Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [51]
Small stainless-steel bowls are set in the holes along the table. Kia holds his trout firmly with one arm and centers her over a bowl. With the other hand, he takes a sturdy grip just behind and below the pectoral fins, drawing steadily toward the tail; at once a continuous stream of what looks like orange liquid shoots out and into the bowl. When it tapers off, the bowl is a third full of beautiful, brightly colored eggs the size of tapioca. Kia tosses the trout—out of the water for less than a minute, but now looking concave and insulted and squished—into a hole in the wall, where she slips down a slick pipe and back into the lake.
I’m bemused. They just squeeze the fish? Apparently they do. Apparently this isn’t an unusual talent on Kia’s part, like being able to flip flapjacks in midair or write with his toes—another man is already squeezing a second fish over the same bowl. This time the fish is a male, dripping sperm onto the orange eggs. Michelle Moore picks up the bowl, unceremoniously mixing the contents with her fingers as she disappears into the next room. Soon there’s a respectable assembly line going: fish wrestled from the water, fish squeezed over the bowls, bowls mixed and moved to the next room as soon as they’re ready.
The process, the only reason there are any trout in the lake at all, seems amazingly straightforward and low-tech—enough so that I ask Kia for permission to help. The idea is to mix the eggs with your bare fingers, then ladle in some numbingly cold water from the hatchery farther up the hill. You mix this cold biological soup for exactly one minute, which seems too short until you consider that under natural conditions this mixing would all be taking place in nearly open, flowing water, with only a small depression, called a redd, to keep the eggs from washing away. After the eggs are fertilized, they need to be cleaned of any worms or mud or lake weed, so you ladle in several changes of water, swirling the eggs as though rinsing starch from white rice; the water gets dumped out through the grated floor. “The dud eggs are the most important to get out,” Kia says. “Those white ones—they’ll rot and kind of cottonball, spread fungus all over the rest of the eggs and smother them.” But this part of the process is simple and also, when I think about it, amazing: I’m helping to grow fish.
In 1864 market fisherman Seth Green, frustrated with trying to fill orders for wild fish hurt by logging and overfishing, opened his first hatchery in Caledonia, New York. Within two decades the U.S. Fish Commission was hatching salmon in California and shad in New England; it brought in European brown trout to replace the failing eastern brookies. Though hatcheries sometimes helped to supplement healthy fisheries, they were more often responding to a collapse, as the Paiute hatcheries did. Today the Pyramid Lake cutthroat trout are entirely dependent on the descendants of people who once largely depended on them.
More ironically, some of the rivers the trout once spawned in are now being slowly, laboriously twisted back into their proper knots by the same army corps that once carved them sterile and straight. Twain mocked the twisting desert rivers, but their cottonwood-shaded bends sheltered the redds of the trout he loved. Though their beauty wasn’t as obvious to him as Tahoe’s, or that of the Sierra mountains, all were bound together—all helped make the others what they were.
TROUT PIE
Clean, wash, and scale them, lard them with pieces of a silver eel rolled up in spice and sweet herbs, with bay leaves powdered; lay on and between them the