After a few slight tugs at the line, the fishhook came up empty for Tony Brown’s son Devin. His father shook his head and smiled over the lost bait.
“You ain’t gonna catch no fish like that dawg,” he said, taking the pole from his son, attaching another frozen shrimp and effortlessly casting almost 100 feet over the murky waters of the Anacostia River.
Under the welcome shade of a sycamore tree in Anacostia Park, Brown had six lines in the water last Saturday afternoon. Within five minutes he had hooked two foot-long catfish. Although he said he has been warned against eating the fish, that doesn’t stop him from occasionally indulging. These two specimens, however, were returned to the cloudy depths.
Brown and his family are among countless fishermen who crowd the river’s banks on summer weekends and evenings, some for sport and fun, others for a bite to eat. Those who choose to consume the fish are eating from an urban river that the D.C. government acknowledges is one of the 10 most polluted in the country.
In its 2000 Water Quality Assessment, the D.C. Environmental Health Administration found high levels of contamination by heavy metals, chemicals and bacteria in the Anacostia. While littering and industrial pollution are major contributors to the river’s state, the report found that the worst offender by far is the D.C. government itself, which allows a total annual discharge of approximately 1.5 billion gallons of raw sewage and storm water from 17 sites along the river. The outlets, called combined sewer overflows, are set in stonewalls and are usually covered by inconspicuous wooden doors. According to data compiled by the Water and Sewer Authority, however, as little as one-tenth of an inch of rain can overwhelm the city’s dilapidated sewer system and fling open the doors, sending raw, untreated sewage directly into the river.
Sewage overflow is much lower in the Potomac River than in the Anacostia, according to WASA data. The volume of overflow into the Anacostia River is on average approximately 50 percent greater than in the Potomac and Rock Creek combined.
WASA Program Manager Mohsi Siddique said that more outflow ends up in the Anacostia because the city’s 19th century sewer system follows underground streams that flow from the Capitol Hill area, east into the river.
After a heavy rain, the river fills with bright green plumes of algae and reeks of waste for several days, according to Glen O’Gilvie, president of the Earth Conservation Corps, an environmental awareness group located at the river’s edge, adjacent to the future site of the Nationals baseball stadium. He said that overflows from the pipes are accompanied by enormous quantities of debris and trash that get washed into storm drains. On one occasion, he said, a tricycle popped right out of one of the nearby pipes and landed among the trash and filthy water.
O’Gilvie said that pollution has taken its toll on life in the river. Anacostia fish have developed the highest rate of cancer ever recorded in an American waterway, he said. On the docks of his group’s office last Thursday, a dead catfish lay stinking on its side in the midday sun, covered head to tail in lesions and sores.
The city does not shrink from warning fishermen about the consequences of eating their catch. According to a public health advisory maintained by the city’s Environmental Health Administration since 1989, popular bottom feeders like catfish, carp and eel caught in D.C. waterways should not be eaten under any circumstances, while consumption of other fish should be limited to one half pound per month. Swimming is illegal in both the Anacostia and Potomac rivers.
According to Ira Palmer, Program Manager for the D.C. Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, the advisory has been renewed every 3-4 years as Department of Health officials take tissue samples of popular species of fish caught in the river.
He said that levels of PCB’s and chlorodone, two common pollutants that are now officially banned, exceeded commonly accepted guidelines. Based on conservative estimates that assume uncharacteristically high rates of fish consumption, he said, the presence of elevated levels of the chemicals could pose a risk of cancer.
For Brown, however, a lifetime of eating his catch flies in the face of the government’s warnings. Brown grew up in the District and said he has fished on the Anacostia all his life. He said he determines whether he should eat the fish on the basis of what he can smell, taste and see. For the most part, he said, the fish tastes pretty good.
“I never taste nothin’ wrong with it,” he said.
He balks, however, if he catches a fish with lesions or sores on it. While Brown said other fishermen simply cut off the lesions and eat the fish, he chucks the cancerous fish back into the water or offers them to passers-by, who he said often gratefully take them.
