November 30, 1979
Page 34299
SALUTE TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, John N. Cole, a distinguished Maine journalist and author has received the prestigious Outdoor Life Conservation Award for 1979 in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the striped bass of the Atlantic.
John's study of the striped bass brought to life our centuries-old appreciation and fascination for this remarkable species of fish. It underscored the value of the species and its special character. And it spurred others to take up the cause of the striped bass. The result was federal legislation — signed into law by President Carter 12 days ago — mandating an emergency study of the Atlantic coast striped bass. The 3-year, $5 million plan is a recognition of the striped bass as a sport fish and a food fish. It is a recognition of the increased pressure on the species. It admits our ignorance of the magnitude of the crisis the species is experiencing. And it mandates a wide-ranging analysis and proposals for action. It is also a recognition in another sense of the work of John Cole. I offer my congratulations, and on behalf of all who believe in conservation, my thanks.
It is not only conservation of natural resources which has engaged John over the years. He has written and spoken about our political, cultural and social resources — their definition, their value and the risks they face in a technological world. He is eloquent, imaginative, and most of all, he is effective.
I think John would be disappointed if he met anyone with whom he did not disagree at least occasionally. And he would be satisfied if he did no more than challenge his readers to apply their own intellect and imagination to our problems.
Indeed, the contributions individuals can make are an important part of his view of life.
I request that the following items be printed in the RECORD.
HISTORY OF OUTDOOR LIFE ANNUAL CONSERVATION AWARD
Outdoor Life has always recognized Americans who make outstanding and unselfish efforts to conserve our natural resources. In the 1930's, two distinguished conservationists, Aldo Leopold and J. N. (Ding) Darling, were given special awards.
It was at the end of World War II, when the outdoor magazines were full of stories about a wildlife "crisis," that the magazine pulled out all the stops in "a concerted effort to save and restore the prized outdoor resources."
The editors decided to sponsor a contest. First prize was $3,000, and altogether the pot was $5,000. "Write a 30-word Conservation Pledge which Americans may recite like the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag — a solemn promise to safeguard our national resources," the ads said.
Thousands responded. The winner was L. L. Foreman of Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose words still appear in every issue of Outdoor Life. (the word "air" was added in 1970) . Second-place winner was Rachel Carson, who would later write the conservation classic "Silent Spring."
The pledge was read before the House of Representatives and accepted for the people of the United States by Secretary of the Interior J. A. Krug. February 5, 1947, was Conservation Pledge Day, with radio programs, speeches, and thousands of recitations of the pledge itself. In 1950, President Harry S. Truman was presented with a hand-carved plaque of the pledge.
Today's Outdoor Life Conservation Award started with that pledge. It is presented every year to an individual who has fought and sacrificed to defend our natural resources, but it's also important for the attention it draws to conservation issues. The editors of Outdoor Life recognized that when they instituted the award in 1951. "Surveys showed that many more people were reading our hunting and fishing and adventure yarns than our conservation stories," said the magazine's September 1951 editorial. "Might we not scratch a head or two and come up with an idea for getting more people to read conservation stories voluntarily — and enjoy them?"
What the editors came up with was the award, presented that month to a Florida eradication firm that cleared Lake Talquin of water hyacinth. The award was presented monthly until 1956, then reinstituted on an annual basis in 1968. Some of the winners who preceded John N. Cole, who is the 1979 recipient for his efforts on behalf of the striped bass of the Atlantic, were Ed Breathitt, who as governor of Kentucky fought to control the ravages of strip mining in his state and elsewhere; Gerald D. Schuder, who led a Virginia citizens' drive for regulation of river channelization; Dr. Rex Hancock, who fought to save the Cache River; Dr. Bruce Cowgill, who initiated the "Acres for Wildlife" program; George T. Dagby of the Georgia Game and Fish Commission, who fought to save the Alcovy River; Ralph A. McMullen, who as Michigan DNR director campaigned against the use of hard pesticides that threatened Lake Michigan; George Palmiter, whose innovative ideas cleared Ohio rivers of logjams without damaging channels, and Robert Boyle, the first journalist to make Americans aware of the perils of PCBs in fish.
