Every spring, the walleye leave the Ohio shore of Lake Erie and swim north, where Canadian boats out of Wheatley and Port Dover set their nets and take them. The fish then return in refrigerated trucks over the bridge at Detroit to restaurants in Sandusky and Port Clinton, where they are sold to Ohioans as the local catch. An Ohio fisherman who netted that same fish in his own water would be committing a crime. The lake now holds a record 180 million walleye, yet the men who once made a living on them are almost all gone.
To understand how strange that is, it helps to know what this lake once produced. In 1936, boats working Lake Erie brought in 26,787,000 pounds of a fish called the blue pike. That single species accounted for 67% of everything landed on the lake that year, American and Canadian shores combined. It was a fish so ordinary in Cleveland that nobody photographed it, so cheap that it fed people who could not afford anything else, and so abundant that the men catching it assumed it always would be.
Mike Johnson runs trap nets out of Loraine, Ohio. He is one of a handful of men left doing commercially on the American side of this lake what hundreds of outfits did within living memory. When the walleye run through his nets in the spring, he has to let them go. They swim north into Canadian water and Canadian gear, and then a portion of them are sold back across the border into his own state.
As he put it plainly: “The Canadians catch them over there and sell them over here. They’ve got the hammer on us. ”
Start with the water itself, because the water explains almost everything that follows. Lake Erie covers 9,900 square miles, which makes it large.
Its average depth is 58 feet, which makes it a puddle. The whole lake holds 110 cubic miles of water, while Lake Superior holds about 2,900. Into this shallow pan comes the Detroit River, carrying 90% of everything that enters the lake. Four great lakes drain eventually through Detroit.
The drainage basin runs to 29,700 square miles, and 70% of it is American. Shallow water is warm water, and warm water grows fish. Sunlight reaches the bottom across most of Lake Erie, which means plants, which means insects, which means bait, which means predators. Biologists have estimated that this one lake, the second smallest of the five by surface area, holds roughly half the fish in the entire Great Lakes system.
Commercial netting started here around 1840. The gear that industry ran on was the gill net, a curtain of fine mesh hung in open water with cork floats along the top and lead along the bottom, standing in the current like a tennis net a fish cannot see. The net does not chase anything. It simply waits in the dark for a few hours in water the fish have used for 10,000 years.
One boat could set a mile of it. If your grandparents lived anywhere between Toledo and Buffalo, the fish on the table on a Friday night was probably blue pike, and it probably cost less than hamburger. It was a smaller cousin of the walleye, slate gray and blue-backed with an oversized yellow eye. It went out of Sandusky and Ashtabula in iced freight cars to Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York.
Restaurant menus in Cleveland listed it without comment the way a menu now lists chicken. It was not a delicacy. It was a staple. And for 45 consecutive years, it behaved like one.
From 1915 through 1959, the annual blue pike catch on Lake Erie averaged about 12 million pounds. The fish showed up season after season through the First World War, the influenza year, the crash, the Dust Bowl, and the Second World War. The men who fished it built their lives on the assumption that this was simply what the lake did. Boats were financed on it, fish houses were built on it, and sons were raised into it.
There were good years right at the end, which is the part that makes the story hard to see from inside it. In 1944, the lake gave up 24,323,000 pounds of blue pike. In 1949, 23,784,000. In 1955, the total came to 19,685,000, and Ontario’s share of that was the largest Canadian blue pike catch ever recorded.
A man looking at those numbers in 1956 would have concluded that the fishery was in excellent health. He would have been looking at a corpse that had not yet fallen over. The first thing to go was not a fish. It was an insect.
For as long as anyone had lived on the western basin, the last week of June belonged to the mayflies. Hexagenia nymphs spent a year buried in the mud of the lake bottom, then rose all at once in clouds thick enough to blot out the lights at Putin Bay. In 1953, they did not come. The reason was hidden under the surface.
In summer, the lake separates into layers: a warm top layer heated by the sun and a cold bottom layer sealed off underneath it. In a lake with an average depth of 58 feet, the bottom layer does not hold enough oxygen to last the season, particularly once dead algae start raining down into it and rotting. The mud suffocates, and the nymphs in the mud suffocate with it. The International Joint Commission wrote it down without decoration in its 1970 report: the mayfly nymph hexagenia had become extinct in the western basin since 1950 due to oxygen depletion in quiet weather.
