Part 4

These names are also indicative of the range of the alewife, all the way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Carolinas. In the spawning season they come inland by way of sandy inlets, great tidal bays, fresh-water river mouths, or creeks only a few yards wide. Most of the streams by which they are still able to swim up have their local history of fishing alewives, either with traps, weirs, dip nets, or even pails. In the fisheries of Maine it is known as “alewife dipping.” This is an important “food fish,” even though it may never have approached the sea herring in numbers, nor been as famous as the cod.

If the English sailor, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, had been ashore in the springtime instead of on his ship when he gave the Cape its name, it might now be called Cape Alewife.

Though they are only part of a multitude of other lives that nurtured the American past, the alewives should be given high and special credit. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation testifies to their vital importance in the Pilgrims’ first year. After the Mayflower left in early April of 1621, Squanto, that greatly helpful Indian, showed them “that in the middle of April they should have store enough come up the brook by which they began to build, and taught them how to take it, and where to get other provisions necessary for them.” This brook ran, as it still runs, through the town, so that the Plymouth inhabitants were lucky to have their supply of alewives close at hand--they seemed to have depended on them primarily for plantings, also taught them by Squanto. The fish came in “fat and fair” and amazingly plentiful after a lean winter full of apprehension. At first apparently each inhabitant took freely of the fish in the brook, but this seems to have resulted in “injuring the property of those near the place of taking.” As a result the Town Brook became town responsibility after a few years, and the fishing was regulated. The cost of a weir was distributed among the inhabitants and the fishing put under the charge of town officers, with fines set for taking alewives without permission. Innumerable fish laws were passed after that, from the Colony of Plymouth to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The fish ran comparatively free for a while, but through the progression of these laws you might watch, in town after town, the gradual growth of human population plus human concern for a valuable product. In 1709 a general law provides: “That no wears, hedges, fishgarths, stakes, kiddles, or other disturbance or encumbrance shall be set, erected or made, on or across any river, to the stopping, obstructing, or straitning of the natural or usual course and passage of the fish in their seasons, or spring of the year, without the approbation and allowance first had and obtained from the general sessions of the peace in the same county....” An Act of 1741, to “prevent the destruction of the fish called alewives, and other fish,” might indicate that the colonists were beginning to notice a decline in their numbers and to be apprehensive about it, although it is hard to judge. A History of Barnstable County, published in 1890, has this to say: “Early in the last century the supply of herring so far exceeded the demand for fish food that the surplus was used to fertilize the fields, and the growing custom of using them in each hill of planted corn was checked in 1718, the town fathers [of Bourne] ordering that none should be taken in the future to ‘fish corn.’”

Apparently the alewife population did start to decrease a long time ago. Fishermen along the Merrimack River noticed a diminishing in numbers as early as the mid-eighteenth century; and somewhat later they thought it might be due to the number of small ponds which had been dammed up. These ponds had access to the river and so provided spawning grounds. Certainly the alewives, through man’s agency, began to suffer great setbacks in the old use of their runs. Some of the first culprits were the woolen mills, and corn or grist mills such as the one at Brewster--they blocked up many of the runs, in spite of the fish laws. Then a tremendous industrial expansion put cities and factories along all big rivers and many large streams, adding more mill dams across the runs. The resulting sewage and manufacturing wastes polluted the waters, destroying many fish, and making some rivers completely unfit for migration. Extensive deforestation also resulted in the drying up of a number of streams and the lowering of water levels. The nineteenth century was a notorious plunderer.

Alewives in any large number now coincide with undeveloped areas, which happen to be comparatively few along the Atlantic coast. As a result of industrialization the original heavy runs were so reduced that the only important, commercial runs are now in the southern part of the alewife range, notably the Chesapeake, or north of Rhode Island. Although the fish still have much less access to their ancient, natural routes, the existing runs are probably less carelessly protected by law. State laws put the responsibility of keeping the fishways clear on the localities through which they run, but the state supervises their condition, and if a run is too depleted the state can forbid the sale of its fishing rights. Whatever may be said about their decline in the long run, it is quite likely that state supervision has helped to increase the alewife population during comparatively recent years. It certainly seems to be true that the number of fish at the Brewster run has increased since the fish ladders were built in 1945. The new fishways made the rocky, often clogged stream easier of access, and cut down on fish mortality as they ascended. They can, in other words, be brought back; although there are fishermen in Maine who estimate that the alewife population is only a third as large as it was some fifty years ago, and there are those who say the decline has been even greater in Massachusetts.

A great many of the old alewife fisheries lost their vitality because there was no longer any local dependence on them nor any general call for the product. A recent article in the Maine Coast Fishermen said this: “A few weeks ago in Wareham, Mass., the local selectmen refused to auction off the fishing rights, feeling the bids were too low. An old timer of the town, who has watched these migrations since he was a boy, recalled that the alewife rights to the stream in question once brought as much as $12,000 a year.” In the smaller run at Brewster, incidentally, the bid taken during the last spawning season was $450.