[From the New York Times, July 16, 1978]
CATFISH HUNTER, A CANDIDATE FOR THE PEOPLE
(By John N. Cole)
BRUNSWICK, MAINE.— I've been voting ever since I was discharged from the Army Air Corps in 1945. As a survivor of 35 combat missions, I concluded the numbing experience might acquire some significance if I participated in the process I had risked so much to help protect.
Since I moved to the small community in Maine where I have lived for the past 20 years, I have voted in every town, primary and general election. The people here make it easy. There are no long lines, no bureaucrats checking computerized voting lists. Here, I have an identity; a visit to the polls is a pleasant, folksy experience.
But I did not vote in the primary elections this past June, and I've been thinking about the reasons ever since. My conscience has been nudged by frequent newspaper and magazine columns about the disturbing decline in the number of voters in each succeeding election of the past decade. If the trend continues — and it is accelerating — the nation's elections will be decided by a relative handful of the more than 100 million eligible voters.
As a lifetime believer in participatory democracy, I am well aware of the dangers of the current trend. Yet, after 30 years of voting, I consciously became part of the danger. Why?
Part of the answer came to me when I realized the significance of a change in my reading habits. During the war in Vietnam, which I actively opposed, I was often dismayed when the public seemed unimpressed by news items I considered revealing and significant. "That's the trouble with this country," I would say. "Most of the people read the sports pages and the supermarket ads. They don't pay attention to the important news."
These days I am reading the sports pages with much more interest than I read the news from Washington. Mario Andretti, Catfish Hunter, Billy Martin, and Niki Lauda are engaged in far more interesting efforts — I have decided — than Jimmy Carter, Ed Koch, Hugh Carey, and Perry Duryea.
The nation's political process and its politicians have been dehumanized. There is no romance, no adventure, no humanity, no drama and no grace left in politics. As far as elections go, Hemingway has indeed been buried. Over the past decade or more, a combination of ad agency campaigns, professional pollsters, computerized strategies, intricate ethical and financial codes, television, and the cynicism bred by Watergate and its fallout has produced the dehumanized candidate.
The ready reason given for not voting by most of the nonvoters interviewed is: "There's no difference between the candidates. They're all the same ... They're all crooks." The popular logic argues that voters will return to the polls when they have a "choice." I question that logic. There are choices offered now. They are relatively indiscernible, however, because they are propounded by candidates of such controlled balances, of such premixed neutrality, that they excite and interest no one except the professional party members.
We (myself and the 15 million voters who have stopped voting during the past 10 years) cannot relate to manufactured candidates and computerized issues. If we are to return to the polls, humanity must be restored to the electoral process. We need to see palpable vitality, heroism, failure, clumsiness — humanity in all its diversity.
Consider George Scott's comments about Catfish Hunter, which the Times reported on July 3: "That man (Catfish) don't have nothing to be ashamed of, no matter how he goes out. He went out and challenged peoples. He went out and beat peoples. He battle your tail. The man coulda alibied lots of times, 'cause he was pitching hurt, but I never heard him alibi once, 'cause he ain't that type. I'd give him the ball in a big game before I'd give it to anyone. He pitched his 300 innings and won his 20 games for years. He's a Hall of Famer, Jack!"
George Scott of the Red Sox and Catfish Hunter of the Yankees are eminently human beings; their humanity is vital and apparent. As candidates, that humanity would be stripped from them as it has been from nearly every candidate in recent years.
I'll vote again when it is required, and I'll bet I'll be joined by most of the 15 million who stopped voting before I did.
(NOTE: John N. Cole is contributing editor of Maine Times.)
STRIPED BASS: FOR COUNTLESS FISHERMEN FROM THE CHESAPEAKE TO THE ST. JOHN, THE STRIPER IS THE CADILLAC OF SPORT FISH
(By John N. Cole)
In the striper's beginning, there was the glacier. It came, a ponderous ice plain, one hundred thousand years ago. Moving south from what is now Labrador, the pale sheet slid as slowly as the centuries. Like a hatch cover closing, it obliterated lakes, rivers, forests, and all the earth as far south as the mouth of the Hudson River. In the tumult of its melting and recession fifteen thousand years ago, the glacier gouged new seas, cut new waterways, mixed the brine of the Atlantic with the pure fresh waters of inland lakes and rivers. From this massive crumbling of natural barriers, the striped bass evolved: a fresh-water creature who found a new environment in the salt sea the glaciers had tumbled toward it.
