The Founding Fish (7 page)
Authors: John McPhee
S
t. Pierre has sent eggs to Thompsontown from places a great deal more distant than Smithfield Beach. For example, the Columbia River. To help meet the voracious requirements of the Susquehanna shad rehabilitation program, he has FedExed eggs from the West Coast to Pennsylvania. Something like five million shad come up the Columbia in spring, the largest shad run anywhere. They go a hundred and forty-six miles upstream before they encounter one of the world's largest concrete structures. They stop to think it
over. They have been likened to a crowd waiting for an escalator, which, literally, a lot of them are. The ladders at Bonneville Dam can accommodate more than a hundred thousand shad a day, and one or two million go on to spawn upstream. The majority spawns below Bonneville, and shad fishermen are all but shoulder to shoulder among the big boulders on the tailrace side, casting heavy darts on eight-pound test into the ten-mile current. Every so often a fly fisherman appears and stands off downstream, where the backcasting of his dense ten-weight sinking line won't attract a lawyer.
t. Pierre has sent eggs to Thompsontown from places a great deal more distant than Smithfield Beach. For example, the Columbia River. To help meet the voracious requirements of the Susquehanna shad rehabilitation program, he has FedExed eggs from the West Coast to Pennsylvania. Something like five million shad come up the Columbia in spring, the largest shad run anywhere. They go a hundred and forty-six miles upstream before they encounter one of the world's largest concrete structures. They stop to think it
over. They have been likened to a crowd waiting for an escalator, which, literally, a lot of them are. The ladders at Bonneville Dam can accommodate more than a hundred thousand shad a day, and one or two million go on to spawn upstream. The majority spawns below Bonneville, and shad fishermen are all but shoulder to shoulder among the big boulders on the tailrace side, casting heavy darts on eight-pound test into the ten-mile current. Every so often a fly fisherman appears and stands off downstream, where the backcasting of his dense ten-weight sinking line won't attract a lawyer.
The American shad does not derive from these American waters. The species originated in the rivers of eastern North America, and first appeared in the West in 1871, two years after completion of the transcontinental railroad, when Seth Green, of the New York Fish Commission, came over the Sierra Nevada by train with four milk cans full of baby shad from the Hudson River. Seth Green could cast a dry fly a hundred feet. An aquacultural pioneer, he was in his fifth season of hatching shad. He had worried the fish across the continent, trying to keep their environment healthy. In Chicago, he tried the drinking water and found it too oily. Chicago water, though, had Omaha water beat to death. In Omaha, Seth Green filled a bucket with water and poured it into another bucket, then poured it back, and poured againâbucket to bucketâuntil he had oxygenated and purified the water. On he went, five years before Little Bighorn, through the homeland of Cheyenne and Sioux, where a heat wave was hostile to the shad. The train carried ice cut in winter. Gently, gingerly, his fingers turning red, Seth Green flicked ice water into the milk cans, keeping temperatures down around eighty degrees. Two thousand shad died, but ten thousand made it to Sacramento, and by stagecoach up the Sacramento River a hundred and fifty miles to Tehama, where Green let them go.
He liked their chances in all environmental respects but one.
There was something alarming about thousands of millions of cubic yards of the Sierra Nevada being flushed off the mountains by giant nozzles working gold. The ocean was brown at the Golden Gate. Enough material was going into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal. Washed-down rock, gravel, sand, and mud choked the American River. The American and the Yuba were tributaries of the Sacramento River. The mining detritus had raised the Sacramento seven feet. Seth Green planted the fry in the Sacramento. He reported to the New York commission: “I can only say that if they do not have shad in the Pacific Ocean there will be but one cause, the roily water, caused by washing the mountains down for gold. However, I think the fish will get through all right.” Shad deal well with turbidity. The shad would make it. They'd be back in four years. A reward was postedâfifty dollars!âfor the first adult shad caught in California. According to Volume I of the “Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission” (1881), Baltimore Harry caught the first shad.
