Four Fish Read Free

spread her ashes at Tod’s Point in Greenwich, the anglers who worked the shoreline there were fewer than I remembered and their buckets were generally empty.
    Loss can have a tricky way of playing itself out in the mind of the loser. A psychologist once told me that in the face of loss either you can grieve the lost thing or you can incorporate it into your very being and thus forestall the grieving. Fishing somehow came to be that lost thing I clung to. With the help of my mother’s 1989 Cadillac Brougham, a car she’d scarred badly on a stone pillar when the half dozen tumors in her brain had partially blinded her, I drove up and down the Connecticut and Long Island shores, northward to Massachusetts and Maine, and south again through the Carolinas and Florida, fishing all the way. And all the way, fisherman after fisherman echoed the same complaints: smaller fish, fewer of them, shorter fishing windows, holes in the annual itineraries of arrivals and departures, fewer species to catch.
    In addition to fishing, I did one other thing that had been a habit of my former fishing self—I visited fish markets and tried to divine the provenance of what was on ice. The difference was palpable. If, after taking in a screening of the movie Jaws in the summer of 1975, you were to walk down to the bottom of Greenwich Avenue to the Bon Ton Fish Market near Railroad Avenue (as I did on many occasions), you would likely have found at least a dozen varieties of finfish displayed. Many of those fish would be from local waters. All of them would be wild-caught. They would buoy you up with their size and color, the clearness of their eyes, and the fresh quality of their skin.
    But in the early 2000s, as I traveled the eastern seaboard, I saw that a distinctly different kind of fish market was taking shape. Abundance was still the rule, and yes, I still saw groupings of many species that could give the impression of variety and richness. But like anyone who fishes regularly, I have some ability for decoding the look of fish flesh, and I can usually tell how long ago a fish was caught and whether the names fish are sold under are quaint localisms or intentional obfuscations of something alien from far away. What I noticed was that in the center of the seafood section, whether I was in Palm Beach, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; or Portland, Maine, four varieties of fish consistently appeared that had little to do with the waters adjacent to the fish market in question: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna.
    Just as seeing my stream entering the Byram River had given me the idea to pursue the wider world of the ocean, seeing this peculiarly consistent flow of four fish from the different waters of the globe into the fish markets of America drew me again beyond the familiar to find out what had happened. I spent the next few years, sometimes on my own recognizance, sometimes for the New York Times, traveling to places I had previously only read about in the pages of Field & Stream and Salt Water Sportsman.
    The more I examined the life cycles and the human exploitation of salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna, the more I realized that my fishing history and the fishing history of humankind followed a similar pattern. Just as I had started out inland in a freshwater pond and then made my way down a river to coastal salt water when my grounds had gone bad, so, too, had early human fishers first overexploited their freshwater fish and then moved down the streams to their coasts to find more game. And just as I later turned to the resources of my father to take me far offshore to catch codfish beyond sight of land, so, too, had humans marshaled the resources of industry into building offshore fishing fleets when they found their near-shore waters incapable of bearing humankind’s growing burden.
    The more I thought of it, the more I realized that the four fish that are coming to dominate the modern seafood market are visible footprints, marking four