Part 3

The early colonists spoke of alewives coming up their streams in “incredible” numbers, and so it still looks, though Stony Brook, for one, is narrow in its upper reaches, and when the fish are forced into it they are crowded beyond all proportion. The inland stream, with its fresh-water grasses, insects, and small fish is suddenly host to a large and almost foreign form of life, except that they are both closely joined to the sea.

On the whole, it had been a rainy month. The brook below the seining pool was roaring and foaming down. Such was the teeming crowd of alewives trying to swim up through the ladder, through the violently heavy flow, that there was a constant falling back, a silver slapping and flapping over the concrete rims of the pools. Farther down, where the waste stream tumbled over a small mountain of rocks, too high for the fish to jump (their limit, on a vertical leap, seems to be not much over two feet), there was a scene to force the heart. Always a certain number of fish, dividing from those that swam the main stream toward the ladder, would attempt the impossible at this place. Ordinarily, when an alewife meets obstacles in its advance upcurrent it will quickly go forward into it, then leap in short dashes over rocks and the lip of fishways. I had seen them go up without apparent rest where the stream falls down the inclined ladder at the pond outlet above. They were dancing and flipping up those waters, which were rushing and bubbling down, like kites in a fast wind.

Yet here, for all their instinctive valiance, was the unsurmountable. Now, as they had done for thousands of years, they tried and failed. White tons of water smashed down over the rocks, but time and time again one fish after another made a quick dash into it and almost flew, hanging with vibrant velocity in the torrent until it was flung back. Many were exhausted and found their way back to the main stream, circling and swimming slowly, and a large number were smashed against the rocks to turn belly up and die, eaten later by young eels, or gulls and herons, as they were taken downstream by the current. Some were wedged in the rocks and could be seen there for days as the water gradually tore them apart until they were nothing but white shreds of skin.

A wooden bridge crosses over Stony Brook at this point. A neighbor of mine, a mother of children, was standing there watching when I came up, and I heard her say, “Terrible!” I guessed that she knew what she saw, besides death and defeat. It was the drive to be, a common and terrible sending out, to which men are also bound in helplessness.

We are astonished by this fantastic drive. “What is the point? What makes them take these suicidal chances? Why?” It is as if we were trying to get back, or down, to an explanation in ourselves that we had lost sight of. But somewhere in us, through this feverish, undecided world, we still know.

Are they stupid? There is no measure in the world of nature more excellent than a fish. It may be comparatively low in the evolutionary scale of complexity, but no animal is more finely made, or better suited to its own medium. All the same, the unvaried blindness their action seemed to show would sometimes strike me as hard as did their ability in the water.

Stony Brook was black with them. There was no open patch of stream bed to be seen. And with the excessive crowding, the general procession, so steadily insistent on its own time, was hurried up to some extent. Their motion became almost ponderous and tense, while individual fish leaped like dolphins, pewter- and gold-sided, over and through the dark herd. Others circled in and out or kept pace with the rest, staring ahead.

They had a synchronized momentum of their own. If I dropped a stone in the middle of them, they would separate at that point and then close in to fill the gap. There could be no nullifying or breaking their united persistence. Their onwardness, their desperate dashing against the rocks, had its own logic--a logic which had nothing to do with hope, reason, or choosing another alternative. No way out, in other words. Slavery to the reproductive urge. These alewives are more dumb than sheep. If you were to press your own sympathy hard enough, you might feel a terrible lack of variety in them, or, paradoxically enough, of daring. The lidless-eyed and plunging multitude seems brutally driven, without a chance. This is “togetherness” with a terrible vengeance.

Perhaps there is something here that we know too, as fellow animals, and lose sight of. At the risk of making one of those vaguely anthropomorphic assumptions against which the objective scientists are constantly warning us, I would guess that the self-motivation in this onward mass of fish might be compared to those human crowds that take action under stress, independently of the individuals that make them up. Suddenly a crowd, hitherto a random combination of people, takes on a frightening rhythm and purpose of its own. It is governed by laws which go back infinitely farther in the history of life than the immediate goal of its anger or exultation.

I have explained nothing. I can only say that when I first saw these fish I was moved in spite of myself. Instinct is no more blind than wonder. To have the human attributes of mind and spirit and the race’s ability to control its own environment does not give me the wit to beat the infinitely various will of life at its own game. All I could wish for would be to join it.