That heritage has shaped the striper's behavior since its violent genesis; the creature has never abandoned its affinity for the purity of its beginnings. Stripers are seldom, if ever, seen more than three miles off the coast; they swim up rivers with the ease of their distant forebears; they choose the fresh waters of their ancient ancestors for their most critical rite — reproduction and the preservation of the species.
It was this compulsion that first brought fish and man together. Before Christ was born, East Coast Indian tribes could find the striper pursuing its preservation in shallow rivers flowing by spring campgrounds. There are records in shell heaps and other archeological artifacts that indicate the waterway tribes knew of the creature. And early in the seventeenth century, with the coming of the European explorers to the New World's Atlantic Coast, the striper's prolific presence is duly recorded by the captains, historians, and journal keepers who took detailed notes on whatever novel species were discovered, particularly if they appeared to be of value,
The fish is a sort of white salmon, which is of very good flavor and quite as large; it has white scales; the heads are so full of fat that in some there are two or three spoonfuls, so that there is good eating for one who is fond of picking heads. It seems the fish makes the Indians lascivious, for it is often observed that those who have caught any when they have gone fishing have given them, on their return, to their women, who look for them anxiously. (Isaak De Rasieres, a Dutch commercial agent on the Hudson River 1623) .
The Basse is an excellent Fish, both fresh & salte, one hundred wherof salted (at market) have yielded five pounds (sterling). They are so large, the head of one will give a good eater a dinner, & for daintinesse of diet they excell the Marybones of Beefe. There are such multitudes that I have seene stopped in the river close adjoining to my house with a sands at one tyde so many as will loade a ship of 100 tonnes. I myselfe at the turning of the tyde have seene such multitudes passe out of a pounde that it seemed to me that one mighte go over their backs drishod. (Captain John Smith, off the New England coast, 1614.)
The basse is one of the best fishes in the Country, and though men are soon wearied with other fish, yet are they never with basse. It is a delicate, fine, fat fast fish . . . sweet and good, pleasant to the pallat and wholesome to the stomach . . . When they use to tide in and out of the rivers and creeks the English at the top of high water do crosse the creek with long seanes or bass nets which stop the fish; and the water ebbing from them, they are left on dry ground, sometimes two or three thousand at set, which are salted up against winter, or distributed to such as have present occasion either to spend them in their homes or use them for their grounds (William Wood, New England Prospect, 1634)
The maize growers and squash planters of seventeenth century New England had just five years after 1634 to continue using striped bass as fertilizer for "their grounds." Recognizing the commercial and food value of the fish, the general court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued an order in 1639 that prohibited that practice.
Thirty years later, the patriarchs of Plymouth Colony decreed that funds from the sale of striped bass would be used to construct this nation's first public schools. Thus, more than a century before the American Colonies declared their independence and the new nation was born, the presence of the striped bass had become a bright and significant thread in the American tapestry. So admired was the creature from the very earliest days that in 1879 a sprightly and ingenious public servant named Harry W. Mason spent ten days in June on the Navesink River in New Jersey trying to collect a significant number of striped bass fry for his boss, the Honorable Livingston Stone, the U.S. Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries.
It was Commissioner Stone's purpose to respond to a plea from his counterpart in California, S. R. Throckmorton, chairman of that state's Fish Commission. Throckmorton had discovered the striper on a trip east; he urged Stone to try to transplant some to the West Coast, and Stone dispatched Mason to the Navesink.
"On reaching Red Bank," writes Mason in a subsequent report to his chief, "I found none of the arrangements which we haddirected to be made had been attended to; the two men — I cannot say fishermen — had but a faint notion of what was wanted, and had provided themselves with an eel seine wholly insufficient for my use."
Overcoming these nineteenth-century bureaucratic barriers with a dogged zeal. Mason got his two men to haul a bass seine every high tide around the clock (midnight included) for a week. He and his unwilling crew went to the upper reaches of the river and ". . . also spent Saturday morning exploring the mysteries of mud and water in every ditch and brook that empties into or communicates with the Navesink River above Red Bank.
