The Founding Fish (31 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

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The collection of fish skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, is in many respects unrivalled, and can be compared only with skeletal collections in London, Paris, and Chicago. There are more than ten thousand fish skeletons in the American Museum, and about a quarter of them came from the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo. Most of these specimens were dissected and prepared by Gareth Nelson, an American Museum ichthyologist, who, over the years, scraped and dried on Dauphin Island more than twenty-five hundred skeletons representing two hundred and fifty-three species. A year ago, on the verge of retirement, Nelson brought Willy Bemis with him and showed him how to work the rodeo. Then Nelson went off to Australia. The American Museum, in Willy's words, “is out of the fishskeleton-collecting business now,” and Willy has an obsessional dream. He sees in his mind's eye a Massachusetts Museum of Natural History. He has already sketched a logo for it. He has designed an M.M.N.H. green-and-gold flag, which is flapping even now on a pole within a few feet of the space in which he is dissecting.
He knows just where on the U Mass campus, in Amherst, he intends the building to be. Already, he has raised $1.3 million. He needs twenty.
S
ponsored fishing teams are in the rodeo. Young, photogenic pros, they go from tournament to tournament, representing boat makers, engine makers, or tackle companies. Appearing on the dock in essentially identical clothes, they look like assistant basketball coaches: Team Big Boy, in green and gold; Ranger Sportfishermen, in blue. Their boats are as showroom-fresh as they are.
Second afternoon, and Blue Monday ties up—a homemade boat flying two Confederate flags. She is skippered by a competitor who is also a commercial fisherman. He has shrimp stickers on his wheelhouse and trawl doors aft. Blue Monday, imperfectly fashioned from quarter-inch steel plate, is possibly a sister ship of the African Queen. The skipper's face is quizzical and darkly bronzed. His eyes seem to be narrowing on something they can't quite hit. He says he has asbestosis. He says he has been shot eleven times, mainly in Vietnam. He says he has had a heart attack and lung disease, and each day he lives for the day. His bluefish and red snappers are not going to appear on the leader board. He casts off resignedly, and leaves.
Ynot comes down the Aloe Bay Channel. Ynot is a Fountain, a thirty-one-foot open fisherman, with a fineness ratio (length to width) of such elegance that it seems to slice—rather than part—the quiet water. Watching it approach, Jerry Walden remarks that it's “a high-dollar boat.” Two people are aboard: a man, at the wheel, and a smiling—not to say exuberant—young woman eyeing the dock. They are father and daughter. Five feet tall, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and New Balance boat shoes, she is as trig and pretty as the boat—blond and fine-featured, with the shape of a gymnast. Ynot waits for an opening and then moves into a slip.
They got up at four, at their home, near Pascagoula, Mississippi, and at six were trolling off the Chandeleur Islands in thirty-five feet of water. Due south of Biloxi Bay, the Chandeleurs are seventy-five miles east of New Orleans. The skipper on this run was John Colle
(kolly),
and the fisherwoman Natalie Colle. With two drift lines and a third line on a downrigger, she was fishing for king mackerel. On each line she used a single hook and a treble hook and a hundred-pound-test metal leader. (“Mackerel have such sharp teeth.”) The bait on each line was a ribbonfish, “which we call a silver eel, a skinny eel—the single hook goes through its mouth and nose and the treble hook goes on its back to make it seem to be swimming right, even though it's dead.” The line itself was thirty-pound-test, appropriate for a king. Each rod was seven feet long—“a king/ling rod, a standard king-mackerel rod.” The rods were held vertically in hardware rod holders.
Off the curving Chandeleurs, the Colles were following birds. (“Where there's birds, there's baitfish; where there's baitfish, there's fish.”) They trolled around the feeding schools. (“It was real slick water, real calm. We could see the schools.”) Suddenly, one of the drift lines moved. Natalie picked up the rod. For forty-five minutes, the fish on the line held her off. It felt sizable, and Natalie wondered how it might place among the tournament kings. When the fish came to the boat, though, it was a blacktip shark, about five feet long, with three sharksuckers riding on it. She released it, and rerigged the line.
Something hit heavily at noon. The rod was in a rod holder. The reel, on light drag, started “zinging.”
