The Founding Fish (5 page)
Authors: John McPhee
O
ut of our waders and into Kynard's office, we had been through a fair amount of this dialogue at the S. O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center, in Turners Falls, a small community in northern Massachusetts enabled by a dam built in 1798 at a natural pitch of the Connecticut River. Built to intercept logs, it also blocked the migration of fish, setting a fateful precedent as the first main-stem
dam on a major river in North America. Thomas & Thomas bamboo fly rods are made at the intake end of the power canal there, and the Conte lab, two miles down, is not far from a generating station where the canal water spills through turbines and back to the river. Below Thomas & Thomas, a modest cluster of antique industrial structures soon gives way to open ground, forested at the edges, in which the swift current of the canal slows and spreads into something like a lake, flanked by a road butâin the better part of a mileâonly a low pair of buildings, the seventeen-milliondollar Conte lab, nestled into the canal's right bank. Named in part for Silvio Conte, the Massachusetts congressman who made it happen, the lab was Boyd Kynard's idea. It was built by the Department of the Interior and modelled on a lab on the Columbia River that is now a parking lot. It was also named for anadromous fish, which live in oceans and spawn in fresh water. Nimbly, all other possibilities have been covered in language that would entertain W. S. Gilbert. If you live in fresh water but go out into the ocean to spawn, you are catadromous. Anadromous means “running up.” Catadromous means “running down.” If you are anadromous or catadromous, you are also diadromous. And if you're a fish that goes from fresh water to salt water, or salt water to fresh water, to eat or to survive drought but not to procreate, you are amphidromous.
ut of our waders and into Kynard's office, we had been through a fair amount of this dialogue at the S. O. Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center, in Turners Falls, a small community in northern Massachusetts enabled by a dam built in 1798 at a natural pitch of the Connecticut River. Built to intercept logs, it also blocked the migration of fish, setting a fateful precedent as the first main-stem
dam on a major river in North America. Thomas & Thomas bamboo fly rods are made at the intake end of the power canal there, and the Conte lab, two miles down, is not far from a generating station where the canal water spills through turbines and back to the river. Below Thomas & Thomas, a modest cluster of antique industrial structures soon gives way to open ground, forested at the edges, in which the swift current of the canal slows and spreads into something like a lake, flanked by a road butâin the better part of a mileâonly a low pair of buildings, the seventeen-milliondollar Conte lab, nestled into the canal's right bank. Named in part for Silvio Conte, the Massachusetts congressman who made it happen, the lab was Boyd Kynard's idea. It was built by the Department of the Interior and modelled on a lab on the Columbia River that is now a parking lot. It was also named for anadromous fish, which live in oceans and spawn in fresh water. Nimbly, all other possibilities have been covered in language that would entertain W. S. Gilbert. If you live in fresh water but go out into the ocean to spawn, you are catadromous. Anadromous means “running up.” Catadromous means “running down.” If you are anadromous or catadromous, you are also diadromous. And if you're a fish that goes from fresh water to salt water, or salt water to fresh water, to eat or to survive drought but not to procreate, you are amphidromous.
Ordinarily, ichthyologists visit fish. At the Conte lab, it's the other way around. “Without a lab, we could not do experimental work; all we could do was field work,” Kynard explained. After shad arrive at Turners Falls, a selected number might go into one of three long concrete flumes that suggest the containment chambers in a nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant. The fish hop uphill and upcurrent in pool-and-weir fishways built of wood and jigsawed into experimental geometriesâopen Vs, inviting trapezoids. Above each poolâeach step of the ladderâis an antenna. The shad are wired and are broadcasting to the antennae, which are related
to a computer. Using fly-tying vises, Dr. Alex Haro and Ted Castro-Santos, a graduate student, have bound No. 8 fishhooks to small cylindrical microchip tags in exactly the way you bind bucktail to a shad dart. The microchip rigs resemble shad darts. Haro and Castro-Santos hook them into the back end of the shad's dorsal fins. The shad don't seem to mind, possibly because they are each and all veterans of Holyoke Dam, showing raw spots and missing scales from the thrashing ride in the elevator.
to a computer. Using fly-tying vises, Dr. Alex Haro and Ted Castro-Santos, a graduate student, have bound No. 8 fishhooks to small cylindrical microchip tags in exactly the way you bind bucktail to a shad dart. The microchip rigs resemble shad darts. Haro and Castro-Santos hook them into the back end of the shad's dorsal fins. The shad don't seem to mind, possibly because they are each and all veterans of Holyoke Dam, showing raw spots and missing scales from the thrashing ride in the elevator.
