Blues Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  BLUES

  “Blues is a special book, the kind you can picture coming upon in a beach house on a rainy August afternoon—its binding mildewed from the salt air, bits of sand caught up in the margins, its pages creased from frequent readings—he has never written a book of more delight.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “An enchanting book—larger even than its fascinating subject.”

  —ROD MACLEISH, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

  “For Hersey, a fishing line is both for sounding the depths of the human imagination and for anchoring him to the limits of the sensual world. Blues aims for balance, it aims to teach and to delight, and it does both well.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Hersey’s all-knowing Fisherman imparts generous wisdom about the sea, its vast teeming plankton and the great food chain it drives, as well as the environmental dangers that threaten it—and he does so in the eloquent prose that has made Hersey one of the most respected writers of his generation.”

  —Seattle Times

  “A celebration, a paean in honor of bluefish…beautifully written.”

  —The Atlantic

  “Hersey casts this lore with the grace of a smooth spinning reel.”

  —Richmond News Leader

  ALSO BY JOHN HERSEY

  The Call (1985)

  The Walnut Door (1977)

  The President (1975)

  My Petition for More Space (1974)

  The Writer’s Craft (1974)

  The Conspiracy (1972)

  Letter to the Alumni (1970)

  The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)

  Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)

  Too Far to Walk (1966)

  White Lotus (1965)

  Here to Stay (1963)

  The Child Buyer (1960)

  The War Lover (1959)

  A Single Pebble (1956)

  The Marmot Drive (1953)

  The Wall (1950)

  Hiroshima (1946; new edition, 1985)

  A Bell for Adano (1944)

  Into the Valley (1943)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1988

  Copyright © 1987 by John Hersey

  Illustrations copyright © 1987 by James Baker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1987.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hersey, John, 1914–

  Blues.

  1. Fishing stories, American. 2. Bluefish—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3515.E7715B58 1988 813’.52 87-45942

  ISBN 0-394-75702-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-394-75702-5

  Ebook ISBN 9780593080733

  A signed first edition of this book has been privately printed by the Franklin Library.

  Owing to limitations of space, permission to print previously published material may be found on this page.

  Map by David Lindroth

  v5.4

  a

  To Sierra, Cannon, Eric, and…

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  June 10

  The Red Mullet

  June 20

  The Fish

  June 24

  The Baite

  July 12

  The Lung Fish

  July 16

  From THE ODYSSEY: BOOK TWELVE

  August 10

  The Drunken Fisherman

  August 14

  Song

  August 20

  Pike

  September 1

  Trolling for Blues

  September 15

  A Voyage

  October 10

  The Pier: Under Pisces

  October 28

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Fisherman’s acquaintance with the bluefish has been much enhanced over the years by trips in Spray to Woods Hole, with its many riches: the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Woods Hole Laboratory of the Northeast Fisheries Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Particular thanks are due to John Boreman of the last of these three, for much patient help in the Fisherman’s education; and to Bori Olla and Anne L. Studholme, who, having conducted many beautiful experiments on the bluefish at the Northeast Fisheries Center’s Sandy Hook Laboratory, generously shared their knowledge. The Fisherman is grateful, too, for various aids to understanding from David G. Aubrey, John Gibbs, Paul R. Gross, Louis Leibovitz, John McDonald, Nancy Marcus, Edward C. Migdalski, John H. Steele, John Valois, and Stuart J. Wilk. And to Judith Jones, both for perceptive readings of Blues and for some knowledgeable hints on ways to make the bluefish delicious. And, of course, to the Stranger, for asking so many questions.

  June 10

  The fisherman swings his boat alongside the dock. He sees a familiar figure leaning on one of the pilings. This person has often been here in the afternoons, facing the sea but appearing to be somehow disconnected from it. He seems rooted to the shore like a tree. His face, however, is alert to the ferries, and he watches the sailboats leaning in their long tacks up to the harbor. He looks as if he may envy the sailors at their tillers. There is something deeper in his gaze, as well, which has interested the fisherman. It is as if the man is trying to puzzle something out. The fisherman has wondered what it might be. Is he hoping that the sea will cast up some lost memory of his? Is he trying to catch sight of the years hiding in the waves? Or is he simply fascinated by the ever-changing blues of the water and the air?…

  The fisherman decides to speak to him.

  FISHERMAN: Stranger! You on the dock! May I toss you my bow line, and would you take some turns on the cleat there? Thank you. Stern line, too? Thanks.

  STRANGER: Are you going fishing?

  FISHERMAN: I am, yes. I’ve seen you here quite often, haven’t I?

  STRANGER: I come sometimes.

  FISHERMAN: I’ve noticed you looking out at the water. Are you a sailor?

