United States | Lexington

In praise of America’s founding fish

The Potomac river is a more vivid symbol of American history than any of the monuments along it

SINCE MARCH 12th, when the first hickory shad of the year succumbed to a sparkly lure, anglers of both sexes, several races and all sizes have been lining the bank of the Potomac in Washington, DC, like salmon-hungry bears. When early-bird attorney anglers leave for the office their spots are taken by mask-wearing housewives from Bethesda. Frazzled lobbyists (who prefer the river to the swamp) silently cast their fluorescent jigs alongside grizzled Trump voters from Virginia, and also three-generational Hispanic families, with their umbrellas and coolers and music.

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Lexington and his children are sometimes among them. Any fool can catch a shad when the mood takes it. Hence the popularity of the fish, a sort of outsized herring that migrates up America’s east-coast rivers to spawn. And the deep, churning three-mile stretch of the Potomac that runs from Fletcher’s Boathouse, at the top of Georgetown, to the Little Falls dam is some of the best shad water there is. ‘It’s kind of sad,” says Alex Binsted, who caught that first hickory and is, at 34, a master angler, “but I’ve caught 95% of every fish I’ve ever caught right here.” He gestures, as he rows, to a 100-yard stretch of river in front of the boathouse, which has been renting wooden fishing skiffs to Washingtonians since the mid-19th century and which he now manages. “When the fishing’s so good here, why go elsewhere?”

An osprey and juvenile eagle circle, looking for exhausted fish, as Mr Binsted noses the boat onto the skirt of the current, where a line of skiffs are anchored. “Hey Lois!” he calls out to a small white-haired woman, a retired patent lawyer who is known as the “shad queen”. This is where the serious fishing takes place, among Fletcher’s “inner circle”, whose members know shad—where they lie and when and how to induce a reluctant bite—almost as well as each other. “Hey Dad!” Mr Binsted hollers at another boat. Within a minute he is into the first of a dozen silver American shad, the biggest of the species, two-to-six pounds of ocean-going muscle. Your columnist, fishing the same lures in the same spot, and so far as he can tell in exactly the same way, draws a blank.

Americans know Washington for its monuments. Yet the capital’s closeness to nature—on a vast and fecund American scale—is far more unusual. Kinshasa, skirted by the turbid Congo river, is one of the few great riverine cities that compares to it. And this proximity is as redolent of history as any memorial. The Potomac’s fishy bounty was one of the earliest and most fabulous New World discoveries. In 1608 John Smith of the Jamestown colony described trying to ladle shad aboard his boat with a frying-pan, so thick was the river with them. Intercepting the migrating fish, by brush trap, weir and horse-drawn net, was soon an industry of continental importance.

Following their native guides (who called the shad “Tatamaho”—“Inside-out porcupine”), the Pilgrim Fathers manured their fields with shad. George Washington’s wealth was based on his shad fisheries; his troops at Valley Forge were said to have gorged on the fish. So did William Penn, Thomas Jefferson (born in Shadwell, Virginia), Abraham Lincoln and so many other great men that the shad has been called the “founding fish”. In 1823, 110m pounds of it were harvested from the Potomac. To watch the river boiling with spawning fish is to connect with that history.

It is also to contemplate a great conservation success, however. During the 19th century, a time of dam-building, Potomac shad stocks fell by over 80%. By the 1960s, the river had become so black with pollution that Lyndon Johnson termed it a “national disgrace”. The shad, a species more numerous and formative than the bison, was almost eradicated from it. Yet this helped spur the Clean Water Act of 1972, which began a cleanup of America’s rivers. And that federal law was in turn augmented, along the Potomac and elsewhere, by local authorities and an army of volunteers.

In the 1980s and 1990s Washington, Maryland and Virginia closed their shad fisheries and cut a fish-passage through the Little Falls dam. Shad roe was later milked from fish caught downstream, hatched in Washington’s schools, and millions of fry released into the river’s upper stretches. The tactic worked. By the early 2000s the shoals were recovering so strongly that Potomac shad roe was being carted to other depleted rivers.

This success has helped spawn a culture, as well as fish. For centuries, individual shad were valued in proportion to their plenitude. The first president fed the fish to his slaves; but he himself preferred to eat beef and angle for trout. Hardly anyone fished for shad with a rod until the 20th century. Yet the fish’s brush with extinction has encouraged a new understanding of its qualities. Its seminal role in the ecology of east-coast rivers is now manifest—and illustrated by flourishing birdlife wherever it has returned. Its sporting qualities are equally prized.

Scales of justice

For shadding greenhorns, it may be enough that when the fish chooses to bite, it is hard not to catch. For experts, when and why it sometimes snaps at a green dart but not a red one, then vice versa, before it suddenly stops snapping altogether, is as fascinating as its fight is daunting. “Look at how it’s using the current!” cries Mr Binsted respectfully, while tussling with his umpteenth fish (each of which he returns tenderly to the water).

Henry Thoreau, a great fish lover, predicted the much-abused shad, “armed only with innocence and a just cause”, was “reserved for higher destinies”. He has been proved right. Continent-wide, the founding fish is still struggling. But, year-by-year, its recovery is continuing on the Potomac and spreading further. Last year the shad and other migratory fish were free to swim up the Brandywine Creek in Delaware for the first time in 300 years. The founding fish appears to have been saved and at last appreciated. It is a story of fruitful co-operation and hopeful progress, emanating from a city too rarely known for either.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "A shad state of affairs"

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