THE RUN
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The Run
JOHN HAY
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
1959
_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-11598_
_Copyright © 1959 by John Hay_
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_First Edition_
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
I
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]
II
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
“The herring are running!” must have been a great cry once, for men,
women, and children over the whole Cape. There was a deep meaning in
this seasonal event, since the fish were a part of the local livelihood
the year around. Nowadays, so far as commerce is concerned, the
alewives lack their former importance. In Massachusetts, although they
come into a number of streams and rivers few alewives are taken for the
market. I understand that in recent years only the runs at Brewster and
Middleboro have been open for commercial use, the fishing rights having
been sold to the highest bidder.
For all that, it still seems a live, high, and social morning when
you wake to the gabbling of gulls in the distance and know that the
alewives have finally arrived. The sun spreads down new warmth. There
are cool sweeps of breeze, broad runs of blue in sky and sea past the
gray and white houses, with those silver hordes starting to enter
inland veins in a bold reminder of perpetuity.
This season the rights to fish the stream had been bought from the
town by a firm that wanted them for lobster bait. On the eighteenth
day of the month a big red truck had pulled alongside the seining pool
and the old mill. Three men were down in the pool, with their rubber
boots on, putting a wide net in place. It was rimmed with cork floats
and roped at the center to a hoist fixed to a small dock on the bank. A
little wire gate was closed at the stream entrance on the upper side of
the pool, so that the fish could go no farther. The run was officially
on; and until it thinned out two months ahead, the fish would be hauled
from the pool four days a week, thrown into barrels, and trucked away
to be sold as lobster bait.
A sign was posted at Stony Brook, reading: “No herring may be taken
or molested in Stony Brook on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in
accordance with state law. Residents of Brewster are entitled without
charge to one dozen herring daily on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays,
and Thursdays during the open season, and should obtain them from J.
B. Salvadore, Jr., who has purchased the Herring Fishery Rights for
this year, or may take them from the brook on these days if he is not
present.” It was signed by the selectmen of the town of Brewster.
On the down side of the road a bunch of children were celebrating the
coming of the fish. The alewives, crowding, resting, circling, and
slipping up through the pools and falls of the fishway--their bodies a
fretted-lavender brown in the bubbling waters--were now fair game for
the inland world they had come back to. Three boys were competing for
a crab net they were dipping into the water, scooping after the fish,
and as often as not heaving it up empty. One of them was professionally
pinching the belly sides of a fat, gleaming alewife to see if it was
a female and would emit some of its roe. Then he flung it back into
the water with furious energy; and it slapped hard when it hit, and he
cheered.
Were they under the law, these predators? Well, this play, or hunt,
this spring jubilation had been going on for several hundred years.
“Let the kids play around there, I say,” said Herring Harry. “We were
kids too. We didn’t start out old.”
In barer, colder, perhaps simpler days, days when men lived closer to
their natural surroundings and were more dependent on them than they
think they are now, the alewives meant food and revenue, an abundance
returning to your own back yard. They came under the heading of useful
acquaintances. But now the roe, or fish eggs, is the only part of the
alewife that is highly considered locally. It is a very bony fish
and most people reject the idea of eating it, forgetting the days of
“good salt herring” when the children ate them on sticks like candy.
So the Brewster resident gets his allotment for the roe, to be fried
in butter. An ambitious gardener can bury the rest under his corn
plantings to serve as fertilizer, if the cats permit, though it is
still a very good way to make corn grow tall in unreceptive soil. A
hundred years ago or more, when it was done extensively, it resulted
in rich yields. I have heard that one acre set with a thousand fish
would produce three times as much corn as an acre without them. It
is a practice that we inherit from the Indians, although the Indian
agriculturist was likely to be plagued by wolves instead of cats.
Cape Codders, even so comparatively short a time ago as fifty or sixty
years, would not have liked to hear this farming method belittled.
Some of them may even have regarded it with delight. I recently talked
with a man who was a boy in the 1890’s and remembers walking behind a
wagonload of “very dead” fish in a field made ready for corn. A man in
the wagon pitched out a forkful of herring into each prepared hole as
they creaked along, while another, walking behind, shoved dirt over
them and planted the seed. He can remember a relative cocking a keen
ear one night and saying, “Listen! You can hear it growing. By God,
when their feet hit that stinking mess don’t they start up and go!”
Although to know them may have been to understand their worth, I find
one early writer, Marshall McDonald Douglass, in his _North
America_, 1740, who does not give the tribe much credit.
