Chapter 1 of 9 · 3938 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

THE RUN

[Illustration]

The Run

JOHN HAY

Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York 1959

_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-11598_

To my father and mother: Clarence Leonard Hay and Alice Appleton Hay

FOREWORD

This book mirrors an attempt to go farther afield, from one man’s center. Its writing represented a kind of migration in itself. We all undertake them, whether we like it or not, near or far. To follow on the track of fish, birds, or any other animals, might be both discovery and repetition, because it might mean to go exhaustively into the nature of being alive. The alewives helped to open the world for me, although the outcome of their circling was always beyond knowing.

Above all this book is about one race which has an equal status with us in the great motions of this planet. Men may be highest, or so men say, but they cannot be complete without granting equal dignity to the unsurpassed uniqueness of other forms of life. One ought to be able to say: “Here is a life not mine. I am enriched.”

Not a great deal has been written specifically about alewives, but the three published works I found most useful as an introduction were: _Fishes of the Gulf of Maine_, by Bigelow and Schroeder, published by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service; _A Report on the Alewife Fisheries of Massachusetts_, by David Belding, published by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation in 1921; and _Factors Influencing the Migration of Anadromous Fishes_, by Gerald Collins, Fishery Bulletin No. 73 of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I also received some helpful information from the Fisheries Research Board of Canada; and the Department of Sea and Shore Fisheries of the State of Maine, as well as its Department of Inland Fisheries and Game. Maine has been undertaking an important research and educational program with a view to rehabilitating the alewife fisheries.

I am greatly indebted to Hal Turner of Woods Hole, Dr. David Belding of Welfleet, and John Burns of the Massachusetts Department of Natural Resources, Division of Marine Fisheries, for answering my questions so readily and courteously; and of course, much thanks to Harry Alexander. He guards a good run.

CONTENTS

Foreword 5

I Waiting Weather 9

II Arrival 19

III Dried Fish: an Informal History 27

IV The Reproductive Urge 45

V The Nature of an Alewife 53

VI Puzzles and Speculations 63

VII Port of Entry 75

VIII The Common Night 83

IX The Hunt 89

X Transition: Salt and Fresh 99

XI Up the Valley 111

XII The Imperfect Ladder 121

XIII Persistence 129

XIV Spawning: the Dance 141

XV The Return 151

XVI The Young Follow After 161

XVII The Power of Fragility 175

XVIII Going Out 183

Waiting Weather

It was in March, in comparative ignorance about their lives and habits, that I started looking for the alewives. This is the time of year when a few forerunners usually come in from the sea, in spite of the cold airs and waters that still grip the narrow land of Cape Cod. I had seen these migrant fish before, during a previous season, but from the road, so to speak. I had never followed them as if they challenged communication.

The place I started from was the Herring Run in the town of Brewster, part of a little migratory inland route by which the alewives travel up from Cape Cod Bay to the inland ponds where they spawn. At the Herring Run the waters of Stony Brook pour down from an outlet north of these ponds--three of them, all interconnected: Walkers, Upper Mill, and Lower Mill. The flow then goes over a one-and-a-half-mile stretch, first over the fishway, a series of concrete ladders and resting pools built through rocks and high land, the area of the Herring Run, then through a valley of abandoned cranberry bogs bounded by low hills; and finally it elbows through tidal marshes to Paine’s Creek, its mouth on Cape Cod Bay. This little river was called Sauquatuckett by the Indians and was subsequently known as the Setuckett River, Mill Brook, and Winslow’s Brook. At its falling headwaters the first water mill in this region was built, and one of the later mill buildings is still standing--it has an old water wheel that is still in working order and is used to grind corn as a tourist attraction. By the time the mass of tourists arrive the alewife migration, aside from the “fry,” hatched in the ponds and returning to salt water, has about run its course. They can still take pictures of the old mill in July or August, but they have probably missed a more vital antiquity.

[Illustration]

The initial facts about the migration are these: each year, close in time to the vernal equinox when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are of equal length, this member of the herring family begins to enter innumerable inlets and tidal estuaries down the length of the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland to the Carolinas. Scientifically known as _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_ (also, under an older classification, _Alosa pseudoharengus_, along with species of shad), the alewife is an “anadromous” fish, meaning that like the salmon and shad, but unlike its relative the sea herring, it grows in salt water but leaves it as a three- or four-year-old adult, to spawn in fresh. A “catadromous” fish, like the eel, does just the opposite, growing up in fresh water and spawning in the sea.

The alewives, I learned, were due to come in from the Bay when the temperature of the brackish water that flowed into it was warmer than that of the salt water. In fact, a local resident had already noticed a group of eight or ten alewives of apparently large size that had appeared in the brook a few days before. Their arrival was a token that the land, though still cold, was warming up more quickly than the sea--just about the time a few male red-winged blackbirds showed up too, in advance of housekeeping. But if some began their migration in March, the first big run was not likely to come until the middle of April or later, depending on how long and cold a winter it had been. During an exceptionally cold season the alewives might not appear in volume until the first days in May. Where were they now, and what were they doing? Schooling somewhere offshore, and waiting to move in?

I stood on the beach and the sea still looked and felt and smelled as raw and cold as winter--iron-gray, massive, keeping its counsels--although, as I understood it in an incomplete way, the waters were undergoing seasonal adjustments at varying depths in the shallow coastal areas. Spring changes would begin to take effect. Perhaps I knew them, smelled them, on the sea wind. I was impatient. I wondered what specific combination of length of life, biological responses, currents, tides, the composition of the sea water, might impel one roving school of fish to leave the sea and start inland.

March, that season of the whole air hesitating and blowing back and forth, the circuit of the compass, especially in low-wooded seaside lands, is a time of hesitation, preparation, and violence. It is waiting weather.

The tempo had changed--it was late in February I had felt it. The winter fist began to unclench a little. Before another day of frost, sleet, or wet snow, spring rain might bucket down in the evening, or freak lightning might crack the sky. The days were gray and raw more often than not, but when the sun shone it was sheer grace. One night there were wands of light shuddering against great, shimmering, flushed curtains on the sky wall over Cape Cod Bay--being the legendary northern lights, grandly named aurora borealis. The following day was cold, dull, and obdurate again.

Then when the temperature began to ease up occasionally from the thirties to the forties, as March went on, a surprise snowstorm came howling in. Poles snapped; wires broke, and the resulting power failures lasted for several days, during which some people rediscovered fate. The radio, before communication was entirely cut, sounded off about the inexorable as cars and trains were stopped and men died after shoveling snow. In that whole weather always cast beyond complaint or prediction, this storm only represented a temporary arrest. Our primal agent the sun still had the season’s growth in hand, more various than fate; which is not to minimize the tragedies along the way. Some days after the storm I found four or five male bluebirds in spring plumage all huddled dead in the bottom of a birdhouse--a pathetic brilliance. The entrance had probably been blocked by wet snow after they had taken refuge there.

As the growing sunlight played a steady tune, so the alewives, perhaps less affected by local storms than we, were due to come in, if only in small numbers. Where were they? I stopped by the Herring Run where the brook was full of loud cold water, but empty of fish. All the same, Harry Alexander, the alewife warden, was there, giving a display of public confidence. He had taken up his annual stance on Stony Brook Road, which bridges the run, and with a truculent punch of his lips against his pipestem, he made ready for the coming season.

In a world era, this is a local man. He has the cast and sense of place about him and some of its accumulated age. I have seen it in other men who have spent their lives in the same country environment. He is heavy, ruddy, thickset--an old boat in a Cape port. During his tenure on the alewives committee he seems to have developed a proprietary attitude about the run which probably exceeds his authority, but very few people object.

He certainly makes more of the job than the small wages he gets from the town; and in years past the alewives have had a defender in him at Town Meeting, when discussion came up about the amount of money allotted to the Herring Brook. From a naturalist’s point of view, he can hardly be said to have much sentiment in him about these fish as part of the living community. Too many of them would stink the place up, or so he affirms. I remember him at a hearing, speaking to a public official in this wise, “Ever see my brook? Our brook, I mean. No dirty, stinking mess up there!”

So, in his special way, he keeps the area clean, and is the herring’s defender and interpreter. I think he likes to conceive of himself as a kind of rascal. To those who ask him about the fish he is liable to dispense information that is an outrage to the innocent. Two Connecticut schoolteachers were once directed to the run, and came away saying the alewives were often so plentiful that the Cape Codders shingled their houses with them. (This is part of what he has called “My fight with the public.”)

So, a “Cape Cod character,” personification of an old locality ... but I don’t think he would like me to write too well of his character. That day as I lingered at the run he gave me a lowering look. What was I interested in the fish for? Well, if I’d take the information from him, we could make ourselves a pile of money by selling the story to _Collier’s_ magazine. Did I ever hear about the Indians shooting these fish from the trees?

