AND THE HERRING STILL RUN

When I was young, river herring—bluebacks and alewives—filled our local rivers each spring.

They started to run about this time, or maybe just a bit later.  I know that they were always around for Good Friday, when the schools were closed and my friends and I could head to the river and celebrate the new pulse of life that was headed upstream.

I’ve written about that before, telling of how people would come to the river, swarming on its banks and taking the herring home by the hundreds, pouring fish into car trunks in a silvery tumult that knew neither basket nor pail.  It was an abundance that stories can hardly describe. 

I can write about huge schools of fish so desperate to spawn that even when the tide was out, they turned on their sides and splashed through the trickles, always looking upstream where the fresh water flowed. 

I can conjure up pictures of fish, and of the waters, but that was only a part of the story, that doesn’t include the sweet smell of live fish that hung, unseen, above the water, contained by the banks and the bulkheads and dam.  It doesn’t take in the sound of crashing water that carved out a trough at the base of the dam, where herring massed, safe from gulls but not from people, after the dropping tide left most of the river bottom bare.  It doesn’t describe the flash of striving herring that somehow climbed halfway up the man-made freshet that tumbled down the cliff at the corner of the dam, but probably—because we’ll never know for sure—made it all the way to the still water above.

It was one of my favorite times of the year back, something that those of us who were there still talk about at times, remembering the fun we had, and the outrageous things that happened—that had to happen—when enough people, more than enough alcohol and a carnival mood mix in a very small place.

We remember the joy of being young—but just old enough—when it was still socially acceptable for young boys to wander, unsupervised, at the water’s edge.

And we admit, as talk quiets down and maybe the third or fourth glass has been poured, that we probably sensed, even then, that the run woiuldn't last.

The herring came to spawn in fresh water, but a dam blocked their path.  Perhaps a few beat the odds and managed to swim up the spates at the edge of the dam.  A few more were carried up in buckets and dumped over the dam by folks tryinbg to help then reach their spawning grounds. 

But a few buckets of fish was scant compensation for the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of fish denied a route upstream.  Yes, a few herring spawned, because I saw the young fish in the summer, when I rowed my patched dinghy on the lake just above.  But any contribution they made was tiny compared to the spawning potential of the fish that never made it into fresh water.

Out in the ocean, fishermen grew more efficient.  For many years, until the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 became law, foreign factory ships fished close to U.S. shores.  Atlantic herring and Atlantic mackerel were among their targets, which they caught by the tons.  Among those Atlantic herring and mackerel swam schools of river herring, which spend most of their lives at sea.  They were netted and processed, and didn’t return to the rivers to spawn.

Even after the foreign ships were gone, the herring fell victim, this time to nets pulled by American vessels, which eventually began to tow huge midwater trawls that caught large quantities of alewives and bluebacks.  When the survivors returned inshore, small-scale fisheries caught them in smaller numbers; most were used as bait.

Spring on the rivers grew quiet.  The people disappeared with the herring.  Something important was being lost.

But some people didn’t want to lose it.

They began with the dams, building fish ladders and other passages that allopwed the herring to continue upstream.  On the big dams, like Conowingo on the Susquehanna River, the ladders did little good; the dam was just too tall and too deadly for fish to traverse.  But in other places, there were successes.  Connecticut’s Mianus River, my old childhood haunt, has seen life return; thanks to a fish ladder, atg the peak of the run, thousands of herring might pass over the dam in a single day. 

Offshore, both the New England and Mid-Atlantic fishery management councils have put limits on the amount of river herring that can be killed in the Atlantic herring and Atlantic mackerel fisheries.  More needs to be done to protect the fish while they’re out at sea, but real progress has been made.

We track that progress in our own rivers, where people have begun to monitor the waterways, counting the returning fish in established runs, and searching other streams in an effort to find signs of life that might be encouraged to thrive if dams are removed, culverts opened, or passage around various obstacles secured.

I started my monitoring on Monday.

One place that I watch is a long shot, a pool beneath a small dam.  To reach it, the herring would have to swim through an underground culvert for hundreds of feet; I have no way of knowing whether the culvert is clear of debris, or whether it presents such a tangle of dead limbs and trash that herring could never ascend. 

The other spot is pregnant with possibility. 

Years ago, when I first monitored the runs, I watched a stream where a new fish passage had just been installed; previous to that, such access to fresh water had been blocked for more than a century.  On one March evening, I came to that water and spotted a herring that stranded itself on a gravel bar after swimming off the fish ladder’s edge.  I later learned that other monitors had found hundreds more that had successfully entered fresh water after negotiating their way around the first dam.

Now, I'm watching a spot farther up the same river, trying to learn how far up the river they run.  If I can confirm that they’re going as far as the second dam, there may be a chance to build another fish passage that will open up additional miles of river.   

So every year, as winter dies, I look forward to returning to the river and resuming my watch.  It’s not quite the same as it was half a century ago, for it’s a different river, in a different state, and after so many years, I’m different, too.  But it still feels right and familiar to walk along the bank, returning time after time to see the buds on the trees swell and burst into leaves, to watch ospreys and herons hunt for the same fish that I seek, and to know that a new abundance of life is displacing winter’s desolation.

But this year, things are somewhat different.

Before, when I came to the river, my sole concern was the herring run.  Now, when every voice on the radio and so much in the news warns of COVID-19, I am concerned about the health of family and friends as well. 

This is not a normal time, yet a return to the river is also a return to a sort of timeless normalcy.  

The water runs high and clear one day, and is stained by rain the next; a few days after the rain, it runs clear once again. 

Any day now, the first ospreys will return to the river, to fish and to build nests nearby, as they did for millennia before DDT caused their population to crash, and as they’ve been doing again ever since DDT was banned.  There’s even a chance that an eagle might fish in my river; they’ve survived the DDT years as well.

On Long Island, the herring’s return moves from east to west.  As far as I know, on my river, the herring haven’t yet passed the first dam.  But they’re on their way, and the strong runs out east hold out the possibility that, just maybe, the crisis has passed, and herring might be poised for a slow, if uncertain, recovery.

Maybe tonight, the herring will ascend my river, and pass the first dam.  Some might continue upstream.  Perhaps, some already have.  

Two years ago, a trout fisherman, who seemed to know what an alewife was told, me that he had accidentally caught a couple well up in the river, just below the second dam.  I don’t know whether or not that was true. 

But in these first days of spring, I’ll looking down through the water, trying to discdern the thin, circling shapes of alewives on their spawning run.  Maybe I'll see them, maybe I won't.  But so long as herring still run up rivers, despite dams and nets and the warming sea, I’ll continue my vigil.

With hope.