by John McPhee
And twelve days thereafter, in the Old Town canoe about halfway from Waterville to Augusta, we passed a concrete boat launch that had launched its last boat. Its lower lip was many yards back from the river and much higher than the surface of the water. Broad shingle flats had become exposed here and there, but mainly the banks of the river were so steep that evidence of the breaching was confined to the two sides. Small, hanging streams and small, hanging falls were cutting fresh canyons to the river. A kingbird went over us, a bald eagle, a cedar waxwing. A cormorant swam past us, and two beavers off the left bank slapped and disappeared. Standing high in the river now like stockade towers were the rock-filled cribs of the log drives. Made from trees with a hundred and twenty rings, they disciplined the flow of logs. This stretch of river had a parklike appearance, with no structures but these emblems of the history of Maine. An island, high and elongate, sat up like a warship on its hull of rock, with twenty-three towers leading to it and five away from its downstream end. When dams are built, the complaints of inundated communities gradually gurgle into silence, and when dams are destroyed—evidently—complaints in fresh demeanor come to life. An ecosystem sixteen decades old was being destroyed, no matter that it was significantly man-made. Seriously threatened were the yellow lampmussel and the tidewater mucket. On the day of the breaching of the dam, volunteers from Nokomis High School worked feverishly all afternoon moving mussels and muckets from mudbanks to deep water while baby lampreys squirmed in the muck around them. In the absence of Edwards Dam, some people thought, carp and other untouchable species might get into tributary streams. When the State of Maine proposed building a small dam in a tributary to block the carp, letters to editors shouted ironic derision. A citizen of Augusta called the Edwards Dam breaching the “blunder of the century.” Noting that the damsite was actually a fine place for a much higher dam and more hydroelectric power, another writer ridiculed a government “pushed by environmental wackos.” In less than a year, in the spring of the next migration, fishermen would be catching five-pound shad in the Kennebec above Augusta.
Dams are said to last, on average, about fifty years. At the time, one of four American dams was that old and eighty-five per cent would be by 2020. In the state of Washington, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told Condit Dam on the White Salmon River that fishlifts would soon be required. Condit is four hundred and seventy-one feet long and a hundred and twenty-three feet high. Removing the dam is cheaper than installing fishlifts. The owner agreed to remove it in 2006. On the Elwha River, where two dams also block salmon, the government has bought the dams in order to remove them. The Army Corps of Engineers is weighing the fate of four dams on the Snake River. They date from the nineteen-sixties and seventies, they are half to three-quarters of a mile wide, they irrigate thirty-six thousand acres, and they make enough power to light Seattle. From Pasco, Washington, to Lewiston, Idaho, they block a hundred and forty miles of river, and the price of their removal is a billion dollars. Nonetheless, if all methods of assisting fish migrations fail—if the salmon population continues to decline—the four dams may be removed. The Corps of Engineers, like any bureaucratic agency, has no higher agendum than its own survival. It can survive as well removing dams as building them.
On Fossil Creek, in Arizona, a paradise of rock ledges and travertine pools, it’s 5.6 megawatts versus the Gila topminnow and the razorback sucker. Embrey Dam, on the Rappahannock River, in Virginia, has about the same height and width as Edwards had in Augusta and cuts off a hundred miles of historical spawning grounds of shad. While the cost of removing the dam is four million dollars, the cost of fish passage would be 10.2, so the dam is coming out. The shad migration on the Neponset River, in and near Boston, has been cut off variously since 1634. The Army Corps of Engineers has been studying the feasibility of removing the Neponset’s two dams. A dam on Malibu Creek, in California, is a hundred feet high, and the reservoir behind it is completely landfilled with silt. It is seventy-five years old. A rare species of steelhead used to run up there. Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River, in Oregon, is thirty-nine feet high, four hundred and sixty-four feet wide, and was built more than eighty years ago to help small farmers whose farms are now real-estate subdivisions. The endangered Colorado pikeminnow would be considerably less endangered following the removal of Price-Stubb Dam, on the Colorado River, which was built for irrigation before the First World War and has not watered anything since 1919.
