CATFISH
Travels in Time and the Delta
Emily Hiestand

Written in 1990; first published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

The fish had an appealing name, and was abundant in the waters near the small Tennessee town where I grew up. It was often lured onto the lines of my father's fishing rod in the nearby Clinch River or Watts Bar — one of the vast new TVA lakes that flooded whole valleys in eastern Tennessee. But I sensed that there was something not entirely proper about the catfish. I heard my great-aunties refer to it as a “scavenger" and a "bottom-feeder," and my mother, who was always willing to clean the bass, pike, and pompano fishes my father caught, refused to handle catfish.

Her position was based on the many tales about the catfish’s notorious dorsal spine, a spike-like item that the fish can raise at lighting speed. The spine can not only rip through the flesh of a hand but releases a venomous secretion. Even a catfish that seems well into the afterlife can resurrect suddenly, inflicting a painful wound. In addition to its menacing spine, the channel catfish sports two bands of rough teeth.

"Razor sharp! Stand back," my father called out, as he gripped a caught catfish, pulled it over the gunwales of his skiff, and plopped it into a round, live-fish bucket. A small person nearby watching the operation might easily feel that, at any second the scavenger catfish might leap out of the bucket and try to scavenge you. All in all, my earliest impression was that the catfish was the bad boy of fish, a James Dean of the lake. So, watching my dad catch a catfish felt momentous, more dramatic even than when he landed a large-mouth bass, the prize fish that our Tennessee fathers took to Vernon’s Taxidermy to have mounted on wooden plaques, then displayed on the walls of their dens where the lacquered fish bodies arched in a perpetual leap over television sets and bridge tables.

Looking back, I think I felt getting near a live catfish was in the same category as sticking a wet finger into an electrical socket. This danger must have been what I hoped to court by creeping up to my father’s metal fish bucket, slipping my hand into it, and lightly touching the slowed, silvered, interesting looking bodies: the fish have low flat heads and whiskers, and supple, spiny pairs of whiskers growing from the mouth and chin. Officially, the whiskers are called "barbels,” an extraordinarily good word, but not better than "whiskers," which, for a fish, has a Seussian quality.

"Your mother wouldn't clean catfish," my father recalled recently, "so Jim Burns and I skinned them first and then your mother would agree to let them in the kitchen. She would cook them and they were delicious. It was Jim Burns who taught me how to fish for catfish, honey. Do you remember Jim Burns?"

Do I ever. Above all, what I remember about Mr. and Mrs. Burns, our next door neighbors, was that they had a brace of living room lamps made out of artillery shells — two gigantic, dull-bronze 200 millimeter shells, which Mr. Burns had bought home from World War II. The artillery shells stood about four feet tall — for a while they were taller than me and my brothers — and the lampshade was attached to a rod that Mr. Burns had fitted into the pointed end of the shell. I was deeply perplexed by the lamps. Were they still weapons? And did Mrs. Burns think they were typical decor, or were they a novelty, or something else? Although I could not have put this into words at the time, it seemed to me that artillery lamps represented not just a conflation, but a contradiction of realities, as though “far away” and “close at hand” were suddenly declared to be one and the same. I was surprised that an artillery shell lamp in a living room was even possible, in terms of both interior decorating and metaphysics. On the wall above the doorway between the Burns’ living and dining rooms, Mr. Burns had also hung a curving red and black Japanese sword, and thinking about those rooms now I would say they had a Damoclesian air.

When I return from that brief memory, I hear my father, usually a taciturn man, still talking about catfish and the techniques he and Jim Burns used in their pursuit. My father, now 82, retired from fishing some years ago, despite my mother’s occasional reminders of how much fun she and he had going fishing together, outings on which my father fished, and my mother painted watercolors. “You know," my father is now saying, “catfish live in bottomless holes, so you have to put a lead weight on the line to get the hook way way way down there. And you must put something on your line that a catfish likes to eat."

I’m absorbing my father's view that the catfish is not merely a bottom-dweller, but a fish that dwells where there is no known bottom. He also seems to be saying that the catfish requires special food. 

"I thought catfish were scavengers, Dad, I thought they would eat anything.”

"Well, honey, I don't know about that," my father says thoughtfully. “Lots of times we put every sort of delicious thing in the world on our lines, and we did not catch a single catfish. Ed Bailey and Jay Nichols went out on many survey missions at Watts Bar Lake. They dropped weighted lines all over the lake to locate the bottomless holes, and mapped those places on a chart. A lot of people spent a lot of time doing things like that, trying to get a catfish."

