The buckies
were running all last week in the mighty Saugatucket River in Wakefield. They
are also called river herring, buckeyes or alewifes. Perhaps you saw the
volunteers and DEM workers netting them, scooping them up over the dam. Every
once in a while, as the nets were emptied, a fish slipped back and went over
the dam with the continuing flow. The RIDEM even brought a tank truck and a
‘bucket brigade’ of nets filled up the tank to drive the fish up stream.
These fish
are anadromous. They return from the sea each spring and swim up area rivers to
spawn and then some die, some return to the sea. In the fall, the juveniles
migrate back to the salt water where they spend their adult years. The survival
rate for these juveniles is very low (1 percent, I am told).
It all had me
wondering, what these fish did to survive before people were netting them on
their way up stream or in very luxurious fashion, driving them up stream. When
the several mills were operating along the Saugatucket, were the fish able to
swim up the sluice ways? When hundreds of mills were operating all over New
England, how did the buckies return to upstream waters to spawn - before
fishladders and volunteers could coax them on their way?
Apparently,
the fish ladder in Wakefield has a design flaw and in addition when the fish
miss the ladder, they will not move from their position at the dead end of the
dam. That’s where volunteers and workers filled their nets, in the riffles
below the dam.
The two young
boys I was with, both avid fishermen, scurried down the bank to look under the
Main Street bridge. There in the shadows of the overpass, hundreds of fish
pooled and rested for the continuing journey. You had to look closely to see
them camouflaged in the shadows and blending with the rocks.
I told the
boys there were Indian camps near this site along the Saugatucket - to harvest
the herring in the spring. I also told them about a nearby store who sold
smoked herring on a stick out of big barrels. They didn’t seem all that
impressed but I realized I was witnessing an ancient ritual, as ancient as the
sea. This return to spawn and retreat had been going on hundreds and maybe even
thousands of years. If we dug along the banks of the Saugatucket, we would find
remnants of Indian camps and fires for smoking and drying the fish. The years
sent a shiver up my spine as we watched heavy ladened nets hoisted over the
dam. But the boys just shrugged, wishing all the while with envy that they had
their rods or better yet, a net or two. Then my reverie was shaken as I heard
them speak of permits and fishing licenses.
But upstream
from the dam, a dozen cormorants dove and resurfaced, gorging themselves on the
buckies. No permit required. I wondered how many fish a cormorant could eat “in
one sitting.” My son referred to this stretch of water as a gauntlet. A
gauntlet indeed, between the cormorants, the dams, the obstacles and their own
mortality.
Still, the
boys didn’t tire of watching and wanted to stay longer. My thoughts meandered
and returned to the Indians who probably marveled at this migration each spring
and depended on it. And they told their forbearers who told theirs, until the
traditions were altered by mills, dams, sluiceways. But still, the buckies
return each spring. 