Shad and the River

Three thousand miles and almost sixty years away from it, I dream of the lovely Connecticut River of my childhood. Every spring about this time it flooded with the spring snow melt from its source in Northern New Hampshire down through western Massachusetts to Long Island Sound. The Sound, a grand estuary of the Atlantic Ocean, runs along the south coast of Connecticut. It seemed a vast sea to me. Long Island, that stretch of land from New York City almost all the way to Cape Cod, was only faintly visible on a clear day from the mouth of the river.

My mother was fiercely adamant that I stay away from the flooded riverside but the strangely altered banks were irresistible. For a week in late March or early April the grassy lawns of the boat landing at Middle Haddam were several feet underwater, making the river twice as wide as usual.

The smooth glittering waters snaked silently downstream at eight miles an hour. When the tide turned in obedience to the earth's spin and the moon's pull, the Sound’s rising waters only pushed the river wider and higher. The hypnotically rising and sinking debris was a fascinating nightmare: a window frame, then the rooty stump of a huge tree, then the ribs and keel of a crushed boat drifted by. An tree's arm might lift itself in agony, then drown again.

When the mountains of northern New England had given up their snow to the sun, the river subsided to it's normal level, six feet up and down every twelve and a half hours.

By early May when it was calm again, the shad began their ancient run upriver to spawn . These big, fat silvery fish, related to herring, are an old, old source of protein for critters and humans, easy to catch with seine nets set near the shore.

With the dangerous flood safely past, Mom would send me down to buy shad roe from fisherman Pat Callahan at the small public landing, a muddy bank at the very bottom of Middle Haddam Village.

Red-faced from drinking Pat and his pal were not too tipsy to haul ashore his small, flat-bottomed boat-load of thrashing, desperate shad. Knee deep in fish, outboard motor blades dripping river water, Pat scaled each one with a toothed metal curry comb, holding it by the tail and stroking hard to the gills. The iridescent scales flew into the sun's low rays like diamonds.

"Sally wants a roe, huh?"

Pat pulled a fat female from the heap and slit its belly with a curved fillet knife, then caught the roe that dropped into his hand the way a midwife catches a new baby. Dark red and river-cool, the shape of beautiful lips, the slid the roe into a plastic bag. I gave him five dollars, pricey then, and headed back uphill for supper. I left a trail of sequined scales all the way home.

Shad roe is rarely available now even on the east coast. Mom wrapped the delicacy in waxed paper, not very pc these days, and pinned it with wooden toothpicks to keep the delicate outer membrane from breaking, then sautéed it in bacon fat. We'd peel off the waxed paper and break off a browned lump of firm, crunchy roe moistened with a squeeze of lemon and a bite of the crispy bacon. A very large roe would just about feed my father and me for breakfast but two roes were better for dinner.

Mom found it as disgusting as raw oysters and never failed to mention that we were eating at least a million eggs at one sitting. True, any roe is eggs and high in fat and cholesterol. The pale shad flesh is delicious but contains thousands of tiny hairlike bones. Occasionally Mom roasted a whole shad, sans roe of course, on a plank for a whole hour. This supposedly dissolves the bones but even so you will spit a few. For me, long-cooked fish is not worth the trouble.

Here I am three thousand miles and almost sixty years from that river but I still smell its mud. And long for just one more bite. With my father at the table before me.

For more on Shad, see: http://wdfw.wa.gov/outreach/fishing/shad/shad.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_shad