Death on the Delaware Bay

The fish after losing consciousness....and yes, fish are conscious.

I looked for crocuses, but found none, so I went to the north side of the Cape May ferry jetty today, one of my pondering places, maybe the pondering place. The afternoon was February bleak.

The south breeze was about 8 or 9 knots, but the water was flat next to the rocks. I was hoping to find a seal (and I'm always hoping I'll see the spout of a whale again).

I saw a swirl, I thought. Then I saw it again.

A small striped bass, maybe 4 or 5 pounds, was cutting across the surface. It was not well.

A ferry was on its way in. Ferries cause a lot of current on both sides of the jetty. I know because I watch. (I do not understand the physics, but I know what I see.)

The bass fought against the surge, and when the surge reversed, as it does, the bass slammed headfirst into the rocks.

It floated sideways unconscious, the gills still weakly moving.
And then nothing.

I've watched a lot of humans die, including my parents. I've killed a lot of the living, and some would argue I killed my Mom as I eased her pain with increasing doses of morphine and Fentanyl.

I watched a manchild die on his 18th birthday, back when cystic fibrosis meant early death, when he was finally old enough to demand his breathing tube be removed.

And I am always, always shocked by death's finality. The myth of the soul helps us grasp death's final incomprehensibility, but it's just that. A myth.

I went home and picked some kale, in the middle of winter. We will eat it this week.
This is not a metaphor, a fable, a parable.

It's just life.

Maybe I needed the reminder. 

A fish story

My students took the New Jersey Biology Competency Test last week, and I can't blame them for thinking we're done for the year. They might be, but I'm not.

We're talking about immunology this week. A few yukky photos, and they're hooked again, like fish dancing on a line. And so this week I will share a fish story.

Check out the dorsal fin spines.....

***

I have fished a long, long time. I'm reasonably competent, despite no certifying test.

I spent a couple of hours tossing a variety of lures into the bay, with no hits to show for it, but no one else had a hit either.

A gentleman strolled up on the rocks. No tackle box, no net, no shirt, no shoes. He had a pole, a shocking pink bucktail jig, and more cigarettes than sense. He announced he was from Florida, and started fishing on the wrong side of the jetty, happy as a clam just to be out there.

And within 5 minutes he had a two foot bass.

I landed the bass for him, I unhooked the bass for him, I held the bass for him, and when he was about to toss the fish back like a wet washcloth, I released the bass for him. A few of the jetty regulars left in disgust.

I noticed some blood on the tail just before I released it, an unusual place for bleeding. Turns out the blood was mine. I caught my thumb on a dorsal spine, not the first time, and likely not the last.

And now I got me an nice little infection, perfect for class tomorrow.

***

Friday we talked about the "itis"-reviewing signs of inflammation. I showed a photo of an infected foot, and let the class figure out what made inflammation look like inflammation. It takes a bit more time than flashing up a slide with the 5 signs of inflammation, but I'm more interested in the process than in checking off the curriculum.

And tomorrow I will show them my thumb. I will project it up on the big screen, in all its oozy, red. swollen glory. We will talk about pus and pain, and then we'll revel in a "who had the worst infection ever" discussion. We will talk about the mechanism, and when we're done, inflammation will be more than a list of words to be memorized. Dolor, calor, rubor, tumor....

The bigger lesson may be this. A half dozen seasoned fishing experts all cast from the same side of the jetty, using essentially the same plugs, confident in our methods, confident in our conformity. We must have made close to a thousand casts among us that morning, and nothing to show for it.

Except a swollen red thumb and a good story.

Should I teach inflammation by just reciting the 5 signs?
Striper photo by Associated Press, found here.

May life, May death

Some years I fish, with joy and exuberance, ecstatic at the pull of an animal on the end of the line.
Other years, I avoid it, acknowledging the pain and cost of life to the fish. It's not something I'm ever going to resolve....

I tossed some plastic out at the setting sun on the Delaware. Striped bass are around, and as much fun as they are to catch, they are even more fun to eat.

Flapflapflapflap...

A large bunker had hurled itself out of the sea, away from the jaws of a striper, onto a slightly less inviting scenario, the edge of the surf. Were I a true striper angler, I'd have stuck a hook through it and tossed it back at the striper that precipitated its predicament.

I didn't. I tossed it back. It may well be striper poo by now.

And we had pesto for dinner.