Control is still local. Where there are still good-sized runs, the towns appoint alewives committees, whose members are re-elected annually at Town Meeting. In Brewster, on a salary of some twenty-five dollars a year, plus small wages for time spent, it is their job to keep the Herring Run area neat; to post regulations; see that no individual gets away with more than his allotted portion of fish; and keep the stream free from obstruction so that the fish can proceed to their spawning grounds, as well as into the nets of the concessionaire. The town sells annual rights for the privilege of fishing the stream in season, four days a week. On the other days the alewives are allowed to go ahead and propagate their kind. The five hundred barrels or more of fish that have been taken yearly from Stony Brook happen to have been used recently for lobster bait.

To some extent, incidentally, their use and commercial value depends on their condition and flavor. An alewife’s flesh is best when it has been taken directly out of salt water. The ocean flavor is progressively lost as the fish migrates through inland streams. So they have their highest value where the runs are located close to the sea, or tidal rivers such as the one at Damariscotta, Maine.

The West Indies trade is over, as well as the days of “good salt herring.” The most likely place to see indications of alewife now is on the stupendously bountiful shelves of a chain store, in the form of a can with a picture of a cat on it. And the future of the alewife, in human hands at least, seems to depend on a wider demand for it. It is valued neither for sport nor edibility, but is used for cat and dog food, fish meal, and pickled fish, with some, as at Brewster, being taken for lobster bait. Apparently there is an innate prejudice among some New Englanders against using a traditional food fish for other purposes, and a belief that selling it for meal or cat food is less profitable. Put this down to thrift, or respect for old ways, still it stands against the fact that the alewife’s latest value comes from its status as a processed, rather than edible, food. “Reduction” is what they call it when the alewives are turned into fish meal, and in a sense perhaps they have been reduced, at least in our personal esteem. They now belong to a technical age with the rest of us.

With modern methods of handling, packing, and transportation the old fisheries may have been left behind, but it should be said that, because of its new status in commerce, ignominious or not, the alewife may stand a better chance. The State of Maine, for example, has been undertaking thorough study of the alewives in order to find out how old runs can be brought back, or new ones created. They are a fish that are very responsive to management. When barriers are removed and open fishways are made, they take their opportunity.

All is not well with the traditional ways, though the alewives may be perfectly ready to go beyond them. In the old days on Cape Cod there was hardly a seafaring man who did not take his salt herring aboard with him, and on land, after being salted, dried in the sun, and smoked, they were strung on sticks and sold for ten cents a stick. There were many smokehouses on the Cape, and in the wintertime dried fish hung on the barn rafters above the haylofts. I have a comment on those days from Mr. Alexander: “None of your First National Stores then,” said he. “We lived off the earth ... potatoes and smoked herrin’. That’s why some of us old goats lived so long.”

It is hard to find smoked herring these days. It is a skill that seems to have almost gone; and I am told that there used to be a good deal of variation in the product. Smoked fish are now easier to find in Maine than on Cape Cod. I bought a pair recently in a small general store in Maine at the excessive price of fifteen cents. A dried alewife was handsomer than I had suspected, and the smell not unpleasant, although I might not say as much for a barnful. The head and eye sockets were encrusted with salt, and the hard thin body was colored a bronze and smoky gold as though heat still roamed the scales. I was reminded for some reason of a metal bowl I had once seen that came from the land of the Incas. I peeled off the scales and chawed a toast to our ancestors.

The Reproductive Urge

The fishing operation near the old grist mill was in full swing after the twenty-third of April. The Salvadore crew was hauling in their net with the aid of a winch. It was loaded with fish, enough to fill four or five barrels. The victims were flipping and flashing with a whirring violence, a high sound going up in the gray morning air, a beautiful iridescence in their white-silver sides. The whole dripping net was heavy and alive with their shivering, thrashing, and dying. Heads butted through the mesh and gills caught, in their frantic, vibrating despair ... and all for lobster bait, worth six dollars a barrel.

The early colonists spoke of alewives coming up their streams in “incredible” numbers, and so it still looks, though Stony Brook, for one, is narrow in its upper reaches, and when the fish are forced into it they are crowded beyond all proportion. The inland stream, with its fresh-water grasses, insects, and small fish is suddenly host to a large and almost foreign form of life, except that they are both closely joined to the sea.

On the whole, it had been a rainy month. The brook below the seining pool was roaring and foaming down. Such was the teeming crowd of alewives trying to swim up through the ladder, through the violently heavy flow, that there was a constant falling back, a silver slapping and flapping over the concrete rims of the pools. Farther down, where the waste stream tumbled over a small mountain of rocks, too high for the fish to jump (their limit, on a vertical leap, seems to be not much over two feet), there was a scene to force the heart. Always a certain number of fish, dividing from those that swam the main stream toward the ladder, would attempt the impossible at this place. Ordinarily, when an alewife meets obstacles in its advance upcurrent it will quickly go forward into it, then leap in short dashes over rocks and the lip of fishways. I had seen them go up without apparent rest where the stream falls down the inclined ladder at the pond outlet above. They were dancing and flipping up those waters, which were rushing and bubbling down, like kites in a fast wind.