Marine biologists describe catfish as omnivores, lovers of insects, plants, and other fishes, fond even of the decaying matter found on the riverbeds where the fish moseys in tranquility. But my father and his fishing buddies knew the fussier side of the fish. As for bottomless holes, certainly, the TVA-made lakes of east Tennessee are very deep. They submerged whole valley towns and hamlets — with all their houses, stores, churches, stairs, fences, pastures, and roads — that were taken in the 1930s by eminent domain. The valleys were destined to become the reservoirs for the great hydro-dams whose energy electrified and brought new prosperity to the region. No sign of this relatively recent engulfment showed on the placid surface where my father and I floated in his fishing skiff. But below us, aquatic creatures must have brushed against doors and sills, roofs and chimneys of the drowned villages. In the boat, especially as it got to be past noon, and after we had eaten our lunch of ham and cheese sandwiches, my mind would drift to thinking about the underwater world, and also to things like the curious name of the outboard motor: Evinrude. Why would a name with the word “rude” in it be a good name for an outboard motor?

My father came to fishing late, after an Oklahoma Dust Bowl childhood that was too lean to include even the relative leisure represented by a few hours of fishing. He discovered the sport only after he had returned from war, found his career as a government lawyer, and settled with my mother in a new and then secret town named Oak Ridge. He loved the strategies and gear, the careful, methodical preparations, the tying of flies, the brimmed hats, vests, and the slipping quietly away from the house in the dark of early morning. Above all, I think he loved the long silences on the reflective bodies of water. The peace. I loved going fishing with my father because when he was fishing, or planning to go fishing, or talking about fishing, my father was happy. He did not talk especially much during our fishing trips, except to say such things as: "Give it more line, Sweetie," and "I do not want you to stand up in the boat," and "Hungry yet?"

He was a wonderful legal thinker and writer, a master of legal language, and presented cases in court eloquently, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. But fishing was not for spoken language; the communication we had in the skiff was on another level, and it might have been one of my earliest experiences of contented silence. Along with the thrill of a fish on the line, or bringing a fish into the boat, seeing my father happy was the point of going fishing.

Even as a very young girl, I detected my father’s meditative quiet, and liked it, and since this state of mind was bound up with fishing gear, the whir of spinners, red and white bobbers, hooks, weights, and a metallic green metal fishing box, I liked those things very much too. They were the accessories of intimacy, as practiced by my father. Now, I would say his temperament was a mixture of innate calmness, a boyhood dominated by the Depression, and the trauma of spending his late teens and early twenties on the battlefields of World War II. For my father, life had been about necessity since childhood: about getting a ration of food from the market; about keeping his one shirt clean and ironed for school; about hoarding a penny for a day-old doughnut he bought at the start of his paper route, for which he arose at 5 a.m.

When I think of all he accomplished – service in the war, rising to the rank of Major, law school on the GI Bill, graduating summa cum laude, marrying, having three children and a distinguished legal career – the marvel is that he kept on keeping on though traumatized by losses at an early age: the grim poverty, the death of his mother when he was eight, a father who went blind from an injury, his 2nd Infantry comrades who didn’t come home. He returned from war with nightmares and found fishing to be a peaceful, healing practice, a kind of meditation. The fish were a bonus.

Several evenings each winter, Mr. Burns walked across the lawn to our house after supper, and sat with my dad at our kitchen table, where the two men made lures. They each had a large metal tackle box that unfolded into a series of cantilevered shelves containing dozens of small compartments. They each had small paper bags full of feathers, clear thread, colored thread, and fishhooks. As they assembled lures and tied flies in our pale green kitchen I sat nearby on the metal folding step stool, next to the beige radio from which we had heard the news that Eisenhower had won the election. I noticed that my father and Mr. Burns spoke in shorter phrases than my mother and her friends did, that there were more silences, and that the conversation did not glide from one thing to another in widening circles, but stayed on the topic of fish — with an occasional detour for Ike.

Their tackle, however, was exuberant: bright green rubber worms, oval silver lures with eight hooks, fluffs of feathery, jewel-like flies. Watching the men's hands looping threads around feathers on a chilly February night, I started to understand that they began to catch summer fish in winter. Far from the lake, which was then frozen, they were already beginning to send an invisible line of intention toward the fish. Many things were secret, or perplexing to me in those days, and the bright flies with needle-sharp hooks tucked amongst feathers were one way to bring something onto a line and up to the surface.

