A Million Black Sails

Perhaps if the alewife had been differently named, poets would have sung of its beauty and made epics of its travels. Better than a poem, however, is the experience of lifting one of these fish from the water and holding it to the light for a moment before releasing it to continue on its strange journey. It is worth a memory to hold in the hand a spirit of Spring: a living mosaic with jewels flatly pressed and overlapping, blue-black gems near the back, then amethysts brilliant and deep, then gleaming hundreds of opals fading to pearls. When the fish slips into water again, its colors are lost. There is little more to be seen than its dull dark blue back so near the surface of the water that the dorsal fin is exposed like a wee black sail unfurled.

Hard by are thousands of similar sails, a fleet of small black fins voyaging from ocean depths up stream to the ponds, their little black sails, in annual milllions, passing up the Atlantic. The scent of arbutus is still in the air when they come, the elder buds, in purple cones, are nearly ready to burst into cream white bloom, and the maple blossoms are hanging red; but I doubt that the scent or color of flower reaches the alewives in the sea.

The frogs are in full chorus, the toads are trilling, the bobolinks are jubilant with northland joys, the meadow larks are calling, "Spring is here"; but I doubt that song of batrachian or of bird quickens the alewives in their ocean depths. Yet somehow Spring touches them intimately, impelling, and the alewives can no more resist their impulse to migrate to fresh water than the bobolinks can refrain from their northward flight. The birds that come four thousand miles for a nesting site have, I think, an easier journey than the fish; for however smooth their way may be during their ocean voyage, the alewives that venture into a certain Maine brook head into a hazardous course when they enter fresh water.

Pausing one day in mid-May at the mouth of Patten's Pond Stream, I glanced down upon a fleet of little black sails. Countless thousands of alewives were waving their dorsal fins above the surface of the water in Surry Bay just where it was rippled by the rapids of the stream. The fish were held until the rise of the tide. As they waited there, not deliberately of course, but blindly, they seemed a parable. How often we wait, as unwittingly as they, for the turn in some inscrutable tide. The fate of that fleet suddenly gripped my imagination with its pathos; its exhilaration. The refrain of a passing meadowlark reminded me that pathos was a false note, sung out of key by a foolish human dread of the dangers that were ahead.

By: davidbunch

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