By late August of 1967, that same deep water was running at 10% of saturation. Cleveland could taste it. The city’s water intake sat out in the lake, and every summer, when a southerly wind pushed the surface water offshore, the dead water from the bottom rose to replace it and came up the pipe. Algae counts at Cleveland tell the story in one line.
Between 1927 and 1930, the average was 1 to 200 cells per milliliter. By the early 1960s, it ran between 1,300 and 2,400, and the kinds of algae had changed to the kinds that grow in a sewer. Then the blue pike went, and it went faster than anything in the record. In 1957, the lake produced 10,370,000 pounds of them.
In 1958, it produced 1,400,000. The following season, 1959, the total catch of blue pike from every American and Canadian port on Lake Erie came to 79,000 pounds. That is one decent day’s work. Then it got worse in a way that stops feeling like a fishery report and starts feeling like a death certificate.
In 1960, 11,000 pounds. In 1961, 2,000. In 1962, 1,000 pounds, all of it landed in Pennsylvania. In 1963, nothing at all.
By 1964, fish dealers are reported to have sold 200 pounds of blue pike that year across the whole of Lake Erie. Three years later, in the column for Ohio, somebody typed a two-word note beside the empty row: fishery closed. That is the entire obituary of the most productive freshwater fish stock in North America. There is one specimen everybody in Ohio knows about.
In 1962, on hook and line off Kat, a man named Jim Anthony caught a blue pike. He took it home, put it in his freezer, and left it there for 37 years. In 1999, he handed it over to the University of Toledo. All because he understood before the scientists did that he was holding the last of something.
So what killed it? Nobody can give a clean answer. The fight over it is still alive. One camp blames the nets and has the arithmetic to argue it.
Another camp blames the water and points at the oxygen numbers, the smothered spawning reefs, and the silt washing off farms in the Mami Valley. A third points at biological invasion, because rainbow smelt and alewives arrived in the same decades and ate the same young fish the blue pike needed. A fourth notes that blue pike appear to have been prone to boom and bust cycles long before anyone dumped anything in the lake. Most fisheries scientists say the honest answer is all of them at once, which is another way of saying that no single person can be blamed and no single decision can be undone.
Whatever the cause, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed the blue pike as endangered in 1967. In 1983, the agency declared it extinct. It is one of very few American fish ever given that status. And to this day, the Ohio Division of Wildlife fields calls from people convinced they have caught one.
Rewards have been posted, and frozen fish have been mailed in. Travis Hartman of the Ohio DNR has given the standard answer: if there were any number at all left out there, somebody would be catching them regularly by now. And here is where the story turns on itself, because the blue pike may never have existed as a separate thing at all. It was named a distinct species in 1926 on the basis of body measurements, then demoted to a subspecies of walleye.
In 2014, fish geneticist Carol Steppian and a graduate student ran the DNA of museum specimens against modern walleye and found nothing to separate them. Her summary was blunt: “They were never distinct from walleye. ” If she is right, what vanished from Lake Erie was not a species but a population, a deep-water form of an ordinary fish that occupied a niche the lake stopped providing. The men who fished it do not accept that, and their objection is not sentimental.
They handled millions of pounds of both fish in the dark, by touch and by eye, and sorted them apart on a moving deck without thinking about it. Call it a color morph, if the DNA demands it. The people who paid their mortgages on the difference never once got the two confused. The walleye went next.
It went the same way. 1956 was the biggest walleye year Lake Erie has ever recorded, at 15,450,000 pounds. Three years later, the lake produced 3,100,000 pounds. Three years after that, in 1962, the whole lake, five jurisdictions, two countries, every licensed boat on the water landed 717,000 pounds of walleye.
That is a 95% cut in the one thing the boat, the gear, the loan, and the crew all exist to catch. Boats came off the water and did not go back on. Fish houses in Sandusky and Huron shut their doors. Nets went into sheds, and in a lot of cases, they never came out again because the men who knew how to hang them took other work.
