Part 6

The alewife hordes puzzled me as they moved slowly but definitely through the channel. A new animal, moving to unknown needs is hard to understand. You grasp for some translation between you that will not come. Relationships in the water world seem to need other senses than your own. It could be said that to understand the transition of the alewives from salt to fresh water and back you must know about the effect of the endocrine glands on the reproductive system, as well as adaptations of the kidney, along with the temperature, the time of the tides, and the chemical composition of a particular stream--just to begin with. If you are wise and devoted enough to put all the known factors together, you may come out with a unified interpretation, and be abreast of the latest theories of process. Knowledge is the motion by which the human animal may come closest to a fish. Still I looked in my ignorance for another familiarity in which we shared. Where the sea pushed inland and the alewives moved ahead or returned, I saw an indefinite route, of surpassing, complex elaboration; but in their pulse and tempo I felt something that gave me present assurance, and a touch of joy.

XI

Up the Valley

When you leave the channel that elbows through the tidal marshes and then goes under the shore road, Route 6 A, through the valley ending at the Herring Run, you go from one living community to another. You leave the thousands of fiddler crabs tunneling through marshy ground, the fat, olive-colored little salt-water minnows, or mummichogs, darting through green clouds of muck in the warm pools left by the tide, and muskrats, kingfishers, herons, ducks, or gulls. Some are permanent residents, others are itinerants, but all are presently bound together in the tidal grounds. They feed off one another, being both producers and consumers of food, and so sustain the balance of all their lives together. Such communities are the principal study of the ecologists--the interrelationship of living things in their environment.

The alewife migrates from sea to ponds through the inland vein, from crabs and shellfish to robins, and frogs beyond the tide. Its migration runs through several different life communities, of which it is not strictly a part, although its progeny, the fry, will be a part of the food chain all the way along, the prey of many different kinds of fish and birds, and eaters themselves of food the ponds provide. But the alewife’s migrant continuity is like the water itself that runs unceasingly down the valley, and ties all the life together that adjoins it.

The stream, on the north side of the shore road, used to run up the center of the valley where there is still a ditch dividing once cultivated cranberry bogs, but the watercourse was long since diverted to the eastern side of the valley. It was in that direction I went one half-showery, half-sunny day for a further exploration, but first by way of the short, bordering range of hills before going down again. Hills and scoured valley were left by the most recent continental glacier as it melted back from the terminal moraine of Cape Cod perhaps some twelve thousand years ago. I climbed the steep slope on the west side of the valley, nearest the Herring Run. Below me the long, snaky turns of the run went down from its rocky top where the waters were churning white and spilling over. As I walked up and down the slopes and across the small ravines between them, I could hear voices receding down by the Herring Run; and then a woodchuck whipped a whistle and dove when I came up, its brown rump disappearing into a freshly dug hole, which had an arc of sandy yellow dirt piled outside. On the way there were wild cherry, viburnum, hawthorn, pitch pine, and juniper sparsely growing, and I passed a dipping stone wall that marked an old boundary line. I picked up a wing from the remains of a dead herring gull on the ground, put it before the light wind, and was struck with what broad strength it held the air. As I came toward that knob of a hill where the gulls congregated, they flocked away with a simultaneous rush of wings and went crying high toward the Bay. The hill was bald, except for a few wild rosebushes on its crown, and its slopes were covered with a wild pink, moss campion, and patches of sorrel made more profuse by nitrogen and ammonia from gull droppings. On the other side of the valley there was a wood of twirling, gnarled, gray tupelo trees with the pink of their buds still showing. Bay waters and the curving, final shore carried distance out along with the gulls; while this valley with its dips and slopes and the migratory waves of life to which its land and water were hosts seemed wide enough for many worlds.

As I clambered down a slope toward the stream, three ducks that were coming in to settle on marshy ground changed course, two black-crowned night herons flew out of a tree, clucking like hens, and a yellowlegs stalking through muddy peninsulas flew up and away, its sickle wings in reckless flight, with a cry both tremulous and sharp. Everything fled before me. I might be a part of these communities myself but as an itinerant, it seemed, and a dangerous one. How difficult it is to prove to anything but domestic animals, long since tamed and lost, that a man is not dangerous! Men have a hard time trying to prove it to themselves.