“We had the clicker on. Tournament rules—you reel it in yourself. I went to the rod, put it in my rod belt. I'm thinking, It's a big king. A real big king. The prize king! Before long, it jumped. It shook in the air. It was a tarpon! Again, he jumped. He twisted in the air. We call it skyrocketing.”
What Natalie had on her line was like this—described for all time by Thomas McGuane, in the collection he titled “An Outside Chance”:
The closest thing to a tarpon in the material world is the Steinway piano. The tarpon, of course, is a game fish that runs to extreme sizes, while the Steinway piano is merely an enormous musical instrument, largely wooden and manipulated by a series of keys. However, the tarpon when hooked and running reminds the angler of a piano sliding down a precipitous incline and while jumping makes cavities and explosions in the water not unlike a series of pianos falling from a great height. If the reader, then, can speculate in terms of pianos that herd and pursue mullet and are themselves shaped like exaggerated herrings, he will be a very long way toward seeing what kind of thing a tarpon is. Those who appreciate nature as we find her may rest in the knowledge that no amount of modification can substitute the man-made piano for the real thing—the tarpon. Where was I?
When her tarpon jumped, Natalie saw a spray of blood leaving the gills. This was neither the scene nor the fish she had imagined, and she felt an impulse to cut the line and let the tarpon go. Her father, John Colle, suggested that she stay with it. In all his years, he had never caught a tarpon. His father's dream had been to catch a tarpon. He never did. And now his father's granddaughter had a tarpon firmly hooked—a fish at least as big as she was. The tarpon, in a sense, was hanging by a thread. Her monofilament line was thirty-pound-test.
An hour passed as Natalie dealt with the tarpon. “He fought and fought. He would surface and jump. He stayed strong the
whole time. I'd huff and puff and reel and get him in close, and he'd take off again. At least ten times he did that. I thought the rod was going to break. It was totally bending over. Then he would sound, and sit there like a dead weight. Every time he did surface, he would take my line back out and just sit there.”
John Colle had shut off the engines. Now and again, the tarpon pulled the boat. This way. That way. Several times, Natalie walked completely around its periphery “trying to keep him clear.”
After an hour and fifteen minutes, little had changed. “Was I exhausted? No, I'm in pretty good shape. I work out a lot. I do triathlons. I got, if anything, kind of bored. You have to keep the rod tip up the whole time. I'm kind of a hyper person. My attention span isn't real long. When he sat there, I could not reel him in. So I just sat there, too. Each time, he came up a little more slowly. He would make an arch and go down again. When he was making the arch, you could see the brilliance of his body shining off the water. I thought, This is a beautiful animal and he's fallen into a terrible trap. He came close to the boat four times, regained energy, and went off. After an hour and a half, we missed him twice with the gaff. The third time, my father and I hoisted him into the boat together. My first tarpon. My first time, for sure. I had no plans to catch that fish.”
She decided to go in and enter the fish “before he loses a lot of weight”—fifty miles to Dauphin Island. As Ynot reached the sound and swung into the Aloe Bay Channel, she was, as she would later describe herself, “beaming with excitement.” She was thinking, This is going to be great. Maybe I'll set a record. Maybe as a woman angler I've accomplished something. It all seems worthwhile—the heat, the sun, the effort.
Now Ynot, after waiting its turn, at last nudges the dock. A Jaycee says to Natalie, who is standing in the bow, “You have a kill permit—right?”
“A kill permit?” she repeats.
“A fifty-dollar tarpon kill permit. You can't enter the fish if you don't have one.”
“But I didn't know I was going to catch it—I wasn't trying to catch it.”
The Jaycee says he is sorry.
“We were not aware of it.”
The Jaycee repeats that he is sorry.
Her great surprise is not as great as her palpable disappointment. Her triumph in vapor, she is struggling to deal with the psychological bends, and in this moment is confronted by a professor from Massachusetts saying, “Can we have your fish? We're marine scientists. We're going to do research.”
She is bewildered but she gives him the tarpon. “All right,” she says slowly. “You can have him. At least it's good for research.” The tarpon is lifted by two men and carried in a trough to a large scale. Ninety pounds. The tarpon is driven off in an A.T.V.