Another veteran angler, Shairline Adams, said she trusts in the safety of the fish and enjoys marinating and freezing the meat before serving it to friends.
“I’ve been fishing out of this river for years and never gotten sick,” she said.
Adams, who lives three blocks from the Anacostia Metro station, was a special police officer, but she is now unemployed due to contract downsizing. She seemed happily ignorant of the health advisory on eating fish.
In the blighted landscape of the lower Anacostia River, where rusting oil barges are tied up to decayed industrial sites on the waterfront, O’Gilvie said that poverty is deeply connected to the pollution of the river. Poverty rates in surrounding Southeast neighborhoods are among the highest in the city.
O’Gilvie said that local residents have not been educated about environmental degradation and don’t realize what nature can offer.
“Not being educated to know that this is not the way it has to be creates a lack of empowerment on how to change it,” he said.
That lack of awareness of the environment has resulted in extremely high incidences of littering and dumping, O’Gilvie said. On one occasion, a mysterious polluter got away with scuttling an entire dumpster in the river. A corner of the massive object still peeked above the surface of the water last weekend.
The environmental and health concerns of the river are not on every Anacostia fisherman’s mind, however, since not everyone is there to eat the fish. Many of the men and women seated on the banks were there this weekend for some simple peace and quiet.
“I just throw ‘em all back or give ‘em away. I don’t eat these fish,” Al Hill said as he waited for a bite on Saturday afternoon. “It’s just leisure time out here, it keeps the kids out of trouble, keep ‘em from getting drunk.”
A retired Californian who visits the area to see family, Hill fishes in the Anacostia for sport and leisure, just as he does in Yuma, Ariz., and the mountains of Colorado. He has caught everything from catfish to bass, rockfish and blue gills in Anacostia Park.
“Catfish will eat just about anything you throw out there,” he said.
Hill and his friend Reggie, who only gave his first name, had been out on the banks since 7:30 that morning, and they intended to continue enjoying the cool breeze until sundown. Reggie, a District resident for 58 years and city government employee, comes out nearly every afternoon after work. He said he typically pulls in several nice catches on any given day.
“You can get about eight fish like the big fish there,” he said, pointing out a one-and-a-half-foot catfish he had hooked and tethered in the shallows.
But his showing for the day paled in comparison to a 60-pound, four-foot-long catfish reeled in at the same spot the previous afternoon. Standing over an ice chest that barely restrained the still-fighting beast, local resident and fishing enthusiast Randal spoke proudly of his feat. He also declined to offer his last name.
“When I first saw him, I was like, ‘Oh my God, you are not getting away. You can’t get away,” he said last Friday. “You can get the 18-pounders much easier.”
Randal said he fishes all year long and comes out 20 to 30 times per year.
The District record for a fish caught locally is 80 pounds, for a Maryland blue cat, and Randal noted that near the Chain Bridge in McLean, Va., the blue cats easily get up to about 60 pounds.
Adams said that the best spot for big fish was down in Blue Plains, at the south end of the District, where she said they feed vigorously in the nutrient-rich water. Blue Plains is the site of the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
Leviathan catfish sometimes come up the Anacostia in the late summer, during their mating season. Randal said a lighter coloration indicates that the fish has come upriver from the ocean, and this is the best time to catch the largest ones before they lay their eggs and leave.
“Most of the time they’ll get away from the inexperienced anglers,” he cautioned.
The local myths that circulate about the river’s catfish among the veteran fishermen can be as big as the fish themselves.
“I’ve heard some guys will take it while it’s still breathing, put it in the freezer so its heart rate slows down and then put it in a bathtub to thaw and bring it right back to life,” Randal said.
Like the catfish, the river itself lies suspended in pollution, waiting to be brought back to life and cleaned up. Despite the pollution, however, fishermen keep coming back for sport and food as they have done throughout the District’s history.
Additional reporting by Chris Norton and Austin Richardson