Since 1960, some two hundred small-river dams have been removed in the United States, nowhere as feverishly as in Wisconsin, where the Slabtown Dam, on the Bark River, was destroyed in 1992; the Wonewoc Dam, on the Baraboo River, in 1996; the Hayman Falls Dam, on the Embarrass River, in 1995; the Readstown Dam, on the Kickapoo River, in 1985; the Mellen Dam, on the Bad River, in 1967. Baraboo was Barabeau once. A barabeau is a sturgeon. The tribes called the river Ocoochery (Plenty of Fishes). Wisconsin has deconstructed more than seventy-five dams, ranging in height up to sixty feet and length to four hundred and fifty.
There are sixty-six thousand river dams in the United States five or more feet high. The highest—Oroville, on the Feather River—is seven hundred and seventy feet high. The greatest producer of power is Grand Coulee Dam, on the Columbia River, making six thousand megawatts. American Rivers once said that the power made at Edwards could be saved “by replacing seventy-five thousand lightbulbs with energy-efficient bulbs.” Grand Coulee appears safe, unless someone comes along with a hundred and thirty-two million lightbulbs.
To be completely free, the Kennebec River will have a more than metaphorically uphill struggle. In its watershed above Augusta are at least a hundred dams, ten in the main stem from Waterville to Moosehead Lake. In the resurrected rapids of this stretch above Augusta, its fifteen miles seemed both modest and momentous. It was about the length of Manhattan Island. A lot of fish could spawn there. In its possibilities as a state park, its beauty and seclusion, it rallied the nineteenth century. From no river in the country of the Kennebec’s size or stature had a dam ever been removed. On the fresh current, we rounded a final bend. Down the long thoroughfare of water and trees we now saw—three and a half miles away and rising from mid-river like the blade of a gunsight—the bronze and granite Capitol of Maine. To left and right, above the trees, were the spires of two churches. With John’s father, Alexander McPhedran, we had scouted early in the morning for a place to end the trip, and, with some difficulty, had found one, about a quarter of a mile through woods from a small roadside park. We had left a white-birch log on a rock to mark the spot. Seeing it now, a mile down, John McPhedran rummaged in his pack, removed a cell phone, and asked his father to pick us up.
FIVE
SPAWNING AND THE OUT MIGRATION
In the days before the dam was breached, more than three million larval shad had been poured into the Kennebec at Sydney and Waterville to pass the summer and be imprinted in the renewed spawning grounds. Another million would soon follow. Stocked by the state, they were coming from a private hatchery in Waldoboro, some thirty miles to the southeast, where fertilized eggs are obtained in a manner strikingly different from the fatal strippings at Smithfield Beach and the Pamunkey reservation. Sam Chapman, in his Waldoboro Shad Hatchery, induces a soothing counterclockwise flow in big cylindrical tanks and puts full-grown, swimming shad in there to have sex while he watches. I wanted to watch, too. I went over from Augusta. Spring after spring on the Delaware, on quiet evenings at dusk, I had sat on a boulder cleaning shad and looking downstream across half a mile of what seemed like Olympic rings not quite overlapping—ritual circles in the river, drawn on the surface by paired shad in tight coils. Since the view stopped at the surface, I wondered how they went about what they were doing.
In squarish green ponds on the edge of open country, black clouds of larval shad raced for cover in suddenly emerging sunlight. “If they can stay away from bright sunlight, they will,” Chapman said. “If a pond is green, they’ll get down in it. If a pond is c
lear, they’ll school right on the surface, having nowhere to go to get away from the light. As these fish develop in the eggs, one of the first things you notice is the development of the eye, so light must play an important role in this fish’s life.”
