Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [42]
Whatever he called them, the trout that Twain ate at Tahoe had been in the lake only minutes before hitting the frying pan. Years later he wrote about the taste of such fresh fish when the boys hide out on Jackson’s Island in Tom Sawyer: “They fried the fish with the bacon and were astonished; for no fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They did not know that the quicker a fresh water fish is on the fire after he is caught the better he is; and they reflected little upon what a sauce open air sleeping, open air exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient of hunger makes, too.” That last bit sounds like a pretty fair description of life at Tahoe, right down to cooking with bacon fat, which Twain and Kinney had a good supply of after raiding their friends’ cache.
The fish themselves were remarkable, even astonishing. You might confuse the local varieties of Lahontan cutthroat, but you’d never mistake one for a comparatively puny eastern fish: comparing a brook trout to a Lahontan is like comparing a fish stick to a barracuda. More than forty years earlier, Thomas De Voe had reported that brook trout sold in New York ranged from half a pound to four pounds, and he made special mention of one “mammoth” fish, “one of the largest brook trout perhaps ever known in this country,” which weighed in at seven pounds two ounces. Cutthroats, by contrast, were simply colossal—the record catch in Tahoe, in 1911, weighed better than thirty-one pounds. Twain joked about the difficulty of catching trout in the lake, saying that they averaged less than a fish a week—but even if that’s true, that one might have fed them until their next take. If he’d seen one of Tahoe’s larger specimens, only his experience with Mississippi River catfish (he called a six-foot, 250-pounder a “roaring demon”) might have muted his amazement.
Good fish come from good water—and even in 1861 good water wasn’t a given in America, especially close to the cities. In 1734 the nation’s first fishing regulation had restricted fishers working Manhattan’s Collect Pond (today a very dry park, not far from Chinatown) to hooks and lines. Now, many fish were failing in New York City’s polluted water, which also imparted an awful, muddy taste; a friend of De Voe’s who caught eels in the Hudson afterward “supposed the gas-works or refuse from that place cast into the river had affected them, as he found the taste much as the gas-tar smelled.”
Tahoe’s water wasn’t just clear compared to the Mississippi or the Hudson; it was one of the world’s most transparent large bodies of water. Even today, with visibility diminished by more than twenty feet from what it was in Twain’s day, it’s a challenge to stay oriented while scuba diving. Without floating sediment to orient you, you feel like you’re hovering perfectly still as you sink down, and down, and finally bounce off a boulder. That clarity may be one reason Twain had such a hard time catching the trout—he thought it was an advantage to see the trout but didn’t consider that they could also see him.
Light bends when it enters water; this means that outside a given ring—known as Snell’s window—a floating object can’t be seen from below. Beyond Snell’s window, which gets wider and wider the deeper the viewer sinks, the surface looks more like a mirror. But the cutthroats in Tahoe were very deep indeed and could have seen Twain’s boat rowing around for a good long while before it came to rest straight overhead (which was, of course, exactly