Yet here, for all their instinctive valiance, was the unsurmountable. Now, as they had done for thousands of years, they tried and failed. White tons of water smashed down over the rocks, but time and time again one fish after another made a quick dash into it and almost flew, hanging with vibrant velocity in the torrent until it was flung back. Many were exhausted and found their way back to the main stream, circling and swimming slowly, and a large number were smashed against the rocks to turn belly up and die, eaten later by young eels, or gulls and herons, as they were taken downstream by the current. Some were wedged in the rocks and could be seen there for days as the water gradually tore them apart until they were nothing but white shreds of skin.

A wooden bridge crosses over Stony Brook at this point. A neighbor of mine, a mother of children, was standing there watching when I came up, and I heard her say, “Terrible!” I guessed that she knew what she saw, besides death and defeat. It was the drive to be, a common and terrible sending out, to which men are also bound in helplessness.

We are astonished by this fantastic drive. “What is the point? What makes them take these suicidal chances? Why?” It is as if we were trying to get back, or down, to an explanation in ourselves that we had lost sight of. But somewhere in us, through this feverish, undecided world, we still know.

Are they stupid? There is no measure in the world of nature more excellent than a fish. It may be comparatively low in the evolutionary scale of complexity, but no animal is more finely made, or better suited to its own medium. All the same, the unvaried blindness their action seemed to show would sometimes strike me as hard as did their ability in the water.

Stony Brook was black with them. There was no open patch of stream bed to be seen. And with the excessive crowding, the general procession, so steadily insistent on its own time, was hurried up to some extent. Their motion became almost ponderous and tense, while individual fish leaped like dolphins, pewter- and gold-sided, over and through the dark herd. Others circled in and out or kept pace with the rest, staring ahead.

They had a synchronized momentum of their own. If I dropped a stone in the middle of them, they would separate at that point and then close in to fill the gap. There could be no nullifying or breaking their united persistence. Their onwardness, their desperate dashing against the rocks, had its own logic--a logic which had nothing to do with hope, reason, or choosing another alternative. No way out, in other words. Slavery to the reproductive urge. These alewives are more dumb than sheep. If you were to press your own sympathy hard enough, you might feel a terrible lack of variety in them, or, paradoxically enough, of daring. The lidless-eyed and plunging multitude seems brutally driven, without a chance. This is “togetherness” with a terrible vengeance.

Perhaps there is something here that we know too, as fellow animals, and lose sight of. At the risk of making one of those vaguely anthropomorphic assumptions against which the objective scientists are constantly warning us, I would guess that the self-motivation in this onward mass of fish might be compared to those human crowds that take action under stress, independently of the individuals that make them up. Suddenly a crowd, hitherto a random combination of people, takes on a frightening rhythm and purpose of its own. It is governed by laws which go back infinitely farther in the history of life than the immediate goal of its anger or exultation.

I have explained nothing. I can only say that when I first saw these fish I was moved in spite of myself. Instinct is no more blind than wonder. To have the human attributes of mind and spirit and the race’s ability to control its own environment does not give me the wit to beat the infinitely various will of life at its own game. All I could wish for would be to join it.

I walked on down the banks of Stony Brook, past the Herring Run area with its neat paths, bridges, and fish ladders, my shoes squashing in the mud. The stream turns a slight angle at this point, gets broader and shallower and begins to run through the little valley that ends in tidal marshes and the Bay. The alewives, for a hundred yards at least, were running up against the downward currents, massed almost stationary, not in ranks, but ordered mutuality, with a long waving like water grasses or kelp, and curving, twisting, swirling like their medium the water as they moved very gradually ahead. There was no indiscriminate rushing ahead. It was done to measure; but it seemed to me that through their unalterable persistence I saw the heaving of crowds of all kinds, of buffalo, cattle, sheep, or men. I had seen as much motion in crowds pouring out of a subway entrance or massing through a square. History was in their coming on, without its shouts and cheers. They could not speak for themselves; but who knew how deep the silence went?

Ahead of them there was a net; behind, down the broader reaches of the brook, the greedy herring gulls dropped down into the water after them, or stood along the bank in apparently glutted satisfaction, while others screamed and sailed overhead. In spite of their slow gliders’ grace and local lethargy compared with swift sea birds like the terns, gulls travel the rims of the world. They had always made me think of far-distance, voyages unending. Many of them had congregated on a bald hill that overlooks the run and were standing like white sentries under the shafts of the northern sky beyond. From far off they sometimes suggest rows of military crosses, and I have heard them compared to a field of flowers. Soldiers, flowers, graves ... all these they might suggest on the heights of fate, by their pure bold greed and unmatched design. They stood on a wide stage.

The Nature of an Alewife

The fish kept moving up. I watched them swinging back and forth with the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly be a scattered dashing, coming as quickly as cat’s-paws flicking the summer seas. They may have moved by “reflex” rather than conscious thought, but what marvelous professionals they were in that!