Blues
Page 16
S: It’s all very well to have a course, but toward what destination? How does the blue know what to aim for?
F: We have to guess that some folk memory, programmed over the centuries into the blue’s neural computer, must tell the snapper to go west and then south in the fall, come north and then east in the spring.
S: Excuse the interruption, but should we just keep on casting here?
F: Yes, this is our best bet. We’re on the cusp of the season. Either we’ll catch or we won’t catch.
S: Please go on.
F: Besides using solar navigation, some birds and some fishes actually carry compasses. The mineral magnetite is found in their nervous systems, and sometimes it is concentrated in one area of the brain. Experiments with certain land birds have shown that they can figure out compass directions and north–south distances from variations in the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field in relation to a horizontal plane. Birds that can steer with their compasses sometimes lose their way in magnetic storms that are caused by eruptions on the sun, and they can be thrown off course in areas with extreme local magnetic deviations. But over long journeys, they seem to be able to adjust for such errors. Magnetite has been found in the brain of the bluefin tuna, which steers itself over great distances in the Pacific, ranging with precision from one feeding ground to another. So far no one has isolated magnetite in the bluefish, but neither has anyone ruled out its harboring small quantities of it, or of some other mineral that is responsive to magnetic influences.
Among the aids the salmon relies on, in homing to its birthplace, is its sense of smell. Can it be that our Vineyard tribe of bluefish—if there is such a thing—having made their nostalgic way northeastward in the spring, taking fixes on the sun, maybe partly conned by compass, guided, too, by responses to the lengthening of days and by changing temperatures of the water, and influenced by the movements of bait, at last sniff out certain delicate liquid aromas, emanating from our Menemsha Pond, Lake Tashmoo, Sengekontacket Pond, Lagoon Pond, Cape Poge Bay, and, in the years when there is a cut in the barrier beach, Katama Bay? That good old Vineyard sea scent—the wonderful musty-sweet smell of their summer house?
S: You once spoke of something about the blue—I think it was the lateral line—as being a high-tech piece of equipment. I suppose they must have small brains, but what gifts are built into them!
F: Survival gear, refined over millions of years. Sacred gifts, Stranger.
S: A fish has taken the lure! Oh my God, this is something else. I haven’t felt anything like this, ever.
F: Don’t rush it. Let it run when it wants.
S: “Let”! It runs whether I want it to or not….This fish wants to live….I’m tired….
F: Keep it coming….I’ll gaff it in….There! Isn’t that handsome?
S: How big would you say it is?
F: Twelve pounds, maybe.
S: You won’t like this, Fisherman, but I think I understand now why anglers like to pull in big ones. That was a battle; getting that fish to the boat was an accomplishment. In the face of all my scruples, that was fun! And yet—I don’t know—after all that you’ve told me about these magnificent creatures—I remember the Elizabeth Bishop poem—the big old veteran with five hooks in its mouth—part of me feels sad to think that I’m killing a survivor of so many years of trials. A hero.
F: Oh, every time I haul in a blue, big or little, I have so many strange mixed feelings. I’m moved by the fury of the fish, I’m astonished every time by its pride, by the energy of the negation in its leaps, by its thrashing refusal—to the very limit of its endurance in the poisonous air—to accept my views of its place, and my place, in the food chain: in the universe. I can confess to you, now, that every time I catch a bluefish, I have doubts about what I’m up to. It’s not that I feel guilty; someone has to harvest food. I love fishing. It is fun. It’s also a craft, and I want to be good at it. I’m at home on the water. As you’ve seen, every fishing trip brings amazements. But I live in a different era from Izaak Walton’s. When I pull in a blue I feel as if I’m caught in a process in which human values have lost their bite. I’m caught on an invisible line, and I’m being pulled toward being a fish. You instinctively jumped at the image, early, Stranger—the fisherman on the wrong end of the line. I can joke about a fisherman getting fishy, but I don’t like it. I am in awe of the bluefish, but I don’t want to become an animated chopping machine. I’ve said often that fishing is complicated. There are wonders and horrors out here, and sometimes it’s hard to say which is which; food chains are serenely fitting and gruesomely cruel; life is harsh. The James Merrill poem I showed you the other evening speaks (in another language, as it were) to these doubts of mine.
