XXIII

I HAVE just returned from a visit to Damariscotta Mills and the alewife run. Every year we all go over to see this great run of fish which is one of the marvels of our coast.

Some three miles away as the crow flies, the long, narrow arm of our pond flows south to a natural dam some fifty feet high, and there winds and tumbles down a stairway of cascades into the salt water of a tidal bay. The glen of the cascades is such a scene as one might find in an old Currier and Ives print or imagine for oneself out of Thoreau’s America—a glen, a vale, of old rocks and tall, peaceful elms, of the incessant sound of waterfalls, and the white wings of seagulls coming and going, going and coming, far above and in the blue. Old houses have closed in to one side, their shingles forever wet with spray where they stand above the water, and the open windows of their kitchens and sheds forever full of the beautiful, incessant sound of the pouring streams.

It is to these waters that the alewives come every spring, going up to the pond to spawn from their unknown winter refuge in the outer sea. Though we call such runs here “herring runs,” the fish is not a true herring though it resembles one in size and shape. Our word “alewife” is a sort of early colonial transformation into English sound of an Indian word used by the red-men of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and carried downeast by early settlers of our towns.

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Perhaps a million or so fish crowd and swarm into the bay. They arrive in April, and their presence in the salt river is signalled to us by a simultaneous arrival of fishing birds from all our region of the coast. The gulls come, a cloud of wings and hungry cries, the fierce osprey finds himself a shelter and a watch-tower and the fiercer and piratic eagle comes to take the osprey’s catch. The fish show no haste in going up into the pond. The living mass waits for good weather, and for a new warmth in the outlet stream. On some fine morning in May, with the sun shining overhead, the run begins.

Entering from the bay, the thickly-crowding, blue-backed, golden-bellied masses are confronted by a channel which branches at the dam into two wild, outrushing brooks. One stream leads to the cascades and to wooden basins from which the alewives are dipped in nets and sent to the smokehouse, for there is an ancient commerce in these fish between our villages and the West Indian isles. It is probably the last relic of the eighteenth-century economy of colonial America. The other stream leads to a winding stair of old fieldstone basins built well over a hundred years ago to help the run move up into the pond.

Built as ruggedly as our boulder walls, and mellowed now by water and the years, these basins on the slope interpose their twistings and turnings to the furious descent of one branch of the outlet stream and at the top lead out of crying foam and currents into the mild and quiet haven of the pond.

The day being warm and summerish and the tide high in the morning, there was a fine run moving upstream when I arrived. One could see the unnumbered mass moving in from the bay, and holding its own in the strong current of fresh water, a stream of life battling an opposing stream. There was a touch of lavender in the blue-black color of the massed fish as they swam under the skin of the brown and rippled water, the swarm pressing close together, each fish having just room to move its fins and no more.

Above and in the channel of the basins the stream was all a miracle of water and life, of life pressing onward, struggling fiercely to turn, climbing, climbing through the wild watery roar and the torrent whose foam was swift with the shadow and sunlight of the elms overhead, life pressing on, believing in itself, keeping the first faith, and remembering the immemorial decree.

FARM DIARY

A household catastrophe. While rummaging about on the kitchen table, I knock over my bottle of ink and spill a great, black puddle on the Mennonite tablecloth. Household remedies come quickly into play, a rinsing, a twenty-four hour soaking in sour milk, and a last treatment with salt and lemon juice. Our kind friend Mrs. Linwood Palmer tells Elizabeth to be sure to use the lemon and salt treatment in full sunlight. Presto change-o! All well again, and you’d never know that anything had happened. / The gasoline pump at the pond having developed a cussedness of being slow to start, my new neighbor Freddy French, late First Sergeant USA, comes over to give me a friendly and much appreciated lift, and soon has the engine going in good style. / Weather bureau warning of a cold night and a possible frost, and the whole neighborhood in a rush to cover what tomatoes have been hazarded outdoors. Temperature at one A. M., 36.

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Among the many things for which I remain profoundly grateful is the fact that so much of life defies human explanation. The unimaginative and the dull may insist that they have an explanation for everything, and level at every wonder and mystery of life their popgun theories, but God be praised, their wooden guns have not yet dislodged the smallest star. It is well that this be so, for the human spirit can die of explanations, even if, like many modern formulae, they are but explanations which do not explain.

A world without wonder, and a way of mind without wonder, becomes a world without imagination, and without imagination man is a poor and stunted creature. Religion, poetry, and all the arts have their sources in this upwelling of wonder and surprise. Let us thank God that so much will forever remain out of reach, safe from our inquiry, inviolate forever from our touch.