The run

It was in March, in comparative ignorance about their lives and habits, that I started looking for the alewives. This is the time of year when a few forerunners usually come in from the sea, in spite of the cold airs and waters that still grip the narrow land of Cape Cod. I had seen these migrant fish before, during a previous season, but from the road, so to speak. I had never followed them as if they challenged communication.

The place I started from was the Herring Run in the town of Brewster, part of a little migratory inland route by which the alewives travel up from Cape Cod Bay to the inland ponds where they spawn. At the Herring Run the waters of Stony Brook pour down from an outlet north of these ponds—three of them, all interconnected: Walkers, Upper Mill, and Lower Mill. The flow then goes over a one-and-a-half-mile stretch, first over the fishway, a series of concrete ladders and resting pools built through rocks and high land, the area of the Herring Run, then through a valley of abandoned cranberry bogs bounded by low hills; and finally it elbows through tidal marshes to Paine’s Creek, its mouth on Cape Cod Bay. This little river was called Sauquatuckett by the Indians and was subsequently known as the Setuckett River, Mill Brook, and Winslow’s Brook. At its falling headwaters the first water mill in this region was built, and one of the later mill buildings is still standing—it has an old water wheel that is still in working order and is used to grind corn as a tourist attraction. By the time the mass of tourists arrive the alewife migration, aside from the “fry,” hatched in the ponds and returning to salt water, has about run its course. They can still take pictures of the old mill in July or August, but they have probably missed a more vital antiquity.

The initial facts about the migration are these: each year, close in time to the vernal equinox when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are of equal length, this member of the herring family begins to enter innumerable inlets and tidal estuaries down the length of the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland to the Carolinas. Scientifically known as Pomolobus pseudoharengus (also, under an older classification, Alosa pseudoharengus, along with species of shad), the alewife is an “anadromous” fish, meaning that like the salmon and shad, but unlike its relative the sea herring, it grows in salt water but leaves it as a three- or four-year-old adult, to spawn in fresh. A “catadromous” fish, like the eel, does just the opposite, growing up in fresh water and spawning in the sea.

The alewives, I learned, were due to come in from the Bay when the temperature of the brackish water that flowed into it was warmer than that of the salt water. In fact, a local resident had already noticed a group of eight or ten alewives of apparently large size that had appeared in the brook a few days before. Their arrival was a token that the land, though still cold, was warming up more quickly than the sea—just about the time a few male red-winged blackbirds showed up too, in advance of housekeeping. But if some began their migration in March, the first big run was not likely to come until the middle of April or later, depending on how long and cold a winter it had been. During an exceptionally cold season the alewives might not appear in volume until the first days in May. Where were they now, and what were they doing? Schooling somewhere offshore, and waiting to move in?

I stood on the beach and the sea still looked and felt and smelled as raw and cold as winter—iron-gray, massive, keeping its counsels—although, as I understood it in an incomplete way, the waters were undergoing seasonal adjustments at varying depths in the shallow coastal areas. Spring changes would begin to take effect. Perhaps I knew them, smelled them, on the sea wind. I was impatient. I wondered what specific combination of length of life, biological responses, currents, tides, the composition of the sea water, might impel one roving school of fish to leave the sea and start inland.

March, that season of the whole air hesitating and blowing back and forth, the circuit of the compass, especially in low-wooded seaside lands, is a time of hesitation, preparation, and violence. It is waiting weather.

The tempo had changed—it was late in February I had felt it. The winter fist began to unclench a little. Before another day of frost, sleet, or wet snow, spring rain might bucket down in the evening, or freak lightning might crack the sky. The days were gray and raw more often than not, but when the sun shone it was sheer grace. One night there were wands of light shuddering against great, shimmering, flushed curtains on the sky wall over Cape Cod Bay—being the legendary northern lights, grandly named aurora borealis. The following day was cold, dull, and obdurate again.

Then when the temperature began to ease up occasionally from the thirties to the forties, as March went on, a surprise snowstorm came howling in. Poles snapped; wires broke, and the resulting power failures lasted for several days, during which some people rediscovered fate. The radio, before communication was entirely cut, sounded off about the inexorable as cars and trains were stopped and men died after shoveling snow. In that whole weather always cast beyond complaint or prediction, this storm only represented a temporary arrest. Our primal agent the sun still had the season’s growth in hand, more various than fate; which is not to minimize the tragedies along the way. Some days after the storm I found four or five male bluebirds in spring plumage all huddled dead in the bottom of a birdhouse—a pathetic brilliance. The entrance had probably been blocked by wet snow after they had taken refuge there.

