The Founding Fish (14 page)
Authors: John McPhee
The terrain behind us was forested. As the last of the tide had been disappearing, Webb had told me that the weir was made of woven brush. Without so much as a nail, it was made entirely of young trees. In winterâfour months earlierâhe had cut down about four thousand trees. Two inches and more in diameter, they had been twelve, fifteen, eighteen feet tall. He had hauled them here to the edge of the forest and bay, and in April took them as needed out onto the flats.
Spruce were best for the stakesâthe fence postsâbecause spruce will “give when the current is strong.” Firs are brittle (“They'll break with heavy runs of tide”). But when you are cutting four thousand trees you sometimes have to take what you can get. The weir's stakes were eighty-five per cent spruce and fifteen per cent fir.
At low tide, he would go out onto the flats with a sixteen-pound mallet, stand on the top of a precariously tall sawhorse, and drive the sharpened stakes as much as four feet into the bottom of the bay. His wife, gingerly praising his accuracy, held on to the stakes. He started at the point of the V, after choosing the spot with an experienced look around. He did not use a transit or any other surveying or measuring equipmentâjust his own height (five feet, eight inches) and his own eyes, repeatedly glancing at landmarks, assessing the subtle contours of the basin, and judging the diminution of the height of the stakes so that all nine hundred of them would emerge on the descending water's surface in essentially the same moment. He placed them three and a half feet apartâfive hundred stakes for the east wing, four hundred stakes for the west wing (“the fishing wing”). He could work only two and a half hours per tide, driving twenty-five or thirty stakes. Sometimes, he worked in a thirty-mile wind.
When all nine hundred were standing, he began weaving brush, with the help of his two sons. There was a softwood layer and a hardwood layerâsoftwoods at the bottom, because they formed an almost impenetrable thicket. Again, spruce was best. It was bushier and more flexible. It went in the middle, and fir filled things out toward the ends. It was a little like weaving a basket. Each tree would go inside one stake, outside the next one, and its butt would lock against the third. Each wing mirrored the other. The butts of the trees were all outboard, and the tops pointed in toward the V. After two courses of evergreens, he wove maple, cherry, alder, and birch (“wire birch, limby birch”) into the upper stratum of the weirâan intricately angled, echelon composition. He had been doing this for twenty-five years, after picking up the technique from his father. Each winter, the storms and rafting ice of the Minas Basin completely destroyed his weir. He had to pick a new siteâbecause the old ground was too much disturbedâand start over again each spring. Sometimes, a storm would wreck a weir in the process of construction.
“Why fish by this method?” I said.
He said, “It's the cheapest way to do it.”
We made the long descent down the cobble beach to the flats. This was my initial voyage into the Bay of Fundyâaboard a Honda three-wheeler towing not a skiff but a cart, over wet but reasonably firm ground, with two Sea-Bands in their case in my shirt pocket. I wasn't really feeling the embarrassment. I was too occupied, on the one hand, and too preoccupied, on the other, with a condition less preferable than a queasy stomach. I had come down with Lyme disease three weeks before, and come downâon the eve of departing for Canadaâwith a resulting Bell's palsy. The left side of my face was paralyzed. Half of my forehead was silk smooth, and the other half was filled with ogival arches. If this name means anything to you, I looked like Jack Nicholson. What had been the horizontal line of my mouth was now fixed at a forty-degree
tilt. When I tried to drink, a hole formed in one corner. My left eye was frozen open, like an owl's. Seasick, schmeesick. (Fortunately, the condition would clear completely in less than two months.) Soon after James Webb and I reached the pocket of the weir on the flats, a couple of clammers drove out from shore and began to dig beside their old Chevrolet sedans.
tilt. When I tried to drink, a hole formed in one corner. My left eye was frozen open, like an owl's. Seasick, schmeesick. (Fortunately, the condition would clear completely in less than two months.) Soon after James Webb and I reached the pocket of the weir on the flats, a couple of clammers drove out from shore and began to dig beside their old Chevrolet sedans.
We left the Honda, and, in long rubber boots, walked into the V of the weir. Gulls hovered. “The weir never stinks,” Webb remarked. “Seagulls, crows, ravens, eagles clean it up.” A shallow pool was detained there, with the help of a course of sandbags below the brush (“The bend never goes dry”). Erect, the dorsal fins of shad were above the surface. They were going every which wayâtacking, coming about, like the sails of small boats in a confused regatta. In less than two feet of water in the absolute point of the V, a great commotion was being made by an Atlantic sturgeon. It looked like an alligator. It was seven feet long. Near it were two smaller sturgeons. The law said he couldn't keep sturgeons. Also in the pool were June herring (“those little wee tiny greenback fish”), seven or eight gaspereau (also known locally as kayaks, and elsewhere known as alewives), two skates, and two old maids, or windowpanesâflounders with spots. He sometimes traps mackerel, cod, halibut, orangeback crabs, sardines, salmon, small silver hake, smelts, striped bass, toadfish, and porbeagles (the mackerel shark). He can keep one bass a day. All this variety notwithstanding, the structure is known as a shad weir, because trapping American shad is the purpose for which it was built.
