The run

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.