seeing that they chose to come in by day--provided there was much
choice in the matter. I heard the theory put forward that they must
have been chased in by bass; but if they were so chased, it did not
seem likely that they would choose the narrow waters of this particular
creek for refuge, or have that much calculation in them. That is not
why they came in. Those thousands of years the alewives had migrated
provided their own track. The fish knew instinctively when and where
to go, and all risks were incidental to that. The only possibility was
that they might have been schooling around in the farthest reaches
of the creek waters in the bay and were hurried in by the bass; but
they were there first. Many others may have gone in the night before.
Those trying to come in during the morning waited their turn after
an ebb tide. This rhythmic deliberation and then going seemed very
characteristic of the fish as I had watched them in inland waters, and
in a larger way it might be similar to their schooling in salt water.
I found out subsequently that the alewives coming into the Bournedale
run in the Cape Cod Canal do so both day and night, but that there is
less chance of the gulls intercepting them there because of the deeper
waters.
I went down to Paine’s Creek the following morning, May 22, and the
frenzied hunt was going on again. I had checked the previous night and
did so the night of this day too and there were no fish coming in, so
far as I could tell. There was no sign of them in the water during the
late evening, no sound of their soft slapping on the surface later on.
It is my impression that though they start into the creek in the
dark--perhaps not later than ten-thirty or eleven o’clock--they do not
move upstream very much until daylight comes. Sunlight stimulates them,
or, to be exact, its radiation. You can see them swimming up faster in
Stony Brook after the bright sunlight warms the water in the morning.
They might enter the creek more successfully under the protection of
fog, or darkness, combined with deep water, but did not prefer such
conditions to broad daylight. When the temperature was right and they
were physiologically ready, alewife schools began to move in from salt
water on an incoming tide ... swing in might be a better term, since a
circular movement is characteristic and sends them on. According to my
observation, incidentally, this is very likely to be counterclockwise.
In any case the power and direction of the migration came from their
combined rhythmic impulses.
Alewives seemed to me to demand a study of universal motions and their
interrelationships. The body of a fish must have in it the declination
of the globe and all its years. If I had read some of my limited
science reading correctly, there was a time system in the world of
life which had nothing to do with clocks, and their specific minutes
and hours. It was built into its creatures so that their stages of
development, their growth and movements, followed the direction and
change of all other forces affecting them. It is a running world; and
who, in that context, is more automatic than another?
X
Transition: Salt and Fresh
The change, for those fish that make it in, is from salt to fresh,
wide to narrow, deep to shallow. Watched at Paine’s Creek in the first
sheltered inland curve, the movement of those I was able to see was
like the movement of tides and estuary waters, a flowing back and
forth, a waving and interweaving. Some dropped back like leaves, then
swam up again with the rest as they all turned together. At the start
of an incoming tide--when the salt water moved in under the fresh and
the creek began to rise--the fish seemed stimulated and swam faster,
back and forth against it. Then gradually, though it was hard to see
them in the high tide waters, they appeared to move farther up the
inlet.
It was an encounter at the dramatic approaches of sea and land, on the
long shoreline where continuous transitions are made between water and
earth and air.
If you say the “anadromous habit” started somewhere in geologic time,
it is difficult to conceive of, and it is probably not accurate, in
the sense that these adaptations to environment do not start so much
as develop and evolve. In any event the incredibly long history of
the earth is not broken down with any facility. First of all, leaving
out the question of whether fish originally evolved in fresh waters
or the sea, and then blithely skipping one hundred million years or
so, you have an evolved race of alewives, established residents of the
sea. As to their habit of spawning in fresh water, it is possible that
alewives, like other coastal fish, may gradually have explored the
inland rivers and streams, until they began to use their comparative
quiet and refuge in which to spawn. Along the northern coasts their
inland migration would have been interrupted during the glacial epochs,
and their range would have started farther to the south. There are
landlocked varieties of alewife in Lake Ontario and in New York State,
which also suggests a period when the continental glaciers retreated,
leaving an access by water to inland lakes from the sea which was later
cut off. In any case this anadromous habit was arrived at gradually,
involuntarily, over a very long time. But, in a sense, what you see
_now_, your center of history, is a routine which is neither old
nor new but both various and inexorable, having in it the pull of the
land, the blood of the sea.
This starting, circulatory movement of the few small schools I had seen
was succeeded by the swimming of steady herds in the brown water of
the channel. I couldn’t find them at first. On the ebb tide, when the
water had receded enough from the banks along the inlet I walked there
for a while and then cut across the tidal marsh. The day was cool and
fresh, with a light northeast wind lifting in, and it smelled of the
sea. (You can live a mile or so inland on the narrow peninsula of Cape
Cod, in the towns or oak woods, and never smell that rich combination
of salt water, shellfish, and tidal marsh, unless the wind is from
the right quarter, with a special condition of the atmosphere.) Light
rippled up the broad inlet--the coppery waters seemed to move slowly
and reliantly. The season had hatched its enthusiasms everywhere, from
flies, to crabs, to birds. The tidal ground was pitted with holes made
by fiddler crabs. They backed away in front of me, the males comically
holding up their one big claw--little characters of a dull metal-blue,
with bubbling mouths--and disappeared into the safety of their burrows.
Ahead of me nine Canada geese, which had been resting and feeding in
the marshes, unfolded their wings and lunged up and out toward the Bay.
