Four Fish Read online

  The bow began to pitch. Pairs of fishermen drifted back into the cabin and shared salami, sliced by their wives “as thin as a quarter.” I opened a Tupperware container and ate a lone, cold pork chop. A guy across from me read a fishing magazine, flipping through it as if it were porn. He pulled back his head, rotated the magazine to the vertical, and showed me a centerfold of a gorgeous tuna. “Hey, buddy, look at that!” he said.

  The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge winked out of sight, and Explorer took on a heavier roll. An extremely fat man laid himself out supine on the deck and began a wet, blubbery snore.

  “They said it was gonna lay down,” the guy with the fishing magazine said. “They said, like, five- to-seven foot waves. By the time we get out to the Canyon, that sea’s gonna be ten to twelve.”

  A massive cooler slid across the floor and hit the extremely fat man in the gut. He swatted it away and continued snoring.

  “I wasn’t gonna go,” the fishing-magazine guy continued. “I knew it was gonna be like this. But I walked out of the Trade Center a couple weeks ago. Tower Two. My name’s Steve, by the way,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Paul,” I said, offering mine.

  “Haven’t we fished together before?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Do you ever go on the Helen H?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. And then we were both embarrassed and silent. I went belowdecks.

  I can’t say that I slept, exactly. I stole little patches of unconsciousness during the boat’s slow uplifts as we plowed farther and farther away from the realm of men into the realm of tuna. In the weightlessness of one crest, I felt my head grow light with the feeling of impending disaster. Then we went into free fall down the other side of the wave and boomed into the trough. My head bounced up and hit the hard metal ceiling.

  Three hours of this drove me topside. I climbed up the stairs and sat on one of the benches and tried to deal with my tuna gear. I started tying tuna hooks onto strands of fluorocarbon tuna leader. Staring at the knots while the boat ground against the waves was nauseating, but I persisted because it was necessary. On one of the fishing sites I had started frequenting, an article called “The Holy Tuna Tablets” maintains that fluorocarbon tuna leaders “give you the edge.” Tuna can direct heat to their huge, luminous eyes, giving them much better vision than most fish and allowing them to see most commercial monofilament fishing line in the water. But modern fishermen have dissected the adaptations of tuna and in each case come up with a conquering strategy. Fluorocarbon line is a polymer that’s almost invisible to fish because it refracts and bends light at nearly the exact angle as water.

  Once the fluorocarbon leaders were tied, I took another Dramamine and waited for the tightness in my throat to back off from a full-scale vomit. Then I started fixing up my squid rig. “The Holy Tuna Tablets” advises you to bring a squid rig to catch your own live squid for bait. During the previous year’s tuna trip, when the tuna were eating only squid, I didn’t have a squid rig. I asked one of the guys at the rail if I could use his.

  “Get your own fucking squid rig,” he said.

  At around two in the morning, Explorer’s engines ratcheted down, and Steve, the guy who had walked out of Tower Two, walked out of the cabin and joined me at the rail. “How ya doin’ there, Paulie?” he said.

  “Not so good, Steve.”

  The wind seemed to be coming from three sides now, but there was nothing to do except fish. Out here in tuna territory, the televisions in the cabin were dead and nobody’s cell phone had reception. I thought that once we anchored, I wouldn’t have such an overwhelming urge to vomit, but anchoring made it worse. Without any forward movement, the wave period had no predictable sequence, and in the deep-space blackness of night on the Canyon there wasn’t even a horizon to help you get your bearings. I tried my squid rig. There were no squid. I pried a piece of bait out of a half-frozen mess of butterfish and threaded the hook into the fish’s gullet. One of the mates ladled out butterfish chum. Flakes of butterfish flew in the wind and stuck to my face.

  “This sucks,” said Steve of Tower Two.

  The wind gusted harder. The sea looked cold and barren. Every few minutes the captain called out sonar readings over the staticky PA system:

  “We got a nice bunch of fish at a hundred feet, guys.” Pshht.

  “They’re way down, now, down at two hundred feet, guys.” Pshht.