  STRANGER: NO, not at all. I have been completely land-bound all my life. I’ve lived in cities. I’ve walked to work on pavements. Here on this island my house is on William Street, in Vineyard Haven, right in the center of town. When I travel here, it’s by air; I’ve never even ridden the ferry from Woods Hole.

  F: Yet you come down to the dock often, and I’ve noticed your awareness of everything that happens in the bay.

  S: I watch, yes, but I feel an ignoramus about all of it. As I say, I’m a thoroughgoing landsman. I go swimming from a beach, now and then, but I like to be able to put a foot down and touch the bottom—to know where the ground is. You say you’ve seen me here. I’ve seen you, too, you know, tying up once in a while. One of the things I have been keenly aware of is the intensity of anticipation on your face, when you’re getting ready to go out. I’ve seen you take off then in your boat, and watched you disappear eventually around West Chop. I’ve wondered what there was out there around the point that gave you that look of a votary. Quite without knowing it, you’ve made me realiz
e what has drawn me to this dock all along: There seems to be an empty place in my psyche, where a feel for the sea should be, and I guess I’ve been wishing I could fill it.

  F: Then you must by all means come out with me, and try to begin, at least, to do that. Won’t you join me? I won’t be out for long. You’ll see some wonders, I promise.

  S: I’d like to, very much. But I’m afraid I have a scruple. I hate the idea of slaughtering fish for sport.

  F: I don’t care for that idea, either. I fish for the table. Do you eat chicken?

  S: Occasionally.

  F: Someone has to wring the chickens’ necks, you know.

  S: I try not to think about that.

  F: All I’m saying is that I am simply going out to get my supper. If you come, I’ll invite you to share the meal with my wife and me. Fish that’s just been caught is as sweet as corn right off the stalk. But there’s more to going out there than just shopping for food.

  S: What do you mean?

  F: To begin with, if you come, I can almost promise you that we’ll catch a bluefish. I’ve fished for blues out on Middle Ground for twenty years, and I have the honor of knowing them well. I’ve a good hunch where to look for them today. You will hold the rod and bring one in. I feel sure that in spite of your bias, that will be an event in your life. Blues are magnificent animals. I tell you, I am very much in awe of the bluefish.

  That’s not all. Today, if you go, we’ll troll along Middle Ground. That’s a narrow underwater sandbank which reaches out slantwise into Vineyard Sound on the other side of West Chop from here. The Sound, you probably know, is the stretch of water between the northwest shore of Martha’s Vineyard and the delicate archipelago across the way, the Elizabeth Islands. To run along the rip at the edge of Middle Ground in a small boat is an experience. The sights—and the conceptions—are breathtaking. You’ll see. This June day shines. Everything out there is momentary. The waves constantly change their period and their curl and their texture as the currents and winds restlessly shift and wax or wane. And the light: The sky gives its blueness to the sea, the sea its greenness back to the sky, and both are written on by clouds. You’ll hear a deep and complex drumming of time out there, as the engine ticks at nine hundred revolutions per minute through metronomic waves over the shoal formed by the glacier twenty thousand years ago. But above all I’m sure that you will come to feel, as I always do, a pepping up, a vivification, which I think comes from a sense of the mysteries of all the lives in the water—a sense of the teeming under the surface that a person has out on the “great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.”

  Do you see the greenish cast of the sea today? It’s becoming especially bright at this time of year. The vast meadows of plankton are blooming. Billions of diatoms, single-celled plants, far too small for the naked eye to perceive, droplets of greenish or golden jelly in exquisite glassy cases of many shapes—the basic foodstuff of all the creatures who live in or off the sea, including me and my family. When I scoop up a bucketful of water to wet down the fish I have caught, I pull up, in these spring days, an unseen vegetable market. Plants are not the only plankton—the word means “wanderers”—out there. There are also countless varieties of microscopic sea animals: radiolaria, for example, single-celled creatures with dazzling radiances of spikes all around them made of the same glassy substance that houses the diatoms; or foraminifera, which means “having windows”—for their tiny chalky red casings do indeed have many infinitesimal glass panes, as if to peep out through at a hostile universe. Then there are bacteria, and barely visible shrimplike creatures, and eggs and larvae of crabs and fish, and many kinds of jellyfish, which may run from microscopic to magnificently dangerous.

  The tiny animals feed on the tiny plants, and what I think of as baitfish feed on the animal plankton. On Middle Ground the predominant bait throughout the summer are silversides, brilliant slender darts which at full maturity measure at most about three inches. The gluttonous bluefish that you pull in will have its belly crammed with silversides, or perhaps just now with squid, yet it will strike at the lure as ferociously as if it hadn’t eaten for weeks.

  You’ll be aware of interconnections. The fish you catch will weigh about five pounds—the slim school out there just now is comprised of fish of that size. I am told it takes fifty pounds of silversides to produce a five-pound blue. It takes five hundred pounds of plankton animals to produce those silversides. It takes five thousand pounds of microscopic sea plants to produce those plankton animals. The vast sea meadows, which give this northern sea great beauty in the spring, also give me and my family, indirectly, sustenance. “All flesh is grass.”