Now, walk upstream and look at what was arriving. In 1970, the International Joint Commission put a number on what was coming through the Detroit River: every year that one river delivered into Lake Erie an estimated 61,200 million pounds of total solids, 182 million pounds of oxygen-demanding waste, 252 million pounds of nitrogen, 35 million pounds of phosphorus, and 6,600 million pounds of chlorides. The commission’s own summary of the river was four words long: “by far the greatest source. ”
Those numbers had addresses along a 30-mile stretch of riverbanks: the Ford Rouge complex, Great Lakes Steel at Ecourse, McLouth Steel at Trenton, Wyandotte Chemicals, Allied Chemical, and Zug Island where the coke ovens burned.
Every one of them had an outfall pipe because in 1955 that is simply how a factory on a river was built. The pollutant that actually restructured the lake was not exotic. It was phosphorus, the same element in fertilizer and dishwasher powder. The commission’s tables put roughly 60 million pounds of it entering Lake Erie every year, 35 million from the Detroit River.
Feed that to a warm, shallow lake, and it does what fertilizer does anywhere. Algae bloomed, died, sank, and rotted. The rotting pulled the oxygen out of the bottom water and suffocated the mayflies. One figure out of the enforcement record gives the scale.
In July of 1965, the Detroit River was reckoned to be carrying something on the order of 70,000 pounds of soluble phosphate into Lake Erie every day. Not a year, a day. That is a freight car of fertilizer tipped into the shallow end of the lake each morning before breakfast. Some of it came out of the nation’s kitchen sinks.
Postwar detergents were built on phosphate compounds, sodium tripolyphosphate, and its relatives, because phosphates softened hard water and made the new automatic washing machines work. Sales exploded through the 1950s. Every load of laundry between Chicago and Buffalo sent a measured dose of plant food down the drain into a sewer into a river into Lake Erie. At the height of it, the detergent industry told regulators flatly that no substitute existed and that finding one would take years of research.
They were wrong about that. Cleveland had its own contribution. The Cuyahoga River came down out of the industrial valley past Republic Steel and Jones and Laughlin. By the 1960s, the lower 6 miles of it were, by any ordinary measure, not a river but a channel of waste.
In 1969, Time magazine estimated that Cleveland was putting 1. 5 billion gallons of waste a day into the lake. That figure is a magazine’s estimate rather than a gauged measurement, but nobody in the city disputed the order of magnitude at the time. There was also the dredging, which is the part nobody remembers.
To keep the shipping channels open at Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo, the Army Corps of Engineers scooped contaminated sludge out of the river mouths and then dumped it back into the open lake a few miles offshore because that was cheap and because it had always been done that way. And then there was Sarnia on the Canadian side of the St. Clair River upstream of everything. Dow Chemical of Canada ran a chlor-alkali plant from 1949 to 1970 that used liquid mercury as an electrode.
Over 21 years, the plant is estimated to have lost about a hundred tons of it into the river. Nobody hid this. It simply did not occur to anyone that it mattered because metallic mercury sinks and sits there. What nobody had accounted for was bacteria.
Microorganisms in river sediment convert metallic mercury into methyl mercury, which is soluble, which enters the food chain, and which concentrates as it moves up. The water samples were clean. The commission noted this precisely: mercury in water taken from the St. Clair and Detroit rivers came in below the detection limit.
Then somebody tested the fish. Walleye out of Lake St. Clair ran as high as seven parts per million, roughly 14 times the limit then considered safe to eat. Nobody had thought to look.
The man who found it was a graduate student. Norvald Fimreite, working at the University of Western Ontario, had trained in Sweden where mercury and fish had already caused a scandal, and he wondered whether anyone had looked in the Great Lakes. Nobody had. He tested fish from Lake St.
Clair in the winter of 1969 and 1970, and the readings came back at multiples of the safe limit. He took them to the Ontario government. Within weeks, a graduate project had closed an international fishery. In March 1970, Ontario banned commercial fishing on Lake St.
Clair and on parts of Lake Erie outright. Michigan and Ohio followed. For the Ohio fleet, this was the blow that landed on a body already down. They had lost the blue pike in 1959.
They had watched the walleye fall by 95% by 1962. Now, in the spring of 1970, with the ice barely out, the state told them the fish they could still catch were poison. The lakewide walleye catch that year came to 99,000 pounds. Two full seasons went by with almost nothing moving off the docks.
