May 29

It wasn’t my kind of fishing, which is why I said yes. My kind of fishing had been consistently lousy; with the rivers so high, the ponds so cold, I hadn’t caught anything longer than a salamander all month. So yes, by the time my friend Ray Chapin called with his unexpected invite, fishing for shad immediately below a nuclear power plant in the middle of a mob under a broiling May sun seemed the very thing.

Words can attract you even more powerfully than fish, and this was the determining factor. Shad. That’s a word worth saying out loud, with its sibilant start so suggestive of speed and stealth; it’s hard, rakish and sound, rhyming with had and cad; its quick, compact finish, suggesting a fish that packs a considerable punch. Free-associate with all the fine old American connotations . . . shadbush, shad roe, shad bake, shadfly; shadberry; shadrach . . . and you have something that exerts a pretty strong fascination, even though, at the moment Ray called, I had never seen one in the flesh.

Neither one of us had the slightest idea how to catch one either, but what the hell. We hitched Ray’s boat trailer to the back of his car, stopped at Wings for some meatball subs, drove an hour south to the big dam that crosses the Connecticut just below the nuke, kicked the winch loose, shoved the boat in, hopped aboard. The shad run, exterminated by the early dams, has pretty well been re-established, and now substantial numbers of fish are finding their way ever further north.

Were we in time to hit the run at its height? For once in my life I was hoping for a crowd, not only as evidence that the shad were there, but to steal some hints as how to catch them. The dam forms a huge pool here, the cement of the spillway merging into bankside cliffs that are even higher. In the middle of the current a flashy runabout was anchored, monofilament lines stretched taut out the back like thinner versions of the power lines that crisscrossed overhead; around and behind it, zipping in and out from the dams base, was a smaller aluminum skiff with a big antenna mounted in the middle, a man sitting in the stern with earphones, squinting in concentration; closer, on the rocks, were (not to put too fine a point on it) a shirtless redneck bully and his entourage of Budweiser-swilling friends. With the pylons, the cooling towers of the nuke, the nearby traffic, all this seemed perversely appropriate. Put a couple of effete fly-fishing sissies in the middle and voilà—the scene was complete.

“What do we do now?” I asked. Caught in a whirlpool, our boat was spinning around out of control—but it takes more than this to break Ray’s concentration.

“We put on one of these,” he said, tossing me something that, compared with trout flies, seems lurid in its redness. “Shad dart. I tied some up last night.”

You’re supposed to fish these slow and deep, something we didn’t know at the time, so we fished them fast and shallow, since, as mentioned, the very notion of shad seems to demand speed and haste. Over on the Vermont side of the river was the fishway, and we could see a family peering over the fence, staring down and pointing, so it seemed pretty clear that there were indeed shad passing within reach of our darts, probably shad in great numbers, and yet two hours went by and we had nothing to show for it but sunburn.

There was a saltwater kind of feel to this fishing, what with our long casts, the expanse of the river, the anchored boats—even the sunbathers on what passed for a sandy beach. The longer we went without catching a shad, the greater my respect for them became. Shad are so powerfully anadromous that even the presence of them in the general vicinity carries the flavor of salt air, far horizons, wheeling gulls. Standing in the bow of the runabout, trying to keep my balance, hauling away, furiously stripping, I felt stretched, mentally and physically both, and it felt good to be so.

When it came time for lunch we put-putted downstream until we found a sandy island shaded by some huge silver maples. Up by the dam all was commotion and hurry, the river industrial, but a few hundred yards away a much more quiet, pastoral mood was in effect, and both of us were pleasantly surprised by how lush and rich the landscape was on both sides of the river. Three states come together here, but they all seem invisible; there you are down on the water hardly aware of anything but the steep and sandy banks, the swallows darting out from them, the trees silhouetted obliquely against the sky, a glimpse now and then of wide, darkly furrowed fields, the rush of current against the boat’s bottom.

Exploring, we thought we might stumble into some fish, and we did—but not shad. Tying on a chartreuse Sneaky Pete, I tossed it out to where a sandbar cut abruptly down into the current, and immediately found a nice three-pound smallmouth. They were stacked up there in line, strong, gutsy river fish, just waiting for our poppers; as I’ve noticed before, they always seem to hit these, not from hunger, but from an outraged, betrayed kind of anger, as if the poppers didn’t represent food at all, but little totems or miniature gods the bass had once worshipped, but then had been disappointed by in some essential way (allowing the invention of bass boats?), to the point where the fish struck back at them every chance they got.

Which, of course, is a lot to read into a bass hitting a popper, but how else to explain that ferocious explosion? I’ve been searching for the perfect analogy to describe it for many years now, and—since I love smallmouth so passionately—perhaps always shall.

Once the sun got lower we went back up to the dam to take another crack at the shad, though by now the day had the feel of going fishless (at least with shad), and that’s a pretty hard notion to shake.

Then a funny incident happened (and yes, it also had the feel of being a funny-incident type of day). A pontoon boat festooned with fishing rods steamed into view from downriver, heading right for the center of our little flotilla. There was a suntanned man steering—in age and demeanor he looked like someone who had retired too early and was having trouble filling up his days. In the bow stood his attractive, suntanned wife, ready with the heavy anchor. Reaching us, he had her heave it . . . but apparently it wasn’t the right spot for him, because not two minutes later he shouted for her to pull the anchor back up. A second spot they tried, closer to the dam in the heavy current, but this wasn’t quite to his liking either, because no sooner had the boat come taut on the anchor line than he had her pull it up again, hand over straining hand.

This went on at least six times—which was obviously one time too many. Suddenly the wife turned her head, said something we couldn’t hear, something especially pungent and to the point, and the next thing we knew the pontoon boat was disappearing downriver the way it had come. We looked at the fishermen in the boat next to us; they looked at us—we all burst out laughing.

Yeah, that kind of easy, relaxed day. Holding each other’s gunwales, we talked for a while with the man in the antenna boat, discovered he was doing research on the salmon smolt released upstream, seeing how many made it through the dam intact, then, on our way in, drifted over closer to the Budweiser boys, and found them to be pussycats, all excited about the shad they had caught the day before. Pulling the boat out, breaking down our fly rods, we took our own beer out of the cooler and strolled over to the concrete fish ladder to see what we could see.

There were shad all right, hundreds of them, three or four pounds each, as compact and purposeful as their name suggests. That each one of these had sailed right past our shad darts without interest seemed beside the point now; it was wonderful just to watch them, admire the way they turned, turned a second time, then shot over the next step on their way up and across the dam. Their color, a silvery brown that veered toward yellow, seemed peculiarly foreign and exotic, emphasizing their migratory quality, as if they were indeed emissaries from a watery kingdom far more colorful than the one we knew.

“Incredible,” Ray said, pointing at the biggest. “Beautiful, huh? Wonder what they feel like on the end of a line?”

I shrugged—but at the same time felt those little sensor muscles in the middle of my forearm, that higher, vital fishing pulse, go taut in sympathetic vibration as I imagined their power . . . the power to run three hundred miles up a once polluted river and gladden us on a perfect May afternoon.