There were three ponds—in effect, some of the shipping docks of the business. Beside the ponds were two metal buildings, like the hangar and machine shop of a very small airport. The larger building was three stories tall and cavernous inside—a single space, with a stairway in one corner that led to a high platform where observers could lean on a railing and look down from close proximity into an uncovered tank fifteen feet in diameter. Large dark shapes flashing silver were swimming there, schooled up and steady in concentric skeins, when Chapman took me to the platform at four in the afternoon. They were swimming against the current, clockwise—swimming high to low in the water column, randomly changing depths. Now and again, the high ones broke the surface slightly with their dorsals or tails. Rarely, they snapped at bubbles, as if the bubbles were shad darts. The scene was calm, cool, and migrational—expert swimmers moving into current, instinctively moving upstream, not evidently rattled by Chapman’s closed circuit. Every so often, as the afternoon lengthened, a single shad would break the spell, looping around to swim against the crowd. Chapman said, “Normally, during the daylight hours, the fish are going to be swimming around the tank pretty well in a parallel fashion. They’re all uniformly swimming, and there’s not much deviation from the given path. It’s like running track. Later, you see individuals break out of that pattern, break the line, and go from one track to the other.”
Eventually, some shad began to alter the pattern further by exploding forward and passing the rest of the school at extreme high speed. Twice, three times, they would whip around before settling down to cruise as before. When they started this “burst-speed swimming,” as Chapman called it, he said, “I’m guessing. It must be five o’clock.”
It was 4:55. Burst-speed swimming is the first real sign of the orgiastic pageant to come. The schooling discipline is closing down for the day and the sexual intent is rising. The tank had something over a hundred shad in it, and by six o’clock they were beginning to swim in a miscellaneous, improvisational, free-form way.
Chapman, in shorts and a T-shirt, is a stocky man with short dark hair, with down-East inflections, down-East humor, and legs that would not look amiss in the National Football League. I asked him where he got the fish.
They had recently come out of the Gulf of Maine and into the Saco River, he said—seventy—five miles down the road. They were trapped at the fishlift at Cataract Falls, and the Maine Department of Marine Fisheries—his customer and client—trucked them to Waldoboro. They would go back to the Saco in the same trucks. He had used fish in years past from the Connecticut River, but he was wary of them because of the beating they had taken in the fish elevator at Holyoke Dam. He said, “You wouldn’t bring a sick cow in to breed it.” Since the season began, he had received more than five hundred shad from the Saco.
I asked him the temperature of the water.
About seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. Its blue coloring was from something called Aquashade, which is used to color ponds on golf courses. Aquashade also inhibits the growth of algae. Its effect in the Waldoboro tank is to calm down the shad.
By seven, the light was beginning to fall, and the shad were loosely carouselling, milling as well, some doing tight whirling turns, or downcurrent loops, at all levels in the tank, dorsals and caudals occasionally splashing the surface. At seven-thirty, Chapman went down to ground level and closed a large overhead door at one end of the building. It was as if the sun had dropped behind riverbank trees. The milling intensified. Chapman had hung a seven-watt bulb in a reflector tilted toward the ceiling, and gradually this extremely low source became the only light. Watching the fish in the dark was like waiting for water to boil.
The smaller shapes were males, the larger ones females. A smaller one slid his nose past the tail of a larger one and moved it along her body. She bolted, sprinting around the tank. He followed, just as fast. “I think she is dribbling eggs and giving off a hormone,” Chapman said. “That attracts him. He’s ready. She isn’t. So she takes off, and he gives chase. I call this phase ‘aggressive one-on-one.’”
The satyr chases began occurring frequently, with a lot of thrashing on the surface, and while that was going on other fish went off to one side and swam in small circles, just as in the National Basketball Association when four players clear the floor so the fifth can go one-on-one. As twilight deepened into night, the aggressive one-on-one became, in Chapman’s term, a “passive one-on-one.” Doing a kind of play-by-play, he said, “It’s almost like a water ballet, with two and sometimes more fish swimming in synchrony, actually touching—each fish vibrating, male and female.”
The essence of the passive one-on-one is that she is now as receptive as he is aroused. While making their tight circles—maybe two feet in diameter—they paired closely, nose to gill, and they vibrated. Sometimes they were splashing at the surface, and sometimes they were a little bit down. They kept moving rapidly, side by side, like a couple of skywriters, trailing gametes—eggs and milt. “It’s just a short dalliance,” Chapman said. A pair would finish in an extremely tight arc, a fiddlehead flourish.
This had an effect. It was democopulation. It stirred the rest of the school. Gradually, they formed their own pairs, and the general orgy got under way, veiled in clouds of white sperm. In 1879, in a small volume called “Fish Hatching and Fish Catching,” R. Barnwell Roosevelt and Seth Green rubbed words together to evoke the ambience of this moment in the spawning beds of the natural world: “They seek out some rocky ledge where there is a gentle current, and uniting in pairs press their vents together and extrude the spawn and milt in a spasm of amatory pleasure.”
Chapman’s shad were now milling, as they do while they spawn in a river. While most seemed to vibrate against one another, others went alone to vibrate against the side of the tank or against the plastic standpipe in the center, swimming in a tight spiral, quivering against the pipe to shake out eggs.
“Once you get enough hormones and gametes in the water it triggers a school-spawning response,” Chapman said. “Now they’re going at normal speed, not trying to get away from one another. When they’re expressing the gametes, they go through some kind of rotational or bumping motion, and this is when the eggs and sperm are coming out. It doesn’t take a one-on-one. They can do it all by themselves. I’ve seen the sperm so thick it was like looking into a milk jug.”
By ten-thirty or so, in the seven watts of light, the evening’s activity had reached the high end of its crescendo and was beginning to quiet down. It doesn’t always end so early. “Oftentimes I’ll come in and check at ten o’clock—and I’ve had it for the day, you know—and I’ll check it and there’s no eggs. Then I come in the next day and there’s as much as a litre and a half of eggs. They’re young eggs. You can tell just by looking at the degree of development. Some of them are just a few hours old, so they were given off in the wee hours.”
As in a river, the indoor spawning in Waldoboro can go on for weeks and take place every night. One year, the same group of shad spawned every evening from the third week of June to the middle of August. The eggs slowly sink and go into a drain and down into collection bags. Chapman culls the best eggs with a two-millimetre sieve, rejecting up to seventy-five per cent. Even so he ends up with about ten times as many eggs as he would if he were squeezing them out of the fish on his own. From a single evening’s spawning, he might collect a hundred thousand eggs, at sixty thousand eggs per litre. Like shad, most fish are oviparous—that is, their eggs go into the water and are fertilized externally. While one female shad has, say, two hundred and fifty thousand eggs, a female giant bluefin tuna will carry in her sacs about forty million eggs. Maybe one or two of those forty million becomes an adult giant bluefin. Shad eggs in the wild do better than that. But not m
uch better.
Chapman describes himself as a man with a “blue thumb.” His wife, Carolyn, who works side by side with him, has one, too. She raised lobsters, oysters, and marine worms at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, in Walpole, on the Damariscotta River. She was from Rockland. They met when they were teenaged. After majoring in botany at the university, Sam, too, went to work at the Marine Center, where he became an aquaculture specialist and discovered his talent for “building things that animals lived in.” The animals were lobsters, clams, oysters, scallops, and mussels. When Sam and Carolyn were in their early forties, they left the Marine Center to follow their own ideas and raise fish in Waldoboro. They began with smelts, advanced to alewives, and escalated to shad.
Growing up in Waldoboro, Sam had understood the effects a dam could have on the life of a river. His home river, the Medomak (it rhymes with “atomic”), was only sixteen miles long and was dammed in eight places. Its name means “where fresh meets salt,” but it could not have been been more discouraging to anadromous fish. In part as a result of dialogue with Sam, a Waldoboro farmer who raised sheep by the river created in his will the Lloyd L. Davis Anadromous Fish Trust. In June 1990, Sam applied to the Fish Trust for travel money and got seven hundred dollars for a trip to Smithfield Beach, on the Delaware River, and the hatchery in Thompsontown, on the Juniata. The following season, he went to the Connecticut River, collected shad eggs, and hatched shad fry in his garage in Waldoboro. “I didn’t know a thing about them,” he told me now. “If you want to get funding, you do something other people aren’t doing.” Sam and Carolyn, in their second summer, hatched a million shad. He sold them to the Department of Marine Resources, which had listed shad second after Atlantic salmon in its restoration endeavors. For the Chapmans, each succeeding season proved as good as or better than the last. They sent larval shad in huge numbers to the Androscoggin, the Sebasticook, the Saco, and the Kennebec, and they kept not a few for the Medomak.