There was something alarming about thousands of millions of cubic yards of the Sierra Nevada being flushed off the mountains by giant nozzles working gold. The ocean was brown at the Golden Gate. Enough material was going into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal. Washed-down rock, gravel, sand, and mud choked the American River. The American and the Yuba were tributaries of the Sacramento River. The mining detritus had raised the Sacramento seven feet. Seth Green planted the fry in the Sacramento. He reported to the New York commission: “I can only say that if they do not have shad in the Pacific Ocean there will be but one cause, the roily water, caused by washing the mountains down for gold. However, I think the fish will get through all right.” Shad deal well with turbidity. The shad would make it. They'd be back in four years. A reward was postedâfifty dollars!âfor the first adult shad caught in California. According to Volume I of the “Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission” (1881), Baltimore Harry caught the first shad.
Baltimore Harry's fish had come home to California, but by no means did all the transplants behave in the traditional way. They spread out. They rapidly invaded other rivers. They not only went up the Feather, the Yuba, the American, the Mokelumne, the San Joaquin, they also went up coastal rivers far from the Golden Gate. They went up the Russian, the Eel, the Klamath, the Trinity. In the words of the 1887 Report of the Commissioner, United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, they upended the “dictum of fish-culture that fish plants in a river would return to it when mature for the purpose of spawning.” Actually, one or two per cent of Eastern shad stray to other rivers, and a similar small percentage began the expansion in the West. Gradually, they spread south to and beyond San Diego and north to the Rogue, the Siuslaw, the Coos, the Umpqua, the Millicoma. They went up the Columbia (where they were also transplanted, in 1885). They went into Puget Sound. In Canada, they went up the Fraser River. They
found the Alaskan archipelago. Eventually, they established home rivers in Siberia. Maybe they were looking for the Hudson. Less than fifty years after Seth Green crossed the continent with his milk cans in the train, an annual six million pounds of shad were being commercially landed in California.
found the Alaskan archipelago. Eventually, they established home rivers in Siberia. Maybe they were looking for the Hudson. Less than fifty years after Seth Green crossed the continent with his milk cans in the train, an annual six million pounds of shad were being commercially landed in California.
The species took longer to attract Western anglers, but the sport accelerated in the years that followed the Second World War. About the first place that shad see a shad dart after coming through the San Francisco bays and into the Sacramento River is at the Minnow Holeâfive hundred yards of the Sacramento River near the Sacramento Zoo. Most anglers are fishing from the shore there. Roughly one in four is in a boat. Collectively, in an average season, they might catch about forty thousand shad, half the number caught by anglers in the whole of the Sacramento River. They kill and keep ninety per cent.
Shad anglers from the East Coast are struck speechless when they encounter these Western numbers. Three million shad coming in at San Francisco! Five million shad on their way to Bonneville Dam! To find that many shad in the Delaware River you'd have to turn time back a century and more. On the Willamette River in Portland, they see boats side by side from one bank to the other. This is known as a hog line, according to Lenox Dick in his West Coast primer, “Experience the World of Shad Fishing” (Frank Amato Publications, Portland, 1996). Travelling East Coast shad fishermen have taken pictures of hog lines in Oregon and later shown them breathlesslyâand a little wickedlyâto Armand Charest at his shad-dart stand in Holyoke.
Lenox Dick is an M.D. who lives in Vancouver, Washington, and does most of his shad fishing in a boat in front of his house. The Columbia River is a mile wide there, but the channel is close to the Washington bank. Sometimes his Labrador retriever, for the sheer sport of it, swims in place beside the boatâa strenuous
standoff with a mighty current. During the 2002 migration, I fished there with Dr. Dick and his friend Paul Johnston, an all-seasons, all-species Columbia River fisherman to whom the doctorâhis shad book notwithstandingâdeferred. To get down three fathoms in that current and flap something past the noses of shad, Johnston used a rig out of Rube Goldberg by Alexander Calder. It involved a swivel on one end of a drop line and, on the other end, a lead sphere about the size of a cherry tomato. His main line went through the swivel, which could slide up and down but was blocked by another swivel, from which his leader led to a small dart with a flexible tail of sparkling plastic. He called this mobile a “slider rig,” and summarized it, saying, “Your main line goes through your drop.” In the turbid river under gray cloud in morning rain, the shad were up in the water column and the lure seemed to be below them. They were within reach of the fly line I was using, with its long sink-tip and lead-core leader. When the sun came out in the afternoon, the shad descendedâright into Johnston's slider rig, one after another and another. To my surprise, they were twenty to thirty per cent smaller than Delaware River shad.