Webb waded around with a small hand netâof the sort a trout fisher would useâchasing shad, not always catching one when he dipped the net. “Shad are very fast,” he said. “They're touchy and they're quick. You've got to have a scoop net to catch them.”
“Do you think they're smart?” I asked him.
“Oh, I guess they're smart,” he said. “They lay in the deepest part of the pool.”
I said, “If they're so smart, why don't they swim right through the weir when they have a chance? If it's porous enough to let the tide through, shad should be able to get through as well.”
He said, “A fish'll go to the water before he'll go to the woods. Birches scare fish. They stop shy.”
With surprising agility, he dodged, feinted, and faked the shad, piling them up in a tub. Now and again, he stepped on a flounder, thus discovering itâthe natural camouflage of the flounder augmented by the turbid water. The flounder went into the tub. He picked up and kept two gored shadâattacked in the V by gulls. He leases bay bottom from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for a hundred and thirty dollars a year, and is required by law to tend the weir twice a day at low tide, even if the hour is three A.M. He nets fish by flashlight and the lights of his “bike,” as he calls the Honda. In the “dark of the tide” he'll catch more fish than by day. Shad he does not sell locally go to Eastern Sea Products, in Scoudoc, New Brunswick. “They are shipped to foreign countries. They glaze freeze it and ship it out.” A large part of the by-catch he sells for lobster bait.
In the flats around us were dotted lines of protruding shafts of wood. They were the skeletal remains of previous weirs. There were many, and there was no orderly sequence about them, but he could point to any one of them and call off its year. The more recent ones stuck up like corn stubble. And one archaeological outline, seventeen years old, looked like the tips of the small intermuscular bones that come up through fillets of shad. The traces of his father's weirs, as much as thirty-five years old, were so faint that to me they were imperceptible until he pointed them out.
I have read sinceâin various articles and booksâthat the Algonquian Micmacs, the original people of the region, showed European settlers in the seventeenth or eighteenth century how to catch fish with brush weirs. Other writers see it differently, suggesting that the Micmacsâwhile expert at trapping fish with
wooden fences in freshwater streamsâlearned from Europeans the craft of building weirs on the intertidal flats of the great bay. Upwards of a thousand years before Christ, Phoenicians in the Mediterranean basin were driving palm branches into the sea bottom forming traps for bluefin tuna. Before Europeans invaded the New World, weirs had been set up for centuries in the Breton flats where the river Rance enters the Gulf of Saint-Malo. The tide range there averages forty feet. To historians like Joleen Gordon (“The Woven Weirs of Minas,” Curatorial Report Number 73, Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, 1993), it seems probable that brush-weir technology was brought to Maritime Canada by the Frenchâby the Acadians, the future Cajunsâwho brought it from Mont-Saint-Michel.
wooden fences in freshwater streamsâlearned from Europeans the craft of building weirs on the intertidal flats of the great bay. Upwards of a thousand years before Christ, Phoenicians in the Mediterranean basin were driving palm branches into the sea bottom forming traps for bluefin tuna. Before Europeans invaded the New World, weirs had been set up for centuries in the Breton flats where the river Rance enters the Gulf of Saint-Malo. The tide range there averages forty feet. To historians like Joleen Gordon (“The Woven Weirs of Minas,” Curatorial Report Number 73, Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, 1993), it seems probable that brush-weir technology was brought to Maritime Canada by the Frenchâby the Acadians, the future Cajunsâwho brought it from Mont-Saint-Michel.
In the early nineteenth century, the brush weirs of the Minas Basin trapped as many as a hundred thousand shad on one tide. Salted and packed in barrels, a large percentage of the catch was exported to the United States. Drift nets entered the picture and became dominant after 1840. Toward the end of the century, two-thirds of Canadian shad landings belonged to the Bay of Fundy. The damming and the pollution of American rivers severely cut the numbers after 1900. And now, after another hundred years, seven or eight weirs remained in the Minas Basin. James Webb's is one of two that are made entirely of brush. Some are combinations of trees and nets; and on others gill nets start from the bottom andâlike the fencing of a golf driving rangeâreach twenty feet up tall poles. When the tide is out, shad are hanging so high in the air that fishermen climb long homemade ladders to pick them. If you don't have a Honda, there's always a horse. Mike Dadswell was greatly assisted in his studies by a fisherman named Gerald Lewis, whose pneumatic-tired wagon was pulled on the flats by his horse, Tom. Dadswell, seeking government money to pay for Lewis and Tom, figured that the official imagination might not be able to encompass fishing by horse and wagon. So he measured from the
horse's nose to the back of the wagon, and applied for money for a vessel of fourteen feet. The vessel's name? Tom. Engine: one horsepower. Ottawa coughed up ten thousand dollars.
horse's nose to the back of the wagon, and applied for money for a vessel of fourteen feet. The vessel's name? Tom. Engine: one horsepower. Ottawa coughed up ten thousand dollars.
