Shad – caught bare-handed

One year, a nearby stream became a magical cord of moving silver thread as shad ran up it.

from the May 14, 2008 edition

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She was not thrilled. Staring at me rather expressionlessly, all she said was, "Bony. Nobody eats these. Trash fish."

But she cleaned a few and froze some more. There was roe – a strange thing I'd never seen before – in two of the shad. My mother allowed that shad roe was "Good to eat; it's gourmet." And so it was.

After she quickly browned the roe in butter, it got a squeeze of lemon juice and that was it.

The roe sat alone on the plate, resembling nothing that would garner an admiring look from anyone. It crumbled a bit as the fork hit it, and the tiny eggs divided into broken architectural shapes. The color was unworldly with its slight undertone of pinkish gray. It felt slightly gritty, then tasted surprisingly rich and light. Shad roe tastes only like itself, like nothing else in the world, I discovered.

Later we had one of the whole shad baked in the oven. It was exactly as my mother had noted – bony. But that didn't matter too much to me – I recalled the scent of the wet grass and the slightly acrid smell of fish plucked fresh from the stream. I could still see those silver and rainbow flashes tumbling through the chilly, bubbling water.

For some days afterward we all ran to the stream after school, bragging loudly to each other about the hundreds (thousands maybe!) of fish we'd catch. But day after day, the water was fallow of shad – the best things to hunt were toads. To this day, that year remains in memory as the Year of the Magical Shad – for never again did the fish run up that stream. We were just fortunate to have been there for it.

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