standoff with a mighty current. During the 2002 migration, I fished there with Dr. Dick and his friend Paul Johnston, an all-seasons, all-species Columbia River fisherman to whom the doctorâhis shad book notwithstandingâdeferred. To get down three fathoms in that current and flap something past the noses of shad, Johnston used a rig out of Rube Goldberg by Alexander Calder. It involved a swivel on one end of a drop line and, on the other end, a lead sphere about the size of a cherry tomato. His main line went through the swivel, which could slide up and down but was blocked by another swivel, from which his leader led to a small dart with a flexible tail of sparkling plastic. He called this mobile a “slider rig,” and summarized it, saying, “Your main line goes through your drop.” In the turbid river under gray cloud in morning rain, the shad were up in the water column and the lure seemed to be below them. They were within reach of the fly line I was using, with its long sink-tip and lead-core leader. When the sun came out in the afternoon, the shad descendedâright into Johnston's slider rig, one after another and another. To my surprise, they were twenty to thirty per cent smaller than Delaware River shad.
Tall and rangy, Lenox Dick had once been a medical missionary in Africa, had long practiced in Portland, and was now eighty-six years old. The next morning, he and I drove east up the Columbia Gorge and stopped off at Bonneville Dam. Nearly half a mile of fishermen, of two sexes and four colors, were lined up below the tailrace. Many were using poles ten feet long. We made our way down the riprap basalt to the edge of the surging river. With seven-foot rods, six-pound test, and split shot larger than chick-peas, we made some long heaves. Dr. Dick hung up his dart on his first cast. He tied on another, and soon was cursing a new snag. However, as he put it later, “the snag took off.” We fished there only half an hour, but I had some snags that took off, too. In the Columbia River at Bonneville Dam, Dr. Dick and I were
catching shad. We also watched them swimming past picture windows in an indoor amphitheater at the top of the Bonneville ladders. They had climbed sixty feet.
catching shad. We also watched them swimming past picture windows in an indoor amphitheater at the top of the Bonneville ladders. They had climbed sixty feet.
We crossed into Oregon and went up the Deschutes River, where he has a shack on the left bank, approachable only on foot or by boat. The Deschutes, in its canyon, describes itself in flights of white water. The river at the time was exceptionally high. After loading up a McKenzie boat with piles of gear, Dr. Dick at the oars fought across at an angle and then continued upstream, muttering all the while about his failing strength now that he's in sight of ninety. I'm not a trout fisherman, not a dry-fly fisherman, anywhere, let alone in a big Western river crowded with brush, deep near the edge, and racing wall-to-wall. Author, also, of “The Art and Science of Fly Fishing” (Amato, Portland, 1993), Dr. Dick was full of tactical and tactful suggestions. He teaches the subject to organized groups. Thanks to him, I caught five rainbows. A day or two later, he left for Wyoming to fish the Green River. In three weeks, he was off to Iceland in pursuit of Atlantic salmon. Fish or no fish, when I grow up I want to be like him.
In Oregon's storied Umpqua River, shad come in after the steelhead run, like ninth-inning pitchers coming in to finish. In the Russian River, in California, fly fishermen make their way upstream from the Hilton pool to the Summerhome Park pool, as Carl Ludeman once did, to cast for shad with a red-white-and-silver fly of his invention, known today as the Ludeman Shad Fly. Using a No. 22 Ludeman fly, a really brilliant caster can hook and land a five-pound shad. A 22 hook is the size used by fly tiers on which to imitate a mosquito.
Bump-net shad fishing developed in the California delta, and has not been adopted by the rest of the world. The California delta itself is a rare phenomenon. It is the common delta of two big riversâthe Sacramento and the San Joaquin. Moreover, it has formed in the Great Central Valley, in the middle of California,
and discharges its flow into the San Francisco bays. Of world rivers with common deltas, there seem to be no more than the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. The deltaic landscapeâwest of Lodi, east of Pittsburg, thirty miles south of Sacramentoâis a polderland of high dikes and low orchards, where you look up at big ships sliding by above the trees. If you were driving on the dikes, you looked down over fields of corn, fields of asparagus, fields darkened by multitudes of sandhill cranes. You passed Chinese towns with false-front stores. You passed Al the Wop's restaurant and bar, famous for its steak with peanut butter. In this milieu, someone figured out that a slowly moving boat could be much like a pregnant shad. With nets made of chicken wire on long handles, bumpers went out in small outboards, notably on the North Fork of the Mokelumne River off Dead Horse Island and Staten Island, not far from where the Mokelumne joins the San Joaquin. When shad spawn, they will often swim high in the water, breaking the surface in a movement known as washing. Males will sometimes turn and butt the females, possibly to help express some eggs. Among the bumpers of the California delta, this process was not ignored. The wash of a slowly turning prop attracted shad. The long-handled, stiff nets were held in the water near the wash. Buck shad came along and bumped the net. They thought the boat was a roe shad. They were spawning with the boat. The person on the handle had about a tenth of a second to react perfectly and flip the fish aboard. Not as many people are as good at it now, but at the meridian of bump-net shad fishing they caught, in a season, ten thousand shad.