  “They’re up at eighty feet now, guys.” Pshht.

  The ghosts of tuna passed unseen beneath our feet. The butterfish-chum slick was punctuated by human vomit now as the less experienced fishermen started to experience their evening meals for a second time. The extremely fat man came off the cabin floor, walked to the rail, and expelled a tremendous vomit, in proportion to his great size. He went back inside and laid himself back out on the floor.

  “Fish are back down at a hundred feet, guys, pshht,” the captain said over the PA.

  I peeled twenty feet of line off my reel. I closed my eyes. I imagined my butterfish fluttering down—a dull little silver coin falling into the empty black purse below. It was a nauseating image. I opened my eyes again. My reel’s spool was spinning on its own. Spinning much faster, in fact, than the weight of a falling butterfish should have allowed.

  “Hey . . . hey . . . buddy . . . Paulie!” Steve shouted. “Hit ’em!”

  He reached over and flipped the spool lock on my reel. I was slammed down onto the rail.

  “Yeahh!” shouted Steve. The first tuna of the night was on my line.

  Like the Explorer, tuna are all engine. On the line they feel like no other fish, and one can almost imagine the Schwarzenegger-type muscles, flexing and pulsing their myoglobin-rich tissue in coordinated, punishing synchronization. They are the one fish out there that make a fisherman think, “I don’t know if I can do this.” As the tuna sprinted off I sank into a kind of squat, trying to shift the stress from my back onto my knees.

  This in turn caused a problem. I had worn extra-wide pants to accommodate long underwear. But the weather was downright balmy out in the Canyon, and I had shed my long underwear before coming to the rails. Now, as the tuna surged forward and I bent my knees in a defensive crouch, my baggy pants fell down to my knees. When I reached around to pull them back up, the tuna seemed to sense it and swam even harder. My pants finally settled midway down my thighs.

  Steve came up behind me. “You don’t look so good,” he said.

  “I . . . know.”

  “You want me to take that pole for you?”

  “No . . . I’m . . . fine,” I said.

  “You don’t have to feel ashamed,” he said. “Tuna are tough.”

  “I know.”

  Ten minutes into the fight, the tuna stopped swimming and I stopped reeling.

  Steve stood by my side and shook his head. “Jesus,” he said.

  Then all at once it turned and charged the boat.

  “Reel, buddy, reel! Reel, reel, reel!” Steve shouted.

  I put my head down and cranked, trying to take up the slack.

  “Jesus, buddy, watch out!” I heard Steve cry. I opened my eyes and saw that the hood strings of my sweatshirt were dangling in my reel. I was about to be bound Ahab-like to my fishing pole. Gingerly, Steve reached around my shoulders and tucked the sweatshirt strings into my collar.

  “Thanks, man,” I said.

  “Doin’ good, buddy.”

  The tuna began swimming a broad, slow arc around the boat. “It’s the death spiral,” Steve said solemnly.

  The death spiral’s diameter decreased with each big circle. Three more circles and I dared a peek over the rail. Way down, just beyond the glow of the boat’s running lights, I saw a muted green flash.

  “Hey,” Steve called out, “we got color here.”

  A mate came by and looked down into the water. “All that screaming over that little thing?” he said.

  The mate lowered the gaff. I held my breath. Sometimes when tuna see the shining metal hook
coming at them, they streak off in a ridiculous, last-ditch escape run, sometimes tail-walking across the water before busting the line. But the mate dipped down agilely and struck into the fish’s flesh. He tried to lift it into the boat.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Not so little?” I asked.

  “Not so little.”

  The mate was yanked onto his tiptoes by the unseen force below. Steve thought fast and grabbed another gaff and struck. He and the mate swayed back and forth like a pair of girls doing the hula. Then they each exhaled, counted to three, and raised their gaffs hand over fist in sync. The fish rolled over the rail, furious. Steve shook his gaff free and jumped back. The tuna hit the deck hard. It was a yellowfin tuna, and, true to its name, its dozen-odd finlets running down the aft ridges of its torso glowed canary bright in the darkness. In spite of its hard fight, the fish was still angry and dangerous and as big as an adolescent. Its huge, superheated eye met mine, and we both gasped for air.