“Alewives,” he says, “by some of the country people are called
Herrings. They are of the Herring tribe but much larger than the true
Herring. They are a very mean, dry and insipid fish. Some of them are
cured in the manner of white Herrings and sent to the sugar islands for
the slaves, but because of their bad quality they are not in request:
in some places they are used to manure the land. They are very plenty,
and come up the rivers and brooks into ponds in the spring.” None the
less, they used to be smoked or pickled in brine and shipped out in
barrels to the West Indies, and whether or not the quality was bad the
demand was enough to make the trade in them into one of great volume,
part in fact of the famous swap for molasses, later turned into New
England rum, which was so important in our early history.
Before I try to defend these fish against any further imputations, I
should explain their name. “Herrin’” is the name and pronunciation on
Cape Cod. I don’t call them alewives just to defy such Cape Codders
as might be fussy about it, but to differentiate them from their more
famous cousins the sea herring, which spawn in salt water. Cape Cod
has its alewives committees, and it may be that the fish were called
alewives here before they were called herrin’.
You can still read statements to the effect that the original name
“alewife” is a corruption of the Indian word “aloofe,” which meant bony
fish. In 1871 a gentleman named J. Hammond Trumbull tried to scotch
this bit of etymology by pointing out--in a government publication
on Sea Fisheries, that the Narragansett and Massachusetts Indians
called the alewife and herring “Aumsu-og,” as had been noted by Roger
Williams. In any case, whichever Indianism we choose, it seems more
likely that the name stemmed from English dialect. “Allizes,” not at
all like aloofe, was one of the names applied to it in company with the
allice shad. To quote Mr. Trumbull again: “The modern English ‘allis’
was in old French and old English ‘alouze’ or ‘aloose,’ nearer than
the modern form of the name to the Latin ‘alausa.’” The latest in this
chain of spellings is of course _Alosa_, the scientific handle now
applied to the shad, and in some texts to the alewife.
To the English colonists an alewife was also an alehouse keeper.
_A Dictionary of Americanisms_ quotes a volume printed in
1675 which said: “The alewife is like a herrin’, but it has a bigger
bellie, therefore called an alewife.” (Let that quotation be of some
comfort to the proponents of herrin’. The name has a formal heritage.)
The writer was surely not making a direct physical analogy between a
woman and a fish. The original alewife he probably has reference to
is a shad, but _Pomolobus pseudoharengus_ does have a deep body
and is heavily built forward, so perhaps a comparison with a hearty
alewife of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England would not be too
far-fetched.
The poet Skelton described an alewife, Eleanor Rummying by name, who
lived in the time of Henry VIII. She brewed a “hoppy ale,” and “her
face was wondrously wrinkled, lyke a rost pigges eare bristled with
here”--at which point I will let the analogy go on its merry way.
The alewife has had a variety of local and common names, the kind that
indicate touch and sight, the handing on of natural meetings--the
signposts of its contacts with man and his history on the eastern
shores of this continent. It is known as “sawbelly,” for example,
referring to the fine sharp little notches or teeth on the midline
of its belly; and for the large eyes, set on each side of its small
head, it has been called “wall-eyed herring,” “big-eyed herring,”
or “blear-eyed herring.” It is also the “spring herring,” “branch
herring,” “river herring,” or “fresh-water herring.”
This old New England name of alewife has its modifications in “Ellwife”
and “Ellwhop” on the Connecticut River, and there were variant
pronunciations in other regions. In the state of Rhode Island alewives
were called “buckies” and in Maine “cat-thrashers.” In Canada the name
is “Gaspereau,” sometimes “Gasparot.” The term “alewife” is uncommon
in the maritime provinces. There seem to be three Gaspereau Rivers,
two in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia, in addition to a town of
that name in New Brunswick, and a lake in Nova Scotia. Apparently the
place name derives from the fish, and not the other way around. In its
15th Report, for 1917, the Geographic Board of Canada says “after a
fish,” in explaining the name of the Gaspereau River. Another Canadian
term for alewife is “kyak” or “kyack,” which sounds like a derivation
from northern Indians. Mr. A. H. Leim of the Biological Station at St.
Andrews, New Brunswick, writes me that he has only heard “one or two
fishermen call them ‘kyacks’; one of these was an old poacher on the
Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia who always used this name. I assume
the word is of Indian origin.”
Finally the alewife is called “grayback,” a name that distinguishes
it from a close relative often confused with it, which is called
the “blackback,” “blueback,” or “glut herring” (_Pomolobus
aestivalis_). The blueback shows up in a late spring run, and seems
to spawn in the lower reaches of a stream, instead of migrating up to
its headwaters. It has smaller eyes than the “grayback” and as its
name indicates its back is dark blue, instead of greenish gray, but as
colors fade at death, this is no sure test. The two species of alewife
can only be told apart conclusively by dissection. The lining of the
blueback’s body cavity is black instead of pink or gray.