I walked on down the banks of Stony Brook, past the Herring Run area with its neat paths, bridges, and fish ladders, my shoes squashing in the mud. The stream turns a slight angle at this point, gets broader and shallower and begins to run through the little valley that ends in tidal marshes and the Bay. The alewives, for a hundred yards at least, were running up against the downward currents, massed almost stationary, not in ranks, but ordered mutuality, with a long waving like water grasses or kelp, and curving, twisting, swirling like their medium the water as they moved very gradually ahead. There was no indiscriminate rushing ahead. It was done to measure; but it seemed to me that through their unalterable persistence I saw the heaving of crowds of all kinds, of buffalo, cattle, sheep, or men. I had seen as much motion in crowds pouring out of a subway entrance or massing through a square. History was in their coming on, without its shouts and cheers. They could not speak for themselves; but who knew how deep the silence went?

Ahead of them there was a net; behind, down the broader reaches of the brook, the greedy herring gulls dropped down into the water after them, or stood along the bank in apparently glutted satisfaction, while others screamed and sailed overhead. In spite of their slow gliders’ grace and local lethargy compared with swift sea birds like the terns, gulls travel the rims of the world. They had always made me think of far-distance, voyages unending. Many of them had congregated on a bald hill that overlooks the run and were standing like white sentries under the shafts of the northern sky beyond. From far off they sometimes suggest rows of military crosses, and I have heard them compared to a field of flowers. Soldiers, flowers, graves ... all these they might suggest on the heights of fate, by their pure bold greed and unmatched design. They stood on a wide stage.

V

The Nature of an Alewife

The fish kept moving up. I watched them swinging back and forth with the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly be a scattered dashing, coming as quickly as cat’s-paws flicking the summer seas. They may have moved by “reflex” rather than conscious thought, but what marvelous professionals they were in that!

The cold raw winds of April had heeled back, and May swung on. There were an increasing number of days with the wind from the southwest, smelling of sunny springtime. The local paper had it that the temperature averaged a high of 66.6 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of 44.2 in the week between the second and the ninth of May. The following week the average rose a little, going to between 67.5 and 47 degrees. The first reported striped bass, a three-and-a-half-pounder, was caught on the Cape the eighth of the month.

The willows that hung over the Herring Run were budding and flowering out, lacing and fringing with many beads, a yellow-green; and leaves of the red maples began to unfold, a light coppery russet color, hanging like limp claws--and elsewhere, on higher ridges and other roads, the oaks in their leafy variety of pink, yellow, gray and pale green, were starting their fires with tenderness. Clouds of the shad-blow’s lacy white blossoms came out everywhere between pitch pines and oaks, to last only a few days and be replaced by beach plums whose flowers burst out of their sheaths like popping corn.

The procession, down the brook and around its bend, made other rushing sounds above the noise of the flow itself. The gulls in the valley were crying out with “ho!” and “ha!” and “yi!” The shadow of a gull flying high over us fell across the water and the alewives rushed to the side. The backs of some of them were cruelly gashed. There was a dead one on the bank, stiff and dry, flatly reflecting the blue in the sky like an unpolished knife blade.

[Illustration]

They were close-packed going up through the ladders, herding, slipping, slanting, struggling in relation to each other. I grabbed one out with my hands. It shuddered, was almost still for a second or two, like a man with his wind knocked out, then plunged in my hands and slipped out onto the bank. It thrashed there in the grass, a twelve-inch fish, with a gray-green back, and silver sides and belly that reflected the magnificent surfaces of May, with grass, sun, and blue sky intruding through the overhanging leaves and the brown earth. It shone with violet, yellow-green, white and brown, pink and blue. It had an inclusive majesty, a great natural art.

Its silver scales are large, like iridescent reflecting coins: and in the water the alewife is able to alter the pigmentation of its skin so as to blend with the background. It is able to do this very quickly, so that it changes in color as it moves up the stream to correspond with a darker or lighter bottom ... part of the whole various pattern of adaptation which the fish show to the water around them.

During the course of evolution brain development among the fishes has been slow. What brain power they have is closely related to their sense organs, concentrated on their whole bodily co-ordination; in which, so far as water action is concerned, they are man’s superiors. An alewife’s body is marvelously fitted to situation--peace or turbulence, light or dark, flood and ebb, ripple or rile. This inhabitant of the sea weaves up through the overhanging springtime, and seems a part of it, experienced as to its flowering.

