In May I blasted down to Texas. I had my friend Eric with me; we’d hired the worldfamous gator-gar-guide Captain Kirk, and I was dead-set on landing a six-foot
monsterfish as thick around as a trashcan with a head the size of a horse’s skull and a snout full of razor-sharp crocodile fangs. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been fascinated by this fierce and primitive fish, which hasn’t evolved since the Miocene. For five years in Louisiana I tried to catch one, but struck out every time. And for the last few years in Missouri, I’d been writing and researching what I call “garticles”—so it was high time I caught me a Texas alligator gar.
Garfish once covered an area from Canada down to South America, and only a century ago they were indigenous to half of North America. But since gar are valued less than the common lab rat, they’ve been extirpated across the continent—especially alligator gar (the largest of the species), which pretty much only exist below the Bible Belt now.
Within the last three decades, though, biologists and conservationists, along with
government agencies, have been making efforts to study and protect this fish, whose populations have diminished due to overfishing, according to some authorities.
Sportfishing has also been cited as a factor.
But the most compelling argument is that of mass extermination, which was
encouraged by anti-garfish propaganda in the early twentieth century. Echoing the
popular nationwide attitude toward the species, government publications like Fishes and Fishing in Louisiana (Bulletin 23, 1933) helped establish the gar’s reputation as a
destroyer of game fish (i.e., bass, trout, walleye, crappie, catfish, sunfish, etc.) by
publishing comments such as: “Numbered among our most objectionable fishes, they
are a pest to the commercial fisherman and to the angler alike, for their voracity is
responsible for the destruction of great numbers of useful and valuable fishes.”
This attitude led to gars being classified as “trashfish” in close to half the states
by the middle of the century. In fact, up until the 1990s, it was illegal to return gar to the water in most of the states, and fishermen were instructed to destroy them by local and state agencies that didn’t question the speculations justifying garocide.
Because let’s face it: Humans have a set standard for fish beauty, and gar ain’t up
there with rainbow trout.
* * *
The size of le poisson armé (the armored fish—as the French explorers called them back in the 1700s), has been greatly exaggerated—and the mythical figure of twenty feet is frequently attached to the most legendary lunkers. For example, in A History of Fishes (Putnam, 1948), J.R. Norman writes that “the Alligator Gar Pike” can reach “a length of twenty feet or more.” Similarly, in The Angler’s Guide to the Fresh Water Sport Fishes of America (Ronald Press, 1962), Edward C. Migdalski notes, “Many huge sizes have been recorded by word of mouth; even statements of ‘20 feet long’ . . . have been published in past years by reputable scientists.”
The truth, however, is that alligator gar can reach lengths of ten feet if allowed to grow for over seventy years. Still, modern gar hardly ever exceed seven feet—though eight-footers have been recorded in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana during the last century.
As for weight, the world-record alligator gar for rod and reel is 279 pounds, whereas the bowfishing record is 290 pounds. Officially, the largest gar on record is 302
pounds (that one was caught on a trotline), but there have been heavier. According to John James Audubon, a gar “was caught which weighed four hundred pounds.” But in the last hundred years, the largest known alligator gar on record (a nine-foot-six-inch 365-pounder) was caught in the Trinity River in Texas . . . by Captain Kirk.
* * *
Which is part of the reason Eric and I went bombing down to Texas with my stripy
canoe strapped on top of the station wagon. The plan was to fish with Captain Kirk the first day, then go out on our own the next.
Captain Kirk was waiting in the parking lot with his gartruck and garboat, all
fueled up and full of gargear. He was an ex-cop, and with his crew cut and sunglasses, he looked it. Over the last few years, he’d received a lot of press in angling mags and cable shows spotlighting gator gar, and in the past eight years, no client had ever caught anything less than a 130-pounder. And since we’d seen pictures of these behemoths, success was gar-anteed!
Eric and I hopped in his truck, and half an hour later, we were at the launch—
where something reeked. It was over by the shore, buzzing with flies: a hundredpound, five-and-a-half-foot bloated alligator gar.
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Stupid bow hunters!” Captain Kirk growled. “Their daddies taught em to throw
em on the shore, so that’s what they teach their kids. It’s a damn shame.”
