The Founding Fish (8 page)
Authors: John McPhee
On the Rappahannock River, in Virginia, brigades carry shad
in buckets from tailrace to pool around Embrey Dam. In April, 2000, Virginia's United States SenatorsâJohn Warner and Charles Robbâwere among some fifty people carrying the buckets. They were there to help proclaim the imminent removal of Embrey Dam at a cost to the federal government of ten million dollars, opening a hundred and seventy miles of spawning ground in the Rappahannock's main stem and tributaries, such as the Rapidan. The fifty-odd people in the bucket brigade carried twelve American shad around the dam. You have to start somewhere. Senator Warner was wearing a fishing vest. His own.
in buckets from tailrace to pool around Embrey Dam. In April, 2000, Virginia's United States SenatorsâJohn Warner and Charles Robbâwere among some fifty people carrying the buckets. They were there to help proclaim the imminent removal of Embrey Dam at a cost to the federal government of ten million dollars, opening a hundred and seventy miles of spawning ground in the Rappahannock's main stem and tributaries, such as the Rapidan. The fifty-odd people in the bucket brigade carried twelve American shad around the dam. You have to start somewhere. Senator Warner was wearing a fishing vest. His own.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, the once unthinkable notion of destroying dams went through a surprisingly swift trajectory from the quixotic to the feasible. As I began collecting material on this one anadromous species, and became ever more aware of historic migrations and the extent to which they had been stifled, reduced, or absolutely cut off, the most obvious of solutions never seriously occurred to me: Get rid of the dam. What had seemed unthinkable, however, rapidly arose as a groundswell of voices, all across the country, calling for the riddance of dams. After the federal government ordered the destruction of a significant dam in the capital of Maineâat the head of tidewater, in a nationally venerated river, restoring spawning grounds aboveâI decided to go up there and watch the dam go out, and return soon afterward to the rejuvenated river.
FAREWELL TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
W
ith John McPhedran, I carried a canoe around a ballfield in Waterville, Maine, and on into woods. The terrain fell away there sharply. The boat was heavy but its skin was indestructible, and we dragged it, bumping on roots. So much for the loving care reserved for canvas, bark, and Kevlar canoes. This one had no need of it. Its makers promote its type with pictures that show one being thrown off the roof of their factory in Old Town. So we twitched it downhill like a log. On the threshold of the year 2000, this was just one of the countless ways of saying farewell to the nineteenth century.
ith John McPhedran, I carried a canoe around a ballfield in Waterville, Maine, and on into woods. The terrain fell away there sharply. The boat was heavy but its skin was indestructible, and we dragged it, bumping on roots. So much for the loving care reserved for canvas, bark, and Kevlar canoes. This one had no need of it. Its makers promote its type with pictures that show one being thrown off the roof of their factory in Old Town. So we twitched it downhill like a log. On the threshold of the year 2000, this was just one of the countless ways of saying farewell to the nineteenth century.
A few days earlier, we would not have had to choose a model so tough. We put it into Messalonskee Stream, which carried us into the Kennebec River, which, in this stretch, had suddenly lost about five million tons of water as a result of deliberate demolition. Fifteen miles downstream, in Augusta, Edwards Dam, two stories high and more than nine hundred feet wide, had been breached on the first of July.
There were rapids at the mouth of Messalonskee Stream, but they had been there in pre-Columbian time. Just above the dam's impoundment, they suggested what its depth had concealed. A blue heron tried to lead us through the rapids, or seemed to, in a series of short, nosy flights down the left bank. A kingfisher
watched. The Augusta Water Power Company blocked the river in the year that Martin Van Buren replaced Andrew Jackson as President of the United States. It was the year of the Panic of 1837, when real estate collapsed, banks failed like duckpins, and homeless people died in the streets. The first steam railroad was nine years old. Oberlin, the first coeducational American college, was four years old. If you could afford Buffaloe's Oil, you used it in your hair to fight baldness. In Augusta, primarily thanks to the new dam, some people could afford Buffaloe's Oil. The dam powered seven sawmills, a gristmill, and a machine shop. Incidentally, it had a fish ladder.
watched. The Augusta Water Power Company blocked the river in the year that Martin Van Buren replaced Andrew Jackson as President of the United States. It was the year of the Panic of 1837, when real estate collapsed, banks failed like duckpins, and homeless people died in the streets. The first steam railroad was nine years old. Oberlin, the first coeducational American college, was four years old. If you could afford Buffaloe's Oil, you used it in your hair to fight baldness. In Augusta, primarily thanks to the new dam, some people could afford Buffaloe's Oil. The dam powered seven sawmills, a gristmill, and a machine shop. Incidentally, it had a fish ladder.
