Blues Read online

  F: I wonder. Maybe because of the melancholy sound of the foghorns. You must have heard West Chop and Nobska Point, over by Woods Hole, moan at each other in the fog. Or maybe the sadness has to do with a mother-wit fear of the power of the sea. We all must have, deep down, a folk memory of shipwrecks. In the old days the Vineyard Sound shores of the Elizabeths—see them, over there, like backs of alligators?—used to be called the Graveyard, because of deceptive onsetting currents, on flooding tides, which so many sailors failed to understand. As recently as 1985, a skipper who thought he knew these waters wrecked a cruise ship, the Pilgrim Belle, at night, on Sow and Pigs reef off Cuttyhunk.

  Here. This buoy marks the eastern end of Middle Ground. Red and black: that means that shipping can go either inside or outside the shoal.

  Let me explain why we troll along Middle Ground. The crest of the shoal lies from six to ten feet below the surface, and on either side of it the water is from thirty to fifty feet deep. Currents run fairly briskly through here—a consequence of the rise and fall and eastward thrust of tides in narrow waters—and they pass over Middle Ground as if over a submerged dam. Bigger fish such as blues lurk, as alert as shortstops, along the lee side, waiting for baitfish to be swept over the barrier. The current is flooding now—coming in. Do you see that place, all along, where the water makes a smooth carpet ten yards or so wide, then breaks beyond into turbulence? That unsettled water is what we call the rip. I’ll steer along on the smooth water, right over the shoal, and I’ll let two lines out about forty yards, so the lures trail along in the rip.

  As a whole, Middle Ground runs diagonally out into the Sound, right to the west, but the shoal isn’t really straight. It takes a number of jogs, and at each jog there is a kind of sluice—we’d call it a hole—and those holes are the most likely places for blues to lurk.

  I’ll slow way down now, and if you’ll take the wheel a minute, I’ll rig the lines.

  S: Where do we go?

  F: Just steer for the tip of the last of the Elizabeths, that’s Cuttyhunk, almost due west.

  Today I’ll use as lures these rubbery white things that look like squid, because that would be what blues are mostly feeding on just now. They’re called Hoochies. I’ll hook a little sliver of pork rind on each hook, to let off a scent the fish may pick up and follow. Out they go. One rod goes in the rod holder on the port side. You hold the other. I’ve loosened the drag on the reel a bit and engaged the ratchet. If there’s a strike, you’ll both feel it and hear it.

  S: Will I really know when one is on?

  F: Will you ever! Blues strike like blacksmiths’ hammers. In fact, what will occur to you first about these animals is that they are vicious; it will take time for you to see what truly beautiful mechanisms they are. Back in 1871, Professor Spencer Fullerton Baird, who became the first head of the now defunct U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, rightly called the bluefish “an animated chopping machine.” He described how a school of blues will rove like a pack of hungry wolves, destroying everything in sight, leaving a trail of fragments of their prey and a stain of blood and oil on the sea. Some fish masticate their food; blues chop and swallow big hunks. In 1965, a commercial fisherman, out at sea in pursuit of a fish called menhaden, which is used in the manufacture of fertilizer, told of having plowed through a thirty-mile-wide school of blues macerating hordes of menhaden. Feeding along coasts, blues have driven terrified menhaden up on beaches until they were piled a foot deep. Professor Baird estimated that in four summer months off the New England coast blues killed twelve hundred million million fish. That estimate may have been high, but there is no question that blues are both butchers and gluttons. They’re cannibals that will eat their young. They will eat anything alive. They have stripped the toes from surfers in Florida. They make the excesses of Huron feasts—at one of which, in 1635, a host served his guests twenty deer and four bears-seem, by comparison, genteel repasts. It’s a myth, though, that blues will eat till full, like Romans, then vomit and eat again; that would be maladaptive. But they can’t not eat; they can’t suppress the urge to kill. If you paint sheep with lithium chloride, their predators soon learn it makes them sick, and they will no longer attack the sheep. But paint rabbits with poison and the hawk can’t help itself, it will swoop and kill, even when sick from having eaten poisoned rabbits. The blue has the same dedication. “It is a hard thing to perswade the belly, because it hath no ears.”

