The Founding Fish (22 page)
Authors: John McPhee
I shall be obliged to you if you can aid him in getting them at as reasonable a price as you can. I presume they will not be higher than what is paid for shad, as they are by no means as good a fish. If through your interest he can be admitted to join in hauling the seyne & come in for a share of shad so as to bring us some, I will thank you, as well as for any other aid you may give him towards his object â¦
Thomas Mifflin, of Pennsylvania, had a mansion at the Falls of Schuylkill where he gave shad dinners for his founding friends. Mifflin was Quartermaster General of the Continental army, President of the Continental Congress (1783-84), delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention, and Governor of Pennsylvania throughout the seventeen-nineties, when the national capital was Philadelphia. Mifflin might be governor of Pennsylvania but not of the State in Schuylkill, in which he was just a citizen, as the members have been called since 1782. He knew better than to depend
on club fellow-citizens for fish, so he bought his shad from Godfrey Shronk. The Schuylkill's pre-dam shad fisheries were numerous, and involved such people as Woolery Meng, Melchior Meng, Conrad Krickbaum, and Titus Yerkes. Titus Yerkes owned the General Wayne tavern at Mary Walters Ford. When going for bass, perch, and bullheads, the fishing citizens of the State in Schuylkill used trot lines. They called them layout lines. On March 27, 1789, Citizen Benjamin Scull, godson of Benjamin Franklin, caught a fifteen-inch trout on his layout line.
on club fellow-citizens for fish, so he bought his shad from Godfrey Shronk. The Schuylkill's pre-dam shad fisheries were numerous, and involved such people as Woolery Meng, Melchior Meng, Conrad Krickbaum, and Titus Yerkes. Titus Yerkes owned the General Wayne tavern at Mary Walters Ford. When going for bass, perch, and bullheads, the fishing citizens of the State in Schuylkill used trot lines. They called them layout lines. On March 27, 1789, Citizen Benjamin Scull, godson of Benjamin Franklin, caught a fifteen-inch trout on his layout line.
In 1809, you could get three acres of riverfront land in Lower Merion for three hundred dollars, yet a timberless and agriculturally barren three-acre island in the Schuylkill River was worth twice as much, because of its fisheries. In 1811, inmates of the poorhouse of Montgomery County, in which Lower Merion is a township, complained of being fed too much salt shad. Among the populace at large, though, shad had risen a long way in their level of acceptance. In that same decade, Pennsylvania Germans were stuffing shad with oysters, baking them in parchment, and drenching them in rich walnut sauce. In Philadelphia in the eighteen-twenties, Joseph Head's Mansion House Hotel was looked upon as the most elegant restaurant in town, where you ate stuffed baked shad under a caper sauce, grilled shad with sorrel, and, for breakfast, shad roe with oranges.
Samuel Lane owned the Bull Tavern, near Phoenixville. According to Samuel Pennypacker's history of the town, Lane “had an arrangement with the fishermen at the mouth of the Pickering, that he was to furnish them each morning with a quart of whiskey, and they were to give him in return a shad weighing eight pounds.” Pickering Creek flows into the Schuylkill a few miles above Valley Forge. The fishermen filled their side of the contract for a time, but the aggregate pressure of the fisheries was such that the size of shad declined. The stomach of Sam Lane's last shad was stuffed with pebbles.
The dams started coming in 1822, and the State in Schuylkill moved downriver to Rambo's Rock, a left-bank site in South Philadelphia, and on May 5th, in the spring migration, betokened its arrival with a dinner of planked shad. Three years later, M.J.PY.R.G. du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, spent a day as a “stranger” at the club. He had been twenty years old when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1777. Martha Washington referred to him as “the French boy.” Now he was sixty-seven and touring the nation he had helped create. His son George Washington Motier was with him, and successfully fished in the river. The marquis helped with the cooking. Of his visit he remarked, “It completes my tour of all the States in the Union.”
In a dusty old cellar under the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, at 1300 Locust Street, are ten metal caskets numbered with gold paint. Inside the caskets are the suede-bound ledgers of the Colony in Schuylkill and the State in Schuylkill. Robert Peck, a citizen of the State who spends the rest of his time as a naturalist at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, is the one person in Pennsylvania or anywhere else who has a key that unshelves those caskets. In his generosity, Peck has opened the caskets, and stayed there with me in the more than amply heated basement, hunting through the ledgers. I am as indebted to him as to the State in Schuylkill's two official histories.
