Tennessee

It started as a joke. I would fish in Tennessee for the Snail Darter, a fish that became famous in 1982 during the planning of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River. But as I thought about it more, the joke turned serious. I called the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and they referred me to Dr. David Etnier, the University of Tennessee ichthyologist who discovered this fish species in 1965. David signed a contract for a September fishing date, saying, “I’ll bring along an ichthyology class to help find and capture at least one of these little guys.”

When I got to the freeway exit where I had arranged to meet David, he was waiting with his wife, Liz; his four ichthyology students, Les, Joe, Charlie and Mark; Mark’s wife, Natalie; and Mark and Natalie’s three kids, Uno, Duo and Teresa.

This exit, near the town of Calhoun, is where a combination of fog and smoke from the local paper mill had caused an accident involving several hundred vehicles earlier in the year. This was one of the many things we talked about while getting acquainted.

It is funny how information comes out in an initial conversation involving several people, all competing for the airwaves. Most people want everyone else to know about themselves, so the information flows freely, with people asking questions not so much to get information as to move the conversation in their desired direction. Here’s a sample of what I mean:

“Hi, my name’s Les. I work for the ‘Daily Beacon,’ the school newspaper, and I want to interview you.”

“My name’s Charlie. Have you ever fished in Russia?”

“No.”

“Neither have I, but I’ve been there.”

David is originally from Watertown, Minnesota. He did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. He and Liz spend summers fishing for lake trout in the waters around their cabin, which is located on an island in a lake near the north end of the Gunflint Trail in the Arrowhead Region of northern Minnesota. All the license plates in the county start with the letters NUJ, so David and Liz acquired Tennessee vanity plates reading NUJ 100 in order to fit right in with their summertime neighbors.

David had laid out an itinerary for the day but warned that it was subject to change. “We’re heading for the tail waters of the Hiwassee River,” he said. “If they’re letting water out of the dam, we’ll have to go elsewhere. The dam generates electricity, and they have other interests as well. They have to maintain a balance, letting water out for whitewater rafting and keeping the water low for trophy trout fishing.”

In discussing directions, I learned that David thinks it’s unfair to travel with maps. “Unfair?” I asked. “Why unfair?”

“It’s cheating,” answered Liz, who then went on to recount a time she and David got lost in someplace like Chicago or somewhere, but for sure, lost for quite some time and he refused to look at his maps.

I'd brought my waders and was told, “That’s cheating, too.”

"O.K.,” I agreed, “I won’t use them. But if using maps is cheating, why are you looking at maps?”

“These are all right,” I was told, “because they’re only county maps.”

I decided not to pursue the argument. After all, I’d be following David and Liz and all I had to do was keep an eye out for their license plate, NUJ 100.

Several months earlier, I had gone to the library to research the Snail Darter. I learned there is something like 144 different kinds of Darters in North America. That’s too much Darter data for me to absorb, so I was glad to have David’s knowledgeable brain to pick. “Are Darters hard to catch?" I asked him.

“Some are catchable with hook and line,” he said. “If you went snorkeling with a fishing pole, you could present the bait to the fish and catch it. One of my friends came up from Alabama to get some Darters for an aquarium. He was mainly interested in the Tangerine Darter, which is tangerine on the bottom and lime green on top. I took my fly rod and caught about six of them in a couple of hours, explaining to my friend that the locals call them river slicks.

While we were fishing, a local man came up to us and asked, ‘Are you getting any?’

‘Yeah, some river slicks,’ my friend replied with a casualness so studied I couldn’t help but laugh at him.”

“Are the Snail Darters in the Hiwassee River a colony you established?” I asked.

“We don’t know, and we’ll never know,” David replied. “We attempted to establish Snail Darters in the Hiwassee, and six years later, they didn’t exist anywhere near where we put them. But we found them in the spot where we’re going today.”

“They probably moved from the place you put them, right?”

“Or they may have been there all the time. I collected 20 of them and compared them with the parent stock, and they were already different. Highly significant differences that make me think they were there all the time. We’re treating them like a transplant species so we can collect and study them. It’s touchy working with an endangered species.”

As we headed for the Hiwassee, mine was the second of four vehicles that traveled down winding country roads. I could see some of the local people sitting on their front porches, probably thinking, “Holy cow! One, two, three, four cars!” The scenery was a combination of farm and forest. Lots of grazing cows, lots of trees and lots of dirt roads, each, according to the road signs, leading to a nearby Baptist church.

When we got to the river, David climbed out of his car and walked back to mine. “This has the makings of a real fishing trip,” he said, his voice heavy with irony.

“Why? Are we lost?”