"The hauling was continued Wednesday but as I had sixty small bass, 31/2 to 41/2 inches long, and thirty medium-sized bass, 6 to 8 inches long, I thought best to be sure of keeping some of them alive, at least, and so stand myself with the fish on the shore for the first time, the men going out alone with an empty tank and a thermometer. As might have been expected, they made a large haul of 139, mostly small, and lost all but twelve before getting back to the wharf. This rather disheartened them, but after considerable argument they were persuaded to try again Thursday, and very fortunately in the first haul we took seventy-five small bass and six large, and succeeded in bringing every one safe to the tank. The tanks were thoroughly washed and filled with water, half from the river, high tide, and half from a spring with sea salt added.
"Thursday noon took the train from Red Bank, the tanks being expressed to Grand Central depot, charge, $15 . . . at five o'clock the tanks arrived at Grand Central, and on examination only one dead bass was found.
"Finding the baggage car was run through Chicago without change I made arrangements to have the tanks in that car, discharged the boy I had brought from Red Bank to help, and congratulated myself that I had one hundred and thirty-three small bass and thirty-four medium-sized bass alive and in good condition. The trip to Albany was uneventful, and with the delivery of the fish [there] I gladly relieved myself of the responsibility that had weighed rather too heavily for comfort upon me during the ten days of my service.
"The difficulty in obtaining the bass, requiring the services of from four to eight men day and night for a week made the expense of my experiments more than it would have been under more favorable circumstances (as a week later in time), but I did not dare relinquish in the least particular lest I should lose all the fish I had, and leaving the account to speak for its own necessity I respectfully submit this report of my ten days at Red Bank (signed) Harry W. Mason."
Mason may have worried about the reception given to his expense account, but he shouldn't have. In terms of public monies invested, his ten days at Red Bank and the care he bestowed on his small charges surely ranks as one of the most rewarding projects the U.S. Government ever executed. Of the original Mason group, 107 stripers survived the transcontinental rail journey and were released in the Carquines Straits near San Francisco. Twenty years later, the West Coast commercial catch of the progeny of Mason's travelers topped one million pounds a year. Today, after passage of West Coast laws that prohibit netting, the bass ranges from San Diego County in southern California to Oregon and the Columbia River and Vancouver to the north.
The creature that originally came surging through the tumult of the glacier's wake, adapting to the East Coast salt sea from the St. John to Florida, had successfully survived the manmade tumult of a 3,000-mile train trip and adapted to Pacific waters as well.
This is, evidently, a creature committed to survival.
And well equipped for it too. The striper is strong, muscular, hardy, and — in a marvelous evolutionary metamorphosis — better able than any other fish to cope with the thumping chaos of breaking surf. Hardheaded, its gill plates covered with bony protection (plus a set of cutting gills as well), and blessed with a tail that can be extended laterally to become almost as broad as the broadest part of its body, the striper sports at the foaming fringes of the sea as a mountain goat leaps from peak to peak, or a gibbon swings from branch to branch high above a jungle floor.
Whenever the southeast wind has cleared the south-facing Atlantic beaches of the Northeast, especially those in Massachusetts and on Long Island, bass can be seen in the very curve of a cresting wave. Driving smaller bait fish into the white water where the minnows become confused and unable to maintain equilibrium in the tumult, the striper feeds easily in the scattering panic, maneuvering gracefully in water so shallow that the fishes' bronze shoulders gleam above the pale foam. The striper never loses its composure in its high-risk environment.
Often, when a wave's backwash leaves it all but high and dry, the fish will lie calmly on its side in the slight depression between two sand ridges, waiting in the two inches of sea water for the next incoming wave to bring it enough watery space to swim in.
The sight of a four-foot fish weighing close to fifty pounds lying on its side in the shallow wash of the Atlantic startles and amazes most observers. What few are likely to realize is the depth of the creature's experience. Bass that size are at least twenty years old, more likely twenty-five. The fish live relatively long lives, even when that longevity is measured on a human scale. Stripers weighing more than one hundred pounds — and catch records over the years are dotted with such giants — are between forty and fifty years old.
On both East and West Coasts, the great striper populations spend much of their lives on migratory journeys, when vast numbers of the fish follow coastal geography in and out of estuaries, up and down rivers and streams, through natural and manmade tidal channels and canals, around the rims of bays and harbors, and, with conquering vitality, through the swells, rip tides, undertows, foaming breakers, and surging seas of that most violent place where ocean and land come together.
