Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook. I imagine walking through a forest and pausing to read these illuminating pages aloud to a listening cedar or a dipper. There are field guides that help us to see, and to name, and to know; Cascadia Field Guide does all of that and more. This is a guide to relationship, a gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Tomcod/Bocaccio
(Sebastes paucispinis)
Tomcod is a name used for two very different fish, but the one we’re talking about here is of the rockfish (Sebastes) variety. Some call them Salmon Grouper, Salmon Rockfish, Slimy, Red Snapper, or Bocaccio. Bocaccio means “mouth” in Italian, and like most rockfishes, Tomcod do have large mouths (and eyes). They are rusty orange and mottled, and adults reach about the length of a Human arm.
Fish in the Sebastes genus generally are long-lived, and Tomcod is no exception, living (we think!) fifty years or so. Females only begin reproducing at twenty years of age, which makes Tomcod very susceptible to overfishing in regions where there is a commercial harvest. Enough of the youngsters must be preserved to grow into reproductive vigor for the population as a whole to thrive.
Rockfish are unusual in that, rather than releasing their eggs to the sea, females hold them internally and give birth to live young. As young larvae, Rockfish eat whatever drifts by them and can fit in their small mouths. Once large enough, they begin eating fish and squid. Don’t be shocked, but Rockfish like best of all to eat Rockfish!
Tomcod is generally the name used for younger fish, which are more easily and often caught, as they live in shallower kelp forests. Since 1990, there has been a precipitous decline in Bocaccio numbers in British Columbia, where they are listed as endangered. Puget Sound’s population was overfished, and today neither commercial nor recreational catches are permitted; Bocaccio in this population is listed as endangered. Offshore of Oregon, though, in wild Pacific waters, Tomcod still thrives.
Tom Cod
A Cod is not a Cod
If he’s a Tom.
Cod is a misnomer
since he’s actually
a fledgling
Rockfish,
Juvenile Bocaccio,
Who could grow
to be a Big Mouth
darter in the deep—
and then, perhaps,
at thirty or forty,
a sanguine moon
held up in the gillnet,
then crated into
the freezer truck,
laid flat on the ice-bed
at the market
where a man will
shovel ice chips.
Colder, colder.
Or, if the ocean were our indoors,
willowy seagrass our décor—
a baby fish, Tom Cod in the creche,
swimming under platforms by the oil jets.
He will grow and leave the shallows
relishing the sunken chill of colder
depths. He’d get out; he’d escape.
But that is just a wish.
No place is cold enough.
As a poet, I too craft a net.
All this slanty rhyme and
holes in the meter somehow
weave and snare a small
and unsuspecting fish.
Oh to dismantle all of it!
Frances McCue is a poet, writer, arts instigator, and professor. She’s the cowriter and coproducer of Where the House Was, a feature documentary about gentrification and poetry. Her poetry books read as novels, taking us through the life of a stenographer who refuses to take dictation (The Stenographer’s Breakfast), or the world of Marrakesh where a tragedy ensues (The Bled). Timber Curtain traces Seattle’s Hugo House building into redevelopment. McCue is engaged in a new literary startup: Pulley Press, a poetry imprint.
Raya Friday is a member of the Lummi nation whose tribal lands are situated on the edge of the Salish Sea near Bellingham, Washington. She was born and raised in Seattle where, from an early age, she focused most of her time and energy in the arts. Since 1995, she has worked primarily in glass. Friday earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University in New York and, while there, started working at the renowned Corning Museum of Glass first as a technician and later as an instructor. Friday returned to the Pacific Northwest to be close to the land and community she loved. In 2019, she decided to return to school to pursue a humanities degree in Indigenous studies in the Native Pathways Program at Evergreen State College, where she is currently still a student. The intention of Friday’s work is to explore how the unique and haunting vocabulary of glass can amplify and encapsulate both the historical and contemporary issues of her community.
Header image, Eastern Rivers Cluster, by Justin Gibbens, from Cascadia Field Guide.
