For her Zócalo Sketchbook, You offers us a psychedelic aquarium of fish that expand and reveal themselves to symbolize her name. “In Chinese, Zhi means wildflower, Yu means fish. So I combined and expanded these two symbols to create this series,” she tells Zócalo.

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Alewives do not fit most contemporary definitions of delicious, but they do have a subtle fishy charisma that has captured the attention of dozens of my town’s 400-odd residents aged 10 to 90. Since 2007, they have spent thousands of hours monitoring and counting the fish. When the culvert became impassible in 2013, people even carried more than 700 fish across the road in buckets. In 2014, squads of volunteers, biologists, engineers, the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, and the Maine Natural Resource Conservation Program collaborated to build an alewife-, beaver-, and turtle-friendly culvert. This surprisingly simpatico relationship between citizens and fellow fish started in the 1600s, when dandelion greens and alewives made a fine spring feast. And—with vigilance and luck—it could continue to the 2400s and beyond.

An image of an alewife, also known as allis shad, from an Arents cigarette card from the U.K.

The future of a fish in general is not assured: Oceans are warming and acidifying, and fish catches have fallen dramatically worldwide since 1996. Between 1950 and 1995, we turned the seas into an industrial site, more than tripling the quantity of fish we pulled from the depths. The poster child for failing fish has been the Atlantic cod, whose numbers drifted downwards for centuries before collapsing in the 1980s—victims of overfishing and warming waters.

And so the alewife, with its deep cultural roots, may be a model fish of the future. They were once abundant in rivers and ponds from South Carolina to Labrador, Canada. But during the first wave of the Industrial Revolution, many of those rivers were dammed. In 1837, the Edwards Dam went across the Kennebec River at Augusta, bringing to a halt migrations of alewives and other herring, salmon, shad, and sturgeon. Pollution, including sewage, industrial waste, and runoff, got dumped in the rivers. Migrating fish numbers fell and fell and fell.

By 1999, the era of industrialization was over, the mills and their jobs were gone, and the Clean Water Act had tamed pollution. A group of environmental advocates successfully petitioned to get the dam blown up. Over the past 10 years, the population of herring in the Kennebec River alone has risen from just 50,000 to more than 3 million.

Dr. Karen Wilson, an associate research professor at the University of Southern Maine, has been working on alewife restoration and dam removal for years. “We won’t go back to the abundance of pre-colonial times,” she says. “But I think the future’s pretty bright.” The alewife has several advantages over other fish facing threats: It’s adaptable, willing to swim up another stream when a beaver has blocked its way. It is mainly fished for lobster bait these days, so there’s not a huge industry built around catching it. Instead of spawning in international waters, alewives do it in ponds tended by small towns. And finally, they are fun to watch as they wriggle their way upstream, which makes it easier to get those towns to support them.

I know about that firsthand. Spending time counting alewives is a highlight of my spring, and it’s allowed me to get to know my neighbors. But I wanted to find out just how alewives captured the attention of me and my townspeople.

I found Karen Robbins at the culvert, counting fish that had landed in the town’s trap, a few minutes after 8 this morning. It was a gorgeous day, warm, and the alewives in the pond were jumping around us. Robbins runs a construction company and in her spare time maintains spreadsheets about alewives.

Smoked alewives at an Alewife Festival in Maine in 2011.

Back in 2006, Robbins said, townspeople were trying to figure out what to do about high levels of phosphorus in the pond that lead to summer algae blooms. Most of the surrounding property is conserved woodland, so there wasn’t an obvious source of sewage or fertilizer to cut off. But then they heard of a study showing that juvenile alewives carried phosphorus out of inland ponds. Ding! The town decided to try to combine lowering phosphorus and helping out the few alewives who still made it to the pond.

And so they signed up volunteers to clean up the area around the culvert, set up a trap (to count the fish), and then organized a schedule of counting and releasing fish twice a day for more than a month. It’s a lot of work for such a small town, and after a few years it was clear the culvert needed replacing. People pitched in, with the town’s oldest resident working on the history of the fishery and an eighth grader designing a T-shirt.