Captain Kirk, however, only practiced catch and release. He believed in keeping
the big ones around—if not for his business, then at least because they’re pretty damn spectacular. Plus, they get a bad rap for crimes their species never committed—and this pissed Captain Kirk off.
“Stupids,” he muttered to himself.
The slanderous 1922 garticle “Alligator Gar More Dangeroous [sic] Than So-Called
‘Man Eater’ Shark” in the New Orleans Times-Picayune did not have a writer attached to it and did little to advance anyone’s appreciation of this fish. Since there wasn’t much reliable info regarding gar at the time, fish writers and journalists referenced this text for the following eighty-five years. Hence, many of the unverified attacks listed in this article were repeated to the extent that gar were established in the media as much more aggressive than they actually were. For instance, the anonymous author writes:
If you should happen to emerge from a bath in one of the bays or streams on the
coast of the Gulf of Mexico next summer with an arm or a leg missing or so badly
mangled that you have no further use for it, do not bring the customary
indictment against the shark or the alligator, both of whom can prove a
satisfactory “alibi,” but present the alligator gar to the grand jury, and you will
have little trouble in obtaining the return of a true bill or in convicting him on
expert testimony.
Fear tactics are then employed: “That he is dangerous to persons who enter the
waters he inhabits is certain. There are instances too numerous to be recounted to show that he will attack human beings.”
But where is the evidence?
Sure, the article mentions an alligator gar killing an Italian barber bathing “off
Spanish Fort a few years ago,” as well as a certain Major William Arms, who was
allegedly attacked while washing his hands after cleaning squirrels, but these secondand third-hand defamations of gar character come from sources such as an unnamed “conservation official” and an ambiguous “employee of the State Museum.”
Then there’s the story of James Giggett, who was wading in a spot in the
Mississippi where three students had recently been attacked by what were reported to be sharks. Giggett was also attacked, but he escaped—with bite marks, we are told, from “an alligator gar.” Our author then informs us that this “matter is of record in the State University at Baton Rouge.” Still, there is no reference whatsoever to the specific location of this information, and there are other technical problems with the article (like multiple typos and the fact that it states there are three types of gar in Louisiana, when even back then we knew there were four), which call its credibility into question.
* * *
But back to the Trinity River, where downstream, Captain Kirk pulled up on the bank
and started chopping drum up. Then he set us up with jumbo Shakespeare surf-fishing reels on mongo sturdy Ugly Stiks and told us where to cast.
“If a gar takes it,” he said, “just let her run.”
According to the Captain, the big ones are always female. “In two-plus decades
of garfishing,” he said, “I’ve never caught a male over twenty pounds.”
We stared at the muddy water. It was as thick and dark as chocolate milk.
“If it goes toward the middle,” Captain Kirk continued, “then heads downstream, that’s a gar. But if it heads toward the shore, it’s only a stupid turtle.”
Immediately, Eric got a bite. His float started bopping toward shore.
“Ya Stupid!” Captain Kirk shouted at the turtle. “Get outta here, Stupid!”
And that’s when my line took off, heading downstream, right down the middle.
Eric reeled in and Captain Kirk cast off. The gar was taking line out fast and we
were floating after it while I tried to restrain my inner catfisherman from setting the
hook. But then the float stopped and the V behind it vanished.
“Ya Stupid!” Captain Kirk yelled at the gar. “Ya dropped it, ya stupid Stupid!”
* * *
Loch Ness isn’t the only lake with a mystery beast lurking in its depths. Legend has it
that a plesiosaurus-type leviathan seethes beneath the surface of Lake Champlain, a
109-mile-long lake that snaked between New York and Vermont and reached into
Quebec. The primary sighting of this mythical sea monster is credited to the
seventeenth-century French explorer Samuel de Champlain (for whom the lake is
named), the originator of the twenty-foot gar myth, who allegedly saw a “20-foot
serpent thick as a barrel and [with] a head like a horse.”
