerks, and in that way snag a chance pogy, about eight inches long, in the flank. Then he’ll bait his larger hook with the menhaden and let it down, wounded but still swimming, near the wheel of a school, and often a raiding bluefish or sea trout will take such an easy offering.
Since I’m not after quantity, I prefer a different kind of fishing. The blues are also feeding on our friends the snappers and tailors, a few of which, at least, are probably still here in their grand hotel, off the meadows and the two pilings, getting up their strength for their own long trip south. By now the snappers make good eating, for either people or blues—nine or ten inches long.
All right, here we are, on the hotel roof. Now, we run out from here eastward, directly toward Nun Three, about a hundred yards, about a third of the way to the buoy….
We’ll use the beach rod today, so we can get really long casts, and I’ll put on the yellow Stan Gibbs plug that swims like a hurt pogy and gives off the glowing flashes one can see as the menhaden turn and shimmer in their merry-go-round. Here. Take some shots. These big ones aren’t easy to catch this way. It may take quite a few tries.
S [casting]: Where do the blues go?
F: The only thing I can say for sure is that most of them go toward warmth in the winter. Wouldn’t you, if you lived in the water? I like to, and I live on land. Migration is one more of the marvels and mysteries of this wonderful animal. For many years, investigators have been catching blues, clipping marked tags to them, releasing them, and waiting for returns on the tags when the fish are recaught somewhere else. There has been a fair amount of evidence about their movements, but some big uncertainties remain.
Prodigies of travel have been reported. In January 1939 a fish that had been tagged off New York was recaptured off Cuba. In 1969 a blue that had been tagged in the New York bight was recovered in the Gulf of Mexico. I know of at least one scientist who thinks some of our blues may winter off the Azores or West Africa; he thinks we ought to be using tags with French and Spanish on them, as well as English.
There’s still a lot of guesswork involved, but the pattern seems to be something like this: In the fall—around here, in late October and early November—the younger blues, snappers and yearlings and perhaps two- and three-year-olds, move southward along the coast, where the water stays somewhat warmer than over the deeps. The bigger and hardier blues stay around a bit longer and then head out to sea and work their way to warmer water down along the edge of the continental shelf. Blues show up offshore along the southern Florida coast in midwinter, and by March anglers make good catches along the beaches. Then toward the end of March and in April the parade of younger blues moves northward again along the coast, past Georgia and the Carolinas, to arrive off Virginia and Delaware in late April. Some find their home grounds there, and stay. Others move on, and reach New Jersey and New York in May. The bigger blues, swimming deep, have again paralleled the inshore procession, and commercial fishermen take some of them off Rhode Island and Massachusetts by late May. My logs show the smaller blues arriving in Vineyard Sound, most years, in the first week in June. There are variations, of course, caused by unusually cold or warm stretches of weather in the spring.
Tag recoveries have given some idea of the blues’ rates of travel. Depending on their size and the weather and perhaps the food they find along the way, they swim between seven and thirty miles a day. One tagged fish had traveled nine hundred ninety miles from Florida to New Jersey in seventy-seven days.
There’s speculation that some blues have gradually become cold resistant and winter over, far offshore, without going south—something like the cardinal, which used to migrate to warm zones but now can be seen all through the winter in many parts of New England. A few blues are caught off to the south of the Vineyard as late as mid-November, and deep trawls have occasionally taken bluefish over the Hudson canyon in midwinter. But most of the blues clear out of these coastal waters at about this time of year.
S: You spoke of the blues that come in here for a final feast as having been “triggered” for migration. What pulls the trigger?
F: Light and heat; darkness and cold. Do you remember, the day when we were talking about clocks, my speaking of how the arrival and departure of daylight set the diurnal rhythms of the blue’s swimming and feeding and resting? The varying length of time between dawn and dusk controls its larger, seasonal rhythms, too. Here is one of the many things that amazes me about this fish. When daylight pours down into the water for almost exactly twelve hours off the south Florida coast, not much longer, not much less, some hormonal bell rings in the bluefish, telling it to get going. What it cares about, in taking the road, is the temperature of the water in which it is to spend the summer months. But the water temperature hasn’t changed much yet off Florida; it is the particular span of light, coded in the fish’s brain, that tells it the time has come to move. For the trigger of the move away from here, the coded day-span is shorter than twelve hours: about eleven and a quarter.
The fish has free nerves in its skin that act as sensors of heat and cold. As it moves northward, the feel of the seaway through which it drives its stubborn, undulant hull obviously begins to influence its rate of travel. The temperature of the flesh of a fish exactly corresponds to the temperature of the water in which it swims. There couldn’t be any such thing as a thermometer for all fishes, with a gradient marked “normal.” There are nearly seventy-five Fahrenheit degrees of difference between the body temperature of a species of fish at the equator and that of another in arctic waters. The typical bluefish functions most at ease when its temperature—and that of its bath—is between 64° and 68°, though it can tolerate a considerably wider range. When the water cools to below 53° or warms to more than 85°, it shows signs of stress; its patterns of daily life go out of whack, and it swims faster and faster, trying to make its way to a warmer or cooler tub. It arrives on Middle Ground in the spring when the water temperature here reaches 54° to 59°—cooler than it really likes, but some deep folk dream apparently tells it that the Sound will soon warm up, to its liking, and it stays. In the fall, it is triggered to move by the shortened days when the water falls to 55° to 59°.
S: How does it know where it’s going?
F: Ah, there you’re getting to the darkest and, to me, the most beautiful mysteries—those of orientation and navigation. How do mig
ratory birds and fish know where they are? How do they know where they want to go? Once a seabird called the Manx shearwater was taken all the way to Venice from a breeding colony on Skokholm Island, off Wales. When released, it circled briefly as if looking down for a quick study of a chart of reality, and then it struck out on the exact compass bearing for home, which it reached, having flown overland across the whole of Europe, in fourteen days. I have installed a tall pole with crossbeams on top for ospreys to nest in, on the sand flats in front of my house. If a pair settle there and build their nest, they will travel to Brazil for the winter, and the following spring they’ll fly back, three thousand miles, to this very same nest.
Blues apparently don’t home in quite such a pinpoint way as the shearwater and the osprey do—or as the salmon does, which returns from world travels to its natal stream; but tag reports have shown that many blues do come back to the same general area year after year. I like to imagine that there’s a tribe of Vineyard blues. How do they find their little island? How will they know, when they leave here this week, where to head for the vast baths of warm water to the south? The smaller fish, remember, go largely west at first, along the shore. We have some slender clues to the ways in which they plot their courses, but here again we have to guess.
We know that some fishes navigate by the sun—and probably the bluefish mainly steers to its goal by this means. These fishes quite literally have a sextant in their heads. They can “shoot” the sun and, with the help of a chronometer in the brain, which is constantly adjusted by the varying spans from dawn to dusk, can factor the azimuth of the sun with the time of day and know where they are and on what bearing they must travel onward. Experimenters once captured white bass, Roccus chrysops, and, having taken them in various directions from their spawning grounds, released them with nylon threads and little floats attached to them. On sunny days, the floats were towed straight for home; on cloudy days the fish confusedly zigged and zagged.