There was one consolation, and it was thin. Canadian prosecutors went after the polluters, and the mercury cases produced some of the first criminal charges in North America brought against industry for contaminating a waterway. It did not put a single Ohio fisherman back to work, and it did not unpoison a single walleye, but it established that a company could be in the dock for what came out of its pipe. Now go back five years, because while the fish were vanishing, something else was happening on shore, and it started with a car dealer.
David Blaushild sold Chevrolets in Shaker Heights on the east side of Cleveland. He was not a scientist or an activist. He was a businessman who liked the lake, noticed it was turning into something else, and had access to one thing most concerned citizens did not: advertising. In July 1964, motorists drove past a sign 80 feet long and 20 feet high that read, “Let’s stop killing Lake Erie.
Have your council vote anti-pollution. ” Blaushild had talked the billboard companies into giving him 15 boards around Cleveland for nothing. It is one of the strangest facts in American environmental history that the first mass campaign to save a great lake was run out of a car showroom. The billboards were the visible part.
The petitions were the machine. Blaushild’s Save Lake Erie campaign collected signatures through the summer of 1964 and into 1965. One account has over half a million gathered between June and August; another has more than a million by the end. The figure that can be checked is this: 26 towns along the lake passed his resolution.
In April 1965, he carried the petitions to Columbus and handed them to Governor James A. Rhodes. The next step is the one that made it matter. Rhodes did not file them.
He forwarded them to John W. Gardner, the United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, with a request that Washington convene a federal enforcement conference on the pollution of Lake Erie. A sitting Republican governor asked the federal government to come into his state and hold his own cities to account. The request was granted on the 23rd of June 1965.
The conference sat in Cleveland from the 3rd to the 5th of August and reconvened in Buffalo from the 10th to the 12th, with five states at the table: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Indiana. The man running it was Murray Stein, the federal government’s enforcement chief, a lawyer who had spent a decade dragging municipalities into rooms like this one and asking them on the record what exactly they were putting in the water. The conference had no power to order anything. It could only publish.
And that turned out to be enough, because what it published was a city-by-city accounting of who was discharging what, entered into a public record with names attached at a moment when the newspapers in four states were finally interested. Detroit was named, Cleveland was named, Toledo, Erie, Buffalo, Loraine, Sandusky. For the first time, the pollution of Lake Erie had a list of authors rather than a general air of regret. And it kept sitting.
The Lake Erie Enforcement Conference did not finish in 1965. It reconvened session after session and was still meeting in Detroit on the 3rd and 4th of June 1970, its fifth session five years after Blaushild handed over his petitions. Across those same five years, the lakewide walleye catch fell from 783,000 pounds to 99,000. At the far end of the lake, there was a second amateur, and he was even less likely than the car dealer.
Stanley Spisiak made and sold jewelry in Buffalo. He also ran the Erie County Fisherman’s Association, and he had spent years hauling his own nets out of water that came out black, then carrying samples of it to hearings where officials explained that the matter was under review. He had been making the same complaint for 15 years. On the 25th of August 1966, President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson came to Buffalo and took a boat out into the harbor.
Spisiak was aboard. He had brought with him a bucket of sludge dredged from the bottom of the Buffalo River and a spoon. At the right moment, he held the bucket up to the president of the United States, put the spoon in it, and lifted out a dripping gray mass so the man could see for himself what the bottom of an American harbor was made of. Two weeks later, Johnson issued an order stopping the Army Corps of Engineers from dumping polluted dredge spoil into the open waters of the Great Lakes.
Years of conferences had not managed that. A jeweler with a pail did it in an afternoon. Around Buffalo they started calling him Mr. Lake Erie, and the name stuck for the rest of his life.
In November 1967, Cleveland elected Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of a major American city. He inherited a shoreline that whole neighborhoods had grown up swimming off, and he inherited the reason they had stopped. In 1969, of the 62 public bathing beaches along Ohio’s stretch of Lake Erie, three were rated safe to swim in.
The International Joint Commission survey put it in its own language: the bathing beaches near Toledo, Cleveland, Erie, and Buffalo were a direct hazard to health, with coliform counts running as high as a million organisms per 100 milliliters against an acceptable level of a thousand. A thousand times over. So Stokes did the only thing available to him. He built swimming pools at the beaches.