Then two black ducks flew off quacking in their deep, wild way. I saw
where a deer had left fresh hoofprints in the mud; looking down at them
made me notice many tiny shells, newly hatched whelks perhaps, carried
in by the tide, strewn between the stiff spikes of the marsh grass; and
I found a couple of empty pint bottles, sometimes as common in these
parts as Kleenex beside the highways of America. Insects, shells,
ducks, geese, crabs, wind, cloud rack overhead, brilliance and shadows
on the tidal ground--many lifetimes of learning. Is there any man who
knows the length and breadth of anything, let alone a creek? Yet such a
place keeps announcing its novelties and exacting from us whatever love
and discipline we are capable of; or so I felt, challenged in the keen
air and the high glitter of the light.
Several hundred yards around another bend in the inlet, where it was
some twelve to fifteen feet wide, I looked down into the water and saw
them again. The dark channel was alive with them. It had a floor of
turning, slowly moving alewives. A few at the end of this school would
run quickly back, revealing their shadows on the bottom. The procession
moved back and forth, as smoothly as the flow of the water, and across
the entire width of the channel. They were more numerous in the areas
where the sun hit the water directly.
Some of them looked torn and scarred. On that basis, and because many
thousands had either been trucked off from the Herring Run in barrels
by this time, or had reached the ponds, spawned, and returned to
the Bay, you could not say categorically that they were all moving
inland. As the season develops you can always find spent fish on
their way to salt water running through those still heading up to
the spawning areas. Aside from watching their movements, one method
of distinguishing between the two classes of fish is to see if they
bear any white patches on their backs and sides. A certain number of
the spent fish will show fungus growths after a period of time in
fresh water. What seems to happen is that an alewife, attacked by a
gull or predatory fish or flung against sharp rocks, will at first
show a “scaling” from the damage. This scaling, unless it is more
than that, a mortal wound, is likely to develop into a fungus growth,
which sometimes covers a large part of a fish’s body; but without,
apparently, any added injury. I believe experiment proves that the
fungus disappears fairly soon after the fish affected are back in salt
water.
The returning alewives will stay for a while in the brackish water of
the inlet, resting and feeding. They are spare and hungry and will feed
on shrimp, small eels, and small fish. Alewives that by chance stay
longer than the others in fresh water have been known to chase and eat
their own young, if they were small enough to swallow.
Their basic salt-water diet is plankton. The copepods and
amphipods--tiny animals similar to the well-known sand hoppers, beach
fleas, water fleas, or small shrimp--provide the staple part. On their
inland migration they will not eat much of anything. They are in the
service of a mission, and they fast. Still there may be occasions when
they snap at lures. I have heard of some, migrating inland, that were
caught by fishermen casting with flies at the Herring River in Harwich,
on the south side of the Cape.
Those herds now in the brown waters of the channel seemed to be
gradually moving inland as the day advanced, and I guessed that for
most of them it was the journey up.
As I watched them there was a slight, quick change of wind, a shift in
the breeze that flicked the water, and in the crosshatches this made on
the bright surface all the fish disappeared. Then the surface cleared
and I could see them again, swimming through a rippling weave of light
that was reflected on the channel floor.
They meandered along, an occasional lively one dashing through the
rest, or rushing up to the surface. I could hear light plops, faint
flips along the water. I walked closer to the edge so that my shadow
fell across them, and they turned back in one quick and graceful
stampede, some of them dashing to deeper water under the opposite bank.
That so many separate entities should have such an immediate response
to one another that they all moved like the beat of a wing was hard for
one individual to understand.
Alewives are able to stand the quick change from salt to fresh water
without any trouble. It would kill some other kinds of fish, but
neither the alewife fry growing up in fresh water nor adults growing
up in the sea seem to mind being taken out of one medium and plunged
into another. They are adapted to both. On the other hand, repeated
changes, such as occur sometimes under certain conditions in tidal
estuaries, are said to be able to kill them.
These changes, incidentally, are registered in an alewife’s scales. To
read them is difficult and requires a competent biologist. In general
they mark physiological changes, such as occur when young alewives
go from fresh to brackish water, or when the adults spend some time
in fresh water before returning to the sea. An alewife’s age can be
determined because a record of each spawning migration is etched on the
scales.
I had seen them flashing and swarming inland up in the Herring Run
area, but in this wide channel were new motions that needed more
patience and information to be understood. For example, where the
fish eddied and wheeled under the dazzling rays, I noticed one group
idling in front of a submerged sand bar or reef that ran across the
channel. I waited there for three-quarters of an hour before the fish
showed signs of any common impulse to cross over it. One or two dashed
over sportively to chase a minnow and then sped back, but the rest
of them--a hundred or more--would make no move. Finally, after many
circling approaches by the whole crowd, the measure of their circle
came closer and closer out of the brown water to the brightly lit,
coppery bar, until some of the vanguard spilled over. Then more and
more sped and skittered over until the move was accomplished. Why?
Were they afraid of the brightness? Did the contrast in light stop them
in some way? This would hardly seem consistent with what I had found
out so far. Perhaps it was just routine to their motion. Evidently
alewives idle in the deeper channels where the velocity of the water is
slower and easier to swim in. They respond to the relative force of the
flow. Where the current is more uniformly rapid, and they are going up
against it, they progress steadily. And perhaps the bar formed an eddy
behind it, so that the water where they swam moved against the current
in the channel and they were unable to tell their direction.
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