While we talked, the fish continued to jump. “I love our fish,” said Robbins. “They were depleted almost to the last fish. Every memory of them was that they were better last year.” Since the project started in 2007 the number of fish returning to the pond has generally gone up, but some years are very high and others are lower. Nobody really knows what makes the alewife populations tick one way or another.

Robbins worries. “I hesitate to be hopeful. This requires vigilance. We need to support the ecosystem until it gets to the point where it can heal itself.” She points out that we’re not really “saving” the species, so much as we’re saving the genetic diversity of the particular stock that comes back here. In the event of a catastrophe elsewhere, the remaining alewives will have more resources to save themselves.

You might think that all this fish love is a new thing, a kind of post-industrial green tizzy—putting up a tree museum after we’ve paved over paradise. But its roots turn out to be much deeper. The written record of alewives in the nearby Nequasset pond, in Woolwich, Maine, goes back to when local Native Americans showed Europeans how to smoke the fish. Regulations about humans’ responsibility to assure safe passage for the fish to spawning ponds are in the 1623 Plymouth Colony Fish Law, says local historian Allison Hepler. She sent me a quote from the minutes of a 1792 Woolwich town meeting where citizens prevented overfishing by setting alewife harvest days and established fines for those who “transgrefsed.” “Any person who transgrefes in Cetching said fish shall pay a fine of ten shillings and forfeit their nets and fish, and ye fine be doubled for every offense.” Conservation wasn’t optional: The alewife was necessary for the community’s survival. Our town still has laws on the books guaranteeing widows two bushels of fish, as does Woolwich.

In this 2005 image, alewives are loaded onto a pickup in Nobleboro, Maine.

When the alewives arrive in the spring all of their predators perk up and a fantastic ecosystem-wide feeding frenzy begins. Bald eagles swoop above the river while the seals bounce up from below. Osprey hover and then dive dramatically, bearing the fish away in their feet, lined up aerodynamically with their flight path, like a fish-shaped basket hanging below a bird-shaped dirigible. Someday, maybe, the cod will come back to join the party offshore.

Inspired by the osprey and the widows—and the bad news about other fish—I’ve been trying to teach myself to enjoy alewives. Smoked, they have the salty slick of bait garnished with a dab of road tar, liquid smoke, and a frill of tiny bones. But I’ve persevered, because dependency fosters vigilance, and thus our mutual survival. I’ve scrambled them with potatoes and chard, pureed them with white beans and spices, boiled them in milk, baked them in water, and mixed them with tomatoes—in the hope that acid would break through the funk. I haven’t yet gotten the flavor profile to flip over into the tastier territories of scotch and anchovies.

But I still have hope.

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Many tourists from the top deck stare at the anglers with awe. Fishing is these folks’ art. And it looks much easier than it actually is. The Santa Monica Pier fishers don’t make much. One fisherman said he could make $25 for the foot-long fish he caught that morning, but he’d prefer to take it home to his family.

Fishing, they say, is both recreation and relaxation. For some, it’s an activity to do in-between jobs and on days off from other work. Pier fishing requires incredible patience and the acceptance that the day’s only conversation may be with the ocean breeze itself. Along with their coolers, and their buckets of shrimp and mussel bait, the fishers bring portable DVD players to pass the time until they see their rod shaking.

They’ll all congratulate someone for reeling in fish. “Bravo! Bravo!” Anything outside a legal-size catch, they toss it back. The fishers have to follow a lot of rules, which vary by season, depth of water, and species of fish. There are rules about the size of fish and daily limits on the number that can be caught. Regulations, though, are not all that limit the fishers. Occasionally, a duck snatches a fish as it’s being reeled in. Everyone laughs: They’ve all been there at one point or another.

Fishing is unpredictable, they say. But, as one fisherman put it: Fishing is for killing time before time kills you.

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The nutshell: University of the District of Columbia legal scholar and former public defender Ferguson takes us into jury deliberation rooms and reviews the intentions of the Founding Fathers to show how our responsibility—and right—to serve on a jury of our peers helps uphold the U.S. Constitution.

