The run

After the first week in June there were very few if any alewives coming up over the dam at the head of the run. An increasing number, on the other hand, were going down, and I could find very few in the ponds. I was to see them returning well on in July, which indicates that while many, perhaps a majority, will leave the ponds a few days or a week after spawning, others may stay there for weeks longer. For reasons known only to the individual fish, occasional strays have been found lingering in fresh water well into the winter.

On the morning of June 10, after a lapse of a few days in which I had seen only a few returning, a boy who was weekending on the Upper Mill Pond told me he had seen thousands go by in the direction of the Herring Run. So they were still schooling for the return to salt water, progressing again by accumulative motion. In a few weeks some of the little ones, hatched out earlier, would start down too.

I stood on a rock and looked down into the water along that peaceful stretch above the dam. This is an area where Indians gathered and camped when the alewives were running, spearing them, or taking them with nets made out of reeds. Many Indian artifacts have been found on the surrounding slopes. On this June day insects were settling down on the still surface. A shower was due—the air heavy. An alewife slanted slowly up to the surface and then dropped down again. It left a perfect circle behind it that gently widened over the blended images of clouds, leaves, and rocks. Then as other small circles, raindrops falling, began to show on the water, a belt of flying herons passed in reflection. A breeze corrugated the surface slightly and the fish swam slowly on toward the roar of the seaward-casting falls.

The returning migrants now have a choice between two outlets: one at the top of the fish ladder, and the other at a board dam where the water drops into a long pool above the old mill. At the far end of the pool the waters fall again a short but precipitous distance, often roaring full and hard down the rocky slope into the seining pool. The alewives use both outlets, but the majority seem to prefer the falling second stream to the ladder by which they came up, perhaps because it is the point of greatest flow. Where they drop down over the falls it looks to the proportionate, or disproportionate, senses of a human being almost suicidal. Most go over tail first. Then they appear to be dashed headlong down the jagged incline that ends in rocky narrows going off at an angle to the pool. One after another they flip and fall, their bodies bent like bows, and flash finally, swift and vibrant—not, surprisingly, having been broken to pieces—at the bottom. Occasionally a fish near the end of the slope will frantically try to skitter back up. Presumably it is trying to reduce the speed at which the ground is going by it, in the way a man tries to brake himself when running downhill. But this almost helter-skelter falling reveals almost as much of the alewife’s supple strength as its leaping up against the current.

As June went on and polliwogs turned to frogs, the leaves came fully out, clover and buttercups were blooming, and the pond algae had increased at a fast rate so that a thick green scum gathered behind the dam, and the pond waters were yellow-green. Still you could see the fish gathering at intervals massed sometimes fifty feet or more behind the two outlets. There is a small wooden footbridge over the board dam at the head of the pool. When I lay down on the bridge and looked under at the curved lip of the water I could see the fish gathering behind. Against the steady rush and whine I could hear a dull, deep change in sound as the fish suddenly turned and plummeted over. Their bodies, enlarged behind a green curve of water, had a metallic sheen, a dull silver, as they would wheel in, loom up, and drop away. I came back at night, and could still hear that heavy sound in this lens, or gong, of water.

In each new phase of migrant action there is an old ceremony. The alewives approach the dam, in groups of varying sizes. They circle, withdraw, and swim back again. Some of them swim between the two outlets as if to decide which one to take. Coming closer, they show an increasing animation, a quicker circling and flipping, as if the outward pull of the water resulted in a more vital excitement between them. After many more starts and withdrawals, lasting anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more from the approach of a given group, or school—using that term in the sense of larger numbers—one or more fish will drop over, and then the rest will follow.

I watched one school making these ceremonious retreats and approaches for two hours. When they finally started dropping over I counted some fifty fish a minute for about fifty-five minutes, until there were only three left. This remaining three must have lacked the common stimulus to go, the rhythm of sufficient numbers, and they stayed behind, as more fish began to draw in closer from the pond. I have seen this often. Sometimes seven, nine, and up makes enough of a group to start over on its own; very occasionally one alewife will go it alone; but it does seem as if a certain variable minimum will not take the move upon itself.