  If the tuna had had a voice and the power of reason, it would have screamed and pleaded at this point. But the only expressive thing about a tuna is its tail. All a tuna ever does its whole life is crank its tail back and forth with great determination. Even after it’s caught, after it’s in the air, it never occurs to a tuna to switch off its relentless tuna motor. Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap, it goes until the mate cuts its throat and the blood pours out onto the deck. Bap-baapbaaap-baaaap —the engine runs down and then stops cold.

  “Congrats,” said Steve.

  “Thanks,” I said, and vomited.

  The forty-eight species of the family Scombridae that are known collectively by the word “tuna” are among the fastest, most powerful fish in the world. One derivation of the word “tuna” goes back to the Greek verb thuno, meaning “to dart,” an ascription that suggests the perspective of a primitive angler caught flat-footed while the fish shoots away into oblivion. In fact, tuna do much more than dart. Contemporary biologists have cruised alongside them as they breach, dolphinlike, in the water, clocking them during their fastest accelerations at speeds in excess of forty miles per hour, faster than the Iowa-class battleships, the fastest warships ever built. Whereas battleships require a constant fuel supply, the largest tuna—the Atlantic bluefin—covers distances that stretch across the foodless depths of the midocean trenches, journeying from the Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf of Mexico in the Atlantic. Their range encompasses nearly the entirety of the ocean.

  Even the most confirmed enemy of “intelligent design” theories can have a hard time imagining the forebears of these great fish inching slowly down an epochs-long evolutionary course to become modern tuna. They seem like deus ex machina incarnate or, rather, machina ex deo—a machine from God. How else could a fish come into being with a weird slot, as hard and fixed as the landing-gear slot on an airplane, into which it retracts its dorsal fin to achieve faster speeds? How else could a fish develop a whole new way of swimming where a slim crescent of a tail, insignificant in size compared to most fish tails, vibrates at astronomical speed while the rest of the body slips forward with barely any bend, pitch, or roll? And how else would a fish appear within a phylum of otherwise cold-blooded animals that can redirect the heat that its muscles throw off back into its very flesh and raise its body temperature by as much as twenty degrees above ambient conditions? Yes, the biggest tuna are warm-blooded.

  That tuna can be extremely large—in excess of fourteen feet and fifteen hundred pounds—is just one side note of how exceptional they are. For those of us who have seen their oversize-football silhouettes arrive, stop on a dime, and then disappear in less than a blink of an eye; for those of us who have held them alive, their smooth hard-shell skins barely containing the surging muscle power within, they are something bigger than the space they occupy. All fish are a distinctly different color when alive than when dead on ice in a seafood market. But with tuna the shift from alive to dead is orders of magnitude more profound. Sometimes fresh out of the water with their backs pulsing neon blue and their bellies gleaming pink-silver iridescence they seem like the very ocean itself.

  And in a way they are. If salmon led us out of our Neolithic caves in the highlands down to the mouths of rivers, if sea bass and other coastal perciforms led us from the safety of shore to the reefs and rocks that surround the coasts, and if cod and the gadiforms led us beyond the sight of land to the edges of the continental shelves, tuna have taken us over the precipice of the continental shelves into the abyss of the open sea—the final frontier of fishing and the place where the wildest things in the world are making the last argument for the importance of an untamed ocean.

  Fish like cod and striped bass with populations contained within discrete national boundaries have in a few cases begun inching their way back toward viability. Effective management measures can be put in place because the people who fish those stocks generally recognize the regulating authority as legitimate and understand that there will be real financial impact on their lives should they transgress.

  Tuna, however, range over open ocean and cross multiple nations’ territorial waters. They are thus now subject to what regulators call an international agreement but what environmentalists might label a free-for-all. In the last fifty years, as humans have outstripped their coastal fisheries and advanced their fishing technologies, fishing has moved out of national territorial waters into what is known in nautical parlance as the “high seas”; these areas are owned by no one and fishable by anyone.