Concrete tanks of chlorinated water put up on the sand beside one of the largest bodies of fresh water on Earth so that children in Cleveland would have somewhere to swim in the summer that would not make them sick. He also asked the city for money. In 1968, Cleveland voted on a $100 million bond issue to rebuild its sewers and its treatment plants. It passed, 66% in favor.
Two out of every three voters in a shrinking industrial city agreed to pay more so that the lake might come back. Then, on the morning of the 22nd of June 1969, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River caught fire under a railroad trestle near Campbell Road. The river, not the lake. It burned for well under half an hour before the fireboats put it out.
Damage came to about $50,000 to two trestles. There were no injuries. What made it famous is that the Cuyahoga had burned before, at least a dozen times since 1868, and the 1952 fire had been vastly worse. Nobody outside Cleveland had cared.
In 1969, the country was ready to care. When Time magazine ran the story that August, it illustrated it with a photograph of flames on the water. The photograph was from 1952; there were no good pictures of the 1969 one because it had been put out too fast. The image did its work anyway.
Within three years of that photograph, the United States had a federal environmental agency and a Clean Water Act. Stokes refused to let the story stay a joke about Cleveland. He walked the riverbank for the cameras the next morning and pointed out that the pollution came down from upstream cities that paid Cleveland’s costs and none of its taxes. Three months later, the lake took something else, and this loss had nothing to do with chemistry.
Euclid Beach Park had stood on the Cleveland lakefront since 1895, run for most of that time by the Humphrey family, who also made the popcorn balls and the taffy that every child in the city associated with summer. It had the Thriller, a wooden coaster that dropped riders toward the water, a carousel, a dance hall, and a beach people were allowed to swim off. On the 28th of September 1969, Euclid Beach Park closed for the last time, and the demolition crews came in. Why it closed is genuinely disputed.
The park’s own management pointed to costs, to an aging plant, and to a city that no longer came. Others point to the collapse of the swimming beach and the general flight of money out of the east side. There were also years of racial tension over the park’s admission practices. Most likely all of it is true at once.
None of the laws that followed were written for the fisherman. Not one line of any of them. By the time Washington moved, the nets were already stacked in the sheds at Vermilion and Huron. The blue pike was long gone.
What the new statutes protected was drinking water, swimming water, and the idea of a lake, not the men who had made their living taking fish out of it. The first tool the government reached for was 80 years old. The Refuse Act of 1899 had been written to keep shipping channels clear of debris, and it contained a sentence forbidding the discharge of any refuse into navigable waters without a permit. In 1970, the Justice Department dusted it off, and Attorney General John N.
Mitchell brought suit against companies discharging cyanide and mercury into the Great Lakes system. In December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency came into existence, assembled out of pieces of half a dozen departments. In April 1972, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the first agreement in which the two countries jointly committed to numbers rather than intentions. And in October 1972, over a presidential veto, Congress passed the Clean Water Act.
Lake Erie is not the only reason those three things exist. It is by a wide margin the most cited one. They worked too. Phosphorus loading into Lake Erie fell by roughly 60% between the late 1960s and the early 1980s.
Sewage plants around the basin were rebuilt to strip phosphorus out. Detergent makers reformulated. The central basin stopped running out of oxygen every August. By the 1990s, the mayflies had come back to the western basin in numbers that once again annoyed everybody in Port Clinton.
But there was a reversal on the way there. In the autumn of 1971, with several states and cities having already banned or limited phosphates in detergent, the federal government changed its mind. The substitute the industry had adopted, a compound called NTA, had shown troubling results in animal studies. Rather than manage that, the administration’s own officials went in front of the country and advised people to go back to buying phosphate detergents.
Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, who had written most of the water legislation of that decade, called it what it was: poor public policy. Local bans were undercut. And for several more years, the sewers of four states kept carrying plant food into the shallowest of the Great Lakes. Now come back to the boats, because 1972 is the year the two halves of this story cross.
The mercury restrictions eased, and Ohio’s commercial fishery was allowed to go back to work. It went back under new rules. The most important of them was a single reclassification. Walleye was no longer a commercial species in Ohio waters.