Facts, Harry. Facts.

“Well, naow, I’ll tell you. With the shore wind blowing on the long flats out there and the water ruffling up like that, the fish don’t come in much. But they’ll be along. Yes-yes.”

So was there nothing to do but take tentative steps and wait? The scene, the place, the weather--an emergent weather in me perhaps--was more compelling than that. The wind blowing, brook roaring, sun shafts through the steely sky, all urged an opening. I walked down to the south side of the road, by the tall lilacs, under high willows and maple trees. Here the waters of the brook divide between the concrete fishway and a side or “waste” stream which rejoins the other some fifty feet farther on, dropping precipitously over rocks that foam with water too high for the migrating fish to leap.

I walked down a path at the edge of this narrow waste stream. Where the water was running swiftly, lithely, between the high rock foundations of the road on one side and a low dirt bank with grass hummocks on the other, I saw the brown head of a muskrat leading across the stream not more than twenty feet away. The sleek, dark little animal swam over to a stone across from me and sat there eating something with quick, legerdemain little gestures, a fast shuttling between its paws and its whiskered face. Apparently it couldn’t see me. The east wind was blowing across us, and the fresh waters were roaring. Then it stopped and nosed back into the stream, swimming across to a tussock not more than twelve feet from where I stood. It plucked out, quickly, a sizable bunch of grass and swam back with it to the same eating place and chewed it up. Then it returned to the shallow water, swimming close to the bottom, where I could plainly see it going easily against the current with its two hind legs stretched out, propelling it, and the long flat tail acting as a scull.

It emerged to disappear in a few rock crevices and then came out, its glossy, questioning head sniffing for danger before it dropped down again. Finally it swam out of sight into the cruel brilliance of sun-reflecting waters that ran full out, full tilt. Pools of plenty were continually releasing and boiling as if they were the strength and source of all motion.

The muskrat’s eyes were black as rock recesses and its pelt as dark and glistening as a mud bank. It was at home, with all its food around it--grass, minnows, salamanders, fresh-water mussels--in an adaptation, a closeness to the place, arrived at through both random and inevitable forces. It knew its small world and needed no outside instruments to set its course by. I might wonder about the next event, the coming storms, but here was this animal swimming away as if it said, “Come on in. The universal water’s fine.”--in a stream as yet too cold for me.

[Illustration]

Arrival

A week or so later, early in April, I finally saw my first alewife of the season. It had the brook to itself where I caught sight of it--a cloudy form running upcurrent--and when I went closer I could see it probing the rippling, beating waters, with all that fish articulation of separate fins together, fanning slightly, waving, threading, and steering, the fixed eyes staring on, its whole body weaving with the flow. It is a surprisingly large fish, seen for the first time in a narrow stream. Its length may be anywhere between ten and thirteen inches, and it has a heavy look for those who are used to sunfish and minnows.

An alewife was no novelty to me, but this one seemed to decide the year’s direction. It started things out. I saw it for the first time, as child or genius does who finds some whole deep image in the air, or radiant clarity in the water. I had the feeling too that I was looking at a professional from an old water world, a new agent of old assurance, deserving profound respect. After all, it had been coming back here thousands of years before me, in the migrant history of its race, and by this time must have mastered its passage. And as a natural event, a part of the spring’s development, it seemed to announce that bud scales on shrubs and trees would start to crack and fall away to let the inner shoots out that unfold as leaves and feed on the sun. It said that flies and wasps and spiders would come out of winter hiding and sleeping, that the song sparrows would begin to sing in the willows and viburnum bushes along the banks of Stony Brook.

There is something exciting and strange about the sudden appearance of new life in the spring, coming from another region, another climate. The terns or plovers that appear along the shore bring an unknown experience with them. They seem to start in or to assemble according to some tremendous demand which is in no way restricted to seasonal lags. They recur; they are recognizable; and yet they bring in endless tides and vivid journeys, being a part of that remarkable projection of nature in which a multitude of lives use their skill in navigation, their plumage, their scales, fins, and various senses, their particular drives toward fulfillment.

Migration is universal. That which prompts animals to emerge from their burrows, or to start moving over the ocean floor, to fly north, to swim into brackish or fresh water from salt, or even, like a ladybird beetle, to move a short distance from a forest floor to a meadow, must have a world-wide energy to it, with lines of communication that reach everywhere ahead and invite the human drive for knowledge. But in a strict sense there are two accepted definitions of migration for the animals. There is return migration, of which the alewives provide an example. Fish or birds in this category travel seasonally from one area to another, usually coming back to some home region after varying lapses of time. Otherwise, there is emigration, in which animals leave their home base but never come back again, lemmings and locusts being good examples. Both definitions, I should think, can prove that home stretches farther than we know.