These names are also indicative of the range of the alewife, all the
way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Carolinas. In the spawning
season they come inland by way of sandy inlets, great tidal bays,
fresh-water river mouths, or creeks only a few yards wide. Most of
the streams by which they are still able to swim up have their local
history of fishing alewives, either with traps, weirs, dip nets, or
even pails. In the fisheries of Maine it is known as “alewife dipping.”
This is an important “food fish,” even though it may never have
approached the sea herring in numbers, nor been as famous as the cod.
If the English sailor, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, had been ashore in
the springtime instead of on his ship when he gave the Cape its name,
it might now be called Cape Alewife.
Though they are only part of a multitude of other lives that nurtured
the American past, the alewives should be given high and special
credit. William Bradford’s _Of Plymouth Plantation_
testifies to their vital importance in the Pilgrims’ first year. After
the _Mayflower_ left in early April of 1621, Squanto, that greatly
helpful Indian, showed them “that in the middle of April they should
have store enough come up the brook by which they began to build,
and taught them how to take it, and where to get other provisions
necessary for them.” This brook ran, as it still runs, through the
town, so that the Plymouth inhabitants were lucky to have their supply
of alewives close at hand--they seemed to have depended on them
primarily for plantings, also taught them by Squanto. The fish came
in “fat and fair” and amazingly plentiful after a lean winter full of
apprehension. At first apparently each inhabitant took freely of the
fish in the brook, but this seems to have resulted in “injuring the
property of those near the place of taking.” As a result the Town
Brook became town responsibility after a few years, and the fishing was
regulated. The cost of a weir was distributed among the inhabitants
and the fishing put under the charge of town officers, with fines set
for taking alewives without permission. Innumerable fish laws were
passed after that, from the Colony of Plymouth to the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. The fish ran comparatively free for a while, but through
the progression of these laws you might watch, in town after town, the
gradual growth of human population plus human concern for a valuable
product. In 1709 a general law provides: “That no wears, hedges,
fishgarths, stakes, kiddles, or other disturbance or encumbrance shall
be set, erected or made, on or across any river, to the stopping,
obstructing, or straitning of the natural or usual course and passage
of the fish in their seasons, or spring of the year, without the
approbation and allowance first had and obtained from the general
sessions of the peace in the same county....” An Act of 1741, to
“prevent the destruction of the fish called alewives, and other fish,”
might indicate that the colonists were beginning to notice a decline
in their numbers and to be apprehensive about it, although it is hard
to judge. _A History of Barnstable County_, published in
1890, has this to say: “Early in the last century the supply of herring
so far exceeded the demand for fish food that the surplus was used to
fertilize the fields, and the growing custom of using them in each
hill of planted corn was checked in 1718, the town fathers [of Bourne]
ordering that none should be taken in the future to ‘fish corn.’”
Apparently the alewife population did start to decrease a long time
ago. Fishermen along the Merrimack River noticed a diminishing in
numbers as early as the mid-eighteenth century; and somewhat later they
thought it might be due to the number of small ponds which had been
dammed up. These ponds had access to the river and so provided spawning
grounds. Certainly the alewives, through man’s agency, began to suffer
great setbacks in the old use of their runs. Some of the first culprits
were the woolen mills, and corn or grist mills such as the one at
Brewster--they blocked up many of the runs, in spite of the fish laws.
Then a tremendous industrial expansion put cities and factories along
all big rivers and many large streams, adding more mill dams across
the runs. The resulting sewage and manufacturing wastes polluted the
waters, destroying many fish, and making some rivers completely unfit
for migration. Extensive deforestation also resulted in the drying up
of a number of streams and the lowering of water levels. The nineteenth
century was a notorious plunderer.
Alewives in any large number now coincide with undeveloped areas, which
happen to be comparatively few along the Atlantic coast. As a result
of industrialization the original heavy runs were so reduced that
the only important, commercial runs are now in the southern part of
the alewife range, notably the Chesapeake, or north of Rhode Island.
Although the fish still have much less access to their ancient, natural
routes, the existing runs are probably less carelessly protected by
law. State laws put the responsibility of keeping the fishways clear
on the localities through which they run, but the state supervises
their condition, and if a run is too depleted the state can forbid the
sale of its fishing rights. Whatever may be said about their decline
in the long run, it is quite likely that state supervision has helped
to increase the alewife population during comparatively recent years.
It certainly seems to be true that the number of fish at the Brewster
run has increased since the fish ladders were built in 1945. The new
fishways made the rocky, often clogged stream easier of access, and
cut down on fish mortality as they ascended. They can, in other words,
be brought back; although there are fishermen in Maine who estimate
that the alewife population is only a third as large as it was some
fifty years ago, and there are those who say the decline has been even
greater in Massachusetts.