My father's fishing career soared during the Eisenhower administration. He caught bass and pike in the Tennessee lakes; pompano in the Atlantic surf-casting at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina; and salmon in Washington State, while on legal trips for the government. The aftermath of my father’s local fishing trips provided my first encounter with the conundrum associated with seeing a creature transmorgrified from a swimming, jumping being to a shape on a filleting table. My father most often returned in late afternoons or early evenings with the caught fish in a round galvanized bucket.

I remember best the times he cleaned fish at a friend’s cabin at the lake. It was just dark. He layered many sheets of newspaper on a table outside the cabin and worked in the faint light of a yellow lightbulb. Soon the newspaper pages were slippery and wet with water, fish scales, and the glossy innards that he cut away. The scales, which were round and hard, like clear plastic sequins, could stick to your clothes, or show up a day later still on your arm.

I knew that filleting a fish was an artful task, like carving a turkey well at Thanksgiving, and that it should be done deftly, respectfully. I knew that if we were going to eat fish, at some point the fish must change from creature to fillet. I was even interested in learning how to scale and fillet a fish, and by age 11, I had learned the technique from my dad and his friends, who encouraged me with guidance and praise. There was a sense of ritual in the process, from the way they arranged the newspapers and the fish bodies, the patient way they carved and cut edible flesh away from the bones.

The fresh fillets were dipped in egg and breaded in a local, stone-ground corn cornmeal and sautéed the same day, often only an hour or so after being caught. As the fishes cooked, they curled into golden brown arabesques. I helped carry the platter to the table. My two brothers and I and our Mum were all proud that our father had caught the fish, which were delicious. Along with the happy, proud part, I also felt something solemn, the change in the once shining creature, which was never discussed directly.

•

By the late 1980s, catfish began to appear on the menus in upscale restaurants, and by the 1990s, could be found in every good fish market, often with a placard describing it as a mild-flavored fish, low in fat and cholesterol, sodium, and calories, and high in protein and heart-protecting fatty acids. But the upscale catfish is almost a different creature than those caught in lakes and rivers of the 1950s. The new version is a farm-raised fish that swims in aerated waters, in clay-lined, tended ponds.

In September of 1990, my husband Peter and I chanced upon some of those new catfish ponds in the Mississippi Delta* during a road trip from our home in Boston through the Deep South. We had learned that while Arkansas had 21,000 acres in catfish ponds, and Alabama 19,000 acres, the Mississippi Delta was then home to most of the catfish ponds in the entire world. We arrived from the east, driving across the border from where my Callahan relatives have long lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The air was baking as we travel south in Mississippi from Clarksdale in Coahoma County, along Highway 49, through Sunflower County, and then east into Belzoni in Humphreys County. 

It’s instantly clear where the Delta territory begins: suddenly, the road drops from the last little rise of the "hills" and the land is pancake flat, a nearly treeless landscape that stretches away for miles and miles. Just as suddenly, the cotton fields commence, which at this time of year, as the harvest begins, are covered in a pelt of white.* But in this most Southern place on Earth, more than 100,000 acres of old cotton fields have been dug up and converted into catfish ponds whose blue-green surfaces now glint on either side of the road. Here and there thin columns of pale grey smoke rise, like a brush losing ink, from rice paddies. It is a serene landscape, with very few human figures in sight.

On Highway 12 just north of Belzoni we see a one-story, industrial building with a gently sloping roof, and a bushy privet hedge. One side of the building is covered by huge red plastic letters that read: MASTER SYSTEMS and in smaller black letters: CATFISH EQUIPMENT MFG. 

"Pull off, pull off," I am about to cry, but my husband and favorite traveling companion has already turned the wheel, and we are gliding into the parking lot. The instant, wordless understanding we share about what’s worth pulling off the road for is one of the many things I treasure in life with Peter. We park and walk inside the building entrance, and find ourselves standing in one of the largest catfish farming equipment showrooms in the world, high-ceilinged and cavernous, with an oil-stained carpet on which stand some very peculiar pieces of metal.

Toward the back of the room, four men are eating lunch at a metal folding table. Upon seeing us, one of them immediately throws his hamburger down on the table — with such gusto the burger almost bounces — and bounds out across the showroom toward us. We start to apologize for interrupting his lunch. The man starts to apologize for the oil-stained carpet, like a hostess to an unexpected guest.