I had come down near the point where Stony Brook started to turn to the east side of the valley. The banks behind me were streaming with spring water and the wet edges were lush with new growth: lettuce-green grass, succulent-looking leaves of skunk cabbage, fiddlehead ferns newly uncurling, and clumps of violets, flowers of a sky-delicate light blue. At this edge of the valley the water was full of thicketed islands, hummocks, and muddy shallows, but as the stream stretched on, ten to twelve feet wide, the current swung along at a man’s fast walk over a brown and sandy bottom, and in it, constantly eddying by and turning over, were innumerable silver fish scales, debris of the striving and death at the Herring Run, several hundred yards behind.

Where the stream turned at right angles across the valley it was bordered by a low man-made dike. Halfway down the dike, at the end of a long narrow ditch bisecting the old bogs, was the remains of a _stop water_, a kind of three-sided dam designed to raise or lower the water in a cranberry bog to its desired level. I looked down into its still, dark square of water and there was a split-second rush of a fish, and perhaps two or three others coiling in the small space together. They may have been spawning. In any case, intentionally or not, they had come down the ditch instead of by the main stream and could go no farther. There are many areas in a run, side pools, ditches, marshy land, to which some alewives may be sidetracked, before the main spawning grounds.

I saw a few later in a dead-end offshoot of the Herring River that looked very much as if they were trying to go back, though I have no reason to suppose they felt that they had made a mistake. If they were not ready to spawn they may have circled back with the ebb tide, which reached that point, and found the main flow where they had lost it on the way up.

I have idly wondered whether a single fish, isolated from its brethren, might not suffer some kind of unknown hell of estrangement. I have seen one swimming wildly down a narrow ditch off a tidal inlet as if it knew the crowd had left it behind, and was frantic to get back. Still, for all we can say about their lack of consciousness, they carry out their great decisions, their deep harmonies, together, by natural laws which we ourselves cannot completely explain, and by which we too may carry out our migrant purposes.

The creek flowed on through banks tangled with poison ivy, blueberry bushes, briars, and grapevines--at times almost impassable. Once, as I peered out from the tangle, I saw a bird I had never seen outside a field guide--a Virginia rail, moving along a muddy shelf under the opposite bank. It moved almost humped over, neck and head forward, like a great mouse, with a docked tail and red-orange beak. Then farther on I saw an egret with head and slender neck above some high pitch pines, pure sky-white, Grecian, out of a stately, impenetrable world, almost too secret for an ecologist.

Where the stream was wider and the shallow water flowed along, lightly and unobstructed, a group of some ten or twelve fish ran easily across it. Then they stopped and circled with the current like a nest of eels, in a slow, fluid mass.

I turned back. After light sunshine there was a faint shower, a spray of rain. The valley was full of sound. A slow plane flew over; a truck’s gears ground over the road; I heard a song sparrow staking out his territory; crows cawed; blue jays gave harsh and silvery shouts; I heard my own breath and the almost silent touch of cool air and rain spray on the ground--a narrow valley, but with melodious resources from everywhere. Why “back to nature”? I thought. Is there anything in it but forwardness?

In the stretch below the Herring Run again I suddenly saw, in the blank, dark water under gray skies, a wave, an eruption, a rushing ahead of a group of fish. Then they moved over to the side of the shallow stream, thirty or forty of them, and stayed there almost stationary for a while in deeper, slower currents where an overhanging shrub shaded the water. I threw a stick in their direction ... when it hit the water they wheeled wildly on their group axis, but stayed in the same place. Then in a minute or two they all made a break for open water at once, and I noticed that another group had come in unseen behind them. They would progress in this way, group after group, until they met the denser population below the fish ladders. One of them would come out first with a kind of flitting, darting, weaving forward against the current and the rest wheeled in behind it.

I took off my shoes and waded out into the stream. A lead fish working its way back and forth with the current swung around as I came and fled back. I stood still for a while, noticing that the gulls I chased out of the valley had returned and were hovering over, chuckling, crying, mumbling, or barking like seals. After a few minutes of waiting the fish came right through and around my legs. My slightest change in posture would send the ones in front looping back, but they still kept coming. It was a quickening thing to see a fish race up in a long reach and then drop part way back again--a tentative, fast exploration of the current, the living current as perpetual as its own communicated impulses.