A great many of the old alewife fisheries lost their vitality because
there was no longer any local dependence on them nor any general
call for the product. A recent article in the _Maine Coast
Fishermen_ said this: “A few weeks ago in Wareham, Mass., the
local selectmen refused to auction off the fishing rights, feeling
the bids were too low. An old timer of the town, who has watched these
migrations since he was a boy, recalled that the alewife rights to the
stream in question once brought as much as $12,000 a year.” In the
smaller run at Brewster, incidentally, the bid taken during the last
spawning season was $450.
Control is still local. Where there are still good-sized runs, the
towns appoint alewives committees, whose members are re-elected
annually at Town Meeting. In Brewster, on a salary of some twenty-five
dollars a year, plus small wages for time spent, it is their job to
keep the Herring Run area neat; to post regulations; see that no
individual gets away with more than his allotted portion of fish; and
keep the stream free from obstruction so that the fish can proceed to
their spawning grounds, as well as into the nets of the concessionaire.
The town sells annual rights for the privilege of fishing the stream in
season, four days a week. On the other days the alewives are allowed to
go ahead and propagate their kind. The five hundred barrels or more of
fish that have been taken yearly from Stony Brook happen to have been
used recently for lobster bait.
To some extent, incidentally, their use and commercial value depends on
their condition and flavor. An alewife’s flesh is best when it has been
taken directly out of salt water. The ocean flavor is progressively
lost as the fish migrates through inland streams. So they have their
highest value where the runs are located close to the sea, or tidal
rivers such as the one at Damariscotta, Maine.
The West Indies trade is over, as well as the days of “good salt
herring.” The most likely place to see indications of alewife now is
on the stupendously bountiful shelves of a chain store, in the form of
a can with a picture of a cat on it. And the future of the alewife, in
human hands at least, seems to depend on a wider demand for it. It is
valued neither for sport nor edibility, but is used for cat and dog
food, fish meal, and pickled fish, with some, as at Brewster, being
taken for lobster bait. Apparently there is an innate prejudice among
some New Englanders against using a traditional food fish for other
purposes, and a belief that selling it for meal or cat food is less
profitable. Put this down to thrift, or respect for old ways, still it
stands against the fact that the alewife’s latest value comes from its
status as a processed, rather than edible, food. “Reduction” is what
they call it when the alewives are turned into fish meal, and in a
sense perhaps they have been reduced, at least in our personal esteem.
They now belong to a technical age with the rest of us.
With modern methods of handling, packing, and transportation the old
fisheries may have been left behind, but it should be said that,
because of its new status in commerce, ignominious or not, the alewife
may stand a better chance. The State of Maine, for example, has been
undertaking thorough study of the alewives in order to find out how old
runs can be brought back, or new ones created. They are a fish that
are very responsive to management. When barriers are removed and open
fishways are made, they take their opportunity.
All is not well with the traditional ways, though the alewives may be
perfectly ready to go beyond them. In the old days on Cape Cod there
was hardly a seafaring man who did not take his salt herring aboard
with him, and on land, after being salted, dried in the sun, and
smoked, they were strung on sticks and sold for ten cents a stick.
There were many smokehouses on the Cape, and in the wintertime dried
fish hung on the barn rafters above the haylofts. I have a comment on
those days from Mr. Alexander: “None of your First National Stores
then,” said he. “We lived off the earth ... potatoes and smoked
herrin’. That’s why some of us old goats lived so long.”
It is hard to find smoked herring these days. It is a skill that seems
to have almost gone; and I am told that there used to be a good deal of
variation in the product. Smoked fish are now easier to find in Maine
than on Cape Cod. I bought a pair recently in a small general store
in Maine at the excessive price of fifteen cents. A dried alewife was
handsomer than I had suspected, and the smell not unpleasant, although
I might not say as much for a barnful. The head and eye sockets were
encrusted with salt, and the hard thin body was colored a bronze and
smoky gold as though heat still roamed the scales. I was reminded for
some reason of a metal bowl I had once seen that came from the land of
the Incas. I peeled off the scales and chawed a toast to our ancestors.
IV
The Reproductive Urge
The fishing operation near the old grist mill was in full swing after
the twenty-third of April. The _Salvadore_ crew was hauling in
their net with the aid of a winch. It was loaded with fish, enough to
fill four or five barrels. The victims were flipping and flashing with
a whirring violence, a high sound going up in the gray morning air, a
beautiful iridescence in their white-silver sides. The whole dripping
net was heavy and alive with their shivering, thrashing, and dying.
Heads butted through the mesh and gills caught, in their frantic,
vibrating despair ... and all for lobster bait, worth six dollars a
barrel.
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.