As the growing sunlight played a steady tune, so the alewives, perhaps less affected by local storms than we, were due to come in, if only in small numbers. Where were they? I stopped by the Herring Run where the brook was full of loud cold water, but empty of fish. All the same, Harry Alexander, the alewife warden, was there, giving a display of public confidence. He had taken up his annual stance on Stony Brook Road, which bridges the run, and with a truculent punch of his lips against his pipestem, he made ready for the coming season.

In a world era, this is a local man. He has the cast and sense of place about him and some of its accumulated age. I have seen it in other men who have spent their lives in the same country environment. He is heavy, ruddy, thickset—an old boat in a Cape port. During his tenure on the alewives committee he seems to have developed a proprietary attitude about the run which probably exceeds his authority, but very few people object.

He certainly makes more of the job than the small wages he gets from the town; and in years past the alewives have had a defender in him at Town Meeting, when discussion came up about the amount of money allotted to the Herring Brook. From a naturalist’s point of view, he can hardly be said to have much sentiment in him about these fish as part of the living community. Too many of them would stink the place up, or so he affirms. I remember him at a hearing, speaking to a public official in this wise, “Ever see my brook? Our brook, I mean. No dirty, stinking mess up there!”

So, in his special way, he keeps the area clean, and is the herring’s defender and interpreter. I think he likes to conceive of himself as a kind of rascal. To those who ask him about the fish he is liable to dispense information that is an outrage to the innocent. Two Connecticut schoolteachers were once directed to the run, and came away saying the alewives were often so plentiful that the Cape Codders shingled their houses with them. (This is part of what he has called “My fight with the public.”)

So, a “Cape Cod character,” personification of an old locality ... but I don’t think he would like me to write too well of his character. That day as I lingered at the run he gave me a lowering look. What was I interested in the fish for? Well, if I’d take the information from him, we could make ourselves a pile of money by selling the story to Collier’s magazine. Did I ever hear about the Indians shooting these fish from the trees?

Facts, Harry. Facts.

“Well, naow, I’ll tell you. With the shore wind blowing on the long flats out there and the water ruffling up like that, the fish don’t come in much. But they’ll be along. Yes-yes.”

So was there nothing to do but take tentative steps and wait? The scene, the place, the weather—an emergent weather in me perhaps—was more compelling than that. The wind blowing, brook roaring, sun shafts through the steely sky, all urged an opening. I walked down to the south side of the road, by the tall lilacs, under high willows and maple trees. Here the waters of the brook divide between the concrete fishway and a side or “waste” stream which rejoins the other some fifty feet farther on, dropping precipitously over rocks that foam with water too high for the migrating fish to leap.

I walked down a path at the edge of this narrow waste stream. Where the water was running swiftly, lithely, between the high rock foundations of the road on one side and a low dirt bank with grass hummocks on the other, I saw the brown head of a muskrat leading across the stream not more than twenty feet away. The sleek, dark little animal swam over to a stone across from me and sat there eating something with quick, legerdemain little gestures, a fast shuttling between its paws and its whiskered face. Apparently it couldn’t see me. The east wind was blowing across us, and the fresh waters were roaring. Then it stopped and nosed back into the stream, swimming across to a tussock not more than twelve feet from where I stood. It plucked out, quickly, a sizable bunch of grass and swam back with it to the same eating place and chewed it up. Then it returned to the shallow water, swimming close to the bottom, where I could plainly see it going easily against the current with its two hind legs stretched out, propelling it, and the long flat tail acting as a scull.

It emerged to disappear in a few rock crevices and then came out, its glossy, questioning head sniffing for danger before it dropped down again. Finally it swam out of sight into the cruel brilliance of sun-reflecting waters that ran full out, full tilt. Pools of plenty were continually releasing and boiling as if they were the strength and source of all motion.

The muskrat’s eyes were black as rock recesses and its pelt as dark and glistening as a mud bank. It was at home, with all its food around it—grass, minnows, salamanders, fresh-water mussels—in an adaptation, a closeness to the place, arrived at through both random and inevitable forces. It knew its small world and needed no outside instruments to set its course by. I might wonder about the next event, the coming storms, but here was this animal swimming away as if it said, “Come on in. The universal water’s fine.”—in a stream as yet too cold for me.