Literary lovechild of: Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men and Laurence H. Tribe and Michael C. Dorf’s On Reading the Constitution.

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The Hudson River is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean, pulling in and out with the tides the 154 miles from Manhattan to Albany. I’ve paddled the length of the river, from Schodack Island to Manhattan. Twice during a long, thrilling day, I’ve circumnavigated Manhattan. I know where the river spreads wide, to three miles, at Haverstraw Bay above the Tappan Zee Bridge, and where it drops deep at World’s End near West Point. I know what stretches are ugly with industry and where everything fades to green, like an untouched wilderness. But the section I know best is off of my home in the village of Tivoli. I know the houses on shore, where I’ll see a bald eagle or snapping turtle, and where my paddles will tangle in water chestnut. I have explored this reach at dawn and dusk, at high noon when I have to squint for the glare of the sun as it reflects off the smooth water, and through windy afternoons when whitecaps froth the surface of the water. I call this section, this reach of river, mine.

A reach is a stretch of river, measured by how far a navigator can see into the distance before a river takes a bend. There are long reaches on the Hudson, like the 13-mile Long Reach off the city of Poughkeepsie. The Tivoli Reach is but a thousand feet long. Rogers Reach, which exists in my imagination, stretches from the Saugerties Lighthouse to the South Tivoli Bay, a distance of about two miles.

I have gone to my reach for adventure, for solace, for inspiration. I have gone to know myself and to intimately know this big river. But in order to know my reach in all of its rich complexity, I needed to navigate the currents and eddies in the dark. Night is the realm of secrets, of animal instincts. I wanted the thrill of exploring by feel and taste and sound. And so at the end of a hot summer day, the sort that leaves me restless, even cranky, I slide my kayak into the water at 11 at night. The moon, obscured by clouds, is near full; the lights from the Saugerties Lighthouse blink across the way. I step into the summer-warmed water and slip into my boat.

I leave the yellow lights of the village. I’m surrounded by ink from below and a cool black blanket from above. Tucking in near shore, I paddle in the shadows of the trees. My disorientation is complete; I stroke toward the middle of the river. I lose any sense of the depth of the water. Outside of the shipping channel, the river in my reach is relatively shallow, 10 feet deep or less in many places, but there in the night it feels like it drops hundreds of feet. I skim the surface as if on a high balance beam. My heart races. This fear has always been a part of my outdoor adventures. It’s the fear that keeps me alert, reminds me of the dangers, insists I keep a tight hold on this life.

As I near Magdalen Island, which lies huddled in the dark, the moon appears from behind the clouds to glow, a lopsided, orange-red ball. I hear voices, a low mumble carrying across the water. Perhaps someone is camping on the island? And then I spy a boat anchored on the far shore. I smell the faint perfume of a two-stroke engine, covering up the familiar mixture of creosote-laced water.

At the end of Magdalen a great blue heron drops out of a tree to croak its discontent; I’ve disturbed its roost for the night. I slush through the shallow water on the east side of the island. I hear the echo of a great horned owl across the North Tivoli Bay.

When I emerge from the cozy swatch of river wedged between the shore and the island, the shadows lift and I can see the shape of the shoreline and the shape of something large and unexpected on the water. A tug rumbles by, towing a long, invisible barge. A parade of fiery lights whooshes past. The wake of the barge rocks my slim kayak, a dizzying up and down.

I make my way back north. Smack. Something strikes the hull of my boat. I cry out in alarm before I realize: it’s a fish. I imagine a long, primitive sturgeon making its way through the dark, shallow waters.

I stroke against the outgoing tide. An Amtrak train interrupts the silence, its horn long and insistent. The rumble seems to shake the foundation of the river until it calms once again.

I swing out wide to avoid the remains of a 19th century dock. The lights of Tivoli beckon. I glide toward the shore between two boulders and bring my kayak to rest on the gravel shoreline.

The river has worked its magic: the heat of the day has been replaced by the lights on shore, the lopsided orange moon, a rush of excitement at the slap of a fish.

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