"Oh Lord, this is just a mess," he says, sweeping his arm around the room, "I am just beginning to get this in order. You should have seen the yard" — he gestures at the heaps of metal outside the showroom windows — "just a week ago. Oh, Lord, have I got a lot of cleaning up to do here. Hello, my name’s Rocky.” 

Rocky has dark, curly hair, short on the side and long in the back, a style fashionable among young country singers. He explains that he has just been brought in from managing another catfish capital equipment outfit further south, in Louisiana, to spruce up this one. And now, although it must be clear to Rocky that Peter and I are not now nor ever will be catfish farmers, Rocky proceeds to treat us as though we are about to be his best customers. 

"You're from away, aren't you?" he says hospitably as he escorts us out onto the grassy apron in front of the showroom. "From away," is a phrase my Alabama relatives use too, and it simply distinguishes the natives of [insert name of your hometown here] from all those who originate from some other less fortunate place in the universe. It’s a phrase that locates [name of your town] as the center of the universe, the place that is “here.” Those of us who have moved more than once from one region to another, or who like to glide between places and cultures, may feel a pang upon hearing this phrase. What must it be like to have the history and temperament that allows someone to be always from “here?” 

Rocky now leads us to a massive, clay-red piece of equipment that is, essentially, a square metal bin sitting atop huge tractor tires. The unit closely resembles the predator robots on the Ice Planet of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. A small ladder that hangs down from the bin almost to the ground. There are gears and a tractor hitch on one end, and on the other, a long tube called a "cannon." This, our guide explains, is a Catfish Feeder fabricated by the Master Catfish machine shop, and Rocky is proud to say that it has a 1-to-1 ratio gear box. 

“How does it work?” I ask.

"Ma’am, you just pull the Feeder up to the edge of your pond, point the cannon out over the water, and turn it on. And shazam!”

The shazam, which we will see in action later when passing a local pond, is an arcing stream of amber, high-protein grain pellets, shooting out of the broadcasting tube and over the waters. The pellet is designed to float on top of the ponds and — this is the secret — bring the catfish to the surface to feed. By this technique, the millennium-old catfish habit of feeding from the bottom is inverted. The new way of feeding also changes the flavor and texture of catfish flesh. 

"The result is deliciously mild and delicately flavored white meat with a superb, firm texture," Rocky says, quoting from memory from a promotional brochure published by The Catfish Institute. He laughs. "It's true,” he says, “It really is."

The Catfish Institute, which is located a short drive from Rocky’s operation, on Hayden Street in Belzoni, has come up with several taglines for its product, including: "The fish with Impeccable Taste," and "The Cultured Fish."  The latter tagline recalls the Charlie the Tuna icon of another decade, and suggests that the fish itself has become a creature of discernment and/or tastier. Unknowns hovered about the old catfish, but I don’t recall that it ever tasted bad.

•

"Taste bad!" my mother will exclaim some weeks later, when I put this question to her in Maryland, where our family moved in 1960 when my father’s career took him to the nation’s capitol. She is incredulous. "No, dear, wild catfish is a delicious fish, sweet and rich. Now it is true that I did not like to handle it,” my mother continues, “and it is a bottom feeder, you know. It could occasionally have a muddy taste. But real catfish, fresh from the lake, oh, that is heavenly." 

"Your mother will not let me buy farm catfish in the store," my father adds.

"That's because the farm fish is flavorless," my mother explains. To clarify, she adds, "Blah." After a moment she continues. "Now, of course, people who haven't had the catfish that live in lakes and rivers wouldn't know the difference, and they might like a farm catfish. In another generation or two, people might not know anything about wild catfish. Your father and I still like to go to a little place in Ten Mile, Tennessee, near Cleland and Isabel’s cabin, where you can still get a real catfish. And every time we have been there, someone is talking about the forty pound catfish that no one has ever been able to catch. You might want to call them up and see if anyone has caught that famous fish.” 