Consequently, in the ensuing four hundred years, there have been over three
hundred supposed sightings of “Champ.” But Champlain never claimed to see any sort
of sea serpent. What he did report was a fish known to the Iroquois Indians as
“Chaousarou.” According to Champlain’s journal of 1609:
I have seen some five feet long, which were as big as my thigh, and had a head as
large as my two fists, with a snout two feet and a half long, and a double row of
very sharp, dangerous teeth. Its body has a good deal the shape of the pike; but it
is protected by scales of a silvery gray colour and so strong that a dagger could
not pierce them.
In other words, it was a longnose gar, which is indigenous to Lake Champlain.
We even have Champlain’s illustration of this fish on his map of 1612, with a caption
reading “Chaousarou.” But once word got out that Champlain had seen a fantastic
creature, there was no stopping the machinery of distortion. As a result, there is now a tourist industry thriving off T-shirts, bumper stickers, Champ-burgers, and visitors with binoculars searching for North America’s most celebrated monster next to Bigfoot.
Still, the only thing that’s been discovered on the shores of Lake Champlain (and
other lakes in America where sea monsters have been reported) is our tendency to carry on the historical tradition of big fish making for even bigger fish stories.
* * *
And so the day went on, Captain Kirk taking us from spot to spot—where he’d pull up
and call out, “Okay girls, come and git it!” But we never got a bite after that first hit.
Still, we saw them jumping all around us. And as the heat picked up, so did their
action, until the river was aboil with five-, six-, seven-foot gar, flashing for a splitsecond, then disappearing just like that.
“C’mon Stupids!” he kept yelling at them. “Ya stupid Stupids! C’mon!”
So we watched the gar slapping all day—thirty, twenty, ten feet away.
“We’ll wait till midnight if we gotta,” Captain Kirk told us, kicking back in his
lawn chair on the bow. “It must be this cold front coming in.”
It was seventy degrees out, rather than ninety, and by eight p.m., any fool could
see that the gar weren’t biting. So we packed it up and went back to the launch.
Where once again, I checked out that murdered gar: Its mouth was frozen open,
its eyes were bulging hideously, and a bunch of guts had erupted from a rupture
underneath its neck. And not only that, but there was an arrow hole in the center of its head, writhing with a squiggling sludge of maggot porridge.
“Christ,” Eric said.
“Pee-yew,” I replied.
And we got the hell out of there.
* * *
Garanoia—or Garophobia—dates back to the gargoyle: a Medieval icon that evolved
from pagan vegetation spirits, then metamorphosed Christian-style into your basic
infidels like wildmen, madmen, lepers, witches, and other grotesque social rejects. Such as the standard European Renaissance demon, reflecting trendy traits of the devil: pointy ears, serpent tail, bat wings.
Such garchitecture, of course, had its impact on the garfish—which basically
became the swimming symbol of this out-of-grace anti-angel in the New World. By the 1800s, the species was demonized with nicknames such as “devil fish” and derivatives thereof.
So no wonder gar have been massacred by the masses, sometimes even
lynched—like in the 1960 photo of Don Jones’s gator gar, killed in southeastern
Missouri. And no wonder children familiar with them fear them like the bogeyman.
That’s why there’s a folk tradition of fathers breaking off their beaks, then throwing
them back, to show kids how to deal with a nuisance.
The history of the garfish is the history of the Indians. In fact, gar were native
Americans before the Native Americans were. For gar are the dispossessed, the
persecuted, the poisoned, the imprisoned and enslaved. Who’ve been banished and
dammed (for the most part) to the swamps and rivers of the South. Where the Acadians were dumped and the runaways and outlaws hid. Where the U.S. Army cornered the Miamis, Shawnees, Mingos, Ottawas, Red Sticks, Seminoles, and half the eastern tribes—then wiped them out to make agriculture easier for settlers. So that ultimately, hybrid crappies and fancy bass could be stocked from Canada down to Mexico and claim a stake in a new nation of industry, deforestation, levees, and suburban sprawl.
In other words, since Colonial interests found it necessary to “tame” the land and
water where their churches were installed, the swamps where gar had bred for
millennia had to go—as well as any “pagan” or “savage” elements that could threaten
the stability of a Satan-fearing economy built on the bogs of spawning grounds.