In the eighteen-thirties, this first angling club in America acquired its own worm digger, Martin Lush. In 1832, on its hundredth anniversary, a hundred people (members and guests) sat down to a dinner that featured eleven pounds of food for each eater, and included, overall, forty-nine pounds of shad. They ate a hundred and seven pounds of beef, four pigs, thirty pounds of tongue, forty pounds of oysters, and twelve lobsters averaging 3.3 pounds. Filling it again as often as they drank it out, they drank on average of alcoholic drink some thirty-four ounces eachâthat
is, was, seventeen gallons of rum and brandy, some of it mixed, and eleven gallons of wine, nearly all of it fortified.
is, was, seventeen gallons of rum and brandy, some of it mixed, and eleven gallons of wine, nearly all of it fortified.
Attracted to the table in 1849 were the “strangers” George Gordon Meade, of the West Point class of â35, and John Clifford Pemberton, West Point '37. On July 3, 1863, Meade defeated Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. On the following day, Pemberton surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg.
On October 31, 1920, when Prohibition was one year old, General of the Armies John J. Pershing wore an apron, peeled potatoes, and ladled Fish House Punch at the State in Schuylkill. Later, he recalled the visit, saying, “I don't know what particular State it was, but I was in a dreadful state when they got through with me. Still, the amusing part of it was that I didn't realize until the next day what a good time I had had.” During his good time, the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World Warârecipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Honor, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Marizio e Lazzaro, the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold, the Grand Cross of Commander of the Order of the White Lion, the Order of the Star of Karageorge with Swords of the First Class, the Order of Mihai Bravul, the Polonia Restituta, and the Order of the Rising Sunâwas made an honorary citizen of the State in Schuylkill, and he wrote in a club ledger: “No honor has ever quite equaled this.”
THE PORTABLE ROCK
I
n the Delaware basin today, sixty-five thousand people fish for American shad. I have no idea how the state surveys arrived at this officially concocted figure, but I find it hard to believe. While personally spending nine hundred and twenty-two hours on or in the river in many different places fishing for shad, I have developed a distinct impression that at least a hundred thousand people have crowded ahead of me into positions superior to mine. In 1965, I interviewed a citrus king in Florida, whose route to success he outlined in this manner: “When I was a small boy playing marbles, I learned that the most important thing is position. If you get in the right position, you can clear up some marbles out of the ring.”
n the Delaware basin today, sixty-five thousand people fish for American shad. I have no idea how the state surveys arrived at this officially concocted figure, but I find it hard to believe. While personally spending nine hundred and twenty-two hours on or in the river in many different places fishing for shad, I have developed a distinct impression that at least a hundred thousand people have crowded ahead of me into positions superior to mine. In 1965, I interviewed a citrus king in Florida, whose route to success he outlined in this manner: “When I was a small boy playing marbles, I learned that the most important thing is position. If you get in the right position, you can clear up some marbles out of the ring.”
Starting out as a shad fisherman, I relied on the instincts of George Hackl, which was the first of many mistakes. As a consultant, Hackl has received stupefying fees. His expertise in the international licensing of pharmaceuticals would obviously qualify him as an authority on the whereabouts of shad. On our first day as shad fishermen, we went to a sporting-goods store, bought shad darts and two shad nets with their long handles and oversized hoops, drove to Roebling, New Jersey, and addressed ourselves in chest waders to the Delaware's tidal flats. The rationale was simple in every sense, but we would be slow to give it up: If half a million shad were in the river, half a million shad would pass Roeblingâor any place in the lower regions of the river. Roebling is fifteen miles
below the fall line at Trenton. We waded out from shore a good distance, and, in water to our waists, began to cast darts. You would not need an aerial photograph to sense the futility of this scene. A thousand feet beyond our casting range, oceangoing ships were passing by. They were in the river channel. We might as well have been fishing for ships. The shad were out there in the channel, too. For three hours, we flailed the barren flats.
below the fall line at Trenton. We waded out from shore a good distance, and, in water to our waists, began to cast darts. You would not need an aerial photograph to sense the futility of this scene. A thousand feet beyond our casting range, oceangoing ships were passing by. They were in the river channel. We might as well have been fishing for ships. The shad were out there in the channel, too. For three hours, we flailed the barren flats.