That meeting line, if every convolution of its granite and sand could be straightened, would cover tens of thousands of miles. The striper is a presence along every one of them, from the St. John River in easternmost Maine to Florida's bather-burdened Atlantic beaches. The striper concentrations, however — the teeming schools that had Captain John Smith believing he could walk dry shod on their backs — range from Chesapeake Bay's southern gateway at Cape Charles to the northernmost harbors of Massachusetts at Plum Island and Newburyport. It is between these points that the primary migration moves each spring and fall; the bulk of it originates in the broad and richly rivered Chesapeake each April when the bass move north to return again in December for a somnolent winter in the bay's deeper reaches.
It is a journey that moves them past the great industrial sprawls of the most heavily populated, the richest, the most developed and electrified such coastal corridor anywhere on the globe. Past Norfolk, Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, Newark, New York City, Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence, Boston, and Lynn they go — past more than fifty million humans working in more than ten thousand factories, living in more than twenty-five million housing units waters concentrated within ten miles of waters the bass can reach from the sea, each persuaded the American Dream is woven from threads of mass production, mass consumption, and mass waste, each persuaded the pursuit of happiness demands a compulsive dedication to weekend recreation, and millions believing there are good reasons why fishing is the nation's number one leisure-time activity, with each of these spending a work week in factory, store, and office, restaurant, supermarket and carwash so they can acquire the wherewithal to purchase the rods and reels and lines and boats and boots that will enable them to better catch the striped bass — a creature embattled by the very lunge to industrialism that makes leisure possible for the legions of blue-collar and white-collar and mink-collar humans who have made the striped their favorite fish because it dependably stays within reach, keeps to a seasonal schedule, and possesses such a driving life force that it has been caught in city sewers by Manhattan fishermen, who lower lines through manhole gratings knowing before they do that they will never be able to retrieve the fish they hook from the fouled, piped waters that run where brooks once ran when stripers swam past the tents of the Algonquin Indians.
No one is certain of the complete explanation for the annual journey north from the Chesapeake and back. While the striper population of the Hudson River also migrates, most fisheries biologists and observers of the river, like Robert H. Boyle, put the proportion at somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent, and those do not travel with the great sweep of their Chesapeake brethren, moving only from the river mouth to either Long Island Sound or Montauk Point via the ocean route. If the wintering stripers in the Chesapeake were sealed in that bay by nets at Cape Charles and across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, the megaloptian millions would be denied their favorite.
Is it the tides of the creature's evolution that pull it on its voyage? Surely, in addition to its search for food, those currents of past eons must be part of the reason. Like travelers from another country searching for their birthplace in a distant nation, the stripers could be trying to retrace that first journey that began with the glacier's elemental convulsions. The erratic history of the creature's scientific nomenclature is evidence that some ichthyologists share this thesis.
Originally christened Roccus lineatus, Latin doggerel, for the coastal rocks the fish prefers and for the lines, or stripes, that mark it, the bass had its name changed in the 1930s to Roccus saxatilis (a redundancy that means rocks found among the rocks) when it was learned that Roccus lineatus was a name previously bestowed on a Mediterranean fish that was no relation.
Then, in 1967, after what has been labeled "considerable research," the striper became Morone saxatilis in the wake of pronouncements by the British Museum that the genius Morone more accurately indicates the striper's ties to the freshwater perch, which is the evolutionary progenitor who, with the help of the Ice Age, was probably the genetic parent of the fish that now swims the Atlantic coast twice a year in its search for a homeland that lies buried beneath megatons of glacial till, or under lakes the striper would have to cross mountains to reach.
The price in its numbers of the adult striper has paid for its migratory compulsion is a price beyond counting. Who can guess how many thousands of stripers were trapped and speared by hunters of the Atlantic Indian tribes, eager to ease the winter's yearning for fresh meat with the flesh of this large creature that finned slowly through salt marsh channels, or rolled in the shallows of narrow rivers, intent only on its spawning rituals.
Who can measure the numbers that were taken by the English, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Italian fleets that made landfall in the New World only to find those harbors writhing with the silver sided splashing of stripers chasing herring or shrimp? And will there ever be any counting of the stripers stop netted in tidal coves, their gleaming carcasses soiled on the mud fiats of their final thrashing after the ebb had left them by the thousands for colonial farmers to hoist to hand barrows for the trip to the corn fields and their burial there?