•

 
Back in Belzoni, Rocky is beaming at Peter and me, and proceeding as though we are going to need several of his machines. He escorts us through his showroom and machine shop, describing as he goes the main points of catfish farming, including its several perils. By now his lunch is cold and forgotten, and he is eager to talk to two strangers about the possibilities of aquaculture. Rarely has a man seemed more fitted to his work, and his joy broadcasts through the room. As Rocky’s tour continues, I notice that Peter's eyes have grown bright, and that he seems more than politely interested in catfish capital equipment. Born with the gene for technology, son of an accomplished ceramics engineer, and a journalist covering the microelectronics industry, Peter is diving into the arcana of this manufactory. 

In the workshop, which is replete with lathes, circular saws, and five machinists in protective goggles, Peter and Rocky are talking about gear ratios again, excitedly discussing the innovations that can be made, as Rocky puts it "right here on site, back of my showroom." Through Peter’s eyes, I see that Master Catfish is a very interesting little shop, a perfect example of one, much-admired theory for manufacturing-technology. Catfish farming is a relatively young enterprise, only about 35 years old, and the industry’s technology is still evolving rapidly. The beauty of Master Equipment is that local aquaculturists can simply stroll into the shop and talk directly with the machine shop fabricators about what is and isn't working out in the ponds. With this valuable first-hand information, the designers and machinists can quickly modify and improve their line of equipment. "At least," Rocky adds scrupulously, "to those pieces of equipment that do not have patents." 

Peter tells me this approach has worked wonderfully in earlier eras. It was the approach of Cyrus McCormick, who worked out the complex reaper, and Eli Whitney, who tinkered with the cotton gin in the Indiana and Georgia farm fields. After many iterations, the gins and reapers until their machines proved their worth and passed muster with local users, paving the way for wide uptake. More recently, the Promethean "wafer steppers" of the silicon chip industry were also developed in a similar way.

The wafer stepper is an immensely complex machine capable of printing microscopic multi-layered circuit patterns on the chips that power the information society (in computers, phones, and anything digital). Arguably the most precise machines in the history of the world, wafer steppers contain exotic and delicate optics and alignment systems, but are also rugged workhorses, churning out product around the clock. Although invented in American, Japanese industry perfected the massively expensive machines, working as McCormick and Whitney did in close liaison with end-users to refine and re-refine their inventions. Fo me, one other interesting fact about the wafer stepper is that almost no one outside the industry has ever heard of it — this most foundational machine of the entire information society! I know about it only because of Peter is the leading journalist for the worldwide semiconductor manufacturing community.  

Now, as Peter and Rocky step out of the machine shop in the Delta, Peter bestows an accolade:

"Way cool!" he says. 

Rocky beams.

"What a great scale you’ve got here for your shop," Peter continues, "a lean, mean, six guy team, and you can do so much stuff, so quickly."

"Bingo," says Rocky. 

•

 

The basic equipment needed to catch a wild river catfish is a stick, a piece of line, a hook and some bait. But it takes a host of gear and a serious financial investment to raise the fish with impeccable taste. Rocky reviews the basics with us. “First, of course, you have got to get a bank to loan you two or three million dollars to dig your ponds. You want a minimum of eight ponds. And then you’ll need some of our gear. You will need Portable paddle wheels with new gear reducers,  not one of those troublesome used truck rear ends.”

"Although," Peter comments, "think about what a good idea that is. You've got an old truck sitting around on your property, the engine all blown out. The seats are on the front porch. But the rear end where the drive-shaft goes into the rear axle is still good. Functional. So you pull that out and it turns a set of two big paddle wheels. Just sitting right there on your farm, the nucleus of a paddle wheel system for your catfish pond." 

"That's exactly true," says Rocky, diplomatically. "But still trouble-prone. Remember," he says entering into the scenario, "the thing has been sitting there since 1958."

He continues. “You will need electric paddle wheel aerators equipped with aluminum floats and water lubricated UHMD bearings complete with bronze wear bushings. You need high efficiently cast steel impellers and de-icers to prevent winter kill. You will want some de-stratification pumps and feeders, seine reels, UV resistant and nontoxic floats. You'll want a 2500 pound feeder, a 14,000 truck feeder, a self-contained diesel aerator, and a seine reel. You'll need nets (100' wide and 500' long, in either diamond or square mesh). You'll need some copper sulfate to reduce pond algae which can take the fish off flavor. You will definitely want some antibacterial control agent, like Romet 30 to keep down enteric septicemia (E. ictaluri) in catfish. You might want feed analysis from the Woodson-Tenent Laboratories in Memphis which offers complete feed analysis including pesticide residues, drugs, and antibiotics. 

