Ekphrasis: Lake Fish Edition
"It took the Great Lakes 1000s of years to reach an ecological fullness that left early European explorers grasping for words to capture its majesty" - Dan Egan 'The Death and Life of The Great Lakes'
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
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Welcome back to Ekphrasis, the series where I write in response to pictures. Originally, I said doing ekphrasis blogs was a way for me to have an easy week, and that’s certainly a factor with summer childcare. Contrary to the haters, tho, I do try with these posts. This week’s actually ties into the book I’m reading for Friday! Check out the epigraph, in which I had to change “thousands” to “1000s” to make it fit!
We’re talking about the fish of the Great Lakes. Man, I love the Great Lakes. Shoutout to Area Man Pat Nolan, who is always reminding me to live life enthusiastically and joyously, to appreciate rad things like basketball, sitting on a porch, good songwriting, community gardens, and Fridays. Some years-ago conversation with Pat was the first time I began to think of myself not just as a Chicagoan, but a Great Lakes Resident.
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Lake Trout
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Love a trout. Good, strong name. Remarkably North American fish, something for us to be proud of. Smokes really well, especially if you’re at Calumet Fisheries. Lake trout are slow-growing, don’t mind frigid glacier-fed waters, and are described by Mark Holey, a Great Lakes specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, thusly: “There is nothing like them. Lake trout have the characteristics to most efficiently transfer the energy in that ecosystem from, basically, sunlight into fresh fish.” He means that they’re effortlessly at the top of the food chain.
Or were, until colonizers came and opened the St. Lawrence Seaway, dug the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and otherwise meddled with the “ecologically a baby” ecosystem of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes and its fish are in danger, right now, and we need to appreciate and protect what we have.
Perch
Some fish you just hear the name and think “I bet that fish lives in the Great Lakes.” Hard not to say PERCH in a cartoonisly Midwestern accent, some toothless old timer in overalls and a massive Carhartt jacket, talking about some yee-heeeeeee we’re having perch for supper before slapping down a brace of suffocated swimmers. Like the trout, perch are in danger. Also like the trout, they are delicious. Try some if you never have. Cook them gently, finish with lemon juice, and reflect on how wonderful the Great Lakes are as you eat.
Alewives
These jerks are an invasive species, actually, not just a craft beer. No one’s completely sure how they got all the way from the Eastern Seaboard to Lake Ontario, and a hack writer would say they didn’t make the biggest splash when they were first discovered there in 1873. Unfortunately for the Great Lakes, alewives—river herring if you’re nasty—got to these waters after a trout population collapse, and they had no real predators. Unfortunately for the alewives, those toothless little invaders simply aren’t good at living in the Great Lakes. In 1967, a fetid, human-execrement-smelling mass of dead alewives piled up so thick and wide on the surface that you could see them from planes. When they washed ashore in Chicago, they were so numerous and so smelly that a huge portion of the Parks Department quit their jobs. Divers reported seeing six-foot high piles of alewife carcasses piled in the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Next time you’re drinking a craft beer, toast a Parks Department worker.
Coho Salmon
Until three days ago, these were the “other kind of salmon at Aldi that I should try sometime” to me. The was Old Me though, unenlightened. Now I know that coho salmon were unilaterally introduced to the Great Lakes by one dude, who made that decision without really consulting much of anybody. Coho salmon does make for excellent sport fishing, and supposedly it tastes good. An Illinois fishing license is only $15. That said, please don’t haphazardly introduce animals into unfamiliar ecosystems. Please, we have government agencies and other people you can consult about this sort of thing. Taking care of the environment around you involves preserving the environment that is around you, and we humans could really stand to do a better job of appreciating ecosystems and food chains.
Particularly the bottom of the food chain, because—
Zebra/Quagga Mussels
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These rotten fuckers. These invaders from the Caspian Sea got here thanks to ballast water from ships (water sucked up into tanks and used to balance the weight of a ship and its cargo). They spread from the Great Lakes to lakes in Nevada and Utah thanks to rec boats and other haphazard polluters. They’re bottom-feeders, some might say “filter feeders” but filter connotes “good.” These assholes suck up all the nutrients so that no one else can have any. They eat phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, hell, they even eat their own plankton-sized larvae, because they are monsters deserving of nothing less than being completely wiped out.
You might think: hell, boy, I love me some mussels, I wipe them sickos out. Believe me, I agree—here’s a poem about falling in love while eating mollusks. Bummer of all bummers, that’s a no-go. Zebra and quagga mussels are (basically) inedible for humans, thanks to the high amount of toxins and pollutants they eat. I’d tell these lake-ruiners to eat shit, but that’s literally their biology.
There’s reason to hope for the Great Lakes, but I haven’t gotten to those chapters of The Death and Life of The Great Lakes by Dan Egan yet. Come back Friday.
Damn, the zebra and quagga mussels got me all worked up.
Gonna go to the beach to calm down.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris