Travels in San Diego

Photo by Neal Matthews

The big old catfish no longer lurks in the shadows of the lily pads and lotus beds in Balboa Park’s reflecting pond. He was partial to the bed in the pond’s southeastern corner, and people who loved him say he would emerge from there to break the waters in greeting or snatch hot dogs, his favorite treat. But he died around 3 a.m. last Sunday, May 24. For a fish, he has an unusual number of mourners.

One is Debbie Johnson, a local artist who often sketches near the pond. She says she started interacting with the catfish when she noticed that he seemed to look her in the eye. Within the last few months, she’d gotten in the habit of stopping by the park at least 4 mornings a week, “just to visit him.” That’s how she met Neal Matthews, another long-time admirer of the wily old bottom feeder. Johnson and Matthews traded observations, and both recently became alarmed when other denizens of the reflecting pond started turning up mauled or missing. On May 15, the two wrote the park’s senior ranger, Casey Smith, requesting that the penalties for harming the pond’s denizens be displayed. Both were delighted when Smith told them that warning signs, which had disappeared over time, would be reinstated. But by the end of last week Johnson had other concerns. The nearly 3-foot-long catfish seemed “a little off,”"  she told me. “He was letting the koi get close to him, and he looked irritated. And when I gave him a hot dog, he just ignored it.” The next morning, she saw no sign of the creature, but when she and her boyfriend returned late Saturday afternoon, they found it floating upside down under the gaze of a small crowd of perturbed onlookers.

Johnson started crying, and even after leaving the scene, she continued fighting tears. So she and her boyfriend decided to try to determine what had caused the death. On the bridge in front of the Botanical Building, they ran into a pond-maintenance worker named Louis, who hadn’t yet heard about the news.  The three of them managed to find and extract the piscine carcass — only to realize that the fish was still moving.

Reached by phone, Smith (the chief ranger) gave permission for it to be transported to a super-oxygenated pond at Louis’s house that “has a truss for taking care of sick fish,” Johnson says. But although the transfer went okay and Louis kept vigil over the animal, it died about 3 a.m.

The next morning, “It was like a President had died or something,” says park ranger Kim Duclo. He and another ranger were assigned to retrieve the catfish (which Duclo says some park habitues had dubbed Bubba)  from Louis’s home in City Heights and investigate the death. They took it to Chollas Lake, where they knew there was a scale that would accommodate the hefty corpse (which weighed in at 22.7 pounds.) They also took several dozen photographs and found no evidence of any barbs or damage to the gills. “I’m not an ichthyologist,” Duclo says, so he couldn’t reach a clearcut conclusion about why the fish had died. But he points out that the pond was never designed to accommodate fauna. (Built for the 1915 Expo, it was inspired by Persian reflecting ponds and primarily intended to enhance the architectural effect of the Botanical Building.)

Almost all the fish living in it have been released there surreptitiously. (One exception are tiny fish introduced by the Department of Agriculture to help control mosquitoes, but Duclo believes most or all of those have been gobbled up by the bigger fish.) He says it’s technically illegal to put anything in the pond, but the park rangers lack the resources to consistently prevent that. They also aren’t able to care for the fish the way they’d be treated in an aquarium. The fish instead depend for food on the kindness of park visitors, and Matthews says he’s heard that some of the park’s resident homeless people look out for would-be illegal fishermen.

Matthews also talked to a groundskeeper who remembered having moved the big catfish from one pound to another in 1999, when it already weighed several pounds. That leads Matthews to conclude that the catfish must have been at least 10 to 12 years old. “I’m in mourning for the poor guy,” says Matthews, who bonded with the fish several years ago. He was undergoing chemotherapy and stem-cell transplants to battle Hodgkin’s disease at the time, and the catfish’s resilience inspired him. “He sustained me when I was at my worst.” Also comforting was the human response to the old animal. “If this were the South, he’d have been [caught and eaten and] gone long ago.” Instead he grew huge, and the day after his death, a cluster of memorial flowers appeared on the bridge.