The Founding Fish by John McPhee Page B

West. Gradually, they spread south to and beyond San Diego and north to the Rogue, the Siuslaw, the Coos, the Umpqua, the Millicoma. They went up the Columbia (where they were also transplanted, in 1885). They went into Puget Sound. In Canada, they went up the Fraser River. They
found the Alaskan archipelago. Eventually, they established home rivers in Siberia. Maybe they were looking for the Hudson. Less than fifty years after Seth Green crossed the continent with his milk cans in the train, an annual six million pounds of shad were being commercially landed in California.
    The species took longer to attract Western anglers, but the sport accelerated in the years that followed the Second World War. About the first place that shad see a shad dart after coming through the San Francisco bays and into the Sacramento River is at the Minnow Hole—five hundred yards of the Sacramento River near the Sacramento Zoo. Most anglers are fishing from the shore there. Roughly one in four is in a boat. Collectively, in an average season, they might catch about forty thousand shad, half the number caught by anglers in the whole of the Sacramento River. They kill and keep ninety per cent.
    Shad anglers from the East Coast are struck speechless when they encounter these Western numbers. Three million shad coming in at San Francisco! Five million shad on their way to Bonneville Dam! To find that many shad in the Delaware River you’d have to turn time back a century and more. On the Willamette River in Portland, they see boats side by side from one bank to the other. This is known as a hog line, according to Lenox Dick in his West Coast primer, “Experience the World of Shad Fishing” (Frank Amato Publications, Portland, 1996). Travelling East Coast shad fishermen have taken pictures of hog lines in Oregon and later shown them breathlessly—and a little wickedly—to Armand Charest at his shad-dart stand in Holyoke.
    Lenox Dick is an M.D. who lives in Vancouver, Washington, and does most of his shad fishing in a boat in front of his house. The Columbia River is a mile wide there, but the channel is close to the Washington bank. Sometimes his Labrador retriever, for the sheer sport of it, swims in place beside the boat—a strenuous
standoff with a mighty current. During the 2002 migration, I fished there with Dr. Dick and his friend Paul Johnston, an all-seasons, all-species Columbia River fisherman to whom the doctor—his shad book notwithstanding—deferred. To get down three fathoms in that current and flap something past the noses of shad, Johnston used a rig out of Rube Goldberg by Alexander Calder. It involved a swivel on one end of a drop line and, on the other end, a lead sphere about the size of a cherry tomato. His main line went through the swivel, which could slide up and down but was blocked by another swivel, from which his leader led to a small dart with a flexible tail of sparkling plastic. He called this mobile a “slider rig,” and summarized it, saying, “Your main line goes through your drop.” In the turbid river under gray cloud in morning rain, the shad were up in the water column and the lure seemed to be below them. They were within reach of the fly line I was using, with its long sink-tip and lead-core leader. When the sun came out in the afternoon, the shad descended—right into Johnston’s slider rig, one after another and another. To my surprise, they were twenty to thirty per cent smaller than Delaware River shad.
    Tall and rangy, Lenox Dick had once been a medical missionary in Africa, had long practiced in Portland, and was now eighty-six years old. The next morning, he and I drove east up the Columbia Gorge and stopped off at Bonneville Dam. Nearly half a mile of fishermen, of two sexes and four colors, were lined up below the tailrace. Many were using poles ten feet long. We made our way down the riprap basalt to the edge of the surging river. With