The Charles: I Went to Fish

While walking near the Charles River one late spring evening, I spotted a kid, maybe eleven, standing on the small rocky beach of Magazine Beach Park, holding a fishing rod with both hands. I watched as, suddenly, his body tensed. A smaller, lookalike boy ran to him. “I think you got something!” he cried. Without losing focus, the older boy reeled in the line, which held a meaty two to three pound fish on its hook. Only with his hand securely holding his prize did the boy smile ear to ear, and holler to a woman in a nearby car. “Mom! Will you take my picture?”

I had lived next to the Charles for nearly four years but had never seen anyone fish, let alone reel in such a healthy-looking catch. It made me wonder: Could I catch a fish from the Charles River and eat it?

The thought of eating fish from my local river was not random. I crave food that is as close to the earth as I can get and frequently forage for greens, root vegetables, and berries in the same park where I watched the boy (who was now letting his brother have a turn holding the fish) catch his trophy. There is something about consuming food cultivated only by nature that has a magical and almost luxurious quality that sustains beyond a full belly. Rebecca Gilbert, who teaches foraging at the Native Earth Teaching Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, explains that “properly prepared fresh wild foods can help counteract many of the ills of civilization and is a great relief to the body.” 

My shared belief in the almost sacred value of wild food is so strong that I don't mind when other people think it’s weird. So when I got home and expressed to my husband my newfound desire to fish from the Charles, I ignored the face he gave me and instead envisioned the beautiful plate of wild greens and protein — all from our urban river’s ecosystem — that I could make for our dinner.

Though I had never fished, I couldn’t let the prospect go. Seeing the boy catch a fish from the river initiated a Baader-Meinhof-like phenomenon in me, and suddenly I was noticing people fishing on the river all the time. I saw fishermen casting rods in the Lower Charles near the Boston/Cambridge part of the river and upstream near Watertown, too. I watched small fishing Charter boats explore the river’s wide mouth. “Where were these anglers before?” I thought. 

I learned that, if you know where to go, the Charles is an excellent spot for fishing. On The Water, a fishing magazine, called the river an “under-the-radar resource,” which made me feel validated about not realizing its fishing potential. I also learned that the area around Magazine Beach, where I saw the boy catch his fish, is a fantastic place to cast for medium-sized bass (two to five pounds) because of a nearby bridge piling from an old railway that catches baitfish and entices the bass. 

  On a weekday evening, while walking my dog, I saw a man casting his rod near the Harvard part of the river at the grassy banks of the John. W. Weeks Footbridge.  Curious, I asked, “Hey, are you fishing for something?” 

“Yup, anything I’ll get,” he replied. I asked him how often he came out. “I come out when I can. It’s just for fun. Now’s a good time, though.” He looked back toward the water, signaling the end of our conversation. 

“Just for fun” was the refrain I often heard when talking to people fishing on the river. The refrain implied that fishing was strictly recreational. “It would mess your brains up,” said a different man after I mentioned that I wanted to eat a fish from the river.  

 My friend Nico, whom I discovered fished on the Charles after I mentioned the boy I had seen, was excited to share about the river’s fishing potential. “There are many possibilities in the Charles, fishing for largemouth bass, eels, carps, catfish. Trout if you go upriver. Stripers near the Charlestown Bridge.” His excitement might have to do with his rural Italian heritage; where his family comes from, a close connection between land and food is part of everyday life. But still, he fishes for fun, not food. “I would never eat anything from the water,” he told me. “It’s not good for you.” 

It couldn’t be that bad, I thought. The other man’s caution that it would “mess my brains up” reminded me of when a friend’s overly cautious mom told me not to harvest burdock from urban soil because of the slight possibility of lead contamination, and the time when the FDA warned about drinking raw milk. I’ve done both, and I am fine. 

But this concern over the safety of the fish made me realize that, like many people who lived on its shores, I cared for the river but knew little about its actual health — only that it was once disgustingly dirty, noxious even, and that the Standells had written the 1966 song Dirty Water about it. But I also knew that the city had cleaned it up since then. My dog waded in it, and I had swum in it twice — both times with City Splash, an annual state-sanctioned event hosted by The Charles River Conservatory. 