S: Yes, I noticed that the child in the poem couldn’t face the eye of the cooked fish. The blue’s eye shocked me that very first day.
F: It forgives nothing. Ah, Stranger, it’s complicated, isn’t it?
[In the bay, on the way in:] Have you ever seen anything like that sheen on the water?
S: Merrill caught the look of it in that poem—brought the sense of touch to what’s seen—strange—with the idea of dipping your finger in kerosene. No, I’ve never seen—or touched—anything like this. It’s as if a rainbow had been dissolved onto the surface.
F: These calm, final fall evenings are cruel. This may be the last hour of the last day of one more season of my life.
S: I never imagined I’d come to hate a thought like that one—about a fishing season, of all things.
F [in the kitchen]: Away with doubts and regrets, Stranger! Another dinner to enjoy. I’m going to cook the fish tonight with what seems to me the most reliably pleasing recipe of all—and so simple to prepare.
First I’ll skin the fillet, taking away all the dark meat and cutting off the flap of fat, since this is an oldish fish. I’ll use the food processor, to mince fine first an onion and then about an inch and a half of fresh peeled ginger root. Over a low fire I sauté the onion in butter until it begins to turn soft and transparent, and then I add the ginger and cook slowly for three or four more minutes. Now I make some fresh mayonnaise and mix four heaping teaspoons of it (these proportions are generous because this is a pretty big fillet) with a teaspoon of soy sauce and half the onion and ginger. I coat the meat side of the fillet. I spread the rest of the onion and ginger in a buttered and heated broiling pan, over an area just big enough for the fillet, put the fish on it, and broil, five inches from the flame. This big fillet will take sixteen or seventeen minutes….
All set! Close your eyes, Barbara and Stranger. Imagine that this dish is being brought to the table by servants crowned with flowers, to the music of flutes.
S: Oh, Fisherman, you were right. This is very pleasing….Did I hear you speak of horrors out there today?
F: Horrors? I forget. What horrors?
S: Eating fresh-caught fish at a round table with friends—what could be better?
F: Would you agree that “this dish of meat is too good for any but Anglers or honest men”?
S: Oh yes, I would! But what is the “or” doing in that sentence?
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Atheneum Publishers, Inc.: “The Pier: Under Pisces,” from Late Settings, by James Merrill. Copyright © 1985 by James Merrill. Originally published in The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of Atheneum Publishers, Inc.
Basil Blackwell Limited: Excerpt from “The Ballad of the Valiger,” from Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses, by Walter Garstang.
Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1961 by Robert Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, Inc.: “The Fish,” from Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1940, © 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. “The Drunken Fisherman,” from Selected Poems, by Robert Lowell. Copyright 1944, 1946, 1947, 1950, 1951, © 1956, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1976 by Robert Lowell. Copyright renewed 1972, 1974, 1975 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited: “Pike,” by Ted Hughes. Originally published in the United States in New Selected Poems by Ted Hughes and in Great Britain in Lupercal by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1959 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.
Little, Brown and Company Publishers: Excerpt from “If This Was Fifty Years Ago,” from The Wheelhouse Loafer, by Joseph Chase Allen. Copyright © 1966 by Little, Brown and Company, Inc. Excerpt from “Seagulls,” from The Face Is Familiar, by Ogden Nash. Copyright 1940 by Ogden Nash. World rights excluding the United States and Canada administered by Curtis Brown Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company Publishers and Curtis Brown Ltd.
W. W. Norton & Company. Inc.: “The Lung Fish,” from For Instance, poems by John Ciardi. Copyright © 1979 by John Ciardi. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Random House, Inc.: “A Voyage,” from W. H. Auden: The Collected Poems, by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 1939. Copyright renewed 1967 by Edward Mendelson. “The Red Mullet” from Incarnations: Poems 1966–1968, by Robert Penn Warren. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Penn Warren. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Viking Penguin Inc.: “A Jelly-Fish,” from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, by Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1959 by Marianne Moore. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he taught for two decades at Yale and was a past president of the Authors League of America and past Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.
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