Above Washington Crossing that spring, we crawled through a storm sewer under Route 29 in order to gain exclusive access to a broad shallow stretch of featureless river, which we also flailed without result. We fished the quiet current at a friend's house in Stockton, on the right bank of the river. We did as well as we would have done on the right bank of the Po. True, all shad in the migration go by any given point below the waters where they spawn, but when they are on the move the odds against a dart intersecting one are long to an extreme. Shad congregate below bridge piers, rapids, riffles, and islands, and fishermen do, too. Even a big boulder is enough to make shad stop, bunch up, and think. They collect in deep pools in the evening, and go up through rapids after dawn. Where white water flattens out, becoming slick and black on the surface of a pool, eddies tend to form on the sides. There is a distinctive seam where the southbound current and a north-drifting eddy touch. Shad cluster beside the seam, which is known as the eddy wall. After you cast crosscurrent and the dart swings, you connect with your shad at the eddy wall. You could make a long list of exceptions, but that in the main is where the fish are, and where the wading fishermen are, tooâstanding in the eddy, casting into the current across the eddy wall.
Four or eight or even sixteen of them are standing shoulder to shoulder like bears in a river in Alaska. Sometimes their casts overlap and intertwine. This puts to the test the renowned politeness of shad fishermen. Ed Cervone tells a story about dropping his wallet near the Lambertville launch. He went home, realized what had
happened, and returned with a flashlight. No wallet. Home again, there was a message on his tape from a young shad fisherman in North Philadelphia who had found the wallet. Cervone: “Only a shad fisherman would do that. If you were at a polo match, they wouldn't do that. These are not just people catching fish. They're a breed apart, all to themselves.” That's true, Doc, they will give you your wallet back. But they will not give an inch of position.
happened, and returned with a flashlight. No wallet. Home again, there was a message on his tape from a young shad fisherman in North Philadelphia who had found the wallet. Cervone: “Only a shad fisherman would do that. If you were at a polo match, they wouldn't do that. These are not just people catching fish. They're a breed apart, all to themselves.” That's true, Doc, they will give you your wallet back. But they will not give an inch of position.
In a crowded situation, Buddy Grucela has seen a shad fisherman “k.o. a guy into the bushes,” and then go back to his position.
Below the fast water at Byram, on the lower river, boats line up in echelon, anchored and still. The fishermen hold their darts in the river. When the fish are not there, which is most of the time, there is no movement in the boats. Against a backdrop bend in a stretch of river of amazing beauty, the scene is so peaceful it appears to be on stretched canvas. Then came a day of roiling high water when one of the boatmen nearly capsized and drowned. His anchor fouled, he needed to cut the rope, he had no knife, his life was in danger. No one moved to help him. To move meant to sacrifice position.
One Memorial Day weekend at nine in the morning, I was fishing in a pool far upriver when a canoe overturned in rapids above me. A boy about seven years old, his father, two paddles, a cooler, a thermos, and other buoyant cargo spilled into the river. The boy was wearing a life jacket with a wide collar that reached above his head like a coif. He bobbed upright in the swirling currents, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Save me! Save me! Daddy, save me!” His father struggled to move toward him. Slowly, though, like an opening flower, the boy, the father, the paddles, the thermos, and the cooler were being spread farther apart as they were swept downstream. The father, helpless, could not swim across the current. The little boy's jacket was doing its job, but he kept on screaming. “Daddy! Daddy! I'm going to die!” Standing about fifty
yards from him in my neoprene space suit and my cleated heavy boots, I was helpless, too, as were other wading fishermen. Walking down to the river that day, I happened to glimpse a canoe stashed behind someone's cabin. To leave the river, climb a bluff to the cabin, locate a paddle, and return with the canoe would take so long that the effort seemed pointless, but I started wading toward the bank anyway. Then I noticed that the boy was being swept toward an anchored boat. Two shad fishermen were in it with four rods. The boy was fast approaching them, still screaming, “Daddy! I'm going to die!” They would end his panic. They would pull up their anchor and go into mid-stream to intercept him. As he went by them, they watched, and did not stir.
yards from him in my neoprene space suit and my cleated heavy boots, I was helpless, too, as were other wading fishermen. Walking down to the river that day, I happened to glimpse a canoe stashed behind someone's cabin. To leave the river, climb a bluff to the cabin, locate a paddle, and return with the canoe would take so long that the effort seemed pointless, but I started wading toward the bank anyway. Then I noticed that the boy was being swept toward an anchored boat. Two shad fishermen were in it with four rods. The boy was fast approaching them, still screaming, “Daddy! I'm going to die!” They would end his panic. They would pull up their anchor and go into mid-stream to intercept him. As he went by them, they watched, and did not stir.
I continued wading to the bank, and was halfway up the bluff when I saw a canoe appear out of nowhere at a bend in the river. The two people in it had capsized earlier and must have been drying out. They picked up the boy.