One hundred yards or so upstream the alewives covered the stream bed where Stony Brook’s divided waters met. Some schooled slowly around below the unsurmountable falls, the rocks of death, the majority headed up the main stream toward the fishway where hundreds were massed, slipping and turning, arched in the white waters. Fishways are so designed as to allow the alewives an easier way to mount an incline, but they do have the effect of concentrating them in narrow quarters. The resting pools are compartments deep enough to check the velocity of the water and so permit the fish to wait before leaping on again. Even so the water roared down with great force on the alewives crammed in them. I could hardly hold my cupped hand against it. As they leaped up they were tunneled in spouts of water, and then they would flip through the boiling surface from one pool to the next, sometimes being thrown back to try again.

XII

The Imperfect Ladder

There is no such thing, I have been told by men who were in the business of making them, as a good or even adequate fishway. There is always an imbalance between the purposes they serve and the results. All the same, fishways are the best we can do to remedy a situation that blocked great populations of fish from entry to their natural routes. They are built to try and bring back what man has taken away; though it should be said that they are as much in man’s interest as the alewife’s. Commerce is the main benefactor of their success.

Fishways help open up free passage to the fish, and so increase their numbers. In a good fishway alewives can be counted or sampled. They can be taken out and transferred to other areas that are to be stocked with them. In other words, the removal of obstacles and the construction of a fish ladder means, in most cases, that a run can either be introduced or improved, and, above all, kept under control.

The trouble is that they cannot be built so as to result in free-and-easy passage for the fish at all times. In fact, if they are not properly placed, they can even be a hindrance. A fishway requires engineering and research in its preparation. They vary greatly, of course, according to local conditions. A fish ladder’s length depends on the distance of the slope down which a flow is directed, or the kind of banks, rocks, or stream formation through which it is built. I imagine there are no ideal specifications. For alewives, fishway construction depends in general on the size and habits of the fish and the nature of the waters in which they travel. The great fish ladders built for salmon at the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River, have pools in them that are forty feet wide, sixteen feet long, and six feet deep, each being a foot above the other. One foot is no problem to the salmon, which have been known to leap as high as ten.

At Stony Brook the pools on the down, or north, side of the road are ten in number and various in size, extending some distance downstream. The first six are smaller and deeper than the others, being so designed as to round a bend in the stream. Their depth, subtracting several inches of sand that keeps washing down from the road, is about two feet.

[Illustration]

On the upper side, above the seining pool, leading from one of the pond outlets, is a straight ladder, some twenty feet long. Its pools are four and a half feet square and twenty-eight inches deep, each being about five inches above the other, thus graduating to fit the slope.

Whatever their design, fishways are all built so as to assure the alewives quick transit from one pool to another. In most cases they seem to work satisfactorily, but unless they are well managed they can effect full use of the stream by the migrant fish. Alewives have their own crowd pressure and motion, their way of moving on, and any reduction in their numbers at any one time or counterpressure, keeping them back, may result in a decline because less will get to the ponds to spawn.

Fishways are more rigid than a natural stream bed, though sometimes less hazardous. Water levels change; the flow varies both in angle and pressure; and managers of a good fishway must be constantly on the alert for new conditions. A marked increase or decrease in the volume of water, especially as it is reflected at the head of a fish ladder, which usually has a gate or wooden dam of some kind, may create a barrier instead of an aid. Unless the adjustment in the dam is just right the head of water coming down may be almost impossible for a fish to surmount.

Alewives are not like the muscular west coast salmon with their spectacular leaps, as if shot by a giant sling. An alewife does not leap over a pool and up a falls so much as swim through it rapidly, being a much smaller fish and in smaller streams. If a head of water coming over a dam or sluice is at the wrong pitch, the fish will not be able to climb it. In designing a fishway an engineer has to take into account the relationship between the water head and the angle of the flow below it, which has to be translated into how far an alewife can swim at what speed.

A fish is supported by water--an advantage over cumbersome human beings in their own surrounding medium, the air--its specific gravity being close to that of its own body. The fish is so made as to swim through the water with as little resistance as possible. It also gets energy from the water, orienting itself by the current, or the various changes of pressure in the flow, the way a bird uses currents in the air. In so far as a bird is streamlined too, and finds in air pressure and weight the means to fly up and forward, their actions have something in common. A bird, like an alewife, may lose its momentum if the angle of climb gets too steep. Swimming and flying take place in fluid surroundings.