  S: Doesn’t sound much like a peaceable kingdom out here—the place for lonely, quiet thought you were talking about.

  F: Oh, there’s mayhem in the ocean, all right. There are sperm whales with huge stripes on their heads from battles with giant squid. Many of the blues I catch have scars on flanks and backs from having been attacked by their own brothers, and I’ve caught very young ones with open wounds that must just have been inflicted in their schoolyards.

  S: If they’re eating all the time, they must have remarkably efficient digestions.

  F: Blues have strong digestive juices which can dissolve bones fairly rapidly. If a blue eats to satiation one day, it can feed the next day but won’t eat as much as on the first day. By the second day after a full meal, it can take another full meal. It will, however, be motivated to kill within a short time of being stuffed. So it’s better to talk about appetite than digestion; the bluefish acts upon an everlasting hunger that it can’t resist. Blues feed on the bottom and all up through the water column to the surface. Their digestion is most efficient when eating fish, or squid, or seaworms, less efficient with crustaceans. They get more energy quickly when the meat is on the outside than when it has an armor.

  S: You said before that a fish with a full stomach would still strike at our lure. How can it eat when it’s full?

  F: It doesn’t eat, it just chops. There’s a fascinating wrinkle to that, which marine biologists have observed in captive blues in a thirty-two-thousand-gallon tank. When a blue is satiated on small prey, it will then be more tempted to strike at larger fish than at the same small bait—sometimes at fish not much smaller than itself. At that point the chopping seems pure murder.

  But don’t misunderstand me. All this about the hunger of blues doesn’t mean they’re always easy to catch. Blues don’t swarm in big schools on the surface here often. And very big blues are mostly to be found in deeper waters off the south shore of the island. Meat fishermen—your bane, those who want to bring in as many pounds of bluefish as possible—consider my kind of fishing pretty puny. But what I like about fishing on Middle Ground is precisely that they’re fairly scarce here most of the time. They’re a challenge. You have to think like a fish to catch them.

  S: Do blues think?

  F: No one really knows. Animal behaviorists would say that they follow their drives—respond to stimuli. They certainly are capable of learning. They have memories. You’re often going to hear me talking about blues anthropomorphically, as if they were people. The way I did just now, talking about murder—applying human moral standards to our poor friends. Ideally I would like to talk the other way around—about you and me ichthyomorphically, as if we were fish. Indeed, after some time the true fisherman gets fishy himself. The trouble is, we don’t have the language to converse like fish. Our understanding of fish talk—of whatever signals fish give each other—is deficient. It’s one of our many ignorances. So I carelessly fall back on what we—

  Wait! Fish on the line! Hand me your rod and take that one out of the holder. Now. Tighten the drag—the star beside the crank on the reel. Then a hard pull up on the rod to set the hook.

  S: My God!

  F: Yes, indeed. You have a life force out there on the end of the line. Keep it coming.

  S: Damn. It’s off.

  F: No, it’s swimming toward you. Keep reeling….Now it’s turned.

  S: Oh, yes, it’s on. How strong it is! Look at that leap!

 
F: Did you see it shaking its head?—No, no, no. Trying to deny that every deep dream must have an ending.

  S: Look at that again! How long does this go on?

  F: Not forever. Not till the end of time. Keep the line taut….All right. When you get it in, work it alongside the boat. Drop the tip of the rod toward the water. Reel in till you see the leader. Look how wild it is at the last moment, as if it knows it’s about to burst for all of eternity out of the mother fluid. Now! Lift it right into the boat—we can do that with these small ones. Good work!

  S: It’s still fighting.

  F: Yes. Look at the way it thrashes around. The denial—so stubborn.

  S: What’s that metal thing?

  F: It’s a disgorger, to reach in and get the hook of its fate out. I wear a thick rubber glove on my left hand, and use this instrument to keep my distance from those teeth. See the way the blue snaps at me? See it watching me? It can see almost as well out of the water as in. Those teeth can take a finger right off. An ichthyologist at Yale told me that his father, a chef, fishing one time off the Thimble Islands in Long Island Sound, lost part of a finger to a blue’s choppers when he grew a bit careless getting a treble hook out.

