Saturday night a driving southeast storm swept the land, shaking boughs of cherry blossoms to the ground, plastering embryonic oak leaves to our windows and sending up the surf at Nauset. The following morning I woke to a clearing but still unsettled sky, and stopped down at the Stony Brook herring run where I found myself the first visitor of the day.
Our herring, or alewife, run has two fairly distinct, separate waves of migrating fish. The first, referred to locally as the ‘blue-backs’ or ‘blackbacks,’ are a variety said to have been imported from the run up at Middleboro over a decade ago. They are darker on top and slightly smaller than the native alewives, and generally come in from the Bay to spawn three to four weeks earlier. After their first surge, the run slacks off somewhat, to be followed in turn by the larger hordes of ‘genuine’ Brewster herring.
The second or ‘real’ run has been in for several weeks now, but never have I seen the herring so thick or full of energy as they were that morning. Perhaps the previous night’s deluge had something to do with it. I have been told that a heavy rain seems to bring the fish in in greater numbers along some estuaries. Ernest Gage, a long-time member of our local Alewives Committee who has cared for and lived beside this run for many years, maintains that the native fish are naturally more ‘aggressive’ than the imported brand. Certainly the passion was on them now, a frenzy almost, making the first run seem more like a walk.
They crowded in at the culvert below the road. In the stepped pools of the fish ladder further down, the overflow turmoil of the descending waters was matched by their upward drive. At one rung I tried to count the rate at which they were flowing through. Two or three fish a second, it appeared, vibrated up through the foot-high concrete lock into the next pool. But then I looked up at the next one where they were exploding up the falls in bursts of three, four, five fish simultaneously, a fountain of fish gushing up against the stream.
Taken out of the water, these native alewives have lighter, pinker sides than the ‘bluebacks.’ But in the falling turbulence their iridescent backs arched and surfaced with glinting, shifting colors intense enough to wreck and founder a watching eye. Occasionally one’s driving force upward would exactly match that of the descending current, and for several seconds the fish would remain stationary, vibrating vertically in mid-fall, its glittering image broken apart in the prismatic water like some cubist portrait of a herring.
A few fish occasionally dropped back into the preceding pool. Perhaps they had already spawned and were now beginning their descent back to the ocean. But more, it seemed it was simply from the inability of the pool above to hold the numbers of bodies being thrust up into it. The force with which the fish leaped, or bored upward was often so powerful that it carried them skittering across the surface of the pool above and into the column of the next waterfall. Sometimes they would be slightly deflected and go sliding partway up the dirt bank or a bordering boulder, flopping over and over like living, silvery coins. Or else they might be sprung back and flipped down again into the pool from which they had just come.
Fish were trying every outlet: side streams, impassable falls, even tiny seepages coming out of the old mill race above. The frenzy seemed to be in part a product of their very numbers, a mass excitement communicated electrically among the hordes. I straddled one concrete ladder and watched them explode upward between my legs. There was no break in the progression; my Colossus was ignored. In such a state they are oblivious to everything but flow.
Down below the fish ladder, by a wooden bridge, a side stream which forks off above rejoins the main stream by cascading over a steep rocky precipice. There I watched ‘a scene to force the heart,’ as John Hay puts it in his book The Run. Many of the fish were flinging themselves futilely, blindly, at the impassable barrier. I counted eight dead, twisted bodies strewn on shore and rocks, martyrs to persistence. A few survivors, bewildered and weakened, circled slowly and hesitantly in the water below, as though seeking a way to avoid both death and doubt.
Their numbers that day darkened the waters below the bridge as far as I could see. Each swirl or ripple held its protruding fin. Beyond the first bend rose the din and shapes of the inevitable gulls: hundreds of them perched on the banks, jockeying for position, paddling in the stream like ducks, rising and falling in the air, and screaming like banshees.
I watched them for several minutes, but it seemed they did very little actual preying on the fish coursing through the channel there. They spent most of the time screaming at or pushing each other, or just swimming. Occasionally a bird would thrust its beak into the stream, but I never saw one come up with a fish. Perhaps they were all temporarily sated, either from feeding farther downstream or at the nearby dump. I have seen them at other times attacking in earnest, bearing the draped, transfixed bodies of the silvery fish in their hard yellow beaks. But now they were at most tormentors rather than destroyers. Even more, they seemed to be catching their excitement from the fish themselves, translating the herrings’ watery passion into an airborne expression: a visible feathery smoke of that submerged fire.
I walked along the flank of the line of low hills that rise and fall down the west side of the stream valley, herding the gulls in the water noisily before me. When I came to the highest prominence, a bald grassy dome overlooking the valley, there was a sudden rush of wings as a hundred sitting gulls rose up into the air and out over the space below, leaving the down-covered and white-spattered crown to the storm and me.
I looked out over a magnificent, turbulent symphony of wind, rain, circling and interweaving gulls, flowing water and cleaving fins, and a wild mixture of sound that partook of all the earth’s shattered and shattering forces. Wildness and wilderness are not, after all, to be evaluated by size or remoteness, but by the nature and play of forces within a place. That morning, at least, the narrow, shallow channel of Stony Brook Valley contained more than its share of creation.