COUNTING FISH
“One fish, two fish, red fish… dead fish?! The Illinois Center for Ichthyological Conservation — or as I like to call it, ‘Ick Ick!’ — is studying the vanishing freshwater fish species of Illinois’s Rivers. Specifically, the Blue paddlesnout sturgeon, a bottom-feeding sucker. I know, that sounds like an insult…!…but the real insult has been done by a combination of local dam projects and river pollution that has reduced Acipenser pseudoboscis to an endangered species.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service budgets hundreds of millions of dollars annually to protect endangered fish species… but in order to save them, ‘Ick Ick’ first has to count them, which is easier to do during mating season when they migrate to warmer, shallower waters to spawn under the watchful eye of local fish-counters. Hey, fish, get a room! This is Sunny Lee, with The Sunny Side.”
The counting of fish has been made necessary by the collapse of the local fish population, the cause of which is debatable: while some blame warmer oceans, overfishing, and pollution, others point to the proliferation of the dams that kill millions of fish as they attempt to swim upriver to spawn, only to bash themselves against a concrete barrier instead. As any hockey player could tell you, it’s harder to score after repeated blows to the head, rendering future offspring unlikely.
Under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is required not to allow any species to advance from “endangered” to “extinct” if it can help it. One obvious way to ensure the Blue paddlesnout’s survival would be to tear down the obstacles to its natural migration, whose turbines shred any fish forced to pass through them like a cole slaw chopper. But because local farmers need the irrigation and business needs the cheap electricity (and politicians need the votes of both), the dams stand, as immovable as a fish-faced Rushmore.
Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers has created a multibillion dollar industry whereupon each irrational act is countered by another more insane gambit — an infinite Mobius strip of ultimately pointless activity. They’ve spent half a billion dollars on a labyrinth of pipelines, sluices, and tunnels to divert populations of juvenile sturgeon and other fish species to be loaded onto barges and trucks — even at one time, airplanes — to travel safely downriver. Then they’ve spent millions building “fish ladders” that allow fish to struggle at heart-attack pace back up over the dam, and even utilized cannons to propel them one at a time at speeds upwards of twenty-two miles per hour.
All of which mess with the natural homing instinct essential to the survival of the species, programmed as they are to return in adulthood to the river they came from to spawn. It would be like meeting someone in a bar and excusing yourself to go to the bathroom, only to be kidnapped and whisked three hundred miles away and dumped in the ocean and left to find your way back. You’d arrive well past closing time after all the good fish eggs had been fertilized.
Another half-billion dollars was spent in an effort to increase the population by building fish hatcheries to produce large numbers of sturgeon that will eventually find their way back to the river — where they’ll likely be killed by the dam. And since hatchery fish are fed by workers scattering food on the surface of their pools, while sturgeon are naturally bottom-feeders, baby sturgeon grow up expecting food to be on the surface so, upon their release they head not to the bottom but to the surface, where they are easy prey for the Caspian tern, a diving fish predator not indigenous to the region, having been trucked in to create a bird refuge (cost: $200 billion) — by the same Army Corps of Engineers who, recognizing their error as they watched ten thousand tern scoop helpless endangered baby sturgeon from the river, attempted to remedy the mistake by relocating the tern (cost: $600 million), only to be stopped by the Audubon Society and a court order.
So, the federal government employs a system of eight different federal agencies as well as local government, private consultants, university fish scientists, biologists, bureaucrats, administrators, and workers at a cost of billions of dollars — not to save the fish, but to save the dam. And to employ this particularly unemployable one-armed fish counter, unless I can talk them out of it.
I’m trained by the nice people at the federally funded “Ick Ick” project along with five other locals prepared to join fish counters already in the field. Among them is a man a full head shorter than me; upon seeing him standing just through the doorway I assume there’s a step down into the room and in acting accordingly I land hard and I stumble into him as if trying to navigate with one leg for a change.
“Sorry!” I collect myself, extending my only hand in greeting. “I’m Aaron. Here to count fish. Although I can count to five better than ten.”
“Percy” is his only reply as he slips his tiny hand into mine, accompanied by a fixed stare.
It’s an intense gaze everyone here seems to share. They all stare completely unabashed at anyone in their fields of vision, like babies unaware of anything but the facial recognition for which they are primally programmed as a survival lure. When I spot Lilith, an average-looking woman with the exception of nose and breasts in equal prominence, she too catches me staring and seems to think nothing of it, staring back, our eyes locked like a pair of horseshoe magnets.
With no further exchange forthcoming from Percy, I extricate myself and manage to approach Lilith without colliding. As impressed as I am by her imposing breasts I’m equally fascinated by that nose, pronounced and beakish in a way that renders the rest of her quite ordinary face extraordinary. Eventually discomforted by our optical intimacy I’m the one who finally looks away, and therefore probably considered the socially inept oddball here.
“Do you like fish?” she asks.
“I admit, up until now I never thought of them as more than seafood,” I confess, and if that bothers her she doesn’t show it. “You?”
“I’m concerned about the mass extinction of a species,” she states flatly, and then, as if mimicking me, adds “You?”
“I needed a job, and there’s not a lot of things I can do.”