Tarpon permits are a requirement of the State of Alabama. Over the years at the deep-sea rodeo, tarpon permits have not been required, because they have always been superseded by the “permit for scientific collecting” that pertained to the American Museum of Natural History. Because Gareth Nelson retired and the tournament was not sure that anyone would be here to replace him, the tarpon permit is mentioned on the competitors' tickets this year for the first time—mentioned, as Natalie Colle sees it, “in little-bitty writing.”
The Colles might have won prizes for most beautiful boat, most beautiful competitor, most beautiful fish, but those are not categories in this tournament, and Ynot goes up the channel into the haze. She is heading back to Pascagoula, the largest deepwater port in Mississippi, where a tugboat named Natalie is one of seven vessels in the fleet of Colle Towing—“the place with the big American flag”—where her great-great-grandfather worked, and where she works now. What Natalie Colle doesn't know is that her tarpon's
complete and bushy structure, mounted on mahogany, is destined for a wall at the Massachusetts Museum of Natural History.
“
I
f we do a nice job with this fish, it's a major exhibit piece,” Willy remarks at the dissecting table, knife in hand. “This is the largest living representative of a group that hasn't changed much in a hundred and twenty-five million years. They are the fishlike elopomorphs, and are generally thought to be closely related to eels. Eels and tarpon have similar larvae—leptocephali—so thin they're almost transparent. I mean big larvae, some of them like a foot long. As larvae metamorphose either into eels or into fishlike elopomorphs, they shrink. It's counterintuitive. Bonefish and ladyfish are elopomorphs. The group also has an interesting fossil history and is probably among the most primitive of the teleosts. We study them to get that insight.”
In a day or two, Natalie will send her tarpon's measurements (“I'm sixty inches, he was nine inches longer”) to J. T. Reese Taxidermy, Inc., in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which will feed the data into a computer and reproduce the tarpon in glass and fiberglass, and send it to Pascagoula. Willy, meanwhile, at the dissecting table, begins to remove the tarpon's skin. With the knife, he is as slow and careful now as he was swift and casual in addressing the shark, because the tarpon has three thousand bones, including six sets of intermuscular bones, the tips of which touch the skin. Eventually, he holds up what appears to be a vest of chain mail. A single tarpon scale is nearly as large as a playing card, and the third of it that is not overlapped by other scales is covered with what appears to be silver plate. You can read the age of the tarpon in the rings of the scale. This one is thirteen years old. Like shad scales, tarpon scales are deciduous—lightly attached, easily removed—
and almost pure bone. People collect them as souvenirs and paint seascapes on them where they are shell white, above the silver.
The flesh looks wine red, but the red muscle is only a veneer over a white inner mass. When fish swim idly, routinely, steadily, Willy says, they are using red muscle, but when, for any reason, fish require great speed they use white muscle. The flesh of the tarpon, like the flesh of an orange, is divided into segments. In this tarpon, each segment is about half an inch wide. The intermuscular bones are ossified connective tissue between the flesh segments. The intermuscular bones are attached variously to ribs and to the vertebral column. They are so numerous that the skeleton, to a remarkable extent, will resemble the complete fish. With the filleting knife, Willy makes long slices between the intermusculars—angling with them toward the tail—and then begins scraping with the cooking spoon, driving shredded flesh along and off the bones as if he were cleaning a pitchfork.
Detaching the skull from the bony curve that is known as the pectoral girdle is not easy without an axe, but Willy patiently succeeds, commenting as he works: “Fishes have a loose pelvic girdle, just floating, whereas the pectoral girdle is attached to the back of the skull tightly—the reverse of land creatures like us, tight in the pelvis and loose in the shoulders.”
Now he has the tarpon's head in his two hands and, with a little pressure, causes the mouth to open so wide that a small car could park inside it. Or so it seems. “The hyoid drops down, the top of the head comes up, then the two sides go out. What an incredible expansion! It flares the suspensorium!” Between the lower jaws is a bone called the gular, common in fossil fishes but rare in the modern world. Also evident, with steel connective wire, are Natalie Colle's hooks—one in the urohyal bone, ventral to the gill arches, and the other in connective tissue between the urohyal and the lower jaw.

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