***

I do not like to kill, but I'm pretty good at it. We all are. Every step we take, every spadeful of dirt, every short jaunt in our car, no matter how "green," results in destruction.

We mostly ignore this. This has not always been so.

People used to die at home. People used to get buried without embalming fluids contaminating the earth. People used to wake kin under a shared roof.

I know a lot of people who never witnessed death, except on a screen. Most of us have witnessed a lot of deaths on screens.

Witnessing the last hours of agonal breathing will change you. If nothing else, it puts things in perspective. Exxon and Pearson and Microsoft will be here long after I'm gone. My priorities should not be their priorities. If more of us realized we're mortal, we'd be a kinder culture.

There's a cemetery in Cape May county that still buries folks the old-fashioned way: no diesel backhoe, no embalming, and the casket is optional. The Steelmantown Cemetery has been this way for over three hundred years.

 

Steelmantown Cemetery--where the dead are treated as the dead

***

I find it ironic that my children must limit their intake of certain fish because of the chemicals they contain:

In coordination with the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and agencies in six other states, the DEP updated its fish consumption advisories and is recommending that the public consume no more than one meal every other month (six meals per year) of bluefish larger than 24 inches.

DEP, June 3, 2009 (Source: StripersOnline)

For women of childbearing age, the recommendation is none. None.

The less we know of death, the more ill we've become.

***

This morning I wandered out to the bay again, this time to the ferry jetty, as steel gray fog rolled in ahead of a thunderstorm. I got to the party a bit late.

Several old men dragged the limp bass carcasses like sacks of manure, leaving abraded scales on a jetty  that was not here 100 years ago, and will likely be gone before the hundred years pass.

The bellies of the bass are full of bunker, and one may have held the partially digested corpse of the bunker I heard slap against the sand last night.

Tomorrow an old man will excrete the undigested remains of a magnificent creature into a bowl, and the water will wash it away into the sewage below our streets, our River Styx now laden with the poisoned remains of animals we no longer dare to feed to our children.

The world is a wonderful and terrible place for all living creatures, incomprehensible in both its beauty and its entropy.

If we cannot teach this, we cannot truly teach biology, or really anything that matters.

The Steelmantown Cemetery picture from an article here. And yes, it is a green cemetery.
The woodcut by Gustave Dore, 1861, via Wikipedia

Hyperlocal

Another post for me--if I slap it down here, I won't lose it....

This is a reminder that November can be a marvelous time of year, despite the waning light.

A few of us wandered over to a mudflat to dig up some clams. The new moon did its job, rewarding us with a spectacularly low tide. Despite a couple of minor setbacks (broken rake, and an abandoned beer), we came home with 30 quahogs, about a half dozen for each blister.

The sky would have made El Greco blush. A flock of brants kept us company, their blue gray bodies competing with the light show above.

The water still holds summer's heat. The clams have not yet sunk deep for the winter. It was a good day to be on the water.




Back home we had tomatoes grown a couple of miles away, and squash from our garden. We had a batch of pesto made from our basil, which is still hanging on. We planned on having squash soup, tomato salad, and two pasta dishes, one with pesto, one with clams.

And then we got the call--fresh striper, caught less than a tide ago, already cleaned. Do we want any?

And here's the whole point of the post--to remind me what we did with the striper, so we can do it again. We lifted a recipe from Chef Emeril--here's our version:

Grab several sprigs of rosemary from the bush outside--scrape off the leaves, and chop fine enough to slurry, mix with wine, sliced garlic, a few chopped basil leaves, and a little lemon juice and salt.

Paint most the slurry on the bottom of a grill pan lined with foil, then throw a few slices of onion over the slurry so the fish is not swimming in it. Lay the fish on top of the onions, drizzle the fillets with what's left of the rosemary slurry, toss on a few slices of fresh tomato, and garnish with a few sprigs of rosemary.

Throw the whole shebang uncovered on the grill, off direct flame. I have no idea what temperature, I still use charcoal, but I tossed it on while the the charcoal was still spitting fire. The bass was an unexpected gift, so time was an issue.... I left the grill cover on most of the time, occasionally pulling it off a bit to let some of the juices thicken a bit.

It was done when it was done (forget the rules, you just got to pay attention), and it was delicious.

Local waters, direct to the plate: quahogs and a striped bass
Our garden: basil, rosemary, squash, and tomatoes
Local farm, less than a couple of miles away: more tomatoes.

Can't much more local than that....good food and great company make the coming dark days tolerable.