For it is a salt-water fish, as I sometimes had to remind myself later between the ponds and the Bay, although there is a landlocked variety; and as such it is part of a prodigious tribe. As a member of the herring family--the Clupeidae, it is related to the sea herring, sprats, shads, pilchards, and menhadens. The sea herring is one of the most important food fish in the world. In Europe whole societies were affected by its shifts in abundance. Loss of control over herring fisheries was instrumental in the breakup of the Hanseatic League. In 1881 Thomas Henry Huxley said: “Man, in fact, is but one of a vast co-operative society of herring catchers.” The yearly catch is enormous. One school of herring may run not into millions but billions of individual fish; though Huxley may have exaggerated the capacity of the herring population to keep its level in the face of human demands.

To mention another important relative of the alewife, the common or American shad is also a food fish, being something of a delicacy, prized highly for its flesh and roe. It is a larger fish, weighing between six and nine pounds; but it is not so abundant as the alewife.

The menhaden fishery is the largest in the country in terms of weight. Some 800,000,000 pounds of this fish are harvested annually from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts; its present fate is to be turned into fish meal, scrap, and oil. In addition many tons of ground-up menhaden, or “pogies,” are used by salt-water anglers to attract bluefish, tuna, or mackerel.

All these herring species are similar in appearance, with silvery scales, easily rubbed off, thin, deep bodies, and tails quite deeply forked.

The alewife belongs to a group of great age in the earth’s history, and one which has survived, for one thing, by reason of its numbers, and not by any skill in speed or individual pugnacity. It depends on the crowd rhythm for perpetuation. Its salt-water whereabouts are comparatively unknown, although it is thought it may not go very far afield; but in a run of alewives you might sense not numbers only, but something of the sea’s capacious demands that made these fish to measure. Green, gray, silver, they wear its colors, and seem built to nose into its space, or be carried with its moods.

Are there no individuals among them? It is perhaps no term to apply with so manifestly united a company. In any case we are deceived if we try to translate ourselves, our ability to choose, our eyes for pattern and variation, into an animal that can see us at best as an occasional, strange, blurred image appearing above the bank, and to whom everything but the water world is unknown. In a sense we know too little, and so do they, to discuss the matter.

Yet anyone, with a slipping, plunging alewife in his hands, knows it in some degree for its uniqueness. This green-backed, silver-sided water animal, smooth, supple, and muscular, with a sail-like fin on its back is definite enough. Its body is convex-sided, coming to a thin edge at the belly, shaped like shellfish, seeds, or Indian artifacts. From its undershot jaw to its tail, it is clearly a tough fish, and in our experience an adaptable one that knows its way.

This is the “sawbelly” all right. You can very easily feel the serrations, or little teeth, with your fingers--it is one good way of telling alewives from sea herring in the dark. But the name “big-eyed” is perhaps most dramatically true of the alewife. Its black, round, shining eyes are very prominent in proportion to its small head and small mouth. They are large black disks like certain water-worn rocks, or they are great bubbles coming up from a dark depth. I fancied, seeing a tiny image of myself in the alewife’s eye, that I was reflected in a deep, impenetrable well.

It is known that a fish’s eye is somewhat like ours in that it has a lens, an iris, a cornea, retina, and optic nerve; but that it is designed to see under water, which ours is not. In J. H. Norman’s _History of Fishes_, he writes: “The eye, as is well known, acts after the manner of a photographic camera, the two essential parts being the screen or retina at the back, and the lens at the front, which projects an image of the outside world on the screen. The lens of a land vertebrate is somewhat flat and convex on both sides, but in the fish it is a globular body, the extreme convexity being a necessity under water because the substance of the lens is not very much denser than the fluid medium in which the fish lives. The space between lens and retina is filled with a transparent jelly-like substance, the vitreous humor. The transparent outer wall of the eye, the cornea, is somewhat flatter in fishes, and the space between this and the lens is filled by the watery, aqueous humor. In land vertebrates the iris of the eye is capable of great contraction, and, acting like the diaphragm of a camera, regulates the amount of light allowed to enter the eye. In fishes it generally surrounds a rounded pupil, and has comparatively little power of contraction.”

I should add that an alewife’s eye is somewhat fixed, and not capable of much movement.

Back of the eyes and mouth are the gill covers that protect the gills underneath, which are weak and blood-filled, dark-red overlapping layers, like petals, four on each side. As the fish’s gill covers open and close, water passes over the gills, taking oxygen into the blood stream. The alewife’s heart, which pumps blood to the gills, is located directly below them.