Plus, as I pointed out to my less-than-enthusiastic husband, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health advises that it’s safe to eat fish from the part of the Charles River between the South Natick Dam and the Museum of Science Dam once every six months (with the notable exception of carp, which is a bottom feeder and therefore is in contact with sunken pollutants.). Further up on the river, between Franklin and the South Natick Dam where the river was less exposed to urban pollutants, the advisory gives clearance to eat two meals a month of fish caught in the river (also excluding carp). 

  This clearance for consumption, albeit modest, surprised me. Based on my interactions with fishermen, random conversations with neighbors, and what I had read in online message boards, I had assumed that you shouldn’t eat any fish from the Charles, ever. I wasn’t sure what to believe. The point of wild foods was to make me feel more connected to the land, but my confusion about fish in the Charles made me feel disconnected. To me, fishing wouldn’t be complete if I couldn’t eat my catch. I realized that, out of respect for the river, I needed to learn more about the waterbody and what it had been through to make its inhabitants so inedible before I could consider taking its fish. 

I got digging and found a public website for an old Harvard undergraduate history course about the “Invention of New England.” The course had a section about the Charles River, and from there, I found a link to a report from a 1942 archaeological dig in Boston’s Back Bay that revealed that under what is now Copley Square, near the John Hancock Tower, there was once an extensive ancient fishing ground. The weir was first discovered in 1913 after subway excavators reported to the Boston Transit Commission that they had found “sharpened stakes” while repairing the underground system, but it wasn’t until 1942, when new building construction called for a deep evacuation, that archeologist Frederick Johnson and his team fully uncovered the 4.9-acre-long fishing weir (almost three times the size of a professional soccer field.)

Before Johnson’s dig site served as the foundation for the tallest building in New England, it had been the mouth of the tidal estuary. The fish weirs, made from sassafras, dogwood, and hickory branches all woven together and secured with stakes, were repeatedly repaired and extended over long periods of time to facilitate an uncomplicated communal fishing operation. The fish would come in with the tide, and they would get caught in the structure when it went out. In what modern natives describe as a “communal” process, men, women, and children used baskets and dip nets to gather the fish. 

In 1986, scientists performed radiocarbon dating of the weir and determined that it contained materials ranging from a mind-boggling 3,700 to 5,300 years ago. By 3,500 years before the present day, the changing environment and shifting sediment had likely made the fishing grounds unusable, causing people to abandon the area. The knowledge that a large settlement of Indigenous people had subsided off of fish from the Charles River ecosystem for millennia added a new perspective in my own quest to catch fish, because it deepened my sense of the river’s ability to provide.

The fish weir is symbolically important to modern Indigenous groups whose ancestors used this technology, and each year, members from the Massachusett Tribe and Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe come together to help students build a replica of the fish weir on Boston Common, not far from where the ancient native fish weir was dug up in 1942. The installation brings awareness to the past generations who subsisted off the river before the arrival of colonists. In addition to the Wampanoag and Massachusett tribes, the Nipmuc people lived near and around southern Massachusetts before colonialism. Nipmuc means “People of the Water,” a reference to the nation’s inherent cultural connection to waterways. 

According to Indigenous linguists, the Massachusett called the Charles River Quinobequin, meaning “meandering.” But the river no longer meanders at will or follows a natural flow path. Since the arrival of the colonists, the river has been so bridged, dammed, and molded to fit into our infrastructure that it no longer meanders. Karl Haglund, author of Inventing the Charles, explains that containing the river was not limited to only its main route. Over the past four centuries, most of the river’s tributaries were culverted or placed into tunnels, and many of the ponds, freshwater wetlands, and salt marshes were filled to make room for urban expansion. 

In 1634, colonists built the first grist mill in Watertown. The grist mill’s dam changed the river's flow, captured sediments, and limited fish migration. However, concerns were pushed away because it helped turn corn into cornmeal. Soon, 43 more grist mills were built on the river and its tributaries. The mill ponds created by the dams became dumping grounds for industrial waste, which leached into the river.

Back then, restrictions on pollution didn't exist. In the Massachusetts State Archives, I came across a 1656 ordinance that freely allowed for the dumping of “beast entralls and garbidg [sic]” at Boston’s North Street, directly in the river’s mouth. This lack of regulation laid the foundation for the river’s dirty future. 

