“Frightened Away”
The swallows freely dip and fall and sail in high wild air, and as a southern surprise two adult turkey vultures soar low over the land, their wings like great flags, frayed at the tips. The cattail seeds begin to fly. Part of April’s cool progression, the tough-leaved Mayflowers blossom out of banks and brown leaf litter, with tiny pink and white flowers, deep cupped, strong and sweet of scent.
On the twenty-fifth there is a big run of alewives in the brook. It is an event that attracts attention. Cars stop by. Small crowds gather and walk down to see the fish. This is not as great a day as it used to be, when salt herring counted heavily in the economic livelihood of Cape Cod, but it brings up remnant feelings. And the fish, after all, provide an open ceremony, even though the details of their natural or economic history may not be known to everyone. It is a spectacle worth leaving a car for, and might even tempt someone to leave his car for good, suggesting new roads and means of locomotion not yet considered.
They mass in the shallow water of the brook, with flinty gleams showing on their backs and dorsal fins. Eyes staring, mouths gaping, turning and wheeling, the foot-long alewives move up through the fishways, obeying their great drive for fulfillment. Herring gulls gather above the water course by which the fish ascend through marshes and then fresh water to their spawning areas in the ponds. They circle overhead in the blinding sky, like a prodigal crown.
The alewife multitude always draws a “why” from some visitor. Their force is so obvious and yet not quite to be explained by referring to them as “poor fish.” Huge numbers are caught in nets where they die in a shining, gasping, shivering mass, and then are hauled away in barrels for the purposes of bait or cat food. Others attempt impossible rocky barriers and die of wounds or exhaustion, and a certain percentage have fallen prey to gulls before they arrive. They encounter enormous hazards, and the alewives, unlike men, or as men think of themselves, are unable to turn back. The plan that put them here seems wasteful and even too bold for those who see life in terms of human ascendancy, where all problems are subordinate to our conscious attempt to use the earth and save ourselves. But there they are, back again so committedly as to make the most self-enclosed glimpse something of the primal energy that makes all life insist on renewal and advance. Even the children who jump down to the water’s edge and try to flip the fish out with their hands, treating them sometimes with extraordinary cruelty, must feel some attachment to this force, or perhaps they feel it more than the rest of us.
After trying to explain the habits of alewives to a group of children one day, I asked them why, if all the fish were taken out of the brook every day in the week, there would be hardly any fish returning in a few years’ time.
I don’t excuse my lack of clarity. In any case, one boy answered: “Because they would get so frightened they would all go away and not come back.”
Wrong, of course. Someone might even be tempted to cry: “Ridiculous!” The answer to the question is that most of the alewives return to the stream in whose headwaters they were hatched and where they grew up for a few weeks or months of their lives before returning to salt water. They then continue to grow in the sea, returning at sexual maturity in three or four years’ time. So if all the spawning fish are taken out of the brook every day in the week there would be no eggs to hatch out in the ponds above the stream, and the population would be decimated.
“No,” you say to the child, “you don’t understand. Let me explain this again.”
That the fish are “frightened” does not come into the picture at all, aside from the facts, and it is blatant anthropomorphism to try and read human response or attributes into a fish. Does a fish take fright? Perhaps, although it might be more accurate to call it an alarm, or flight reaction, an automatic nerve response inherent in the whole race.
Trying to talk like an adult, I describe the alewives’ running in to spawn as “slavery to the reproductive urge.” What happens to them on the way is immaterial to this unconscious necessity. Fish that commit suicide do not do so out of choice.
And yet, when these fish swing away from me, as my shadow comes over them, when they try time after time, sometimes frantically, to climb a mound of rocks or a head of water, I wonder about being “frightened,” or the noun “fear.” Is this spring stream of life without it? A bird trips off a branch in sudden alarm, cries out, and then forgets, to start in on a singing joy all over again. Birds are more emotional than cold-blooded fish, but if fear is a protective, lifesaving reaction inherent in a great many animals, then the fish may not be devoid of it. They are one of the foods of the universe, and in balance with that function, it is not just that their glands stimulate them to momentary activity, or that they flinch before disaster, but that they express in their bodies the wild need for freedom to act, to find, to run, to be, that manifests itself in highly developed animals, and to some degree in the lesser ones. They are in a sense compensating for the uses to which they are put as a prey, or element, of universal appetite.
The alewives will not be frightened away, but they will come back with fear. It is not wise to be too impatient with a child.