“No. This is the spot, but the river’s too high because they’re running the generator. We’ll have to find another spot over on Sewee Creek. This would have been the prettiest place to catch a Snail Darter, but its unworkable when the water’s this high.”

We retraced our route. With two farm trucks slowing us down, I could almost hear the porch sitters: “Holy cow! One, two, three, four, five, six cars!”

Like on most fishing trips, we spent a lot of time driving to the location. Our final approach was made on a one-lane dirt road with a one-lane bridge declaring a one-car load limit, and even that looked questionable to me. The road and the old bridge over Sewee Creek were so beautiful I could have spent the day photographing instead of fishing.

We stopped near a vacation cabin where it was easy to access the creek. The weather was perfect, and soon everyone was in the warm water seining fish. Everyone but Les and me, that is. He insisted on interviewing me for an article in the “Daily Beacon.” During the interview we sat on the creek bank near a virtually unnoticeable hole in the ground, home to a nest of yellow jackets. The interview ended when we were swarmed and I was stung on the ear.

When I got in the water, David informed me the group’s kick-netting efforts had so far produced a Redline Darter, a Rainbow Darter, a Snub Nose Darter, six or seven kinds of minnows, a hog sucker and one little spotted bass, also known as Kentucky bass.

This kind of fishing was new to me. It involved using a seine net about 10 feet long and three feet high with a stick running along each three-foot end. One end of each stick was pushed into the creek bottom so the long side of the net was taut along it. The top of the net rose above the water and the current stretched the net, making it like an empty hammock in a hurricane. Two fishers held the sticks while, upstream, the others stood close to one another and walked slowly toward the net, holding hands and doing what they called a kick. The kickers resembled a Broadway chorus line. As David explained, “No fish is going to willingly swim into a net. You have to stir up the mud so the fish can’t see.” Each time the net was brought out of the water, it contained lots of leaves, sticks and stones, snails, nymphs, crayfish and sometimes even fish. The first netting I witnessed produced a single fish. David called it a “log perch.”

“A what?”

“It’s a Darter, but not a Snail Darter.”

In our next netting, we got a fish all of three inches long. “It’s a Redline Darter,” David said. “It’s the only Darter here with orange lips and dark horizontal marks on its cheeks.”

Next we netted a Greenside Darter, then an Emerald Shiner, a Striped Shiner, some other kind of shiner and a Snub nose Darter.

“See this?” David asked, picking up a small snail. “This is the snail that the Snail Darter eats and Larry here is a little known fact: The Snail Darter swallows these snails whole. They don’t crush them like other snail-eating fish do. They digest the insides of the shell and then defecate the shell whole. It’s true! And if you put your head in the water and listen very quietly and carefully, you can hear them grunt.”

I was still laughing when the next netting produced a Redline Darter, a Sculpin, a turd from a giant hickory-horn-devil caterpillar, another one of the snails that the Snail Darter eats but still no Snail Darter. David wasn’t worried. “They’re in here,” he said. “There’s enough food for them.”

The next couple of nettings brought nothing. Then it happened. “There’s a Snail Darter,” David shouted triumphantly.

“Let me hold it, let me hold it!” cried Uno, Duo and Teresa.

David said the Darter, which was about an inch and a half long, had been born in April. “If all goes well,” he told us, “it will live for three years, getting just a little bit bigger.”

David explained that we couldn’t keep the Snail Darter. “Even though I discovered the species and can kill them to study them whenever I need to, I don’t have a harasser’s permit, meaning I can’t legally harass them,” he said.

I said, “Harasser’s permit, David?" Even the kids got this joke.

Next we netted a Greenside Darter. “These Darters all look the same to me,” I said to David. He pointed out the U-shaped marks on the side, which are unique to the Greenside Darter.

In the next few nettings, we got a Satin-fin Shiner, another “young-of-this-year” Snail Darter, another Sculpin and another Redline Darter. Also there was a nymph that David called “a wonderful animal.” He said it turns into a dragonfly “so big it eats other dragonflies.”

My head was throbbing from the bee sting. Though I was glad about getting another Snail Darter and “a wonderful animal,” I wasn’t sure I was having fun.

Next we caught another log perch, also known as a Horn head. “The locals fish for Horn heads during the spawning run,” David said. “They’re after the big eight-to-nine-inch males. They go nuts over them—cut off their heads, gut them and deep-fry them. The bait fishermen like them, too, for Walleye bait.”