Why had this pioneer of an alewife, and the others that had come before it, arrived so soon? It is possible that they had migrated up Stony Brook before. All mature alewives--a majority seem to be four years old--are moved by sexual development and swim inshore when the temperature of the fresh or brackish water has turned warmer than the salt water from whence they came. The earliest comers often appear to be larger in size. This suggests, at least, that they may be older and that they have spawned in that run before. The latest to come seem to be the smallest, and therefore the youngest. Alewives, like other fish, seem to have a tendency to keep growing, though there may be a maximum size reached in their fifth or sixth year. The only conclusive way to tell their age is by microscopic examination of their scales, which reflect each spawning year and its physical changes.

Work done by Keith Havey on alewives in Maine shows a minimum of alewives spawning at three years of age and the largest number in the four- or five-year-old range. No scales were found which reflected more than two spawnings. As to size, he gives a sampling of their length in inches which graduates up from 11.25 inches in the three-year-old fish to 11.80 in the four-year-olds, 12.35 in five-year-olds, and 12.80 in the six. The female alewife, incidentally, is a little larger than the male.

Possibly then, these early alewives at Stony Brook were the oldest, and because of that they might have been the most practiced at finding their way. I am told that, with new fish ladders, observers have noticed the earliest arrivals seeking and passing through them more readily on the second year after construction than on the first, which leads to the belief that they have been through before. Age may improve the alewife in prowess, though it is a fish of crowds, and not one to strike out much on its own. The “homing instinct,” still unfathomed, but about which I will try to say more later on, brings them back to their streams of origin with almost united force.

[Illustration]

So my lone alewife marked the greatness it preceded, though it was early, in early and still undecided weather. At first the sleet, hail, flurries of wet snow came in profusion, stabbing between the sunshine, as though nature, before making its next terms known, was full of passionate unease. Then wings of warm rain would beat in over the Cape, to slash and curve and follow along trees and houses, through inland ponds, across the ridges and hollows, and the wind poured behind in great gusts, trying, it seemed, to shake a tight world loose. Underneath the struggling air many things waited for more chances in the sun, but under the stars, on foggy evenings or bright days, the singing of peepers in pools, ponds, or boggy land would swell and widen everywhere.

Then as the month kept advancing, that which came out began to stay, and to expand, in variety, flexibility, and strength. The wheels of the world seemed to turn more brightly. I felt a suggestion in each changing tree, in the loosening ground, the kinetic light and air, of new unfoldings, kaleidoscopic discoveries. The formality, and power in the coming on of spring surprised me, as if it had never come before.

More winds began to blow from the southwest, the prevailing wind during late spring and summer. Yellow fingertips of bloom showed on the whip-long branches of the forsythias. The temperature edged toward the fifties, and there were deep new meetings between the moles and the worms. One day many tree swallows began to flit and dive low around the Herring Run. They skimmed along the surface of the water, then sailed up again. Their bellies were as white as a frog’s or horned pout’s, dark wings and tails trimly cut, backs almost a tropical blue in the light above the water, reflecting green at some angles, or a green-blue-purple the color of mackerel. Their flight dipped with the up and down flying insects they were chasing. When some insect, unseen to me, spiraled straight up along the banks, a swallow would leave its water gliding, twist suddenly, beating its wings, and almost spiral after.

That original source of energy the sun, which men might still worship in good faith, was bringing out new facets to shine abroad. The web of life was stretching to its light. Birds, insects, plants, and fish were beginning to move to its changing measure; though if some days were warm with a budding, fringing, easing expectation, others were still raw, wet, and contracting, bringing winter back to flesh and fiber. We kept looking for the alewives. Cars would slow up at the Herring Run. The drivers peered down to see the curving, dark forms of a few fish holding up against the current. Then they drove on. Or they got out, saw nothing, and went away in disappointment. But suddenly one morning toward the middle of April the crowd of alewives had so increased as to cause an inescapable excitement in the vicinity. The water was thick with fish, their fins showing on the surface. It was almost as it had been a hundred years before when the whole population would cry out at their coming, “The herring are running!”

III

Dried Fish:

An Informal History