And, as the nation grew, who ever tallied the bass taken by a growing commercial fishing effort that utilized hand lines, trot lines, line trawls, gill nets, stake nets, drift nets, runaround nets, seine nets, fyke nets, pound nets, trawl nets, scoop nets, trammel nets, and bag nets specially made to be slid under a river's winter ice to trap the bass as it crowded in giant schools near the bottom where the specific salinity and the water temperature were just one degree above the survival limits and a cold that would crystalize the creature's blood?
And who has ever conceived of a system that would tabulate two centuries of recreational, sport, and meat fishing by individuals using hand lines fashioned from packing string or silk, rods from hickory branches or Calcutta cane, fishing from 50-foot motor cruisers or wading in the surf, casting Atom plugs, bucktails, tin squid, cedar jigs, plastic worms, Mooseluk wobblers, or trolling umbrella rigs, Japanese feathers and Rebel minnows, or drifting live eels, menhaden, mackerel, or a soft-shelled crab tied to the hook with elastic thread?
No, there is no way the fare charged the striper for its annual trips can ever be computed. Every fish taken becomes a river of fish, then a cataract of billions, cascading over the centuries in a torrent of silver shapes that roars its testimony to nature's marine abundance.
In their annual verification of that abundance, mature stripers still leave the rivers around the Chesapeake every spring after they have spawned. Thinned and weakened by the vigor and intensity of their spawning, the fish ease down the rivers, borne as much by the current as by the listless movement of their tails. After the April nights when the rivers gleam with the fecundity of these fish, the stripers depart the Nanticoke, the Choptank, the Wicomico, the Chester, the Pocomoke, the Wye, the Corsica, the Sassafras, and fourteen more Chesapeake rivers that are still striper nurseries. On their way, the spent fish are taken by the river's drift netters, but once by those and in the open bay, they are relatively free of harassment by fishermen.
Starved during their spawning, the fish feed as they travel, gathering numbers as they move, segregating into schools according to size and age, establishing the behavior patterns that will set the schools on a compass course — first south to the bay gateway at Cape Charles, then north along the barrier beaches of Maryland, past the oil refineries and chemical plants of Delaware and New Jersey, then across Sandy Hook and the Hudson delta in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, and then past Brooklyn, Coney Island, Fire Island and on along the edge of the open Atlantic to the beaches of eastern Long Island and the oceanic migratory crossroads at Montauk Point where the Atlantic meets Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound and where twenty or more species of food fish and game fish gather during the year on their way to and from the goals of their different migrations. Of these comings and goings, none is more certain, more regular than the arrival of the striped bass in May.
There is movement through Long Island's temperate spring on land and in the air as well as under the sea. Furred, hibernating creatures of the woods emerge from their dens; geese, warblers, wildfowl, shorebirds. and the red-winged blackbird flock to the marshes and thickets of this sandy, scrub-oak plain — this low spur of narrow land that juts seaward, pointing east with its two forked fingers toward an escape from the citified millions that crowd at its western end. This wind-scoured island has somehow withstood enough of the pressures of those millions still to provide east end ponds where Canada geese can rest on the flight from Carolina to Labrador, or where golden plover can swing down for a safe pause on their three-thousand-mile transnational trip from South America.
Yet each year there is a bit less of eastern Long Island marsh; each year one more pond has been drained. Only the Atlantic survives and holds its territory essentially inviolate, and even that is invaded by behemoth barges carrying the rotten offal of the city so it can be dumped in the ocean's depths. But if Long Island's fish of May are deterred by that dumping, it is a sea change not yet understood or acknowledged by humankind. There are still too many fish for that.
They come in great spring floods, undersea rivers that overflow their banks. First the herring, the alewives, bluebacks, and bunkers, the dense fluttering pods of their millions darkening the waters like oval clouds of blue dye, their nervous, fragile tails stippling the sea's surface like a squally breeze, the sound of their placid progress hissing gently like the wake of a sailing ship.