The catch reminded David of a story about a game warden working in northeastern Tennessee. “The game warden stopped to check on a fisherman who had two stringers out,” David recalled. “He asked how the fishing was going, and the guy said, ‘I’m getting a few Horn heads.’ The warden checked one string and it had a bunch of Horn heads on it. He asked to see the other stringer and when the guy pulled it up, there was a trout on it. ‘Do you have a trout stamp?’ he asked the fisherman. ‘No,’ said the man. The warden told him he’d have to write him up for keeping the trout. The guy said, ‘But I’m not fishing for trout, I’m fishing for Horn heads.’ The warden said, ‘Well, you’ve got a trout.’ And the guy said, ‘Yeah. I’ve caught him four or five times, so I thought I’d just tie him up until I’m through fishing and then let him go.’”

When we caught a third Snail Darter, David reminisced. “I was snorkeling the first time I ever saw one,” he said. “I looked down at it and saw the dark saddles. First I thought it was a Sculpin, but then I knew it wasn’t a Sculpin. I poked it and put my hands down around it and caught it with my hands. As soon as I got it out of the water and looked at it cupped in my hands, I realized I had a fish nobody had ever seen before. I started walking very carefully.”

I had fished in Virginia earlier in the year with David’s friend, Bob Jenkins. Bob had told me to ask David if Volkswagen microbuses float, so I did. This brought a chuckle from David and the following story:

“When I was going duck hunting one time, I slid the boat off the trailer into the water, detached the boat trailer from my microbus and parked the bus on the hill at the top of the ramp. Because the hand brake didn’t work, I put blocks under the wheels. As I was taking my hunting stuff out the back door, the bus jumped the blocks and rolled into the water. Moving fast, I got my gun, decoys and a pair of hip boots out the door and slammed it before the bus sank.

“I put the spare tire on the boat trailer so people would realize that the trailer belonged to the microbus, which you could see sitting about a foot under the surface. Then I climbed into the boat and went hunting. I figured with the boat gone, anybody would be able to tell I was out in it.

“When a group of Crappie fishermen arrived, they looked down into the back window of the bus and saw what seemed to them to be a floating corpse. In reality, what they were seeing was my extra set of hip boots, which had retained some air and now floated eerily, and definitely lifelessly, in the murky water.

“The Crappie fishermen called the sheriff. After checking in at the scene, he called my office and asked if anyone there knew a Dr. David Etnier. The student who answered the phone said, ‘He’s one of my professors.’ The sheriff said, ‘He could be one of your ex-professors.’ The sheriff then called my wife and told her what had happened. She asked if the boat and dog were there. Told they weren’t, Liz said, ‘Don’t worry, sheriff. He’s duck hunting.’”

My guess is that during our time at Sewee Creek, the net was dipped and pulled about 50 to 60 times. After a couple of hours, we got to a spot where the water was too deep to fish. Besides that, the University of Tennessee was in the middle of its annual football game with Mississippi State and everyone wanted to get to a radio to hear the game. I wanted to get to a store to buy some aspirin.

I’d been keeping my bee sting a secret because I didn’t want them to think of me as a complainer or a wimp. When I let my wound be known, David told me about how he had once been stung by a giant jellyfish called a Portuguese man-of-war. “It happened down in the Florida keys,” he said. “There’s a little fish called a Nomi that lives in the tentacles of the Portuguese man-of-war. I spotted a nice Nomi and dipped it up. I thought all I had was the fish, but the tentacles of the man-of-war had stuck to the net. It got me with a sting that really knocked me back. It lasted about an hour.”

The fishing trip was over. David and Liz left, followed by Les, Joe and Charlie. Mark and his family left last, after giving me a peanut butter sandwich, a Coke and advice that I should wait a couple of hours before leaving because of the after-game traffic in Knoxville.

As I stood on the old bridge, I felt lonely. I seemed to have bonded well with this bunch, and I missed their company. I don’t like feeling lonely, so I busied myself by photographing the bridge and dirt road. Then, after looking in the rearview mirror and seeing how bright red my ear was, I set out to get aspirin and try to make it through Knoxville before the football game let out.

I tuned in the game in order to judge whether I was going to make it through Knoxville in time. With only two minutes and some odd seconds left in the game, I was still 10 miles from the University of Tennessee exit. Tennessee was behind by four points. They needed more than a field goal to win this game.

There were two games going on at once, the University of Tennessee versus Mississippi State and Larry Stark versus football traffic.

Mississippi State lost the ball with less than a minute to go. Tennessee took some time-outs to stop the clock, while my clock kept ticking. Tennessee won the game just as I passed the exit.

Even though football usually holds no interest for me, I got into this game. It took my mind off my ear. And I had clear sailing all the way through Knoxville, on my way east to my next “Fishing America” adventure.