Beside the second rip we came to was a sofa bed, its skirts showing the stains of fallen water. We expected more of the same. We expected grocery carts. This, after all, was not Township 13, Range 11, of the North Woods, where nearly half the State of Maine consists of nameless unorganized townships. This was settled, supermarket Maine, but in the fifteen river miles upstream of Augusta we would see one beer can, no grocery carts, and three tires. Now we saw a mallard, a pewee, goldfinches. We heard song sparrows, a wood thrush, a veery. I wouldn't know a veery from a blue-winged warbler, but John McPhedran is acute on birds. I had known him since he was seventeen, seventeen years before. Since then, he had become a botanist, a general field naturalist, and a freelance water-quality consultant working for the Maine Department of Transportation. We saw sticking up from a large and newly emergent river boulder an iron bolt fully an inch and a half in diameter and capped with a head like a big iron mushroom. I knew what that dated fromâthe log drives of the Kennebec, which began in colonial times and came to an end in 1976. Put a chain around that bolt and you could stop a raft of logs.
We saw no white pines, very long gone as the masts of ships. Or spruce, for that matter. We saw deciduous trees. In fall, the river's walls would be afire in oranges and reds, but now, in summer,
the leaves seemed too bright, too light for Maine. Among them were few housesâin fifteen otherwise uncivilized miles, a total of three nervous houses peeping through narrow slots in the trees. This seemed to report a population that had turned its back on the river, which it had, for the better part of a century, because the river was cluttered with the debris of log drives, becessed with community waste, spiked with industrial toxins. Square-rigged ships once came up into the fresh Kennebec to carry its pure ice down the east coasts of both Americas and around Cape Horn to San Francisco, and even across the Pacific, but by the nineteen-forties and fifties the Kennebec had developed such a chronic reek that windows in unairconditioned offices in the Capitol of Maineâsix hundred yards from the riverâwere kept tight shut in summer. After the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Kennebec, like so many American rivers, steadily and enduringly cleared, and the scene was set for the dam destruction of 1999 and the restoration of this part of the river.
the leaves seemed too bright, too light for Maine. Among them were few housesâin fifteen otherwise uncivilized miles, a total of three nervous houses peeping through narrow slots in the trees. This seemed to report a population that had turned its back on the river, which it had, for the better part of a century, because the river was cluttered with the debris of log drives, becessed with community waste, spiked with industrial toxins. Square-rigged ships once came up into the fresh Kennebec to carry its pure ice down the east coasts of both Americas and around Cape Horn to San Francisco, and even across the Pacific, but by the nineteen-forties and fifties the Kennebec had developed such a chronic reek that windows in unairconditioned offices in the Capitol of Maineâsix hundred yards from the riverâwere kept tight shut in summer. After the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Kennebec, like so many American rivers, steadily and enduringly cleared, and the scene was set for the dam destruction of 1999 and the restoration of this part of the river.
We looked down through clear water, color of pale tea, at a variously rocky and gravelly bottom. In Maritime Canada, I had recently fished over a scene like that in a place locally known as the Shad Bar. Shad like to spawn over that kind of riverbed. In this river, 1837 was not a good year for anadromous fish. Something like a million American shad came up the Kennebec before the dam at Augusta stopped them. Immemorially, the Kennebecs themselves speared Atlantic salmon below falls upriver. The fish ladder at the Augusta dam may have helped to some extent, but it disappeared in a flood in 1838, not to be replaced.
We saw and heard three crows charily screaming at a redtailed hawkâa sedentary drama enacted in a dying tree. A spotted sandpiper watched as well, from a newly dried rock in the fallen stream. Like a scale model of the Yukon River, the Kennebec was unfolding before us not in multiple twists and turns but in sizable
segments, long reachesâa bend, a mile here, another bend, two miles there. They quickly added up to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered over by the rising impoundment in 1837, and until just a few days ago had been an engulfed series of bedrock ledges under the still-water pool. In 1826, the United States Engineer Department surveyed the Kennebec River and mapped Six-Mile Falls, so named because they were six miles downstream from Ticonic Falls, at Waterville. The engineers' report (1828) would preserve that name, if nothing else, while the surf-like sound and the roil of white water were taken away for a hundred and sixty-two years. Six-Mile Falls, the army engineers reported, were “three ledges of rock forming three distinct pitches.” Downriver, we heard them nowâthat sound of gravel pouring on a tin drum. You don't need Sockdolager, the Upset Rapid, or Snake River Canyon to pick you up with that sound. Any riffle, let alone a small rapid, will do. I can feel adrenaline when I fill a glass of water.
segments, long reachesâa bend, a mile here, another bend, two miles there. They quickly added up to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered over by the rising impoundment in 1837, and until just a few days ago had been an engulfed series of bedrock ledges under the still-water pool. In 1826, the United States Engineer Department surveyed the Kennebec River and mapped Six-Mile Falls, so named because they were six miles downstream from Ticonic Falls, at Waterville. The engineers' report (1828) would preserve that name, if nothing else, while the surf-like sound and the roil of white water were taken away for a hundred and sixty-two years. Six-Mile Falls, the army engineers reported, were “three ledges of rock forming three distinct pitches.” Downriver, we heard them nowâthat sound of gravel pouring on a tin drum. You don't need Sockdolager, the Upset Rapid, or Snake River Canyon to pick you up with that sound. Any riffle, let alone a small rapid, will do. I can feel adrenaline when I fill a glass of water.
