The Founding Fish Read Online Free Page A

fight like that.”
    Me: “Oh, yes it would.”
    I remembered shad fishing one evening at the Trenton power plant when a guy had a carp on four-pound test. Carp can be three feet long, and his was not far off it. He struggled more than an hour. The power plant is on Duck Island, below the Trenton fall line, and the tide was coming in. The best shad fishing from Trenton downriver is said to be on the incoming tide. Duck Island is as far as you can drive along the river down Lamberton Road in Trenton. Then you put on your waders and walk at least half a mile around a high chain-link fence to an artificial bay at the edge of the river—a square bay, where the power plant discharges its cooling water. The water is warm, and fish collect there. More than two dozen fishermen were present that Monday evening, some in boats, some closely spaced along the shore, fishing in the effluent pond, the warm, man-made eddy. A kid caught a big roe shad while I watched. The same kid had a shad on his line every ten or
fifteen minutes. I caught nothing. I was going too low—amateurishly using a quarter-ounce dart. It was sinking fast, and travelling under the shad, which were at the surface, where the warmth was. The kid was using a small green dart. I had nothing but the big darts. As dusk came, the shad were breaking water, hitting lures, working up a frenzy. But I could not hook one even while rods all around me were bending. The man with the carp at long last landed it. He used my net. The carp probably weighed twenty-five pounds. I was discouraged, walking back to the car. I was discouraged by my own failure and discouraged by the scene I had just left: a bay of right angles raked with lures and fed with hot water that brought in the fish.
    Edmund: “Maybe it’s a catfish.”
    Ed: “That is a distinct possibility.”
    While fishing for stripers, Ed had caught a “huge blue cat” in Trenton. The biggest catfish I’d ever seen—far larger than any I’d seen in the bayous of the Atchafalaya—came out of Lake Carnegie, in Princeton. Eventually, we agreed all around that the fish on my line was probably a big channel cat—a catfish with a head at least the size of a basketball. Two hours, fifteen minutes. By now, that’s what it felt like.
    When Edmund mentioned a sturgeon.
    Ed: “Yes! Yes!”
    Me: “A sturgeon ?”
    Ed: “A spawning fish that goes up the river and has tremendous energy.”
    Me: “I know what a sturgeon is.”
    Ed: “That’s it. Completely possible. They never give up. Eventually, you have to go in and wrestle them. You don’t land them, you capture them. I saw one by the 202 bridge a few years ago.”
    Looking up the river in daylight from New Hope, you can see the 202 bridge.

    For that matter, a man I once talked to had seen a six-foot sturgeon in New Hope. Eventually, we agreed all around that the fish on my line was a sturgeon.
    When a shad is foul-hooked-caught in the tail, or another fin, or any part of the body other than the mouth—the shad loses its grip on reality, sprints away in total rage, and thrashes the river on erratic vectors. It is very difficult to hold on to a foul-hooked shad. This fish, of course, could be a foul-hooked shad.
    A mong the spectators on the bridge, a cop appeared. He shouted, “Does one of you guys down there own a green Jeep?”
    Ed Cervone shouted back, “Yes, Officer, I do.”
    â€œWell,” the cop continued, with the slightest pause. “Your wife called. She wants you home. She thinks you’re dead.”
    Laughter on the bridge—9:50 P.M.
    It was not true that Marian Cervone was concerned about her husband. By her own account, the man is too unpredictable to worry about. She wasn’t worried about Edmund, either. It was my wife, Yolanda Whitman, whose mind had been crossed by the ultimate possibility. This was a few years before the sudden