Four Fish Read Online Free

town that compels the traveler to move through quickly. Gloomy brick buildings line its main street, and the only encouragement to tarry is the public lot that charges just five cents for a parking spot.
    But the most noticeable thing about the village of Turners Falls is that there are no falls.
    There is only a dam several hundred feet across that metes out water in greedy spurts to the rocks below. No plaque commemorates the damming or explains why the river’s progress was impeded in the first place. And there is no evidence whatsoever that before the dam the Connecticut River was an important salmon river, one of dozens of salmon rivers throughout New England and Atlantic Canada that made salmon an abundant wild staple for natives and early colonists alike.
    Today in my native land of coastal Connecticut, there is no direct experience or memory of local wild salmon as food. The fish live in the minds of my fellow northeasterners as faceless orange slabs of supermarket product flown in from far away, eaten on bagels, and called “lox”—lox from the Indo-European lakhs and subsequently the Yiddish and Norwegian laks, meaning salmon. But salmon were once present here in significant numbers. The name Connecticut comes from the Algonquin quonehtacut , which translates as “long coastal river.” For hundreds of years before my home state was a state, it was known principally as a place where a long coastal river wended its way to the sea and nurtured great annual runs of salmon, shad, and herring, an abundance that drew Native Americans from as far away as Ohio.
    Every year perhaps as many as 100 million Connecticut River salmon larvae (no one knows exactly how many there were) would hatch out of large, bright-orange, nutrient-rich eggs. After spending one to three years in the fast currents of the river’s tributaries, salmon juveniles (known as “smolts” at this phase) would pass over Turners Falls, heading down out of the mouth of the Connecticut. They would then shoot over to the fast-moving shunt of water in Long Island Sound called “the Race”—a treacherous spot where I once nearly overturned my small aluminum boat while fishing with a friend during summer vacation. Riding the Race’s six-knot currents on an outgoing tide, the salmon would make a hundred-mile jaunt to Long Island Sound’s terminus at Orient Point before breaking northeast twenty-five hundred miles to the Labrador Sea just west of Greenland. Upon arrival in Greenland waters, they would mix with other salmon from Northern Europe as well as with those from Spain. The Spanish salmon were in fact the first salmon, the strain that birthed the entire Atlantic salmon genome, which millions of years earlier had radiated out across the Atlantic. Though one might think a Spanish provenance would imply a warmth-loving animal, salmon originally hailed from the lush, cool valleys of Asurias and Cantabria in northern Spain and evolved to thrive in cold water. The colder the water, the higher the oxygen content, and salmon, with their hard-swimming, predatory metabolism, need a lot of oxygen. In Greenland they found not only cold, oxygen-rich water but also an abundance of oily krill, capelin, and other forage, which they consumed in large amounts and stored up as rich supplies of fats—fats that humans would come to associate with the heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, compounds that have the unique capacity to keep muscle and vascular tissue pliant and vibrant even in subzero temperatures.
    Selection pressure in the form of seals, whales, disease, and accidents of various kinds culled away salmon throughout their journey, leaving less than 1 percent of the original hatchlings to complete their life cycle. After a sojourn of usually two years in Greenland, the survivors would go their separate ways, the American fish to the Connecticut’s mouth at Old Saybrook and to many other rivers in New England and Canada, the Europeans to the rivers Tyne and