Six-Mile Falls was a white riverscape of rock and plunge pools, small souse holes, tightly coiled eddies, and noisy, staired cascades. As we approached, we had to stand up and look for the thread of the river. The place was making scenery lifted from the dead. For six, seven, eight generations, it had been as withdrawn from the world as Debussy's
cathédrale engloutie
, but now, as in the time long gone, it was making its own music. Its higher rock, in broad, flat segments, was covered with filamentous algae, which under water have the look of long grass, combed straight by current. These algae were in thick brown mats, opened to the sky by the breaching of the dam and on their way to removal by the wind. We picked what seemed to be the most promising chute. The canoe slipped through it. We spun around and hung in an eddy. From riverbank to riverbank, water was falling in a hundred different ways. The truly moving fact that this scene, now restored, had been occluded for so much historic time was in an instant wiped
from my mind by an even more stirring thought. Migrating fish “bag up” at the base of any rapid. You could be here during the spring migration and catch the milling shad.
cathédrale engloutie
, but now, as in the time long gone, it was making its own music. Its higher rock, in broad, flat segments, was covered with filamentous algae, which under water have the look of long grass, combed straight by current. These algae were in thick brown mats, opened to the sky by the breaching of the dam and on their way to removal by the wind. We picked what seemed to be the most promising chute. The canoe slipped through it. We spun around and hung in an eddy. From riverbank to riverbank, water was falling in a hundred different ways. The truly moving fact that this scene, now restored, had been occluded for so much historic time was in an instant wiped
from my mind by an even more stirring thought. Migrating fish “bag up” at the base of any rapid. You could be here during the spring migration and catch the milling shad.
From the bateaux of Colonel Benedict Arnold, coming up the Kennebec River, these impeding ledges of rock would have looked about as they again do now, and the bateaux surely had no choice but to bag up here, too. There were two hundred and twenty of them, newly made of green and shrinking pine, and eleven hundred Revolutionary soldiers, some in the bateaux, some on foot along the banks, collecting at places like Six-Mile Falls to portage the boats or haul them up the rapids. Local farmers came, with oxen, to help. Passing through here in September, 1775, Arnold's was the inspiring expedition that attempted to capture Quebec, meanwhile encountering so much cold, swamp, snow, and hunger that the soldiersâwho included Henry Dearborn, of New Hampshire; Daniel Morgan, of Virginia; Aaron Burr, of New Jerseyâboiled their own moccasins for soup.
Thirteen years before the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the first English settlement on the Kennebec River was established. Flowing straight south from what would become known as Moosehead Lake, the Kennebec was the central thoroughfare of Maine. When the Plymouth Colony was eight years old (1628), Plymouth set up its own trading post on the Kennebecâforty miles inland from the ocean, at a place known to the Kennebecs as Cushnoc. According to the Abenakis, of whom the Kennebecs were a band,
cushnoc
meant “head of tide” or “where the tide stops.” The tide stopped at a rapids squeezed by Cushnoc Island. Ocean ships were stopped there, too. Traders continued upriver in smaller boats. This moment in any major riverâthe site of the first rapids above the seaâis known universally as the fall line and is an obvious place for a city. Richmond, Washington, Trenton, Troy, and Montreal grew at the fall line of rivers. Fort Western was built on the fall line of the Kennebecâon the left bank, close to Cushnoc
Islandâin 1754. As early as 1785, settlers there were speaking of the island, the rapids, the ledges, the gravels as a suitable site for a dam, and in 1797 the island, the fort, the native village, and the white settlement became the Township of Augusta in the Massachusetts district of Maine. In red brick and white clapboard, among state buildings of Maine granite, Augusta is still a townâlarger than Montpelier, smaller than Juneau.
cushnoc
meant “head of tide” or “where the tide stops.” The tide stopped at a rapids squeezed by Cushnoc Island. Ocean ships were stopped there, too. Traders continued upriver in smaller boats. This moment in any major riverâthe site of the first rapids above the seaâis known universally as the fall line and is an obvious place for a city. Richmond, Washington, Trenton, Troy, and Montreal grew at the fall line of rivers. Fort Western was built on the fall line of the Kennebecâon the left bank, close to Cushnoc
Islandâin 1754. As early as 1785, settlers there were speaking of the island, the rapids, the ledges, the gravels as a suitable site for a dam, and in 1797 the island, the fort, the native village, and the white settlement became the Township of Augusta in the Massachusetts district of Maine. In red brick and white clapboard, among state buildings of Maine granite, Augusta is still a townâlarger than Montpelier, smaller than Juneau.
