Around this time

My memory is littered with impressions of rural New England from a time long before my own. A prolonged rural stasis, followed by the Great Depression, had preserved many of these features in New Hampshire long after their natural lifespan. But there was only one in which I was a participant.

Perhaps the strangest habit, or ritual, in my village surrounded the annual sucker run. No, this has nothing to do with tourists: they came later and mostly blew by us to the lakes and mountains. I refer to the fish. After checking up on this, I'm pretty sure it was white suckers that filled Mill Brook every April. And every April the young manhood of the village sharpened their fish spears and joined the hunt.

Yes, spears: usually the five-pronged variety like this. For, in spite of what much current information says, these were usually big fish for fresh water, 15 to 20 inches as a rule.

It was also a carnival of wanton waste. The Merrimack, whence they came, was in those days too polluted for it to be safe for humans to eat the fish. However the local cats, crows, and dogs were in heaven, gorging themselves silly on our catch. For reasons best known only to them, the dogs took the orgy one step further, happily rolling in the piles of dead fish lining the stream banks. There might have been abuttor objections, but the fishing portion of the brook ran through a group of houses we'd call "low income" today. It seems likely that some of the abuttors slipped out at dusk and scored the more edible part of that day's catch.

There were of course no adult referees in this strange activity: the protocols and the good places were passed down kid to kid. It was generally understood that one had to be nine, or eight at the very least, to take part. Mechanics played a part in that, since one had to be tall enough to handle a fish spear five or six feet long, and strong enough to actually be able to spear a fish with one. It's much harder than it sounds. Also the brook was in full spring spate, fast-running and bitterly cold with fresh snow melt. Boys needed to be old enough to understand the risk and to stand a chance of rescue if they did fall in.

Inevitably, the rule was bent, then broken. Someone's five-year-old brother tagged along and, unnoticed in the frenzy, fell in and drowned. In the time before 24/7 news, helicopter reporters and helicopter parents, the adult world quietly compassed the end of the sucker ritual without a single TV story or irate mass meeting.

Despite the slaughter, it seems we didn't make much of a dent in the population: the white sucker is among New Hampshire's most abundant fish species. There were at most perhaps 75 boys spearing suckers in that village in any one year. While a few of the big kids ran up impressive scores, most of us felt lucky to spear a dozen in the fortnight's run. The suckers, on the other hand, numbered in the thousands, and were bothered only in the quarter-mile or so below the old grist mill dam, and only during the few hours a day that boys were turned loose on them.

Now the river is clean, the village is gentrified, and I suppose only those few of that generation still living there remember the ritual. That's a pity in several ways. My recent reading tells me that spring-run white suckers make excellent fried fish and chowder fish, a fact probably unknown to everyone in the village.

Also, whilst I speared few suckers, I grew up to get history degrees. When I came to study my state's early history, I began to recall the sucker run and wonder how it started. Here's my hypothesis:

Until the second half of the 19th century, most farming in New Hampshire was subsistence farming. The chief winter occupation, besides logging, was hunkering down and trying to starve to death as slowly as possible. The village was settled in 1728; the brook was dammed for the grist mill the next year. I know enough of other upland towns' economies in the hard months of the year to be sure the first settlers observed those suckers. But when they lined the banks to spear them, it was no ritual: it was a deadly earnest effort to bring home fresh food. Most of the township was either land-poor farmers, hardscrabble farmers, or labourers until a generation or so before my own.

If anyone had probed the business, they would probably have found that sucker-spearing was a food source for a portion of the village until river pollution put an end to it in the 1920s or 1930s. If we as kids had asked around, we would surely have found numbers of people for whom the sucker run as food source was a living memory. In April, the only alternative was trout, which are much smaller and harder to catch. That memory may also account for the adult tolerance that accompanied the ritual until little Bobby drowned.

Days like today--breezy and in the fifties--generally brought the fish upstream to spawn, hence my recollection. I wonder what would happen if I showed up in the village now with waders and a fish spear. The actual, and ritualised, links to the rural past are mostly erased, but the suckers are still there.