It was a sport fish. Whatever came up in a commercial net had to go back over the side, alive or dead. The reasoning was not corrupt. It was not stupid.
A walleye caught by a charter customer generates a boat charter, a motel room, a tank of gas, a license fee, a case of beer, and a meal. A walleye caught in a net generates the price of a walleye. By the mid-1980s, researchers were publishing formal allocation studies on exactly this question for Ohio’s portion of the lake, and the sport side won the comparison on almost every economic measure anyone chose to run. So the state made a choice, and it made it at the worst possible moment for the men on the wrong side of it.
They had just lost the blue pike. They had just lost two seasons to mercury. And now the one species with any real prospect of recovery was removed from their license permanently. Everything that came back afterwards came back for somebody else.
The gill net itself survived another 11 years. Ohio permitted gill netting in Lake Erie right through the stock collapse and well past it, and only outlawed it in 1983, the same year the blue pike was formally declared extinct. Whether the gear had caused the crash is still argued. What is certain is that the ban arrived a quarter of a century after the crash it is often credited with preventing.
Take away the gill net, and the whole economics of the business changes. What remained legal was the trap net, a fixed maze of netting anchored to the bottom that funnels fish into a holding pot and keeps them alive. It is far more selective, which is the point. A crew can release what it is not allowed to keep.
It is also heavier, slower to lift, more expensive to build, and far more vulnerable to a storm. Then came the part that turned a restriction into a sentence. Ohio stopped issuing commercial fishing licenses. The ones in existence were capped, and the state will not create new ones, which means the only way into the business is to acquire somebody else’s operation, and there are almost none to acquire.
A recent count found 18 commercial fishing licenses in Ohio held between 10 businesses. Within living memory, the number of outfits on this shore ran into the hundreds. Now look north. On the Canadian side of the same lake, working the same water, roughly 175 licensed commercial companies operate.
Ontario’s fleet keeps its walleye, which Canadians call pickerel, and sells it. And a great deal of it crosses back into the United States, because the market for Lake Erie walleye is on the American shore where the people are. The fish never changed, only the side of the line it was caught on. The Ohio survivors got a quota system in 1996, allocating pounds of yellow perch and white bass among the remaining licenses.
Perch became the business. It is a smaller fish, a slower fish, and a fish with a thinner margin, but it is the one a trapnetter in Ohio is still permitted to sell. Then they shot themselves. In 2005, a poaching investigation broke open a long-running scheme in which Ohio commercial fishermen had been landing far more than their quota and falsifying the paperwork, something on the order of 40 tons of illegally taken fish.
By the time the prosecutions were finished, roughly a third of the commercial fishermen working the central and western basins had been implicated. The man who blew the whistle from inside the industry, Rick Mickey, did not live to see the end of it. It is hard to overstate what that did. Every argument the sport lobby had ever made about commercial netting — that it could not be monitored, that the men would take what they could get away with, that the only safe quota was zero — had just been demonstrated by the fishermen themselves.
Whatever political room existed for loosening the rules closed. It has not opened since. The ones still working are not quiet about it. Holly Such fishes with her husband Mike out of a port east of Toledo and has made the same case for years: that the state’s own survey numbers do not support the scarcity it keeps invoking, and that the allocation is political rather than biological.
“Ohio favors catching fish that you can hang on a wall,” she has said, “more than catching fish that you can put on a plate. ” That is the decision the state made in 1972 and has renewed every year since. It is not hidden. It is not even especially controversial.
It is simply not a decision anyone ever explained to the men it ended. There is one place the state did spend money on them, and the timing is almost unbelievable. Between 1983 and 1985, the years the gill nets were outlawed and the blue pike was declared extinct, two folklorists from the Ohio State University Center for Folklore Studies, Timothy C. Lloyd and Patrick B.
Mullen, went up and down the Ohio shore with tape recorders to document commercial fishing as a living tradition. They collected around 45 hours of recorded tape and 746 pages of transcription drawn from 25 interviews, plus photographs of the boats, the docks, and the net reels. It became a book, “Lake Erie Fishermen: Work, Tradition, and Identity,” published by the University of Illinois Press in 1990. Read that sequence again.
