June, 1998 issue

The stern of the boat nudged the first pole. Ron had judged the tide just right, and we got right into it. The net came off the poles and into the boat, and we struggled to loose the fish from the meshes. The first fish into the boat was a fine, silvery roe shad. Kneeling on the floorboards I grabbed her, flipped her free of the net, and gave her a big kiss. Carrying on with Hudson River tradition.

I still had the hands for it - no apologies needed - but a couple of big changes became apparent, and soon. For every shad in the net there was a striped bass; the Hudson River bass population has exploded in recent years. And they are trouble in the net, hard to remove, all spines and sharp edges. Worse, they must be thrown back, they cannot be sold. Bass from five to 25 pounds went flying over the sides while the shad piled up in the boat behind us. If I still had the hands for it, I no longer had the knees. By the time we were halfway across the row the floorboards had become tortuous, and the pile of wet net I kept packing under my knees didn't help much.

Then we were on the last space, and a surprising catch of shad was in the boat. This many fish so early in the season: El Nino, no doubt. As we headed for the beach, I focused on the shadbush blooming on the shore. The old-timers had a litany of flowering times that matched the progress of the fishing season. When forsythia bloomed, shad were in the river and it was time to fish. Successive runs of fish came in cadence with the blooming magnolia, cherries and shadbush. The shadbush marked the high point of the season, the peak of the catch. Then came the dogwood run, and finally, the biggest and best shad of the year signaled the end of the season when the lilacs bloomed. Lilac shad might run to fifteen pounds, more than twice the size of the shad we had in the boat. In this El Nino year, lilacs were the only thing not yet in bloom, and we speculated what effect this would have on the shad season.

Rivermen are dogged by two problems that did not even exist until a dozen years ago. The plethora of stripers makes it hard to fish the nets, and the bass are tough and strong. As they fish the net, they shake the shad out of it. Stripers eat shad, a lot of them. Small bass eat young shad and a 30 pound fish can swallow an adult shad.

The second problem has to do with where the shad are, when they are not in the Hudson, which is most of the time. Out in the ocean they describe a vast elliptical migration route, summering in the Bay of Fundy and wintering far out on the Continental Shelf. Shad were beneath the notice of oceanic fishers in the good old days when nets were jammed with more lucrative catches. As one marine fishery after another has diminished or collapsed, shad offer, at least, a pay day. The Intercept Fishery, as we call it, hounds the shad far out onto the shelf, catching the fish when the roe is not even fit to eat. Because of this, numbers and sizes of shad have both diminished in recent years, a sign of a fishery in trouble.

Back in the dock, Scott Ingold sets up the scales as his father gets ready to sort, weigh and box the catch. Ron points out an anomaly. Of the 40 shad taken today, 30 should be bucks, the rest roes, but the opposite is true. The reversed gender ratio is one more sign of an imperiled fishery.

Fishermen are used to reversals, downsides, bad breaks, etc. I wonder sometimes if we don't figure we owe it for all the sunrises and sunsets and double rainbows we are gifted with. At any rate, I'm soon back on the road with all of the buck shad and a couple of roes on ice in my cooler. Shad roe for dinner tonight, along with freshly dug dandelion salad, asparagus, strawberries. The fruits of the season, even if the season is early this year.

I'm a shad eater. In April and May, I eat shad every day in one form or another. The Latin name bears testimony to the succulent qualities of the fish. Alosa sapidissima: herring most delicious. Right now I am experimenting with shad roe caviar, and I have great hopes for it. Tonight I'll sautŽ a pair of roe in butter for 8 - 10 minutes; it must still be a bit pink in the center. Smoked shad is a wonder, and I get conflicted at this time of the year. John Mylod of Poughkeepsie turns out a wonderful cold smoked product that I esteem, and Captain Bob Gabrielson of Nyack gets my full attention with his hot smoked shad. Which way to turn?

I'm proud of my pickled shad. That doesn't sound as elegant as marinated herring, but, of course, that is just what it is. If you want the recipe give me a call. Shoprite once offered to buy all I could produce, but it isn't for sale.

The shad bake is an East Coast tradition that goes back centuries, and for good reason. Good as all the other preparations are, nothing beats shad baked on a hardwood plank propped up before a bed of glowing coals. Give it a whole two hours, starting with the plank inches from the fire and moving it back from the heat as time passes. The heat releases the scent of the oak, which melds with the aroma of the fish and bacon strips used to hold the fish on the plank. When the fish is golden brown, rest it on the plank a few minutes, and then dig in. Cooked this way, it melts in your mouth.

Before I can enjoy dinner, there are some chores to do. The fish must be filleted and skinned, chunked and brined to be served at shad festivals up and down the Hudson Valley. Upriver fishermen are anxious to hear the newsÑare the shad on the way. Captain Bob in Nyack, Tom Lake in Wappingers, John Mylod in Poughkeepsie will all get the news of the first lift of the season. The grapevine at work, lots of calls to make tonight.