A submerged boulder can offer great position to a wading fisherman who is able to reach it and climb aboard. A guy on a boulder dropped his dart box in the river one day. He stuck his arm down in the water and tried to retrieve the box with his long-handled shad net but failed. The pool was deep, the current strong, and the box with its numerous darts was too far down. After observing all this, another shad fisherman stripped to his undershorts, went underwater kicking hard, came up with the box, and handed it to the flabbergasted guy on the boulder. Cervone is essentially correct: Shad fishermen are fraternal and are not customarily greedy, mean, belligerent, or coldly indifferent. Still, the topic we have at hand here is the importance of position in cleaning up marbles out of the ring, and consists of significant if isolated fragments.
I have been crowded by a woman spin-casting in a bathing suit. I have edged close to a woman with piled red hair whose soft
and nonchalant backhand cast came up with a lot of shad. She competed with the guy next to her, to whom, it turned out, she was married. One day, when I had asked him a question, she said, “Keep him talking, I'm catching up.”
and nonchalant backhand cast came up with a lot of shad. She competed with the guy next to her, to whom, it turned out, she was married. One day, when I had asked him a question, she said, “Keep him talking, I'm catching up.”
From time to time, I have encountered a small, slight shad fisherman from Philadelphia whose eyes are oscillating beads. If, arriving on the scene, he sees you with a fish on your line, he will wade straight to you and all but climb your back to see if he can cast from your shoulders. In my fishing diaries, he is called Snopes.
May 13, P.M.: While I have a four-pound roe on the line, two men enter the river and stand virtually between me and my fish. One is Snopes McShad, an annoying and aggressive little ferret who fishes with a very light rod. I net the shad, and cast again. Snopes and his friend are so far out in the river below me that I am crowded and inhibited. As my dart swings toward them, I think it might snag them in the waders, a development that would in no way dismay me.
The first time my nephew Angus ever fished for shad, he arrived at the river, walked down the bank, observed all the fishermen lined up in an eddy, and waded into fast water far above them. He had never even seen a shad. Alone thereâlooking, maybe, foolishâhe began to strip out line and send false casts in drapefolds over the river. His name is Angus Burton. At the time, he was president of Trout Unlimited in Baltimore. Who knows what fly he finally laid on the river, but it swung down into the eddy-sided pool and he had a shad on the line. It ran up and down and jumped twice. Angus's reactions were louder than the river. You could hear him redefining his sense of unlimited. When the fish was at his side in the water, he flicked out the hook and cast again. Downstream, Snopes McShad had pulled out of the line-up.
After splashing ashore, he ran upriver, reentered the water, and was soon within inches of Angus's casting hand. Angus is nothing if not polite, but you could see him wondering. This, after all, was not his game. He cast. He connected with another shad.
After splashing ashore, he ran upriver, reentered the water, and was soon within inches of Angus's casting hand. Angus is nothing if not polite, but you could see him wondering. This, after all, was not his game. He cast. He connected with another shad.
May 16, P.M.: Snopes showed up with a friend in a red hat. Red Hat caught a shad within ten minutes, and put it on a string. It swam like a dog on a leash. After an hour, he let it goâalmost surely to die. He just walked away. When Red Hat got the fish on the line, Snopes moved to his side, like iron to a magnet. Detestable.
Once, when Hackl and I were hitting into fish, Snopes waded into the river eleven inches upstream. He said, somewhat testily, “I know where the school is.” As if we were hiding it. I caught a buck shad, which I intended to eat, and I turned to set it on the bank. Snopes said, “Don't worry too much. I'm not going to take your place.”
I looked around at him and slowly asked, “What did you say?”
He said, “I know where the school is.”
Suddenly, the shad stopped hitting. Activity ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Hackl and I went on casting, but we were just throwing darts into an empty river. Five fishermen spread out below us were also catching nothing. Snopes vanished.
Snopes reappears far downstream, a speck in the river, and he instantly connects with shad. He may be the greediest, most aggrandizing, highly skilled fisherman in Pennsylvania. He knows where the school is. We know where the pool is.
A late afternoon in our second year, I stood in the river until dusk while a northwest wind blew my darts off course in the air.