In the same span of years, one arm of the state of Ohio outlawed the gear these men worked with, and another arm sent scholars to record how they worked with it. Nobody planned that. It is simply what happens when a thing is ending and everyone can tell. What is on the tapes is not nostalgia.
It is work. How to read a chop and decide whether to lift. What a full net feels like through the reel before it breaks the surface. The names for the parts of the gear, the grudges between ports.
The men describing all this were in their 50s and 60s, which means they had learned it in the 1930s and 1940s from men who had learned it in the 1880s, and it had come down the line effectively unbroken for a hundred years. If your father fished Lake Erie, you fished Lake Erie. And the license and the boat and the ground he worked came to you the way a farm comes to a son. What happened in Ohio between 1959 and 1983 did not just remove an industry.
It removed an inheritance. And it did so in a way that made it nobody’s fault in particular: a fish that vanished, a metal nobody knew about, a reclassification, a gear ban, a license that could not be replaced. Walk the waterfronts now at Vermilion, Huron, and Conneaut, and there are restaurants, condominiums, and a museum or two where the fish houses stood. Then look at the water, and the water is full of fish.
Port Clinton, meanwhile, calls itself the Walleye Capital of the World, and on New Year’s Eve, it lowers a 20-foot fiberglass walleye over Madison Street at midnight while a crowd counts down. That is what the fishery turned into: a mascot, a marina economy, hundreds of charter captains selling a morning on the water and a cooler of fillets to take home. It is a real industry and a good one. It is also the same fish off the same reefs earning its money in a way that requires the man with the net to stay on the dock.
The walleye came back, not slowly and not partially. Phosphorus controls cleaned the spawning reefs. The 1983 gear rules took pressure off. An enormous natural hatch arrived in the 1980s, and the stock climbed.
In 1980, the entire Lake Erie commercial walleye catch was 1,858,000 pounds. By 1988, it was 7,589,000. In 1996, it hit 10,937,000 pounds, which is two-thirds of the way back to the legendary season of 1956. The lake had healed.
Now look at how that harvest was divided. In the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s ledger, the column headed Ohio for the species walleye reads zero. It reads zero in 1980. It reads zero in 1988.
It reads zero in 1996, when the lake gave up nearly 11 million pounds of walleye and essentially every pound of it was landed by a Canadian boat. It has read zero every single year for more than four decades. Not one pound. That is what a recovery with an owner looks like.
The cleanup was paid for on both shores by the 66% of Cleveland voters who taxed themselves in 1968, by every household in four states that paid a sewer bill, by the plants that installed phosphorus removal, by the detergent companies that reformulated. The fish that came back went to the fleet that was still legally allowed to catch them, which was the fleet on the other side of an invisible line in the middle of the water. Ontario’s fishery is not a leftover either. It is routinely described as the largest freshwater commercial fishery in the world, run out of ports like Wheatley and Port Dover with big steel boats and a processing industry behind them.
And its customers are largely American, because the appetite for Lake Erie walleye lives in Ohio, Michigan, and Western Pennsylvania. The fish is filleted in Ontario, boxed, trucked south over the bridge at Detroit, and sold into the exact towns whose own boats are forbidden to catch it. So the walleye on your plate at a lakefront restaurant in Port Clinton, in sight of the water it came out of, was quite possibly netted by a Canadian crew, processed in Canada, and imported. It is genuinely a local fish.
It is also legally a foreign product. Nothing about that is fraud, and nothing about it is hidden. It is simply the shape the rules made. Which brings us back to Mike Johnson in Loraine lifting a trap net in April with walleye rolling in the pot and putting every one of them back.
They swim north through the summer into Canadian water, where a Canadian net is waiting legally. Some of them return to Ohio in a refrigerated truck. “The Canadians catch them over there and sell them over here,” he said. “They’ve got the hammer on us.
”
The lake did not stay fixed either, and the second failure rhymes unpleasantly with the first. Starting in the mid-1990s, the algae came back to the western basin. Not the same algae, and not for the same reason, but green water in August all the same. The sewer plants built with Cleveland’s bond money were still working.
The detergents were still reformulated. The phosphorus was arriving anyway, from somewhere. That somewhere is farmland. The Clean Water Act was written to regulate pipes, and it is very good at pipes.