And that’s the way it is.
* * *
The next day, Eric and I went back to the launch, where the massacred gar was still
rotting noxiously—to the point that unloading my canoe became an exercise in not
throwing up. But we got it all loaded up, took off upstream, and found a bend on the
edge of a slow-turning eddy, gars flopping everywhere. This was the spot.
So we broke out our stuff—like my special gar-rod bought at a pawn shop up in
Missouri. It was short and stout and probably meant for paddlefish snagging. It had an oversized baitcasting reel, which I’d strung with one-hundred-pound test and a two-hundred-forty-pound custom muskie leader (and muskies don’t even get that big). Eric, on the other hand, had a seven-foot catfishing rod rigged with sixty-five-pound test and a muskie leader as well.
We cast out, set our poles up on the beach, and sat down on the sand. And for
the next five hours, baking in the blazing rays of the “cold front,” we watched the gar dance across the stage before us, flipping and twisting and slapping the surface.
“C’mon, Stupids!” we yelled at them. “C’mon, ya stupid Stupids!”
They were teasing us, mocking us, laughing at us. But what could we do? They
just weren’t interested in our bait, which was frozen shrimp and shad.
* * *
A 1971 study published by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department concluded that the diet of garfish consists mainly of “forage fish” like suckers, shiners, sheepshead, shad, chubs, carp, bowfin, buffalo, bullheads, gar (yep, they eat their own kind), and other types of garbage-fish commonly considered abundant and disposable. Here are some findings collected from February 1, 1964, to January 31, 1965:
Out of 240 specimens collected, 165 had food in their stomachs. No bugs were
discovered, but 23 crustaceans (mostly crawfish) were, along with 302 forage
fish. There were 63 unidentified remains, 0 amphibians, 3 instances of detritus
(vegetation, sticks, small grains and artificial lures), 4 instances of “unidentified”
(meaning completely unknown food items, due to high degrees of digestion),
and 13 gamefish.
This means that only five percent of the sample examined had ingested game fish—a
statistic found to be consistent with other studies conducted over the next twenty years. The conclusion being that the amount of game fish devoured by garfish is minimal.
These studies were pivotal in establishing that gar play a vital role in controlling
rough fish populations, which are harmful to game fish and their habitats. This
information, however, has been slow to reach the general public. Either that, or the
general public is in denial.
* * *
Anyway, we got completely skunked down in Texas, and so went crawling back to
Missouri with our tails between our legs—all our gar-hopes completely dashed.
A few days later, though, we decided to go fishing on our humble muddy
Midwestern river: the Chariton. Ducking under the poison ivy, we followed the trail
down to the bank, cast our worms out, and tried to act like we weren’t total losers for spending hundreds of dollars and not catching squat.
Suddenly Eric’s line took off, straight and fast, no holding back.
“Set it!” I yelled, and he cranked back. It caught. No doubt, a flathead or channel
cat.
But nope! It was a two-foot-long silvery gar! And Eric was cheering—because we
never had to go to Texas, and we never needed all that gear, and we never needed
Captain Kirk to get ourselves a gar.
And I was jumping up and down. Because Eric was me, losing my garginity. I
mean, that’s what I was seeing, that’s what I was feeling: I was reeling in that gar!
And when he pulled it up on the sand, I grabbed it, just like any fish. And held it
up—all two whopping pounds of it.
It had black spots down by the tail, which meant it was still in adolescence. And
it was serpentine and tubular with hard enamelly diamond-shaped scales. And it was
snapping its needly teeth at us.
Granted, it hadn’t been lurking in the murk for over eighty years—but that
didn’t matter. What mattered was that this simple little shortnose was as jumbo to us as any three-hundred-pound duck-munching gator gar and enough to make it all
worthwhile.
And so we let it go. So it could make its way through the tributaries of America
and propagate its species so that gar could take back the rivers and streams they used to rule before dams and development became the lay of the land.
It was unlikely, though, that this skinny gar could make a difference, but I like to
think it could. And I also like to think that when it porpoised a few seconds later and
slapped the river with its tail, it was waving goodbye—rather than giving us the finger.