When indoor plumbing was introduced to Boston in 1840, waste got siphoned directly into the Charles via a system of pre-existing street drains and newly constructed common sewers, dramatically increasing the bacterial load in the river. Meanwhile, the continuous paving of street and sidewalk surfaces, starting in the 1790s, created impervious surfaces that allowed storm runoff to carry contaminants such as bacteria, phosphorus lead, and Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) into the river. And reports from this time say that human waste could be seen and smelled on the mud flats surrounding the city, the same mudflats that caught fish in the not-so-distant past. 

By 1903, the rising population and increasing sewage flow spurred Boston to build a dam to create a freshwater basin to flood the mud flats and improve water quality.  Instead of improving water quality, the dam construction between East Boston and Cambridge led to worse problems, because it created a settling basin for the heavily contaminated suspended sediments in the water. This was the dirty water that the Standells sang about. 

Dams, more than any other infrastructure, impacted the river's behavior. As a wannabe fisherman, I wondered how the fish population was affected. I connected these two thoughts about the river's industrialization and its ability to supply fish when I came across an academic blog post about Natick’s “Praying Indians” written by Zachary Bennett, a historian who studies the political ecology effects of water power. Natick’s 200-person Ninnimissinuok community, nicknamed Praying Indians because of their outward adoption of the Christian faith, had some of the most secure population numbers of any Southern Massachusett Indigenous community leading into the 18th century. However, by 1753, only 25 families remained, and by the 1790s, only 20 individuals were left. 

For centuries, historians attributed the demise of the notable community to the effects of disease and war. But Bennett argues that it’s more likely that the 1738 damming of the river downstream in Watertown contributed to the community's collapse. The spring runs of fish through the river accounted for 50% of the community’s animal protein, and the extra catch was used to fertilize the nutrient-depleted soil to grow more food. Though Massachusetts Law required the operators of the Watertown dam to build a fish ladder, this law was ignored, and local officials looked the other way. The Native community, unable to fish and farm, began to sell their land and leave. As dams continued to be constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries, migratory fish lost two-thirds of their available habitat. (See the sidebar below on Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Fish Ladders.)

Today, the Charles River is in the recovery process, and it has come a long way. In 1978, the new Charles River Dam replaced the large 1903 dam at the mouth of the river. The new dam was designed to control flooding and sewage build-up while allowing for better fish passage. Then, in 1983, the Conservation Law Foundation filed suit against the City of Boston and the Commonwealth to clean up the dirty, sewage-filled harbor. As a result of the lawsuit, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority created its combined sewer overflow program to help ensure water quality. 

The Clean Charles Initiative was launched in 1995 to make Charles “both fishable and swimmable.” A multi-town effort that started in 2004 to remove illicit storm drain connections has stopped over 48,000 gallons of sewage-contaminated stormwater from flowing into the river every day. This, combined with a secondary treatment plant on Deer Island, has resulted in a 90% reduction of combined sewage overflow since it was first measured in the late 1980s. 

Though swimming in the Charles still requires a permit from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation to ensure that the water is totally safe, the river is deemed safe 70% of the time. But even though the river is cleaner, I still wanted to know why the Department of Health needed to issue consumption advisories. The answer is legacy pollutants, which are chemical remnants of toxic substances used in the past that biodegrade at impossibly slow rates. (See the sidebar below on Legacy Pollutants.)

The role of legacy pollutants in hindering edible fish had me thinking about dams again. As we did with industrial power plants that released legacy pollutants, we built dams on the Charles River without considering how they would hurt the environment. Indigenous people knew and petitioned against them for hundreds of years, but we ignored their knowledge and gas-lit them. A 1665 petition I found at the state archives asked for a piece of land from Native people for a gristmill for “the convenience of all inhabitants.” But in point of fact, the path of industrialization without forethought has been the opposite of a “convenience”: the water is forever impacted, fish species have petered out, migratory patterns have stopped, and fewer fish are available for Indigenous and non-indigenous people to eat. Most people are opposed to legacy pollutants; why not to dams?

The dams haven’t stopped all migratory fish, though. I know, because I caught one. One evening, following my crash course in Charles River fishing history, I purchased a freshwater fishing license and joined my friend Nico to actually go fishing. Along with a rod, I bought a small plastic container of worms to use as bait. The salesman who helped me had been fishing for 45 years. I asked if he had ever gone to the Charles. He hadn’t, but I got the impression that he might try.  