And after the herring brethren come the dogfish, toothless cousin to the shark — summer dog and spiny dog, gray replicas of shark shapes, but in such numbers that if ever they should sprout the teeth and meanness of a shark there would be no other fish in the sea. They glide by Long Island's eastern beaches in May, the bellies of the female stretched with their cargoes of pups, the infant dogfish born complete, dropped swimming by the dozen from their mother's womb with a day's supply of food suspended in the yolk at their umbilical — a day, that's all, to learn to hunt, catch, and eat.
Under the dogs move skates and rays, flying over the sea bottom on the undulating wings that give such grace to these creatures of whipping tails and ugly, grimacing features set in the pale alabaster of their unseen undersides. And with the rays and skates, nuzzling the same sea floor, are the sea robins, sand crabs, lady crabs, blueclaw crabs, spider crabs, angler fish, scup, sea bass, tautog, ling, sturgeon, and star fish — all of these and more setting the sea in motion with the sustained movements of their May migration.
The inshore Atlantic, the half mile of breaking, rolling sea between the outer sandbar fashioned by the largest swells and the inner, barrier beach where the sea ends and the lands begin, here in this single ribbon of brine, the scale of life becomes overwhelming in the Long Island spring.
From the quiet windless dawns to the evenings ruffled by the afternoon's southwest winds, the corridor teems. Small bait fish — the silver sided spearing and the sardine-sized herring — flash like a silver rain blown from under the sea. Terrified by the approach of an infant dogfish, panicked by a scup's rush, the dense schools of these finger-length mites take to the air as if they could find safety where they cannot breathe.
There is a sound like the tearing of a cotton sheet when the bait schools shatter the surface and spray upwards in the sun. If the feeding fish below them are persistent, terns and gulls gather screaming in the sky. Then, as the hapless minnows leap from the yawning mouths below, they jump into the scissoring beaks above. But it takes a feeding frenzy to alert entire flocks of birds.
More often, the silver showers of bait break here, there, the length of the beach in occasional and random patterns, little noted by either bird or human, yet overall a daily and nightly part of the spring sea's particular pattern.
It is only when the stripers and the other school fish move that the birds are likely to gather. First come the small bass, then the middle-weights, and, finally, the ponderous patriarchs and matriarchs, the thirty-, forty-, fifty-, and sixty-pound fish who wait until May is almost gone before they slide past Shinnecock and the Hamptons. With them come the weakfish, bluefish, and some of the larger sharks — makos, threshers, and hammerheads.
There is an order to the procession. Places are made for all, even the dense and apparently aimless schools of blowfish, packing stupidly just behind the surf even though the conformation of their stubby frames and inadequate tails makes it difficult for them to survive the inshore surging. Somehow they do survive, even though breaking swells are often darkened by the hundreds of the small creatures tossed in disarray by their own misjudgments.
The bass make no such errors; nor do the blues and weakfish — the primary schooling, toothed, muscular feeders of the inshore territory. These are the mass killers of the silverside, the mullet, the herring, the shrimp, the tinker Mackerel, the blueback, and the bunker. When a school of three or four hundred stripers receives its simultaneous feeding message from impulses not yet fully deciphered by humankind, the creatures detonate a group frenzy that shatters the water's surface with the violence of an erupting undersea geyser.
Everywhere the bait fish fly, as if some soundless, invisible tornado were sucking them up from beneath the sea. The bass broad tails smash the surface in white welts of foam; the turnings of the feeding fish start scores of swirling whirlpools, each a mark of the consummate energy a fish needs to reverse its course and swerve, openmouthed through the very center of the massed panic the bait fish school has become. Shredded bits of demolished bunker, spearing, or blueback drift to a surface made slick with the released oils of the tiny, dismembered fish. Seabirds scream of the carnage; their coarse signals carry for miles, attracting hundreds, sometimes thousands of their kin. Then the air above becomes part of the tumultuous mass — a sky filled with stripped feathers, the hysterical cry of anxious terms, the hoarser calls of the herring and black-back gulls, all driving, wheeling, hovering and heedless of any approach as they swallow the hapless bait fish whole whenever the prey is driven live from the sea, or pick with their bills at the flesh fragments that rise in the wake of the stripers' feeding rush.
The gluttony ends with the same unity it began with. Another coded message stills the sated school, the birds become silent, scatter; just a few stay, sitting on the surface, drifting markers on a patch of sea, mobile memorials to the oceanic moment when ten thousand tiny herring were consumed.