These men will not fish the way Ron Ingold does. Gabrielson uses anchor nets, fastened to huge weights on the bottom of the river. Lake and Mylod will fish in that classy and graceful way of drifting a net on the tide, my favorite way of fishing. A curtain of net drifts on the tide: you tend it and mend it as the vagaries of the current play with it. You watch the wooden floats duck like a fishing bobber as fish enmesh themselves. Sometimes a lot of floats go down at once. What was that? Maybe a truck tire, or a whole school of shad, or a ten foot long sturgeon. Drifting comes as close to linking commercial fishing and recreational fishing as it seems possible to do. You watch the net and dream about what is going on down there, in the dreamtime before worktime, the calm before the storm. Then it is time to haul back, get those fish out of the net, and do the cleanup. Clean up the net, the truck, the fish, the driveway, but you won't clean up when it comes to money. Fishermen don't get rich.

Tom Lake invited me to share an adventure on the upper estuary last spring, and I took him up on it. His son Chris was in charge of an egg-taking crew, netting Hudson shad to help re-stock the shad-impoverished Susquehanna River. It was a night for memory: cold, calm, clear, with a full moon. We set the nets and lifted them every half hour. Chris and his crew stripped first the roe, then the milt from the fish, mixing them in a stainless steel bowl to fertilize the eggs. The fertilized eggs more than doubled in size in minutes, seafood alchemy before our very eyes. At the dock a special courier sped off to the Pennsylvania hatchery. We wished them luck and toasted them with a couple of beers and a good cigar. I begged a taste of roe from Christopher, and was delighted. With a bit of salt, I thought, this is as good as caviar.

It was nice to think that out there under that May moon, tens of thousands of shad were swirling, shad that had run the gauntlet of nets and survived. On their sprawling grounds in the upper estuary they weave wonderful watery ballets. The Hudson is gifted with millions of tiny shad, one of which is going to get a big kiss from me four years from now. Through the spring and summer months they will ride the river down to the sea. Six hours up with the tide, and six down, feeding as they go. They make a net seaward gain of a mile or two each day. It is lovely to see them in late summer and autumn, tiny slips of silver hope that dimple the inshore waters as they feed their way seaward, following their destiny. I always think it looks like someone throwing new dimes into the water. A splash, a glint, and gone.

More than 40 years ago I picked up a novel about driftnet fishing for shad on the Delaware River. I was a school kid in Michigan, and I don't remember much about the plot -- just that it seemed a wonderful way to spend time on the water, and -- what was a shad? There was no way to know then that shad would in one way or another become a definitive force in the springtimes of my adult life.

That memory was one of the spring-tide-flood of others recently. I was perched in the transom of a shad boat on the last day of March, watching the Edgewater, NJ, shoreline recede and a ragged line of hickory poles get closer. Over the bubble of the outboard engine, fisherman Ron Ingold yelled, "Just like old times, Chris!" and for a little space of time, it was 1970 again. I was young, the Hudson was becoming cleaner for the first time in a century, and I'd been accepted into the circle of shad fishermen, and I loved it all. It was a thrill for a Midwesterner to fish in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, to watch sunrise over the Manhattan skyline, to match strength and skills with a crew of gnarly fishermen. Every day brought contact with new kinds of fish, new kinds of people, slathers of delectable river lore. I was part of the clan, and we were tight, and it was a fraternity I gloried in.

Since I was a tot I've been fascinated by fish and fishing. Being part of the crew marked a kind of coming of age for me. I never made any money to speak of at fishing, and I haven't fished commercially for perhaps 15 years, but, in my heart, my dues are paid up, and I'm still a commercial fisherman.

Ron raised his voice again, pointing to a white blur on the shoreline: a blooming shadbush. Or, serviceberry, or Juneberry, or, if you are a gardener, Amelancher sp. "It's three weeks early this year; it isn't supposed to bloom until the peak of the season!"

I'd stopped at Ron's primitive camp in Edgewater to see how things were going. The third generation of Ingolds to fish shad, Ron typifies many river fishermen. Doughty, generous, defensive of the Hudson, with a soft spot in his heart he isn't fishing for. Fishing is hard, hard work, and Ron's method the hardest of them all. When I walked out onto the dock I got a warm welcome: "C'mon suit up! We're short a man and we're going out right now on the first lift of the year!" And here I was, old times all over again, wearing borrowed oilskins and boots, with Ronnie at the tiller and the poles coming closer. I was excited, with a tinge of trepidation. The three other men in the boat were toddlers when I started fishing three decades ago. What if I couldn't cut it?

Again, the flood of memories of times long ago, Laying back in the boat on May evenings, waiting for the tide to turn. From the shore we heard the roar of the rollercoaster, the screams of the riders, the music of the calliope from the long-gone Palisades Amusement Park. The voices and the faces of men I cared for were in the boat, men now old, many dead.