Though a single fish may be the first to go over, or to advance upstream, it is hard, from my observation, to attribute any leadership to individuals, male or female. The crowd provides its own pressure and momentum. Perhaps the circling of these groups and schools, and their dropping over, might be analogous, though it is a looser motion, to a flock of sandpipers flying off simultaneously as if they were cast out by a lithe, invisible wire, and then turning on an instant, glinting in the sun. The impulse is in the rhythmic unity of the group, even though in the case of the fish some may be left off or behind until they are rejoined in it.

The speed at which they drop over seems to depend on the size and pressure of the oncoming school—population pressure, in other words, unless pressure of numbers is a better term, which must also affect the timing of their entry from the sea. Sometimes they go over: one—two—three—four—one a second; but if the group is small the rate may be ten to twenty a minute. Finally there are those few fish left behind that circle around at the outlet or turn back into deeper water where another school will be coming up.

All morning, as the alewives massed, circled, and dropped, there was one fish that kept wandering through and over the others in a puzzling way. It was a conspicuously darker color, which is characteristic of blindness, as I learned later on. Its loss of sight, then, had deprived it to some degree of the community action, though it had been able to feel its way toward the outlet. Occasionally one that looked exceptionally tired and slow would drop over the falls by itself. I noticed also that those which were scarred and infected seemed to have lost some of the fire of communication.

To the casual eye the spent fish may not look any thinner or weaker than the rest, though when they hit the seining pool they are obviously in no hurry to move on, but circle slowly around it for some time. Their flesh, for the human carnivore, is of poorer quality than when they came in from salt water. Going back to history again, it seems that the recipients of alewives in the Caribbeans were not always pleased with the product. There were complaints in the eighteenth century, as I have indicated, and in the early nineteenth as well, when plantation owners in the West Indies objected that this food was doing bad things to their slaves. They said that alewives taken when they were going downriver after spawning were “poison fish,” and “the very worst food that can be given to slaves, as it both disheartens them, keeps them continually murmuring, and brings on those scorbutic diseases so common among negroes in that climate.”

Bad food or not, they were in all things directional, with the water and the season, moving on and out, taking the rhythms of perpetuation with them, these “reflex machines,” bearers of strong tides. They had been giving me something of a lesson in cosmic weather, though I was still a hopeless beginner. From one place, one road, around one circle, they had led me through so much variety that I was left to wonder at my omissions. The man-made world must still have far to go to learn its inner and outer relations to a greater, expanding world of lives that are given, not made.

What further connections are there, say, between the sun and sight, between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water and of blood? Who knows more about the universe—I with my conscious measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its unthinking precision through the various unknown? Can we not combine? In any case, whatever human beings decide about what is effective or ineffective, what shall stay or what shall go, the alewives know where they live.

The crowd in the seining pool moved slowly, in a wide circle around its rim. Most of their inland enemies had gone now. The human hunters had driven away. The herring gulls had flown to other feeding grounds. Not that one enemy or another made much difference to them, except in terms of sudden fear. Like their eggs, they were expendable. Nature’s ruthlessness, the using and the building up of that which fed and that which was food, would keep them on the way of primordial energy. For the same reason they were also spenders—one of the great sacrificial coinages of the living world.

Still this point in their migration before the return to salt water might be called a place of demobilization, a separation center. They swam slowly around in the pool, passing between each other, but always a part of the circle, each fish with its body and its large black eyes leading forward, obedient to it. They dispersed very gradually throughout the day. One small group after another broke off, sparks from a wheel, and the fish let themselves be carried back down the brook where the outlet of the pool led under the road. In the run below where they went back step by step to the sea—whose pull was in them—they faced up against the current, their orientation, with a tired, slow weaving. I noticed a little perch attendant on them. It ran down backward with the large procession, giving the alewives a look of ceremonial grandeur. I have seen sunfish join up too, although there could be a point on the approach to brackish water when they decide that home life is better than parades. These motions must be catching, communicating to other lives and races than those in which they originate. All have their way stations, or orbits, along a route that is being followed out with primal grace and power.