Others around me were catching fish, and I was not. They caught fish after fish. I did not feel so much as a bump. The embarrassment was becoming an inflammation. I was standing on an underwater boulder, but evidently not a well-chosen boulder, and also not a very large boulder. A little after four, I slipped. I slid down the rock into the river. The water was cold coming into my waders, and when I stood up the wind felt colder. After sloshing ashore, I drained the waders, turned them inside out, and hung them on a bush to dry. In my undershorts, I went back to the fishing, and went on catching nothing while surrounded by success. I did not feel a strike that day. Slowly, my two-digit I.Q. wrapped itself around a conclusion: I was in the wrong place at the right time. The ring was full of marbles but I was not close to the ring. Position is everything. I could use a canoe. A canoe would be a portable rock.
Others around me were catching fish, and I was not. They caught fish after fish. I did not feel so much as a bump. The embarrassment was becoming an inflammation. I was standing on an underwater boulder, but evidently not a well-chosen boulder, and also not a very large boulder. A little after four, I slipped. I slid down the rock into the river. The water was cold coming into my waders, and when I stood up the wind felt colder. After sloshing ashore, I drained the waders, turned them inside out, and hung them on a bush to dry. In my undershorts, I went back to the fishing, and went on catching nothing while surrounded by success. I did not feel a strike that day. Slowly, my two-digit I.Q. wrapped itself around a conclusion: I was in the wrong place at the right time. The ring was full of marbles but I was not close to the ring. Position is everything. I could use a canoe. A canoe would be a portable rock.
I drove down the river three hours home to New Jersey. I spent two days chipping at a living. And then, from a rack in the back of the garage, I took down my sixteen-foot Mad River Malecite, my ash-gunwaled, cane-seated, Kevlar-covered chocolate canoe, a boat so responsive to the touch that a single stroke could cross a river. Or so it had always felt. I put it on the car and went back to the upper river with a formulated plan. I would drive down the railroad on the New York side. With my extensive jetsam, not all of which was flotsamâmy rod tubes, vests, rain gear, pack basket, tackle bag, hoop net, anchor, fillet board, hand scale, Rapala knife, carrot juice, paddle, extra paddle, and uneaten lunchâI was better off going up a flat glide to a pool below white water than I would be heading downstream through rapids. If I spilled all that gear in the river, just the thought of the money it had cost might cause me to yell louder than a child in fear for his life. Some days before, I had driven along the edge of the railroad, on ballast the size of grapefruit. It was a little more than bumpy but the vehicle
survived. And now, at the end of the journey north with the canoe, I went down into the river gorge to the grade crossing and began to turn onto the railroad's right-of-way. Beside the tracks, a pennant-shaped steel barricade, bright lemon chrome, had been erected by the railroad during the two days I had been gone.
survived. And now, at the end of the journey north with the canoe, I went down into the river gorge to the grade crossing and began to turn onto the railroad's right-of-way. Beside the tracks, a pennant-shaped steel barricade, bright lemon chrome, had been erected by the railroad during the two days I had been gone.
I laid on the horn in sheer frustration. The point on the river that I wanted to reach was half a mile away, no more, but the portage was uninviting, and would surely require repeating twice to transport all that gearânot to mention a whole lot of time. The day was waning. I was primed to fish. There was only one thing to do. I went straight down to the river, parked the car, put the canoe in the water, filled it to the gunwales with all my gear, rigged up the anchor, and shoved off. The water level was a little high but that was all right, there might be more cushion over the rocks. Almost like a sled dog, the canoe seemed to sense where it was going and to leap forward toward the rapids, even while they were still out of sight around a bend. Their sound came first. And then all quickly we were right on top of them and sliding through a boulder field of chutes and souse holes, haystacks and swirling eddies. I did not do a whole lot with the paddle. The canoe seemed o.k. by itself. I looked down at the rod tubes, the vests, the rain gear, the pack basket, the tackle bag, the hoop net, etcetera, and marvelled at what had possessed me not even to tie them down. At the foot of the rapids, head of the pool, I saw fishermen on the Pennsylvania side. I peeled off the opposite way and into the New York eddy. You would not see a wader in the New York eddy. It was too broad, too deep. No wader could get out far enough to fish. It bordered the deep main current. I let the canoe get sucked up close to the white water, beside the eddy wall, where I lowered the anchor from its sprit on the stern. I turned and knelt against the center thwart, the river channel on my right. It was an awkward position for a right-handed caster, but I did not have that handicap. I
picked up a rod. On the second cast, I caught a roe shad. I caught three more roes and two bucks with an attentive audience on the Pennsylvania side. As dusk came on, I hid the canoe in a sea of ferns.
picked up a rod. On the second cast, I caught a roe shad. I caught three more roes and two bucks with an attentive audience on the Pennsylvania side. As dusk came on, I hid the canoe in a sea of ferns.
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