The difficulty in making an artificial aid like a fishway comes from the problem, in part, of understanding a fish’s behavior; of meeting its needs; arranging its passage; trying, if not to control nature, at least to be a substitute for it. The positive results are plain to see, but there is something almost as elusive about it as trying to explain a fish in human language.

At one point along the Herring River in Harwich is a concrete fish ladder, twenty-five feet long and six feet wide. The pond above was high, after this same rainy spring, and the waters were roaring and frothing down. The alewives migrating upstream were being held back. Only a few I noticed were getting through. The flow had tremendous, deep force, so that the resting pools were not serving their function, and most of the fish that did manage by extraordinary effort to reach the head of water at the top were not able to pass it.

The racing torrent dropped to a wide, shallow basin which ended in the river winding on within its banks. A continuous long line of fish kept swimming through to the bottom of the ladder, where they would vainly skip and twist and strain through the water’s force. Then they swung back in a semicircular arc across the basin and re-formed at its edge. There was a wide shiver on the water. They wheeled as in a dance, or like the planets in pursuit of light, where they ran up again into the flood. It happened time after time, in this futile but concurrent motion, a beauty to watch--its tension, effort, and relief were exactly co-ordinated with the water. These fish _were_ the water. But I saw in them the mechanics of breath ... contraction and expansion; and systole, diastole, balance and counterbalance, within the dynamics of all nature. They showed the push of life against a current, its running back and leaping forward, its fulfillment and defeat. It was the alewife circle again, as we have ours, in a motion of entirety; but almost impossible to translate.

“You never enjoy the world aright,” wrote Thomas Traherne, “till the sea itself floweth in your veins.” In the knowing and encompassing sense of his word _enjoy_, we will never know alewives until the motion, lift, light, weight, and changing beauty of the water is in some degree a part of us. In any case, we will never build the perfect fishway.

XIII

Persistence

When the little wire gate on the upper side of the seining pool was left open during the weekends the fish could pursue their destiny past the concessionaires. One weekday night during the last run in May some prankster took the gate out and caused much excitement in the alewives committee.

“Gawd! Gawd! ... running all night long. Here’s the town selling this young feller the fish, and he doesn’t get any. We’ll have to put a padlock on it ...” etc. etc.

I may have had such a delinquent impulse myself at one time, but I kept it way down.

There are two streams falling into the seining pool. Both start as pond outlets some fifty yards above, one with the fish ladder going down from it, and the other falling into a pool that ends above the old mill, the water of which can be used to run the water wheel on occasion by being diverted to a wooden sluiceway, instead of taking its natural course down over rocks into the seining pool. This second stream cannot be traveled by fish going up to spawn although they can go down it on their return journey.

One weekend I watched the fish at the top of the ladder as they jumped over the board dam, to meet at last the quiet stretch of pond water above it. The waters were growing green with algae as the season developed, and were penetrated by deep shadows, blue shafts from the sun, yellow and pink reflections from the spring leaves on the bank. Some were unable to make it and slipped back into the rushing, narrow flow in the ladder, and then tried again. Jumping the dam, they would give a final, vibrant, struggling push into the smooth, heavy weight of water over the rim and then shoot off, wriggling away, easing into a new peace. The impetus of this leap was enough to send some of them skittering along the flat surface on their sides, like skimmed stones. Others going into the pond would start back again toward the head of the ladder, and then return and wait a while as if they wanted company. As some new arrivals came they would swim a kind of half circle in relation to them, and then all would go on, having established a communication; but the general movement was a bolt into deeper water and then a rejoining into groups as they went on. After that, where do they go?

As far as fish migration in general is concerned the spawning route beyond Stony Brook is not very great. Roughly, the distance from the outlet through Lower Mill Pond and Upper Mill Pond to the end of Walker’s Pond is about two and a quarter miles. Upper Mill is the largest of these, being about one and a half miles long and a quarter mile wide. Where the fish spawn in this area is not too easy to find out at first. Their preference as to spawning grounds seems to lie along stony, pebbly shores, or shallow beaches. Many of them, before spawning, will travel to the farthest reaches of any given water route. Others, depending perhaps on how far the season is advanced and on their bodily development, will either go the entire distance and then return part way, or spawn before they get there.