What it barely touches is what runs off a field after a spring storm. Dissolved phosphorus from fertilizer and manure carried by the Maumee out of a watershed of several million acres of corn and soybeans arrives in exactly the shallow, warm corner of the lake where it does the most damage. There is no outfall to inspect and no single company to name. That is precisely why it has proved so much harder than the first fight.
On the 2nd of August 2014, the city of Toledo told roughly 400,000 people not to drink their tap water, not to boil it (boiling concentrates the toxin), and not to bathe small children in it. The Collins Park treatment plant had detected microcystin produced by a cyanobacteria bloom sitting over the water intake in the western basin at levels above the guideline. The order stood for three days. Toledo is the same city that sat at the enforcement conference table in 1965 and was named for what it was discharging.
Forty-nine years later, it could not supply its own residents with drinking water out of a great lake, and the cause was not a factory anyone could shut. Bottled water sold out across northwest Ohio within hours. The National Guard trucked supplies in, and restaurants closed. It is Carl Stokes’s swimming pools again in a different form: a city standing beside an ocean of fresh water hauling in the clean stuff by truck.
The blooms have not stopped. The one in 2015 was the largest ever recorded on the lake. Under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the United States and Canada jointly committed to cutting phosphorus loading into the western basin by 40% by 2025. That target was not met.
Neither country pretends otherwise. Set against that, the rest of the ledger genuinely is good news. The mayflies are back in numbers that fill gas station freezers in June. The central basin’s dead zone still forms most summers but no longer smothers the whole floor.
And the walleye population has been estimated in recent years at around 180 million fish, the highest figure ever put on it — a stock in better shape than it was in 1956, when the whole lake gave up 15 million pounds of them. So here is the accounting plainly. The water came back. The insects came back.
The walleye came back so hard that biologists have had to keep revising the estimate upward. Two things did not come back. Neither of them ever will. The first is the blue pike, gone since 1959 in any commercial sense, listed as endangered in 1967, declared extinct by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1983.
Twenty-six million pounds in a single year, then nothing inside a human working life. There is no stocking program, no captive population, no plan. The lake that produced more of them than anywhere on Earth cannot produce one. The second is the fishery on the American shore.
And this is the one that is worth being precise about, because it did not die of pollution. It died of law. The water it needed was cleaned up at enormous public expense. The fish it wanted is at a record high.
What stands between an Ohioan and a commercial walleye is the 1972 reclassification, the 1983 gear ban, and a license system that issues nothing new. Eighteen licenses, ten businesses, hundreds of outfits within living memory reduced to that. The blue pike, meanwhile, refuses to stay buried. The specimen Jim Anthony kept in his freezer for 37 years is in a collection at the University of Toledo.
Rewards have been offered over the years for a verified living fish, and people do still send things in: a gray walleye with a big eye out of the Niagara, a photograph from a boat on the Ohio shore, a fish somebody’s uncle froze in 1971 and forgot. And the argument underneath it will not close. If Carol Steppian is right and the DNA says the blue pike was never separate from the walleye, then what Lake Erie lost was a way of life for a fish, a deep-water, cold-water form that the lake stopped being able to support and might in principle produce again someday. If the fishermen are right, and 40 years of handling the two species on a wet deck at four in the morning counts as evidence, then something unrepeatable went out of the world in about 1959.
There is no experiment that settles it. The last of them are in jars. Most of the men on those Ohio State tapes are dead now, and what they were describing was already a memory. The gill net rigs, the ice houses, the reefer cars going east.
A Friday night in Cleveland when blue pike was cheaper than beef. Seven hundred forty-six pages of it in a university archive in the state that wrote the rules. In April, when the run comes through, Mike Johnson still lifts his trap nets off Loraine. The pot comes up heavy with walleye in the best spring the lake has had in a century.
Thousands of dollars of fish rolling in the mesh. And he tips them back over the side, because that is what the law requires. Every fish, every spring. The nets go down again for perch.
The walleye swim north. Some weeks later, those same fish come back over the Ambassador Bridge in a refrigerated trailer, filleted and boxed. And the waitress in a restaurant on the Ohio shore sets one of them down in front of somebody who has driven from Columbus for a taste of Lake Erie. It is the right fish out of the right water, an hour from where it was born.
It just isn’t theirs anymore.