The Ph.D.s on the lab's staff are also adjunct professors at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst. Alex Haro wrote his doctoral dissertation on American eels, which are not ignored in the anadromous-fish lab, the fact notwithstanding that they are catadromous. Dr. Steve McCormick and Dr. Joe Zydlewski study salt-excreting cells in gills, and the rest of the complex physiology in transitions between river and sea. As one of McCormick's Ph.D. candidates intent on learning how much energy migrating shad burn away as they swim, Jill Leonard developed the laboratory's swimming respirometerâa vertical toroid tube about the size and shape of a truck tire, in which water flows around like river current and can be sped up or slowed down. Built into the respirometer's uppermost arc is a clear-plastic horizontal chamber, sized for one shad, in which the incumbent specimen swims in place under eyeball-to-eyeball scrutiny, taking on whatever current Leonard chooses. She measures, among other things, oxygen depletionâthe oxygen requirements of shad at different swimming speeds.
In the natural Connecticut, down through steep woods from the power canal, some of these people fish for shad, in a place they described as uncommon. Site unseen, I made a date to go with Steve McCormick at six-thirty one morning in late May. From my fishing diaries, this is the entry for that day: “Their place is called the Rock Dam, an imposing diabase ledge between the left bank and a large island. In the ledge close to the bank is a narrow gap,
like an open door. You can cast a fly line across the confined river as it comes through that slot and drops into a twenty-foot pool. Beyond the pool is a pond eddy. Steve McCormick had to leave at eight. Having caught salmon smolts in Turners Falls and equipped them with acoustic tags, he went off to listen to the salmon in Hartford and beyond. Others from the Conte lab fishing at the Rock Dam this morning were Joe Zydlewski, Joe Kunkel, and Gabe Gries. At one point, as many as nine fishermen were clustered there. Gries is an ecologist who works on juvenile salmon. He caught a shad. Joe Zydlewski took itâhe wanted the gills. Joe Kunkel is doing a study with McCormick and Zydlewski to see how gill morphology changes as shad come into the river. I used a fly rod and a spinning rod. I used a flutter spoon. I used darts. I used lead-core leader. I used my brain, to the extent that it was working, and once again I could not get a shad out of the Connecticut River. It's as if I were a rejectee, an alien. The Rock Dam is as tight and intimate as it is natural and beautiful. Everybody else was fishing from dry ground in sneakers, while I was dressed up in neoprene stocking waders, sand guards, L.L. Bean felt-soled boots, and an Orvis vest bearing the orange-and-green emblem of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen's Association. I looked like a hapless astronaut, while these scientists stood on the ledge in their bluejeans, catching shad.”
like an open door. You can cast a fly line across the confined river as it comes through that slot and drops into a twenty-foot pool. Beyond the pool is a pond eddy. Steve McCormick had to leave at eight. Having caught salmon smolts in Turners Falls and equipped them with acoustic tags, he went off to listen to the salmon in Hartford and beyond. Others from the Conte lab fishing at the Rock Dam this morning were Joe Zydlewski, Joe Kunkel, and Gabe Gries. At one point, as many as nine fishermen were clustered there. Gries is an ecologist who works on juvenile salmon. He caught a shad. Joe Zydlewski took itâhe wanted the gills. Joe Kunkel is doing a study with McCormick and Zydlewski to see how gill morphology changes as shad come into the river. I used a fly rod and a spinning rod. I used a flutter spoon. I used darts. I used lead-core leader. I used my brain, to the extent that it was working, and once again I could not get a shad out of the Connecticut River. It's as if I were a rejectee, an alien. The Rock Dam is as tight and intimate as it is natural and beautiful. Everybody else was fishing from dry ground in sneakers, while I was dressed up in neoprene stocking waders, sand guards, L.L. Bean felt-soled boots, and an Orvis vest bearing the orange-and-green emblem of the Delaware River Shad Fishermen's Association. I looked like a hapless astronaut, while these scientists stood on the ledge in their bluejeans, catching shad.”