  S: That eye. It’s so perfect, circle within circle, black within amber. But so ferocious!

  F: Oh, yes—mesmerizing. And judgmental.

  S: Judging me, as a murderer?—is there some reciprocal morality in fishdom? I’m surprised at my reaction to this. I’ve killed a fish, but I can’t say I really feel guilty: You gave me the solace of the chicken necks. I feel tired; that was tense. I do feel sad. The sight of those desperate jumps was painful to me. But I have to be honest with you. I feel a twinge of triumph, too. My first fish—and to have it be so…so valorous, such a seawolf.

  F: You did well, for the first time.

  S: When I think about it, though, that sense of victory bothers me. I feel as if something atavistic, something disturbing that I never knew was in me, had come to the surface.

  F: Fishing is complicated. That bluefisheye stare is corrective of your feelings, though, whatever they are, isn’t it? It’s a contradictory eye. I’ve always been glad I was looking into the eyes of these blues out here in the open air. Wouldn’t you hate to have that eye glare at you under water, in the fish’s own element? Robert Penn Warren had that experience once—not with a blue, but it was the same idea—and he wrote a poem about it. Swimming in the Mediterranean, he dived down deep, and he found himself face to face with a huge red mullet, and I remember that he wrote, “The mullet has looked me in the eye and forgiven nothing.” It’s a wonderful poem. I’ll try to find it after supper and let you read it.

  S: He’s right. I could wish that this blue’s eye weren’t so unforgiving.

  F: We’ll go in, now, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to catch more than we can eat. I’ll just take up a bucket of clean water out here, to keep the fillets in when we go ashore from the boat.

  S: All in all, I enjoyed that, to my surprise.

  F: I thought you would. I’ll ask you out again, if you’d like.

  S: I certainly would.

  F: It’s always so peaceful, coming back in. We’ve done our work. The sea has done its work in us. The bay welcomes us. See how East Chop glows in this light.

  S: But that thumping in the box. Isn’t that death coming on?

  F: Yes. I told you, fishing is complicated. It dies for our living….

  Now that we’re on the mooring, our fish’s struggle is over—it has made the sacrifice of a link in the chain. Do you see how that shimmering steely blue-green color that it had at first has faded, gone flat? It’s as if a fish’s soul had pigment. I remember reading once about Seneca’s outrage as he described a Roman banquet in Nero’s time at which, between courses, a mullet was passed around swimming in a globe of glass, so that the guests could watch its exquisite reds, yellows, and blues go dull as it died—to whet their appetites with the drama of the pallor of death.

  S: How barbaric—and those diners thought they were the most highly civilized people in the world, didn’t they?

  F: Look, I’ll show you my way of filleting a blue. The whole secret is a sharp knife. First, I scale both sides with the back of the knife, working against the grain, so to speak, from tail to head. Next I hold the body perpendicular to the cleaning board and make two shallow lengthwise cuts along either side of the dorsal fins, from head to tail. Then the body goes flat, and I make a slanting cut across it, just aft of the gill covers and the pectoral fin, cutting in till the knife hits the spine, and then another transverse cut just forward of the tail. Now I slip the knife into the upper of the two shallow lengthwise cuts and carefully work the blade along the spine the whole length of the fish, from head to tail. Then the blade goes in parallel to the spine to strip the rest down off the ribs and along to the tail, so the whole fillet lifts right off. I wash it in the Sound water and put it in my small shore pail. The same operation on the other side, and we’re all done; we’ve taken off almost all that’s edible—without having had to gut the fish. The professional fishermen cut fillets with just one slash of the knife from one end of the fish to the other, but I get a lot more of the meat this more careful way. Now the carcass goes overboard to feed the life at the bottom of the harbor….

  Just let me put the fish bucket in the dinghy. You sit in the stern. I’ll row….

  [At the house:] May I introduce you to my wife, Barbara? Barbara, I took this gentleman fishing this afternoon and promised him supper if he caught a fish.

  S [to Barbara]: What an afternoon we’ve had!

  F: Come in the kitchen while I cook our fish. Barbara and I have worked it out that it’s appropriate for the one who catches the fish to cook it.