Like everyone I’ve met at Ick Ick so far, Lilith seems undeterred by my condition. In fact, no one seems to notice my missing arm/hand unit at all — not in the same way others choose to ignore it as a means of avoidance, but by being genuinely and completely indifferent to it. I assume working in scientific research puts one in contact with a variety of oddball personalities; if they can overlook the overbites and thick glasses, poor hygiene and rumpled clothes, shrill voices and personality tics bordering on Asperger’s in evidence everywhere at the orientation, what’s one arm more or less?
I try to redeem my intentions somewhat to Lilith, mostly by overusing the word “fascinating” in expressing my feelings on extinction, dams, nature, conservation, and especially the fish we hope to save, although I know nothing about them yet. It’s enough fake sincerity to earn me a seat alongside her in our next training session.
As our primary instruction over any kind of science or methodology is straightforward recognition, this should be easy since the species we’re primarily counting, the Blue paddlesnout sturgeon, is one ugly motherfucking fish. First of all and most obvious: it has a snout shaped like a paddle. It also has no teeth, an extendable mouth(!), and tactile “whiskers” for locating food. About a foot long, spiky cartilage runs the length of its spine ending in a dorsal fin at the tail, and four pectoral fins actually help it mimic walking along the bottom of rivers or lakes. Described as “primitive” and “dinosaur-like,” Acipenser pseudoboscis is in fact considered virtually unchanged from the Cretaceous period seventy million years ago, when things were genetically designed to be as ugly as possible so as not to be mistaken for food.
Blue paddlesnout can also live for a century, but it seems unlikely any alive today will do so since 85 percent of sturgeon populations are at risk of becoming extinct, more than any other species in the world. But aside from this federally funded boondoggle on the Wabash River, no one really cares because they’re significantly less adorable than pandas or lemurs or baby gorillas, an observation that when shared with Lilith earns a toothy grin, revealing yet another area of prominence to her odd physicality. She’s like a strange painting of a beautiful woman, or a beautiful painting of a strange one, and I find myself oddly attracted to her.
By the time I arrive at work my blood-engorged brain is primed for the task of counting fish, which actually isn’t as difficult as it sounds. It’s not as though you stand on the riverbank and try to spot fish from one end to the other as — simultaneously — three splash through on the far bank while two scoot in front of you and somewhere in the middle a small school passes undetected. You don’t count fish from above, you go to where the fish are: underwater.
Each of us is assigned a small underground room with an underwater window. (It’s like a Tardis, somehow bigger on the inside.) The window overlooks a fish ladder, a series of boards that allow water to pass through but funnel fish through a single chute. The fish counter’s job is to identify the upstream-migrating fish as they pass the window. (It’s the difference between trying to count every car in Manhattan or waiting for rush hour and catching them as they pass through the Lincoln Tunnel, but without the horn-honking and swearing.) We enter that data into a system using a specialized keyboard and computer program. What happens next is outside the area of my responsibility, or interest.
The murkiness of the water further stirred by passing fish — not all of them Acipenser pseudobosci — can make spotting them a challenge. My first day I counted only eleven — which, without knowing what to anticipate other than that as “endangered” there must not be very many of them, sounded like a fine number. However, Percy, stationed at a downstream ladder from me, and Lilith upstream, both counted thirty, indicating that I missed nearly three times as many as I’d counted. The only logical thing for me to do was to engage Percy at the end of the day in casual conversation about his count before reporting mine, which worked fine at first since Percy seemed blissfully unaccustomed to being the subject of another human’s interest. But I soon ran out of variations of “Pretty good day, wouldn’t you say?” and “So, how’d you do?” and, when he started to catch on, “Just tell me how many fucking fish you saw!” drove him away for good. Upstream, Lilith was a clam and wouldn’t reveal her counts under waterboarding.
Recalling the pinpoint focus four Vicodins has helped me achieve in the past, I’m certain that dosage coupled with a hyperalert strain of marijuana will boost my success rate considerably.
After a couple of days of experimentation I discover just the right blend of drugs and pot to set my synapses to alert-level RED: four morning Vicodins (and four more at lunch) and hourly bowls of a Sativa strain called Hocus-Focus have me zoned me in. I’m capable of scanning the window like a barcode reader, registering each passing Blue paddlesnout. As the days and fish pass, my counts routinely matched Lilith’s and when both of ours exceeded Percy’s, he looked violated. Eventually my counts became the standard for the day’s final tally up and down the river. The more I counted the less ugly they looked, all flatheaded grace as they beat on, fins against the current, borne back ceaselessly into extinction.
That’s when out of sheer boredom I start counting the other fish: brook lampreys, sunfish, darters, and three varieties of redhorse — silver, shorthead, and greater — each difficult at a glance to tell from the other but for me as distinct as traffic lights. Sharing this superfluous information at the end of the day is met with a mix of bemused astonishment. We sometimes gather on the riverbank before work while I call out fish species darting down the river, those struggling up too easy to spy in their slowness (although I’ll occasionally announce one long past us without turning my head).
When I emerge at the end of my shift Lilith is waiting for me.
“That was very impressive this afternoon.”
“What can I say? I’ve gotten to love the little guys — all of them, with their thrashing tails and finny perseverance.”
Her gaze is different now; instead of a dead stare it feels alive with intent. It appears I’ve earned a place in her bed.
Excerpted from “AMP’D,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller and runner-up for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
https://www.amazon.com/AMPD-Disarming-Comedy-Ken-Pisani/dp/B0CTTYG4PL/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