The striper school moves on, traveling east to Montauk, guided by the sound of the rolling surf, compelled to continue by voices calling across the Ice Age with urgings that have transcended every fear of net, spear, hook, and trap since the bass first embarked on its journey, before the Indian, before the colonists, before Harry Mason, and before Manhattan's millions.
[Condensed from National Wildlife]
A CHRISTMAS GARLAND — TAKING THE TREE
(By John N. Cole)
It is four days before Christmas and I have come to these woods of pine, spruce and balsam fir to take the tree. For me it is an annual rite that reaches across four decades to my boyhood. Then it was city streets I roamed, late Christmas Eve when tree sellers, hunched by their trash-can fires, pulled their overcoats closer and hoped for a straggler to buy the last of the firs that leaned incongrously against stone skyscrapers. Racing through solemn streets, I would find the best of the trees and trot home.
The boy within me has survived the decades; he is here every Christmas, surging for the annual adventure that taking the tree has become. Yet on this lowering afternoon with its soft cascade of wet snow, I wonder if the boy and the man haven't overreached their grasp. In this December dusk, will I be able to discern the detail that the boy in me — and my pride — demand? Just over the ridge, at the sea's edge, a houseful of critics waits to comment on conformation, taper, fullness of boughs and purity of the topmost spire, poised for its crowning with the glass star that has shone down on two-score country Christmas dawns.
These Maine woods are easily walked. They are fourth- and fifth-generation trees, sprouting in scattered patches — spindly replicas of giants that once marched across the land. Those massive virgin trees gave this place its earliest purpose; felled, then towed to the water, they were fashioned into great ships. When the Yankee fleet had taken sailors to every sea, the great forests were gone — a riverbed of stumps the only memorial to the trees' sacrifice. Soon the stumps too were gone, pulled or burned by farmers determined to create fields where forest had been, barns where birches had soared. For another century, the farms prospered; then, like the wooden ships, they shrank, rotted and disappeared.
Wild creatures returned as the pasture pine took over and the last of the cordwood cutters stripped a third-generation woodlot, leaving slash and brush piles to shelter the cottontail and snowshoe, new growth to feed the porcupine, enough thickets and bogs to hide the deer and moose.
I am just one of the centuries' tenants on this land, living lightly on it for a while and coming once a year for the taking of the tree. As I walk, I can see settlers, shipbuilders and generations of saltwater farmers with me in these wavering trees, walking, axes in hand, looking for their trees, as they must have in their Decembers. But I must hesitate no longer, or surely it will be night and I will walk, treeless, along the snowy road that leads home.
Here — this thick-framed balsam, vigorous and full in comparison to its neighbors. This is the tree. Kneeling, the bucksaw held in front of me, I begin. The lowest boughs tremble a bit with each bite of the steel; the fragrance of fir mixes with the seasoft wind, and the perfume of the resins grows with each labored stroke. The tree eases over but does not fall. Its branches are too thick, too close to the earth. They cushion the falling so the tree reclines with dignity, a monarch going gracefully to its rest even though its trunk is severed.
I rise, fit the saw over my shoulder and grip the base of the tree's lowest bough. I find it difficult to see the trail, so swiftly has afternoon become night. This is, I realize, the shortest day of the year, the day of the winter solstice. Indeed, it is nearing the very hour when the sun will touch the lowest point of its lowest arc in these heavens, will pause there, shuddering with the immensity of its celestial change, and then begin the ascendancy to its zenith in June.
What I am witnessing here in these woods, and what millions of others share in this Northern Hemisphere at Christmas week, is something more than the start of winter. It is the beginning of an annual solar journey that speaks to us of renewal, of the restoration of light, of earlier dawns, longer twilights and more brilliant days, until spring blossoms and summer blooms. There is a gift in this natural event as inspiring as any Christmas ritual. Knowing that the solstice is proceeding even as I labor down the home road, I am filled with joy at the task the boy in me has done this December day.
I see the porch lights. I am up the steps, the door is open, and I surge into the room with the tree behind me. Its branches compress as it comes through the door, then spring back, flinging snow, ice and crystal droplets around the warm room. The tree is alive, like a colt. It shakes, trembles, fills this Christmas house with the vitality of its wildness. Until another December, the rite is done.