K
ynard, as attentive to sturgeons as he is to shad, likes to point out that sturgeons are Cretaceous. That is, the species has existed in the world a hundred million years. This causes him to yawn in the direction of the crossopterygian Coelacanthidae, so-called living fossils (also dating from the Cretaceous) that have turned up rarely in modern seas, inconveniencing Webster's Second International, which describes them as “extinct.” Kynard says, “Biologists
hunt the world for a coelacanth, and sturgeons are right here. When dinosaurs were walking around in shallow water, they were stepping on sturgeons.”
ynard, as attentive to sturgeons as he is to shad, likes to point out that sturgeons are Cretaceous. That is, the species has existed in the world a hundred million years. This causes him to yawn in the direction of the crossopterygian Coelacanthidae, so-called living fossils (also dating from the Cretaceous) that have turned up rarely in modern seas, inconveniencing Webster's Second International, which describes them as “extinct.” Kynard says, “Biologists
hunt the world for a coelacanth, and sturgeons are right here. When dinosaurs were walking around in shallow water, they were stepping on sturgeons.”
Sturgeons run up to spawn in most American coastal rivers. In Nova Scotia, I have seen themâseven feet longâtrapped in shad weirs in the Minas Basin. They inhabit tubs in the Conte lab. The experiments of Erika Henyey, one of Kynard's grad students, are meant to show how they orient to bottom structures in riversâshortnose sturgeons, Atlantic sturgeons, highly endangered pallid sturgeons. The fish anatomist Willy Bemis, of the University of Massachusetts, has said of Kynard and his graduate students, “He doesn't hang around if they're not good. He's stiff. As a result, it's a distinction to have been trained by him. Moreover, he is the very best field biologist I've ever known. You can go anywhere with Boyd. He'll teach you to observe things you would never have seen by yourself and that other people either aren't able or willing to teach you. The animal sign. The little scrape in a stream. He's a real honest-to-God naturalist. He might not tell you where to fish with a fishing rod, but he'll tell you what you need to know to get started. When you're out there stomping around with him, it's like being out there when you're fourteen.”
When Boyd Kynard was fourteen, he fished with a cane pole, “a little short six- or seven-foot cane pole,” he says, “which I would go out and cut in the swampsâcut my own cane poles, cure my own cane poles.” Sometimes, he cut big ones: “Thirteen, fourteen feet; drying them was a long process, seeing what kind of action they had.”
“No reel?”
“No reel. I just pulled fish straight up and out. There was native cane in canebrakes all over the swamps. You pick exactly the kind of pole you want, put eyes on it, and wade out into the oxbows and lower a minnow from the pole.”
Kynard does not talk Massachusetts. A shad is not a piece of
broken crockery. A bod to him does not suggest a poet. In his adult life, though, he has lived in the Pacific Northwest, in the desert Southwest, and in enough other places so that his phrases emerge in a phonic palimpsest. It takes a while to hear your way through them and into Mississippi.
broken crockery. A bod to him does not suggest a poet. In his adult life, though, he has lived in the Pacific Northwest, in the desert Southwest, and in enough other places so that his phrases emerge in a phonic palimpsest. It takes a while to hear your way through them and into Mississippi.
With a few feet of fixed line on those homemade poles, he was fishing in the meandering rivers of the central part of the state. He fished the Strong, the Yazoo, and, most often, the Pearl. He trapped. He kept snakes in his back yard. The Pearl was two miles from his home, in north Jackson. He would go there on his bicycle. Alone, or with others, he camped there. He was on the river twelve months a year. “It's a serious river. It was the nearest wilderness. The rest of it was farms. Crude farms. Once you got to the Pearl, that was it, there was nobody lived there, it wasn't anything but snakes and alligators and fish and water and trees and swamp.” He caught bass, crappies, catfish. There were sturgeons in the Pearl. Paddlefish. Gar. He was fifteen when he hooked his first bowfin.
“Bowfin?”
“Think of a coelacanth. A primitive, voracious fish. Twenty-five to thirty pounds. You'll hook a lot more than you'll ever land. The inside of their mouth is solid bone, with not much to hook onto. Lower a minnow in the oxbows, and my God Almighty you're like five feet away from these fish. You'd be in there with these monster fish, and when they'd grab ahold you weren't sure who had ahold of who.” From a canoe, he was lowering a minnow when he attracted that first bowfin. “He weighed at least thirty. I got him up near the surface, and he was running at the boatâright underneath the surface, running right for the boat. All I could do was hold the pole up. His head was like seven inches thick. You're in a canoe and a fish is charging and you wouldn't normally be afraid. But that guy was so big and so aggressive. He bent the rod right under and broke the line. That made me a bowfin fisherman.”
“When did it dawn on you that you were never going to leave this field?”