In an ocean system more than two thousand miles long, tined with spawning runs far up countless rivers, anything local that harms this species will be broadly regional in its effect, especially if the locality is in the Bay of Fundy, where nearly all shad go. The tidal-power project conceived by Canadian engineers was an excellent idea in the abstract if not in the environment. The tides of the Minas Basin would yield about three times as much power as Hoover Damâabout five times as much power as a nuclear generating stationâif a barrage were constructed from Economy Point to Burncoat Head, sealing off Cobequid Bay. This would be a dam five and a half miles wide with a hundred and forty-eight turbines inside it. They would not make power from the incoming flow of the rising tide. The whole apparatus would function like a pumpstorage project. After the incoming tide filled up the inner bay, gates would close, and as the tide ebbed a head would developâa difference in water level on the two sides of the dam. From the high side, water would drop through the generating turbines.
This was not the sort of thing that could be done just anywhere. You could do it at Mont-Saint-Michel. You could do it in the Solway Firth. You could do it at Turnagain Arm and Cook Inlet and somewhere in the White Sea. There are not many places in the world where the tide range exceeds fifteen feet, and foremost among them is Fundy.
During the years when the proposed barrage was a bold dotted line on the map, it made considerable contributions to natural science, as the government paid for studies of its potential impact. Not only did they detail and illuminate the stories of great migrations (the intercontinental sandpipers, the continental shad) but also they suggested what might become of the migrations after the
dam was in place. Turbidity would greatly decline, and with it the abundance of plankton. Amphipods would steeply decline, and with them the avian migrations. Softshell clams (steamer clams) would die by the million. A third of the Canadian clam harvest comes from the Minas Basin. “The day they close the dam, ten thousand acres of the coast of Maine is going under water,” Dadswell said. “In Marblehead, basements will flood. Damming the Minas Basin will change the resonance of the Bay of Fundy. The effect will be to raise tides in the Gulf of Maine.” Salt water would get into coastal wells, it would run through the storm sewers of Portland. In a world of thick fog, there would be thicker fog.
dam was in place. Turbidity would greatly decline, and with it the abundance of plankton. Amphipods would steeply decline, and with them the avian migrations. Softshell clams (steamer clams) would die by the million. A third of the Canadian clam harvest comes from the Minas Basin. “The day they close the dam, ten thousand acres of the coast of Maine is going under water,” Dadswell said. “In Marblehead, basements will flood. Damming the Minas Basin will change the resonance of the Bay of Fundy. The effect will be to raise tides in the Gulf of Maine.” Salt water would get into coastal wells, it would run through the storm sewers of Portland. In a world of thick fog, there would be thicker fog.
Meanwhile, back at the barrage, while the ebb tide fell through the twelve dozen turbines, fish would be falling, too. What would happen to them? In Dadswell's words, “It isn't pretty.” To find out, he studied a pilot barrage on the Annapolis River, which flows into the Bay of Fundy at about the latitude of Halifax and has a spawning run of a hundred thousand shad. The first hydroelectric tidal power station ever built in North America, it has one turbine. One was enough to show Dadswell what happened to the shad. It contained a propeller. Shad that were not chopped to pieces by the propeller had additional hazards to face. Off the tips of the blades was a zone where waters moved at differing velocities, shearing (like a wind shear) with force enough to tear off shads' heads. From sudden pressure changes near the turbine, their eyes popped, they hemorrhaged at the bases of their fins, and their air bladders exploded. Since a shad's air bladder extends into the braincase, the brains also exploded. Where air produced imploding vaporsâthe phenomenon known as cavitationâthe effect on shad was severe bleeding and the pulping of body tissue, as if they were being killed by dynamite. Dadswell summarized his study, remarking, “Shad are not well designed to go through turbines.”
In their ocean migration, individual shad linger in the Minas Basin something like fifty days. Dadswell figured that each fish would go through the barrage ten to twenty times. For every hundred thousand shad to go through the barrage, about thirty-nine thousand would be mutilated. That's just “unacceptably high,” the resulting paper concluded. The government agreed. There is no barrage between Burncoat and Economy.
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