There’s more! We learn that catfish in different stages of life like different kinds of food; from the Gold Kist company a farmer can choose "Pre-Starter Food" for one-inch fry, "Starter Food" for the nutritional requirements of a fish 1 to 4 inches in size, and "Floating Fingerling Food" for a growing fish 4 - 7 inches who needs extra vitamins and minerals. We learn that we’d also need biomed vaccine, oxygen monitors, circulator caps, roots blowers, waders, seine boats, spotlights, dip nets, and agitators. 

And that we’ll want a Scare-Away System (or a Screamer, or Roost Dispersal System), to protect the pond from flocks of migrating waterfowl, especially cormorants, who like to eat a pound of cultured catfish a day each as they come down the Mississippi River Delta flyway. We learn that it takes eighteen months to grow a one and a half pound fillet, which is the most desirable catfish size: any larger and they are tough, any smaller and they are too immature.  The phrases "on-flavor," and "off-flavor" are in constant use in the catfish farming world.

"My new aerator helps insure that the fish will be on-flavor for inspection," says Rocky. He explains that the inspectors are from the U.S. Department of Commerce, and they conduct weekly inspections at the behest of the Delta catfish farmers, certifying fish with a seal that says Mississippi Farm-Raised Catfish. "They are testing for taste,” he says. “They have people who come up and take samples, take them back to the lab, cook them and eat them, and then pronounce whether the fish is on-flavor.”

Being on-flavor is crucial. Only fish deemed "on" can be sold, and it would be devastating for a whole crop to be "off." Yet “on” and “off” are a somewhat mysterious property. Even with all the right gear, one pond among nineteen can be off-flavor. If the mystery persists, a farmer might need to call on a consultant, perhaps Roger Caudill in Benton, Mississippi, who specializes in feed milling, and whose card says: "Any problem can be solved.”

•

The piece of odd-looking equipment that Rocky is proudest of looks like Huck Finn's raft — a flat deck on two pontoons, with a small metal hut in the middle and two poles sticking up in the back. This is his new Water Quality Aerator, which has been designed and tested over the last three years by experienced catfish farmers and aquaculture engineers. This aerator promises to keep the oxygen levels in the ponds higher and more consistent that paddle-wheel type aerators, which means that the fish won't die so often, and the farmer's maintenance will be less, while production and profits will be higher. 

I had read before our visit to the Delta that working a catfish processing plant is not the greatest job in the world (cold, repetitive motion of filleting, no job security, Dickensian bathroom breaks, no unions, poor wages, white male managers, black women workers, etc.) I have also read that there is some concern about the migration of pesticides from the surrounding cotton fields, including from aerial spraying. The pathology of late stage untempered capitalism, environmental pollution, and the growing division between the rich and the poor all seem likely to be present in the aquaculture of the Delta, as well as nearly every other American industry. But these are not easily broached topics to a deeply hospitable host upon first meeting even if you merely want to get his opinion. Thankfully, Rocky brings up the matter himself. 

"You know," he says, "some people are worried about the pesticide migration," he says. “It’s true that the pesticides do migrate into the ponds, that's a fact, but it’s not a problem at all. Our farmers have figured out how to offset the pesticides with another chemical that they put in the water. The real problem down here," Rocky continues, "what we're going to have to deal with are the floating casinos coming to the river in Greenville. I mean, you're right here in the middle of the Bible Belt, and the Baptists are going to go about this. Oh, they are going to go about this!" 

I’m no longer dazzled by the “technological fix,” the idea that one bit of technology or science can fix a problem originally caused by technology or science, but I have to say I’ve never seen a better example of how to shift attention from one problem to another one.  

Later, however, at The Catfish Journal in Jackson, Mississippi, an editor also tells me that pesticide drift is a non-issue. "We've been catfish farming now for some 30 years, he says, "and many many fish have been examined. Except for a few isolated cases from aerial spraying, they have never found anything in the fish." Dr. Ed Robinson, director of the Delta Catfish Center agrees. "The ponds are above ground," he points out, “so there is no risk of run-off. And only once in eleven years have I heard of an aerial spray that killed some fish. But those fish didn't go to market," he adds. "We are more interested in water quality than the pesticide issue, more interested in fish genetics, and fish behavior. We don't really know much about how catfish behave. What are they doing down there?"  