“Quite early. When we moved to Jacksonâfrom Bruce, Mississippi, a small lumber townâI saw my first tropical-fish store. This was 1950. I was twelve. In north Jackson, there were very few stores, but a guy opened a tropical-fish store. We hadn't been there three weeks when he came. The place stood aloneâthis small, old building, no others around it. I had never known of anybody who had fish in captivity or used fish for anything other than to eat. You know, catch and eatâthat's what you did with fish. And here was this little tiny store, like six feet wide and ten feet long. I walked in, and there's these little beautiful fish. I remember thinking, You can buy fish in a store! You gotta be kidding me. You know what I did that summer? I mastered the techniques of not only housing and caring for them but breeding them. I would go down to the pickle factory and get five-gallon pickle jars. I learned to put a kerosenesoaked string around a pickle jar. You light it, and it expands the glass under the string. You just take the top right off. I must have made fifteen or twenty aquariums, and I used them for breeding different pairs. See, I'm so cheap I would buy two fish at the tropical-fish store, and in two months I'd have forty. I was selling them to other kids. I knew a good thing when I saw it.”
He bred zebra danios. (“They were my egg-layers.”) He bred swordtails, mollies, guppies. He sold them for ten cents apiece, undercutting the tropical-fish man by fifty per cent. This went on for three years. “Ask guys who work with fish for a living if they raised fish when they were young. You can't just look at one and say, âThere's a fish.' You really have to want to get under those fishes' skins. You really have to understand how to make a situation that fish want to breed in. This implies a great deal of understanding, even for zebra danios. I knew when I was in the eighth grade that I wanted to be a biologist.”
“Did you eat the fish you caught?”
“Of course. The bowfins were real cottony and had a lot of bones in them. You had to marinate those guys.”
Catfish were a whole different thing.
“We would camp out on a beach. There were lots of beautiful sand beaches on the river. You always set out catfish trotlines. Trotlines and Southerners are almost inseparable. We'd put chicken livers and gizzards on there, for channel catfishâoh, goodness! We had the fire going. When we'd catch âem, we'd skin 'em down, fillet 'em, throw 'em right there on the fireâI mean the fish was not even fifteen minutes out of the water, and if you've eaten fish like that it's a whole different thing. We'd just do that all night.”
When he was seventeen, he became a Y-camp counsellor, on the swiftly flowing Strong River, where he taught canoeing, camping, tree identification, and survival skills, and led overnight canoe trips twenty miles down the Strong to its junction with the Pearl, and fifteen more down the slower, wider Pearl. There “your attention switched to catfish.” Five miles below the junction was an immense limestone outcrop (“with layers of quartzite, white and crystalline”) that knocked the river right back where it came fromâbent it around like the head of a paper clip. At the curve, opposite the outcrop, was the steepest sandbar he would ever seeâ“as vertical a sandbar as you can pile up sand.” The water in the curve was “probably forty or fifty feet deep.” Kynard and the others were in fifteen-foot Grumman canoesâa hundred per cent aluminum from their molded seats and machined thwarts to their flotation chambers. Traversing the deep curve, Kynard and the others heard an unearthly, weird sound. The air was still, the current silent, but out of somewhereâwhat else but the river?âcame deep down-register tones, halfway across the scale between bull and bullfrog. They camped on top of the outcrop. Kynard took a Grumman, went out, and heard the sound again. He decided that it was coming through the water, and that it was being picked up and amplified by the flotation chambersâin effect, sealed
drumsâin the bow and stern of the canoe. After he had crossed the deep curve, the sound was gone. He turned around, went back, and heard it again. He gave some thought to bowfin, but more to catfish. “I know catfish make sounds. They have a bone that they rub against their air bladder. You can take a channel catfish out of water, and he'll sit there making sounds. I, of course, had brought my trotlines. I baited them with chicken parts, and caught two of the biggest catfish I'd ever seen. That must have been some concentration of fish.” For years, in Grumman canoes, he listened in other places. Nowhere but in that one place has he ever heard the catfish chorus.
drumsâin the bow and stern of the canoe. After he had crossed the deep curve, the sound was gone. He turned around, went back, and heard it again. He gave some thought to bowfin, but more to catfish. “I know catfish make sounds. They have a bone that they rub against their air bladder. You can take a channel catfish out of water, and he'll sit there making sounds. I, of course, had brought my trotlines. I baited them with chicken parts, and caught two of the biggest catfish I'd ever seen. That must have been some concentration of fish.” For years, in Grumman canoes, he listened in other places. Nowhere but in that one place has he ever heard the catfish chorus.
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