  Catches from the high seas have doubled in the last half century, and much of that catch increase has come in the form of tuna. Moreover, because tuna cross so many boundaries, the way international tuna treaties are set up means that even when tuna do tarry in any one nation’s territory, they are still technically catchable by any other treaty member nation. The conventions that govern tuna allow any tuna-fishing nation to fish in any other tuna-fishing nation’s waters, provided the fishers stay within an overall quota of fish caught—a quota that no nation seems to have the resources or the attention span to adequately monitor and enforce.

  On top of all these regulatory challenges, there is the rise of sushi in the past three decades and the new demands that this phenomenon has put on tuna stocks. Curiously, tuna sushi is a relatively new invention, even in Japan. As Trevor Corson, an East Asia scholar and author of The Story of Sushi, wrote me recently, the cultured palates of the Japanese aristocracy generally preferred delicate white-fleshed snappers and breams over heavy, red-fleshed tunas. “Many of the so-called ‘red’ fish were thought to be too pungent and smelly,” Corson wrote, “so in the days before refrigeration, discerning Japanese diners avoided them.” All this began to change in the nineteenth century, when an abundant catch of tuna one season prompted a Tokyo street-stand sushi chef to marinate a few pieces of tuna in soy sauce and serve it as “nigiri sushi.” The practice caught on. Generally, smaller, leaner yellowfin tuna were used for nigiri. Occasionally a big, fatty bluefin came to market, but as Corson pointed out, these big bluefin were nicknamed shibi, or “four days,” because chefs felt they had to bury them in the ground for four days to ferment and mellow the heavy, bloody taste of the meat. From the few stalls that served it in the Edo period, tuna caught on and by the 1930s was considered an integral part of a good sushi meal.

  At first, Japanese tuna fishing was relatively contained. As a term of Japan’s surrender at the conclusion of World War II, Japanese vessels were prohibited from fishing beyond their territorial waters throughout the 1940s. But when the prohibition was lifted in 1952, things started to change. As Dr. Ziro Suzuki, an authority on Japanese offshore fisheries wrote to me, “In order to recover from the devastation of the war, Japanese fishermen needed more tunas to secure food for domestic demand and also to earn more money by exporting tunas to the canning industries in Europe and the U.S.” When the technology to deep-freeze tuna in the holds of fishing vessels was invented in the 1970s, though, more and more tuna could be served raw rather than
canned. Suddenly fishermen could haul in tuna from the farthest reaches of the oceans, freeze them immediately, and keep their catch sushi-ready for as long as a year. Tuna sushi was suddenly exportable.

  The evolution of the Western/Japanese sushi relationship had other twists. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Americans and Canadians ramped up the sportfishing of giant, thousand-pound Atlantic bluefin tuna, principally off Canada’s Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. Most of these fish were caught, killed, and then discarded at the town dump, for, just like the Japanese, Americans considered bluefin too bloody to eat and had no interest in bringing home their catch. But the bluefin sport fishery developed at the same time as the Japanese export boom to North America. Cargo planes from Japan, stuffed with electronics and other consumer goods, would arrive in American airports only to fly back empty to Japan—a huge waste of fuel. It was only when several Japanese executives realized that they could buy bluefin for pennies on the pound from American sportfishermen that they began filling empty cargo holds with bluefin and flying them back to Japan. Within a few years, Japanese began esteeming bluefin above all other tuna, and this fetishization boomeranged back to the West, which soon developed its own bluefin appetite.

  The West’s embrace of the Japanese sushi tradition had another multiplier effect: it brought people who had previously disliked fish into the fish-eating fold. I saw this immediate effect within my own family when my brother moved to Los Angeles to become a screen-writer. “You know how I’ve always been about cooked fish,” he wrote me when I asked him about his newfound sushi habit. “I couldn’t stand the smell or the taste or the texture. The few times I had to eat fish were usually at dinner parties. In those cases, I would breathe through my mouth so I couldn’t smell it and swallow small pieces whole so I wouldn’t have to taste it.