Nico and I went to a spot next to the MIT bridge, on the Boston side, known for catfish and largemouth bass. From there, we could look downstream and see the skylines of Boston and Cambridge. I could also feel the vibrations of cars whizzing down Storrow Drive less than 20 feet behind us. Yet, as the sun set and the golden hour approached, the river’s waters soothed away the urban noise. 

I noticed that we weren’t the only ones fishing that evening. While we cast our rods from a low bank close to the water, an older gentleman wearing a bright blue Middlesex baseball jacket stood on a small concrete bridge under which a small tributary passed. The muddy but running waters of the tributary attracted fish, and using only a lure and line dropped into the water, the man waited for bites. 

An hour later, after learning how to properly cast, I felt the tug of my line and thrill of excitement as Nico told me to “reel in!” When I did, my hook had caught not a largemouth bass or catfish, but a small white fish no bigger than my hand. Neither of us could identify it, and seizing the opportunity, I brought the fish to the older gentleman to ask. 

“Perch!” He answered me in an accent I didn’t recognize.

“Can you eat it?” I asked, making the motion with my hand. He nodded enthusiastically and held up his bag of the same kind of fish. Judging by the size of the bag, he was either going to feed his cats or was fishing for subsistence (and indulging in far more than the Department of Health recommended for a period of six months).

At home, I googled how to cook the fish, which I had confirmed was white perch, and came across a wild foods website which advertised the small white perch as “some of the best table fare there is,” especially when fried whole. Sold on the prospect, I emptied the guts, scaled it, and beheaded the creature before dunking it in a mixture of milk and mustard and then battering it in a bowl of flour, cornstarch, and celery salt. I fried the fish in a layer of hot canola oil in a cast iron skillet for two and a half minutes on each side. 

When it was done, I took a few bites of the fish, pulling out small bones as I went. I realized why the man had caught so many—there wasn’t a lot of meat on it. Anything fried tastes delicious, but still, I felt immensely satisfied with myself. All I could think about as I chewed the white flesh and crispy skin was, “I can’t believe I just caught this from the Charles River.” 

Catching fish from the Charles started as a symbolic quest inspired by my interests as a wild food lover. Being able to fish in its waters makes me feel like the river I love is clean and healthy, even if it's not all the way there yet. But in my pursuit to understand the river’s past and its current ability to provide fish, the quest had also become symbolic in support of food sovereignty and long-term restoration of the river’s health. 

Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Fish Ladders 

In a class on Indigenous food systems that I took as an elective for my food studies master’s degree, the instructor, Ryann Monteiro, of Aquinnah Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent, taught our non-indigenous class about native food sovereignty. Food sovereignty, defined by the Declaration of Nyéléni in 2007, is “the right of peoples to healthily and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems.” 

Food sovereignty moves beyond food security because it recognizes that food is not just a commodity; it’s also related to cultures and ecosystems. For example, food sovereignty recognizes that although a shipment of government-subsidized food to a struggling tribal nation can fill bellies, it cannot fill the equally important cultural and spiritual needs connected to the ability to hunt for traditional foods on protected land. The Alaska-based Muckleshoot Tribe’s buy-back of 93,000 acres of ancestral land is an example of food sovereignty. 

Activists who have worked toward the ecological stability of the Charles River watershed, including the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA), frequently cite food sovereignty as a reason to make crucial changes to the river's layout. Changes would include the removal of unnecessary dams that prevent fish migration and contribute to invasive species growth, cyanobacteria blooms, biodiversity loss, storm flooding, and a decrease in water quality. 

The modern Nipmuc Tribe, descendants of the Natick’s Praying Indians who originally professed to the government that the dam was killing their fish, currently supports the removal of the Charles River dam in South Natick based on the principles of food sovereignty. The Nipmuc Indian Development Corporation (NIDC), a community group that promotes culture revitalization, defines food sovereignty as the “growing, catching, and eating [of] healthy, culturally-appropriate foods,” with the goal of reducing health issues and restoring their relationship to the land. To the Nipmuc, environmental work is connected to their food systems. 