and discharges its flow into the San Francisco bays. Of world rivers with common deltas, there seem to be no more than the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. The deltaic landscapeâwest of Lodi, east of Pittsburg, thirty miles south of Sacramentoâis a polderland of high dikes and low orchards, where you look up at big ships sliding by above the trees. If you were driving on the dikes, you looked down over fields of corn, fields of asparagus, fields darkened by multitudes of sandhill cranes. You passed Chinese towns with false-front stores. You passed Al the Wop's restaurant and bar, famous for its steak with peanut butter. In this milieu, someone figured out that a slowly moving boat could be much like a pregnant shad. With nets made of chicken wire on long handles, bumpers went out in small outboards, notably on the North Fork of the Mokelumne River off Dead Horse Island and Staten Island, not far from where the Mokelumne joins the San Joaquin. When shad spawn, they will often swim high in the water, breaking the surface in a movement known as washing. Males will sometimes turn and butt the females, possibly to help express some eggs. Among the bumpers of the California delta, this process was not ignored. The wash of a slowly turning prop attracted shad. The long-handled, stiff nets were held in the water near the wash. Buck shad came along and bumped the net. They thought the boat was a roe shad. They were spawning with the boat. The person on the handle had about a tenth of a second to react perfectly and flip the fish aboard. Not as many people are as good at it now, but at the meridian of bump-net shad fishing they caught, in a season, ten thousand shad.
Shad fishing is good in the Yuba River, the American River, the Feather River, with darts, spoons, or flies, and even naked flashing hooks. Going up the Yuba River the shad run is blocked by Daguerre Point Dam. In the American River the shad run is blocked by Nimbus Dam, in the Sacramento by Red Bluff Diversion Dam,
in the San Joaquin by Mendota Dam. In the Feather River, the shad run stops at a fish barrier close to Oroville Dam.
in the San Joaquin by Mendota Dam. In the Feather River, the shad run stops at a fish barrier close to Oroville Dam.
Driven by desire to place their offspring as far upstream as they are able to, the shad that migrate by ladder into Columbia waters above Bonneville Dam are looking up a river that is further plugged by The Dalles Dam, John Day Dam, McNary Dam, Chief Joseph Dam, Grand Coulee Dam.
In major rivers of East Coast America, the migrations are blocked by seventy-eight dams. The first ones up from the ocean tend to concentrate shad fishing, as in New England at Holyoke Dam. The Hudson, drowned in its fjord to Albany, is dammed at Troy, and the migration piles up there. The Susquehanna is blocked ten miles from its mouth and shad fishing is illegal in the Susquehanna. Alone, as noted, is the Delaware, with its two hundred miles of shad fishing above tidewater at Trenton. In several places, there are wing dams, also called pier damsâwalls that reach into the river from the two sides but don't meet. Angled downstream, they concentrate and deepen the channel, and were built in the nineteenth century to help float rafts of logs. High in Catskill tributaries are three dams built to enhance New York City's water system, but from mile 1, at Hancock, New York, to the sea buoy at Lewes, Delaware, the river flows free. When you come home to the Delaware from the confines of other rivers, you feel a patent sense of relief as you move about in the absence of dams.
For some years, shad were picked up below Conowingo Dam, in the Susquehanna River, and put in trucks full of water that was swirling in circles to create in the fish a sense that they were migrating inside the truck. And they were. They rode fifty-eight miles, passing four dams, and were let back into the river. This was known as trap-and-transport. There were as many as ten trucks. One year, they carried fifty-six thousand shad. The Susquehanna dams now have elevators.
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