The run

Did the alewives choose the night or late evening hours to come in by? So I had been told. By daylight evidence, the fish population increased at the Herring Run on the mornings following a nightly high tide. I had also heard that there were more alewives running during the tides of the full moon, in the farthest monthly reaches of ebb and flood; but this was a correlation that would be hard for me to make without more years to judge by. In the middle of May on the days just after the first quarter of the moon, which came on the sixteenth, the fish seemed to be running just about as hard as they did during the days preceding the full moon in April, which had appeared on the twenty-fourth. Judging accordingly, it seemed as though their migration had its own ebb and flood during those months. All this was not much better than impression plus hearsay, but there seemed to be some justice to the night tide theory, so, to begin with, I went down to the shore late one evening during an incoming tide to see if there might be any sign of the alewives.

About eight o’clock, an hour before high tide, the tide was running strongly in at Paine’s Creek. The channel in the marshes flooded over its banks and marsh grasses were floating and stirring as the swaying waters rose around them. It was near dark. I could see some seaweed flinging by against the sandy bottom at the mouth of the creek, and a big, ghostly green eel slithered up at the edge of the bank the waves were licking, seemed to look up at me, looped back into the water, and disappeared; but it was too dark to see much more than those black clumps of seaweed racing by. I saw a group of gulls standing in shoal waters beyond the beach, where waves were rolling in hard under a steady northwest wind. The sun’s cauldron had dropped down, a raw, glistening orange-red, into the sea and back of the curved horizon, leaving its horizontal flush behind.

I walked back under the lee of the sand banks bordering the curving creek. The tide was pulsing and roaring, its waters loping in to the creek which began to turn a harder, darker blue under the sky. Then I began to hear the innumerable soft slaps of fish breaking the surface. The alewives were making their entry from the sea.

And the gulls proclaimed their coming. Out in the Bay, they began to gather by the hundreds, clambering up with a scrambled yelping and hollering. The last smoky, red line of sunset was disappearing and they hovered over it in a maddened, high, wide swarm like huge bees. It grew darker, and a black-crowned night heron, or “quawk,” sometimes “quok,” a name true to the sound it makes, flew by with rounded wings against a star. The gulls began to disappear, streaming faintly like ashes against the last fires on the sea, but still crying vastly and collectively toward a world of distances. And in terrible simplicity, the alewives were swimming toward the inland gauntlet they would have to run, having a title, by their common, wild, and ancient advent, to all great kindled things. Who will see more than that in his short life, with its many meetings and separations?

I by an old and natural right felt a fierce water-deep wonder of the spirit. The beyondness in me went back to its beginnings. I thought of the nights on which children I have known were born, and of the voyages of war, leave-takings at railroad stations and at ports of embarkation, and of dreams in which I struggled toward new meetings and other lives. The wind blew through the arches of the stars, and the surfaces of the dipping earth, water, and sky in their lasting communion made me dizzy. I felt a cold inevitable grandeur, below consciousness, a swim and go in an uttermost wild world, past home or my life’s memory.

So by this evidence the alewives came in at night, and, as a further discovery not to be denied, so had I. Perhaps it was the closest I would ever get to the non-human fish in a darkness where all the components of existence ran the same race. That real depth, fish-oriented, nakedly omnipotent, fills men when they recognize it with more awe than their limited worlds can encompass.

As I started back, about a quarter of an hour before the full tide, headlights swept over where the road ended at the shore, and in a minute or two a couple of fishermen lurched down the sand with high rubber waders on, carrying their casting rods. They stood on the beach in the dark, one of them coaching the other in baiting his hook. I came up and spoke to them, hardly able to make out their faces. The older one, he who did the coaching, told me that they had just got a pail of herrin’ from the Brewster run to use as bait. They had hopes that there would be some bass here, the famous “stripers” chasing the alewives in. They brought their long rods sideways and back to sling the bait out into the black and silver waves. The older man spoke low words against the wind, and I strained to hear him. Suddenly he thought he felt what must be alewives nosing his line and bumping against it on their way by into the mouth of the inlet. Last year, he told me, he had seen hundreds of them dead on the flats, and the gulls, he said, had slit their sides open as if with knives to get the roe. The waves had begun to slacken off when I left, and the fishermen were still casting, but without much hope of a strike.