Some five years ago, on a night in early April, I happened to be aboard
a United States naval vessel bound coastwise from the southern drill
grounds to New York. Our course lay well out of sight of land; the
night was springlike, still and mild, the stars thick-sown in a faintly
hazy sky. I remember that we saw the lights of a few ships standing
in to Philadelphia. Once these had dimmed and disappeared behind, the
sea was entirely our own, a vast, lonely, still, and starlit sea. Just
after one o’clock I saw ahead of us on the sea a field, a shimmer of
pale light, formless as the reflection of a cloud and mysteriously
troubled by auroral undulations. We had overtaken a migration of fish
moving north along the coast with the advance of spring. The skirts of
the sun’s robe, trailing over ocean, stir the deep, and its mysterious
peoples move North on the fringes of the light. I do not know what
species of fish I chanced that night to see, for there is a definite
and populous area of marine life lying between Hatteras and Cape Cod.
They may possibly have been herring. As our vessel neared the living
shoal, it seemed to move as one thing, there coursed through it a new
vibration, and it turned east, grew vague, and vanished completely in
the night.
Every spring even such a fish migration, moving through ocean as
mysteriously as the force of a wave, breaks against our south New
England shore. In colonial times the younger Winthrop wrote of it,
telling of “the coming up of a fish called aloofes into the rivers.
Where the ground is bad or worn out, the Indians used to put two or
three of the forementioned fishes under or adjacent each corn hill.
The English have learned like husbandry where those aloofes come up in
great plenty.” This “aloofe” of the colonists, better known as the
“alewife,” and often and incorrectly called a “herring,” is really not
a herring at all but a related fish, _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_. It is
distinguishable from the true sea herring by its greater depth of body
and by the serrations on the midline of its belly which are stronger
and sharper than those of the true herring--so sharp, indeed, that the
fish is sometimes called a “saw belly.” In April they leave the sea and
run up our brooks to spawn in freshwater ponds.
[Illustration: _Fire in the Pitch Pines_]
There is a famous brook in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which I try to
visit every year. I remember the last warm April day. The “herring”
brook--it is scarce more than ten or twelve feet wide and hardly
more than a foot deep--was flowing freely, its clear brownish waters
rippling almost noiselessly in the morning light. The fish were “in,”
moving up the brook as thickly massed as a battalion along a narrow
road; there were no ranks--only an onward swarming. So numerous were
the fish, and so regimented, that I stopped at the water’s edge and
easily caught two or three with my bare hand. Through the brownish
stream the eye looked down to numberless long backs of a subdued dark
lavender-grey and to a fleet of dorsal fins breaking water. The brook
smelt of fish. Here and there were dead ones, aground on the edges of
the stream or held by the current against a rock; dead things lying
on their sides, with opaque, slime-coated eyes, and rock bruises on
their sides--raw spots of fish blood red in a side of brown and golden
scales. Sometimes the advance seemed stilled till the studying eye
perceived the constant individual advance. A hundred thousand had come.
These alewives of Weymouth come up out of the sea, and from Heaven
knows just where out of the sea. They run up Weymouth Brook, are
stopped by a dam, are fished out in a net, dumped into barrels of
water, and carted overland in a truck to Whitman’s Pond. I have
watched them follow currents in the pond, once they have been spilled
out into it. Then comes, perhaps, a sense of arrival and intended time;
each female lays from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand glutinous
eggs, these drop to the bottom, drift along the mud, and ooze and
attach themselves as chance directs. The spawning females and the
males then go over the dam and back to sea, the herring born in the
pond follow them ten months or a year later, and then comes another
spring and a great mystery. Somewhere in the depths of ocean, each
Weymouth-born fish remembers Whitman’s Pond, and comes to it through
the directionless leagues of the sea. What stirs in each cold brain?
what call quivers as the new sun strikes down into the river of ocean?
how do the creatures find their way? Birds have landscape and rivers
and headlands of the coast, the fish have--what? But presently the fish
are “in” at Weymouth, breasting the brook’s spring overflow to the
ancestral pond.
Some remember Whitman’s Pond, others remember the ponds of the Cape.
There are “herring” ponds and “herring” brooks on the map of Eastham.
The road to the bay leads off at the town hall, passing an old
windmill which still has its grinding machinery in place. I entered
it once, long ago, to see the dusty chutes, the empty bins, and the
stones in their cheese-box cases of ancient and mellow wood. Locust
trees inclose it, and song sparrows perch on the arms that have not
turned for years. I heard one as I trod the dusty floor, his mating
song entering through a broken pane. Beyond the mill, the road passes
a scatter of houses, crosses the railroad track, winds between the
ponds of Eastham, and then comes to an open mile of sandy fields and
pitch-pine country extending to the bay.
The road descends, for the bay rim of the outer Cape is lower than the
ocean wall. North of the road, it is but a bank at the end of fields.
Accustomed to the roar of the ocean beach and to the salt wind in my
ears, the quiet of the bay fell strangely about me. There was no surf,
scarce a lakelike ripple; masses of weed, shaped in long undulations
by water waves, lay heavy on the beach; forty miles across, earth-blue
beyond blue water, and mounded and separate as so many isles, appeared
the highlands of Plymouth woods and Sagamore. A few ducks were feeding
more than a mile offshore, and, as I watched, a solitary drake rose
from the broad marshes to my right and flew off to join them.
[Illustration: _The Eastham Moors_]
The quiet of the bay, the subdued easterly blowing across the fields,
the belt of winter weed, the glint and warmth of the sun, the
solitary bird--there was a sense of old times dead and of new times
beginning--recurrence, life, the turn of the sun’s wheel, always the
imperative, bright sun.
I walked along the beach to the mouth of the “herring” brook. The
stream is but a clogged gully of clean water running down to the sea
through the sandy open meadows. Arriving at the shore, it spills out
over the beach and trickles down to the bay. Low tides wash at the
trickling rills and cover them; high tides climb the beach and enter
a pool which has formed at the mouth behind a dam of weed. Yesterday,
the low course tide had scarce touched the edge of the barrier and
had begun to ebb an hour before my coming. Between the dam and the
high-tide mark of the day lay a twenty-foot interval of beach traced
by flat rillets seeping from the barrier. I looked into the pool. The
“herring” had been in, for there was a dead one lying on the bottom of
weed, a golden fish silted over with fine mud.
Suddenly, on chancing to look bay-ward, I saw a small school of
“herring” just off the mouth of the brook and scarce more than fifteen
feet from the motionless rim of the tide. There were, perhaps, fifty
or a hundred fish in the school. Occasional fins chopped the quiet
water. “Herrings” of Eastham brook unable to enter the pond in which
they were born, barred from it by a dam of Nature’s making. As I stood
looking off to the baffled creatures, now huddled and seemingly still
in deeper water, now huddled and all astir in the shallowest fringes
of the tide, I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life
everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the
air, and the seas. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things
and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead,
life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning
ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures,
even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what
bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish
the earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal
their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will
of life universal?
The tide ebbed, swiftly shallowing over the flats, the “herring”
vanished from sight like a reflection from a glass; I could not tell
when they were gone or the manner of their going.
Returning to the outer beach late in the afternoon, I found the ocean
all a cold jade-green sown with whitecaps, the wind rising, and great
broken clouds flowing over from the east. And in this northern current
was a new warmth.
_Chapter VIII_