The EPA's man in Atlanta also agrees: there is no study he knows of that shows bio-accumulation of pesticides in catfish, but there is a potential for what he calls "a toxicologically insignificant amount of some pesticides" — particularly the synthetic pyrethroids used on cotton — to wind up in catfish flesh. Because that is so, the catfish industry would like the EPA to establish a "tolerance level" for these chemicals in catfish flesh, just as it does for other all the other foods — grains, fruits, and vegetables, and meats — that contain pesticides, which is to say most of our food. Only a small fraction of our food does not contain pesticides, and DDT, which persists a half century in soils, can be taken up even by organic vegetables and fruits. But here is the Catch 22: the agency can only establish a tolerance level for legal applications of a pesticide, and since any pesticides in the fish are from accidental drift, the EPA cannot set any tolerance level. "It’s one of those little dilemmas," says the EPA's man.   

•

The last nugget of catfish info that Rocky shares with us is how to find Allison's Restaurant in downtown Belzoni, the very best place, he says to dine on some great local Delta catfish. Driving toward Belzoni we pass more blue ponds and smoking rice fields, and here and there a de-foliated cotton field. Peter is quiet for many miles. I knew he had been moved by the operations at Master Catfish Equipment so I merely watch the fields unfold outside our windows. Then, a few miles outside Belzoni, Peter speaks.

"I've been thinking,” he begins. “What the catfish industry needs is closed-loop monitoring and adjustment of all the parameters, a closed loop all the way, with sensors to monitor water temperature, Ph, and oxygen levels. Anyone who could bring some silicon into the Delta could be big in catfish farming.”

I could see my beloved riding a solid-state-technology arm over his blue catfish ponds, guiding the high-tech-sensor array with a joystick, the instrument panel glowing over the surface to which the new fish aesthetes are drawn to dine on floating pellets. Peter is wearing a hat to shield him from the sun. He looks terrific.

I know that my husband is casting a line into the lake of the self to see if anything bites. "Let's do it," I say, "Let's move here and be catfish farmers.”

Peter continues to reflect, and after a while he chuckles, and says, "I wonder how many times boys from New York, Atlanta, or Boston have come to the Delta,” he says, “imagining that they could improve on something.” Peter’s humor which includes self-deprecating humor, is ever-ready and also among the things I treasure daily.

Allison's Restaurant is located in a handsome 19th century brick building. A deep green awning shades the wide front of the restaurant, and ceiling fans are turning inside. The mood is as stately as a room that contains a shrine to Elvis can be. Several waitresses, all wearing lovely summer dresses are clustered at the long wooden bar, gathered more like friends in someone’s home. One of them approaches, and turns out to be Allison herself. 

"You’re from away aren’t you?" asks Allison. “Where y’all from?”

Peter says, "We're from Boston."

"If you don't mind my being personal," Allison says, "just what in the world are you doing in Belzoni, Mississippi?"

"We've driven down to get a catfish," says Peter.

Allison likes this answer.  "Wooeeee,” she says. “You've come a long way for a fish. I sure hope you like ours.” 

We do. We both have the Fried Catfish Plate Special, which is an Old Dutch Masters study of glowing golden-browns: three catfish fillets, hush puppies, and fried potatoes. We also like the slices of chocolate pecan pie that Allison presses on us, on the house. Thus fortified, we step outside, soak in another moment of the warm Delta air, and start our drive north up blue highways through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and back to our home in “away.”

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Notes

*1. Is this land truly a delta anymore? Before the levee systems were built, the Mississippi River would flood annually, gliding quietly in a 2-3” shallow coating across the width of its ancient bed — that’s what the flat land of the delta is — saturating the soil with rich nutrients, natural fertilizers that made the land so ripe for planting. Since 1927 when the Mississippi River last crested over the levees, there have been no other breaches and the land has lacked riverine renewal, and farmers have become dependent on chemical fertilizers. 

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*2. Of the cotton fields that remain, the ripest ones are blanketed in a white froth; others are green and white, and still others have the bronze cast of fields whose leaves and stems have begun to die from the powdered defoliants released in wide colorful trails from low-flying airplanes. One of those plane appears suddenly nearly in front of our car, rising up from a field alongside the road like a great grasshopper. The bright green-yellow bi-plane whirls over our car, circles, banks, returns deep into the field, flying low to release another stream of orange-yellow defoliant over another row of cotton plants. After these treated leaves die off, the harvesting machines that will soon come through the fields are able to pick a far higher ratio of cotton-to-stem-and-leaf.