The run

The first alewife I saw in early spring was wild and new to me, feeling its way upcurrent alone, cautiously, as if testing out an old trail. Down Stony Brook there were long patterns in the water dappled like fish scales. In the sky above there were cloud tosses and wind turns during a break toward spring that the fish itself exemplified. Later on the fry in the apparently indiscriminate times they moved out and headed for salt water seemed to be pulled as if by moon tides and turning earth. The course I followed was full of natural complexity. Forms and patterns were endlessly co-ordinate and suggestive, but with the mystery of their making, the universal power, at once ordered, vast, fluid, out of reach.

The alewife migration taught me how to start. Had we been two and a half miles up from salt water to the farthest pond, then back again, or was it three thousand? I had learned that measurement was indefinite.

I still knew next to nothing about their lives in salt water. And what was ahead on land? I could expect them to follow certain rules of behavior. They would come back year after year unless the run was so consistently overfished that the population dwindled. I knew where to look for them now, and had some acquaintance with laws of supply and demand, plus the effects of management or the lack of it. Perhaps alewives could be expected in general to do what they had done before. But those laws that lead all migrants on have more in store for us than we can anticipate. The variations I had found in action and circumstance, following those fish, variations like the changes of air and water, leaves, grass and ground, intermoving light and shadow, were unexpected and perpetual. If the alewives ever proved that anything was static, it could only have been in me. There is no personifying the unknown fish. I am not acquainted with it yet; but now we are on a run together.

The alewife is another of the amplifications and extensions of life. In the flip of its body, its communicable “Let’s go,” it offers to be followed. So that race with its recoil and approach, approach and recoil, circling in consonance with the forces of the earth has the lesson of migration in ourselves. When I watched them coming in on their old, persistent track and felt so much in my own senses of that exploring, through the growing and falling off of leaves, the wind charging and easing off, the bright waters, I knew there was an infinite sum in me of the unused. What is migration? Is it to “pass from one place to another”—just that? And its causes may be the need for food or to reproduce in season; but surely the term comprises a great deal more.

Whether the migration of animals seems random, or with definite intent, it leads across the earth. All the studies made of individual species result in new directions to be explored, new unknowns about the actions of other lives, and the ways they follow. The mystery about the travels of birds, eels, monarch butterflies, or alewives, is not only a matter of routes or seasonal behavior. It has to do with an internal response to this spinning globe and its unendingly creative energies. As a result of a respectful regard for other animals we may find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us, and in their deep alliance with natural forces we find a new depth in ourselves. This is the common ground for all living things, where migration has in it the blood of contact, the winds and waters of communication.

On that July week when I first saw the young alewives coming down through the outlet, the roads of Cape Cod were roaring and humming with cars. The tourist season had suddenly come to its height. The population of the Cape had jumped from 60,000 to 200,000 or more. There were new demands, new pressures in the air. This was the yearly coming on of an immense, expanding world, a migratory phenomenon in itself. Voices and prices were rising. Man’s abundance vied with the natural summer.

It was a hot day, though it had started out cool in the early morning, with drifts of fog along the shore and patches of it through the inland hollows. I had followed the alewife fry down from the Herring Run to the shore road. They had become increasingly hard to find; but when I reached the slow waters of the channel at Paine’s Creek I could see multitudes of them heading in the direction of the Bay. Farther on where the water ran out through the sands on the ebb tide there were groups of them moving with it like little clouds.

There were a few people walking on the flats in the distance where herring gulls were yelping and an occasional tern gave a light, harsh cry. An old panting setter dog lunged aimlessly across the sands, then splashed through the shallow waters of the creek at its outlet. On the beach a family crowd of bathers were listening to a portable radio that noised out the baseball scores. Some of them got up and saw to their children, or fell, sat down, or dove into the water at the edge of the sands. They sounded low, then high, like the gulls—“Stop it!” “Come on!” “Here, bunny” “Come back here!” “Jump in”—full of alarm, solicitude, friendliness, irritation, communality.

Back in the channel where the tiny fish, progeny of Pomolobus pseudoharengus, were swimming on in the brown water, a couple of growing, gawky children, a boy and a girl, half round, half lean, were pushing each other down, floundering and thrashing, while they laughed and threatened each other, completely oblivious of the great migration a few yards away. Or can anything be oblivious? I felt that I had come to the middle of things.