This is a plankton eater, although it will eat shrimp, small fish, or young eels, on occasion. It has no teeth, or such a semblance of tiny, weak ones, back in its mouth, that they are of little use. The particles of food that come through its mouth are strained through a device known as gill rakers, which act as sieves or filters, in the form of fine hairlike growths mounted on the gill arches, the bony structures on which the gills are also arranged.

A female alewife can be recognized fairly readily by its size. On the average the males run from ten to eleven inches and the females from eleven to twelve, and the males are of course lighter. The proportion of males to females on the inland run seems to be about fifty-fifty.

Alewives weigh anywhere between eight and ten ounces. Part of the weight of both sexes during their spawning migration is accounted for by the roe; in fact, their ovaries and testes may become so enlarged as to fill up a large part of their bodies. The egg sacs of the female vary in color from pink to yellow or yellow-orange, depending on their stage of development. The milt, sometimes called soft roe, of the male, is white and pink.

To sketch a fish so generally is scarcely to know it, but even if I were able to give a good account of its complex skeleton down to the last bone, or discuss all the actions of its nervous system as known so far, I would not have done enough. Our bodies may have chemicals in common with them, but we will never know the fish.

The alewife I took from the water eluded me. Cold-blooded fish, warm-blooded man, the water’s triumph caught by the alien air. It slipped my hand and knowledge. “An aquatic vertebrate?” A mystery, though I recognized a life that shone with vibrant persistence, one of nature’s particularized energies, a wild texture as old as the animal world, a food that was the beneficent matter of all struggle and greed.

Were there more connections between us that needed exploration? How much fright, how much nerve-threaded darkness, how much throbbing electric quickness might not be receiving me in the distance of that fixed eye? Perhaps we strangers all meet somewhere in each other’s sight.

VI

Puzzles and Speculations

The Herring Run area, small center of commerce and history, had been my starting point, but I had hardly begun to follow the alewives on their whole migratory route between salt water and the ponds above. First of all I had some background of local hearsay to bring into question. Did the herrin’ really go all the way down to South America in the wintertime? Was it true that each fish returned to the stream it was born in? Did they come inland on their spawning journey and then die, like the west coast salmon? I overheard a man say, “Poor fish! All that work just to die!” But that was one interpretation I could dispose of early, having seen them go back to salt water the year before. Did they only come in from the Bay at night or on foggy evenings? To find out would take more watching and waiting than I had done so far.

You might deduce this much to start with: the alewives, only a few at first, started to come inland in the spring when the brackish waters from the Stony Brook outlet were warmer than the Bay into which they flowed, if only by a few degrees. They responded with sensitivity to the temperature. If the earliest fish were the oldest, it was possible that the later runs also corresponded to age groups, guessing by their size, and that the youngest came last of all. Evidently schools of alewives stay together during their ocean life according to the years when they were spawned. Yet why, between March and June, any given schools would come in when they did would be hard to tell.

There are places where you can watch the alewives approach, at the junction between tidal and inland waters. At Damariscotta, Maine, they swim up a wide tidal river until a fresh-water stream flows into it from a height above. I was told that the fish are seen massing and circling, sometimes for days, at this point, until by some communicated decision, or joint response--perhaps to pressure of numbers, combined with the right temperature conditions--they start going up. A cold snap may make them drop back to tidewater. In the same way, cold weather may discourage their coming in from Cape Cod Bay.

You can also see them schooling in the Cape Cod Canal at the entrance to the Bournedale run, but not at Stony Brook where the outlet flows into the Bay through low sand dunes, or sand flats at low tide. Whatever the local topography may be, the alewives are evidently attracted to the warmer currents and the lack of salinity in a stream where it flows into salt water.

In general the cause of their moving in together from the offshore depths is their sexual development. I have heard the speculation that this is affected by the increase in light at this stage of the season, but unfortunately know no more about it. In any case at the age of four, or sometimes three, they are ready to spawn, to follow out the new force that is in them, on an old track. Their timing, when to migrate, is a question of generation, a decision that has to be made once again in the earth’s timeless schedule. Perhaps there is a comparison to be made once more with the weather, in which the element of surprise is constant during the usual course of the season, the intangible variant still plaguing prediction. The turns to storm or sunshine have their own order in the years beyond the immediate one. Who knows when anything will happen? Suddenly the cicadas start to sing in the August trees. Why that day or hour? Because “conditions are just right”? Perhaps, if we could ever track down all the conditions. Natural acts may be repetitive, but no flight, or song, or new growth has ever existed before at exactly the same time, pitch, or ratio. They are part of the indefinite context of generation.