“We see them [the fish] as kin, and we learn from them how to be in right relationship. So when we see those sources being destroyed, we understand that those indicate our own struggles and challenges and lack of health,” said Kristin Wyman to attendees at Natick’s Charles River Dam Advisory Committee meeting in November 2021(which I was able to watch from an online archive). Kristin, a member of the Nipmuc nation who serves on the Native Nipmuc Indian Council, encouraged members of the committee to think long-term about the health of the river and the fish. “It might take some time before we can source the fish and have the nutrients in our lives,” but it would be worth it for a return to “tribal ethics and sovereignty,” she said.

To learn more about the impact of dams on migratory fish and native food sovereignty,  I volunteered for CRWA’s annual spring/summer herring count at The Charles River Watertown Dam. Volunteers for the citizen science project sign up in time slots each week to count the number of fish moving up the fish ladder during the migratory season. Fish ladders are a common solution to encourage fish migration even when a dam blocks the way. The CRWA project counts Blueback Herring and Alewife Herring, two species of ecologically significant migratory fish that are vastly important to the food web and food sovereignty of the Nipmuc, Massachusett, and Wampanoag people.

Twice a week, I put on polarized sunglasses, peered over the dam's edge to the fish ladder, and used a handheld tally counter to count the number of herring that successfully made it up the ladder. Several times in my data sheet, I noted the number of birds hanging out near the calm pool on the bottom of the ladder where the fish congregated before going up the ladder. On my highest count day, I tallied  217 fish in ten minutes, moving up the ladder. Their ingenuity always surprised me. I am not sure if I had a brain that small, I would be able to find the narrow section of the dam, avoid becoming a bird’s dinner, and muscle my way to the top. I wanted to congratulate each one I counted. 

I did not know this when I volunteered for the project, but the CRWA takes a skeptical view of fish ladders. They describe fish ladders as a “band-aid” solution to the stoppage of migratory fish due to dams, because they only allow the passage of certain fish species in certain conditions. And, as I observed, the passage is mentally and physically stressful for the fish. Skeptics of ladders echo my observations that many fish get caught by predators as they wait at the bottom of the ladder to climb up.

 But despite these challenges, 227,560 herring moved up the fish ladder at the Watertown Dam during this migratory season. This sounds like a lot of fish, but without data from a damless, free-flowing river, it’s impossible to make claims about how healthy a number this is. But what is clear is that having no dams would allow for the uninhibited passage of all kinds of migratory fish — and more fish for all kinds of people to catch.  

Restoring food sovereignty is a crucial part of deconstructing white colonialism and is inherently connected to the protection of earth against human-caused destruction and climate change. And, for the modern Indigenous communities living near the Charles, food sovereignty would mean the ability to safely gather, catch, and eat fish from the Charles in the way their cultures once did. Food sovereignty would also mean protecting the abundance of the waters for all non-indigenous users — including me. 

Legacy Pollutants

Legacy pollutants are toxic chemicals that were previously used and are now banned or discontinued. Because of their chemical structure, they break down slowly and linger in the soil and water as they spread out in the ecosystem. Legacy pollutants, among many other scary things, are linked to an increase in the risk of cancers, primarily liver, breast, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as fertility issues, birth defects, and neurological damage. 

Legacy pollutants work slowly and sneakily. For instance, when mercury got dumped into the waterways from coal-powered plants during the industrial revolution, it settled into the sediment and turned into toxic methylmercury. This methylmercury slowly accumulated in the bodies of small fish and then moved up the food chain. Eventually, it accumulated in large predator fish and bottom feeders (such as carp), until they became too contaminated for humans to eat. Researchers estimate that so much mercury from past pollution is currently present in our soil, air, and freshwater that methylmercury will continue to accumulate in the oceans and in fish for decades, even  centuries, to come.

Legacy pollutants are the main reason that although the Clean Charles River Initiative has made the water swimmable, it hasn’t made the fish edible (or at least not more than one every six months). Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a group of industrial chemicals used mainly in electrical equipment until they were banned in 1979, are still present in the tissues of bottom feeders such as carp and largemouth bass that swim in the Lower Charles. They cause liver and immune problems in humans. 

Pesticides and Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a category of man-made chemicals used in cleaning products and non-stick cookware, are also found in the fish in this part of the river. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, PFAS are responsible for fertility issues, increased cholesterol, risk of cancer, changes in fetal and child development, and more. The slow accumulation in our bodies when we eat fish is why the Department of Health suggests moderation.