  The blues are not the only fishes along Middle Ground. During the season there will be—besides various forms of baitfish—striped bass, mackerel, weakfish, flounder, fluke, scup, tautog, bonito, sea robins, sand sharks, and many other species, several of which help feed my family. And above and on the water you’ll see the birds that have taught me where to fish: graceful terns and raucous laughing gulls outnumbering the cormorants and herring gulls and black-backed gulls.

  In my small boat running along the rip at Middle Ground you will have an idea of the chains of the forms of life, and I warn you that you may develop an ache in your chest, a symptom of mourning, over what mankind is doing to the deeps. We human beings cannot exist alone. We cannot live without the support of these other living things. There are rules of mortality and survival which we dare not break, else all living things up and down the links of interdependence perish. You spoke of slaughtering fish. We are killing the seas. Greed, ignorant plunder, rampant technology, profligate flux of sewage, mindless dumping of garbage and toxic chemicals, carelessness with the terminal instruments of war that man has finally invented—all these can strike, have begun already to strike, at the oceans’ meadows of diatoms just as much as at large animals like the bluefish and the striped bass—and us. If these follies continue to go unchecked they are liable to break forever, irreparably, the delicate laws of balance. And if that happens, links of life on earth—the fragile chain—will part and will never be able to be mended. We’d better marvel while we can.

  S: I like the sound of everything you’ve said. You’ve touched on questions I’ve wondered about, standing here on the land these afternoons and looking out over the water. And I can tell, from what you say, that you’d probably open my eyes to lots of things that I’ve never even thought about. Yes, I’d like to join you, and I will.

  F: Good. I think you’ll be glad you did.

  S: But I must remind you—forgive me if I step on your toes—I have to remind you of my real distaste for what I think of as the fishing mystique: all that notion of the elegance and nobility of a brutal blood sport.

  F: Try to remember that we are going after food—that we are, in a way, exploring our place in the systems of life in the universe. I grant you that our place, when we think we’ve found it, isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it’s awful, but often it’s also awesome and very beautiful. It’s what we have and must live with, at any rate.

  S: I accept that. I’ll try to accept the killing. Yes, I’ll gladly come.

  F: Just let me fill my water tank, and we’ll be off. There. Cast off the lines and come aboard.

  S: I like your boat. It seems bigger when you get in it than it looked from ashore. How long is it?

  F: Twenty-six feet. It’s called a Sekonnet. It’s old-fashioned, lapstraked, made of wood—to me that’s the nicest thing about it. That connects it with a reach of human restlessness from which steel and fiberglass are totally cut off: with Noah’s floating zoo; and the brave Argo of the Golden Fleece, which had a piece of oak in its bow that could speak; ancient, batten-winged Chinese junks; Viking ships with their swan’s-neck prows; the Santa Maria, fetching up on a strand of a world not really “new”; the Victory, the
ship of the line on which Nelson died with duty on his lips; the surging tea clippers in the China trade; and the lovely J-boats, with lines like those of the swordfish, racing for The Cup. Not to mention all the sailing ships drifting through the great dreams of Homer, and of Melville and Conrad. This chunky thing is a so-called bass boat, built really for these waters. When the wind and current are running strongly in opposite directions out on Vineyard Sound, you get a nasty chop. I feel safe in this beamy wooden boat in the most threatening seas. Its high freeboard, giving it this deep cockpit, makes for a secure work platform for fishing on the wildest days….But don’t worry, we won’t have rough water today.

  S: I didn’t notice the boat’s name. I suppose you have it painted on the back.

  F: On the transom. Spray. That was the name of the vessel Joshua Slocum sailed alone around the world—the first man to do that—at the end of the nineteenth century. Slocum liked to gam with big ships in the open sea—the two craft would luff up and crewmen would call greetings across to the solitary skipper—but then he liked even more to trim down and sail on all by himself. I often fish alone. I love my family and my friends, but from time to time I feel the value, now that the world is so crowded, of solitude on the sea. I am seventy-two years old. I feel as if I’ve gone through life at full tilt. I’ve come to savor the serenity and privacy of an hour, here and there, of lonely thought. I do a lot of my work out here—the back-of-the-head sort of work you hardly know is being done for you by your considerate brain….But I like company, too! I’m glad you’re along.

  S: How fast are we going?

  F: About fifteen knots—a little more than seventeen miles an hour. When we troll, we’ll just creep along at three or four knots.

  S: Look at that white cylinder of a lighthouse! It’s so stark, so like a Hopper, with that slant of the sun’s whitewash wrapped part way around it.

  F: That’s the West Chop light, as I guess you know.

  S: Lighthouses always make me sad. Why is that?