The Founding Fish
Excerpts
They're in the River
I hadn't been a shad fisherman all my days, only seven years, on the May evening
when this story begins - in a johnboat, flat and square, anchored in heavy
current by the bridge in Lambertville, on the wall of the eddy below the fourth
pier. I say Lambertville (New Jersey) because that's where we launch, but the
Delaware River is more than a thousand feet wide there, and, counting west-
ward, the fourth of the five stone bridge piers is close to New Hope,
Pennsylvania. Yet it rises from the channel where the river is deepest.
American shad are schooling ocean fish, and when they come in to make their run
up the river they follow the deep channels. In the estuary toward the end of
winter, they mill around in tremendous numbers, waiting for the temperature in
the cold river current to rise. When it warms past forty Fahrenheit, they begin
their migration, in pulses, pods - males (for the most part) first. Soon, a
single sentence moves northward with them - in e-mails, on telephones, down
hallways, up streets - sending amps and volts through the likes of me. The
phone ri ... read full excerpt from The Founding Fish ebook