A
t about six A.M. on July 1, 1999, the first of more than a thousand spectators began to collect above the eastern end of the Augusta dam, in a place known locally as the Tree-Free Parking Lot. Tree-Free Fiber is a bankrupt company that recycled paper. The view was immediate, across three hundred yards of barrageâcalled Edwards Dam since the eighteen-eighties, when the Edwards Manufacturing Company bought it and was soon operating a hundred thousand spindles and employing a thousand people in one of the largest cotton mills in the world. The dam was veiled now in falling water, an exception being a gap at the west end, where sixty feet had been dismantled and removed. A curvilinear cofferdam, convex to the current of the river, ran like a short causeway from the west shore to the broken end of the dam, cupping the wound and holding back the river.
t about six A.M. on July 1, 1999, the first of more than a thousand spectators began to collect above the eastern end of the Augusta dam, in a place known locally as the Tree-Free Parking Lot. Tree-Free Fiber is a bankrupt company that recycled paper. The view was immediate, across three hundred yards of barrageâcalled Edwards Dam since the eighteen-eighties, when the Edwards Manufacturing Company bought it and was soon operating a hundred thousand spindles and employing a thousand people in one of the largest cotton mills in the world. The dam was veiled now in falling water, an exception being a gap at the west end, where sixty feet had been dismantled and removed. A curvilinear cofferdam, convex to the current of the river, ran like a short causeway from the west shore to the broken end of the dam, cupping the wound and holding back the river.
The crowd gathered in suits, ties, and combat fatigues, sandals, sneakers, boots, and backpacksâbabies in the backpacks. There were port-a-potties, T-shirts for sale, booths of brochuresâTrout Unlimited, American Rivers, Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services. There was a row of television cameras. A helicopter preëmpted the sound of the river. With “Muddy Water” and “River” and a banjo and a guitar and a pennywhistle, a trio called Schooner Fare tried to compete. Two fixed-wing planes, one of them on floats, flew in circles even tighter than the chopper's. The people had come to hear the Secretary of the Interior, the
Governor of Maine, and the Mayor of Augustaâbut mainly to witness the freeing of the Kennebec, the breaching of the dam.
Governor of Maine, and the Mayor of Augustaâbut mainly to witness the freeing of the Kennebec, the breaching of the dam.
To dam-allergic conservationists, the idea is insufficiently satisfying that hydroelectric-power turbines spare the atmosphere by reducing the burning of fuelsâa standpoint I had first attempted to describe nearly thirty-five years before:
In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, somethingâas conservation problems goâthat is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil's world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million peopleâand so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. The implications of the dam exceed its true level in the scale of environmental catastrophes. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam. The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers. Humiliating nature, a dam is evilâplaced and solid.
During the energy crisis of 1973 and thereabout, the conservationists kept their viewpoint somewhat muffled while small-scale hydroelectric enterprises blossomed by the hundreds at small existing dams and helped meet a national need. By 1986, though, long lines at gas stations were in long-term memory and the environmental movement made a literal breakthrough on dams. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which had before then
been instructed to promote unequivocally the development of hydroelectric dams, was now instructed, by an amended Federal Power Act, to give “equal consideration” to wildlife, recreation, environmental quality, and related factors when renewing licenses or granting new ones. At Edwards Dam, in Augusta, Maine, for example, ocean fish coming upriver to spawnâsuch as Atlantic sturgeon, Atlantic salmon, and American shadâhad received essentially no consideration for sixteen decades: they could not get past the fall line to their historical birthing grounds above the dam. Disturbed by the plight of American shad in another New England river, in 1849, Henry David Thoreau described them “patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be
reasoned
with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate?” Thoreau would have been thrilled to know that the answer to his questions would one day be handed down by a federal agency called FERC.
been instructed to promote unequivocally the development of hydroelectric dams, was now instructed, by an amended Federal Power Act, to give “equal consideration” to wildlife, recreation, environmental quality, and related factors when renewing licenses or granting new ones. At Edwards Dam, in Augusta, Maine, for example, ocean fish coming upriver to spawnâsuch as Atlantic sturgeon, Atlantic salmon, and American shadâhad received essentially no consideration for sixteen decades: they could not get past the fall line to their historical birthing grounds above the dam. Disturbed by the plight of American shad in another New England river, in 1849, Henry David Thoreau described them “patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be
reasoned
with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate?” Thoreau would have been thrilled to know that the answer to his questions would one day be handed down by a federal agency called FERC.
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