  First, I’ll skin the fillet. Some people think bluefish tastes oily. Skinning is a boon, because most of the oiliness is in the skin. I put the fillet on a cutting board, skin side down. The trick is to make a little cut here near the tip of the narrow end of the fillet, to give your left hand a fingerhold. This enables you to keep the fillet from sliding as you then insert the knife to the right of the fingerhold and work the blade along just above the skin. Like that.

  Tonight I’m going to cook our catch in the simplest, purest way. First, I turn the broiler on. Melt a half stick of butter on the stove top and stir in the juice of one lemon. Spread a little of this on the bottom of a broiling pan; put the fillets in the pan, former skin side down; spread lemon butter on the meat; and put it under the broiler about five inches away from the flame….Baste with more of the lemon butter every three or four minutes.

  S: How do you know how long to cook it?

  F: A wonderfully reliable rule has come down to us from Canada: Measure the fish at the thickest part, and then cook ten minutes to the inch. It’s amazing: This works pretty well with all kinds of fish and no matter how you’re cooking, whether broiling, baking, poaching, frying, grilling, whatever. The great crime of fish cookery, almost universally perpetrated by even the best restaurants, is overcooking, so to be safe I cook a little less than the ten-minute rule would dictate and test with a fork. If the fork goes straight through without resistance, it’s done; if it hits rubber, cook a bit longer. But get it out the instant the flesh is soft all the way through….To table. Salt and pepper to taste.

  S: It’s delicious!

  F: And all the sweeter because you caught it.

  THE RED MULLET

  by Robert Penn Warren

  The fig flames inward on the bough, and I,

  Deep where the great mullet, red, lounges in

  Black shadow of the shoal, have come. Where no light may

  Come, he, the great one, like flame, burns, and I

  Have met him, eye to eye, the lower jaw horn,

  Outthrust, arched down at the corners, merciless as />
  Genghis, motionless and mogul, and the eye of

  The mullet is round, bulging, ringed like a target

  In gold, vision is armor, he sees and does not

  Forgive. The mullet has looked me in the eye, and forgiven

  Nothing. At night I fear suffocation, is there

  Enough air in the world for us all, therefore I

  Swim much, dive deep to develop my lung-case, I am

  Familiar with the agony of will in the deep place. Blood

  Thickens as oxygen fails. Oh, mullet, thy flame

  Burns in the shadow of the black shoal.

  June 20

  FISHERMAN: Perfect conditions today. Southwest wind and a “smoky” sky. We’ll be out there for the last two hours of the ebb tide.

  Wind northeast,

  Fish bite least,

  Wind southwest,

  Fish bite best.

  That’s true for these waters, anyway.

  STRANGER: You said last time it’s peaceful coming back in. It’s exciting going out.

  F: Does your saying that mean that you’re so quickly reconciled to the idea of killing fish, at least for food?

  S: No. That wasn’t what I had in mind. I was thinking of how serene it is out on the water, cut away from the world. But I also have to admit that the experience of catching that bluefish the other day has hung on in my mind, like the half-memory of a vivid dream, with its vague residue of both pleasure and disturbance.

  F: That was a vivid fish you caught.

  S: It certainly was—and it tasted good, too. Yet I still feel troubled….Tell me: Why is it always rough off the point here?

  F: I suppose the reason they called the two promontories East Chop and West Chop was that there’s almost always choppy water off each of them. (Or maybe they called them chops because they’re the jaws of the harbor.) The troubled water, anyway, is a result of a conversation that’s always going on, off these points, between wind and current. The influences quarrel. Sometimes they get as contentious out here as Capulets and Montagues, or managers and umpires—threatening to kill. The Scots call these disturbances “roosts”; they have given some of the cruelest of them mythic names—the Bore of Duncansby and the Merry Men of Mey at Pentland Firth—and there are such fierce ones off the Shetlands that “in this confused, tumbling, and bursting sea,” the British Islands Pilot says, “vessels often become entirely unmanageable and sometimes founder.” On wild days here, east wind, westerly current, I’ve learned by bitter experience to skirt the turbulence. We can bounce through it easily today.