POETRY

Lake Sturgeon

By Sean Hill     Reprinted with permission from University of Georgia Press
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When you think of fish, if you think of fish,
do you think of this fish? If so, do you think
of a dish of caviar or the Civil War?
                                For me this fish brings
      to mind an elbow or knee, places we bend
      where touch is close to the bone. Touch
your patella—​from the Latin for a “small shallow dish,”
and this one upside down and covered, skin over bone plate—​
you get close to the feel of sturgeon with its rows of scutes
(starting more like “skew” than “school” and ending like “boots”),
bony plates under their rough brown skin.
 
Since these drab late bloomers don't mate
till their teens or even twenties and then only
every three years or so, do you think stodgy
sturgeon? Do you know our appetites took
their generations before they could be?
       Their roe fed an economy
for a time in the late nineteenth century.
                              These somber bottom feeders
are long-lived fish. The males live into our middle-age;
the females can live to be one hundred and fifty or so
        —twice our lifetimes.
 
If fish could talk, I would settle in with one of these
antique Tennesseans and ask
                                  If fish had knees, when you were a fry
          at your father's how did he explain to you the cries
                of men at the Battle of Chattanooga,
                the thud of bodies come to rest, the boot-thump
                of rough brogans, the report of rifle and cannon fire
      —Southern men (not bending the knee to keep others
      in their thrall, claiming generations before they could be,
      using slave labor to feed the economy) routed on the ridges
      above your home?
                                 What rippled your sky?
                                                          Did you hear
      cannon fire for thunderclap
and wait for rain?
 
That’s what I would ask,
if fish could talk,
and I could find one
that survived the last century
in those Southern waters
we dammed and sullied.

LAKE STURGEON

Acipenser fulvescens

Habitat and Range: This Mississippi drainage species was once so affected by manmade pollution and dams blocking spawning that none were documented in Appalachia between 1946 and 1992. But in 1992 hatchery-bred lake sturgeon were successfully reintroduced to the upper Clinch River, and the effort was replicated in 2015 in the French Broad. Now this primitive species is slowly resuming its place in the Tennessee River Basin, where it has lived for an estimated 135 million years.

Description and Notes: “Horsing in,” a phrase used to describe a panicky angler who dispenses with the niceties of playing a hooked fish, instead trying to bring it in by force, derives from the possibly apocryphal tale of using draft horses to haul white sturgeon out of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. The sturgeon found in Appalachian watersheds isn't as big as the white (which can weigh as much as 1,285 pounds). Nor does it produce caviar as the Russian beluga sturgeon does. But this fish, with its upturned snout and body covered with bony plates, snuffling along the river bottom in search of mussels and crustaceans, is still interesting. Its swim bladder was the original source of isinglass, used in clarifying beer. It can be as long as nine feet in length and weigh more than three hundred pounds, making it overwhelmingly the largest fish native to its region. And the lake sturgeon is also a big deal because—even though it doesn't begin to reproduce until it is at least 14 years old, spawns only every 3 to 12 years, and has a lifespan of up to 150 years, meaning none of us can plan on fishing for it in our lifetimes—people are working to reintroduce it. In this way, the species functions as an indicator of improving water quality—and good human qualities.


A Literary Field Guide to
​Southern Appalachia

University of Georgia Press