What’s in a name? Alewife T station is named for Alewife Brook, which in turn is named for the alewife herring that used to come up from the ocean in massive numbers every year to spawn. Cambridge residents of a hundred years ago stipulated you could walk across the water on their backs.
Those herring would seem to be entirely gone from the Alewife. So, too, the blueback herring, their cousins.
When, several years ago, I asked Patrick Herron, the executive director of Mystic River Watershed Association, why alewife no longer live in Alewife Brook, his terse, ironic answer was: “Because fish can smell.”
I was ignorant enough about fish, at the time, that after our conversation I had to run to Google to fact check. And yes, fish olfaction is thought to be roughly 1,000 times more sensitive than human.
I live by Alewife, and I can assure you that if you multiplied the odor from the combined sewer overflows (read: dumping of raw sewage) by 1,000 times, I’d make like a herring and leave, too. During long hot dry spells, and after rainfall events, walking across the Massachusetts Avenue bridge to CVS can make me gag. Andy Hrycyna, head of the Mystic River Watershed Association’s Water Quality Program, pointed out during an interview that Alewife Brook – shallow, slow-moving and just 1.6 miles long – gets more completely untreated raw sewage dumped into it than any other river or stream in Greater Boston.
Hrycyna added more reasons to doubt alewife could return to the Alewife. Fish breathe through their gills, and the rotting bottom sediment in Alewife (a phenomenon probably not unrelated to the dumping of sewage) sucks oxygen from the water. “During the summer, there’s effectively no dissolved oxygen in the water column in the early morning,” he said.
Is it crazy, then, to imagine a restoration?
Actually, there are 700,000 – likely soon to be a million – reasons to hope. That is the number of adult herring that return annually to the Mystic River watershed, the larger river system of which Alewife Brook is a tributary. The story of those numbers, and their rise, is one that’s inspiring, too-little-told and, crucially, still unfolding. It’s a story intrinsically connected to the advocacy work of the Mystic River Watershed Association – and the mixed blessing represented by urban areas. A bunch of us humans living all together tends to overwhelm natural systems. But when we start to pay attention, we represent a critical mass of hands that could be helping, minds to study a problem, hearts to be moved.
The Mystic River Watershed Association arose from just such hearts, minds and hands. A volunteer association formed in 1972 by local activists in partnership with staff, students and faculty from Tufts University, it acted to clean up and protect water quality in one of New England’s most urbanized waterways.
From the time of its founding until 2012, the herring run in the Mystic River was in a state that could best be described as “collapsed,” with impassable dams and commercial fishing in the ocean resulting in fewer than 200,000 fish returning every year. It wasn’t just the Mystic; in the 1990s, herring runs had dropped so low that Massachusetts banned the harvest of alewife and blueback, and the National Marine Fisheries Service named both as “species of concern.”
The Mystic, though, had an obvious obstacle: the dam that runs between the Upper and Lower Mystic Lakes. Since its construction at the end of the Civil War, it had blocked herring from much of their historic spawning grounds. By the early 2000s, concern had grown to the point that volunteers formed “bucket brigades” in the spring when the herring came upriver and schooled hopelessly at the foot of the dam. Adults and children would wade out onto the damworks and use nets to scoop herring into buckets, passing them hand to hand along the side of the dam and dumping them above the obstacle.
Reportedly, they helped as many as 20,000 fish a year continue their journey. As Hrycyna noted dryly, though, “This did not represent optimal efficiency.”
An opportunity for a turnaround came in 2010-2012, when the Mystic Dam needed rebuilding to modern specifications. An inexpensive intervention – the installation of a fish ladder – created a natural experiment: What would happen to herring populations if access to spawning grounds was restored?
It took three years for the results to pour in. That’s how long it takes for herring to hatch from their eggs, live their juvenile lives in our lakes and rivers and brooks, swim out to sea, mature as oceangoing fish and return upstream as adults ready to lay their own eggs. (Once they are adults they will – unlike Pacific salmon – repeat the journey back and forth from the sea every year for the rest of their eight- to nine-year lifespan).
Hrycyna showed me the graph. In each year, 2012, 2013 and 2014, roughly 200,000 herring made their way upriver, the too-low number that had persisted for decades. Then 2015 comes – and the numbers double. Five hundred thousand herring.
The numbers keep going up from there. The interventions have kept coming. The next chokepoint for herring runs on the Mystic was the Center Falls Dam, right next to Winchester’s town hall. In 2016, a fish ladder was built, opening up more spawning grounds. Now the number of herring returning annually has more than tripled to roughly 700,000.
This year, I’ve been volunteering as a counter of herring at Horn Pond in Woburn. The last major body of upriver water feeding into the Mystic, Horn Pond represents fantastic spawning ground for alewife herring. And the herring do toil their way up a spillway just to the side of Scalley Dam. During a recent 10-minute session of standing beside the spillway looking very serious in my polarized sunglasses, I registered 47 alewives on a hot-pink counter provided by the Mystic River Watershed Association. Each was a sleek dark shape fighting a swift current in shallow water, their struggles audible as they came painfully up and over steep rocks. I felt triumphant about the 47 that had made it through – until, walking back to my car, I crossed in front of Scalley Dam, and saw what had to have been nearly a thousand fish milling about just beneath, confounded. According to Hrycyna, their instincts to follow the strongest part of the current meant most of the herring wouldn’t even try the spillway – they’d reached, effectively, a dead end.
It made me want to call the bucket brigades back into existence. Especially once I ran across another volunteer whose station was on the Mystic Dam, where the fish ladders are operational. In his 10-minute observation, he’d counted more than 1,000 fish going through.
If we build a fish ladder, the evidence shows, they will come.
Luckily, plans are underway to modify Scalley Dam to be friendlier to herring. Permits are being sought to build a “pool and weir” fish passage – an engineered system of pools along a gentle slope. Hrycyna estimates that three years after the fish gain greater access to Horn Pond, the Mystic River system should start to see the return of upward of a million herring a year. That would make this heavily urbanized river the most productive herring run in the state.
“We couldn’t do any of this without the volunteers,” Hrycyna told me. “In fact, we couldn’t even tell the story without ordinary citizens taking the time to count the herring. The state Marine Fisheries Division doesn’t have the resources.” Every daylight hour at the Mystic Dam and at Horn Pond, a volunteer counts for 10 minutes. And there are online volunteers, too. Over the course of a season, 26,000 one-minute videos of herring crossing the Mystic Dam get generated by a camera inside the fish ladder (see mysticherring.org). People view sample videos from the pool of collected videos, look through every single video and count the herring, generating an additional estimate of daily totals.
With all this effort and inspired focus, what then of the brook named after the alewives? After all, if herring could somehow bring themselves to get through Alewife Brook, beyond are the waters of Little Pond in Belmont. Above that is Spy Pond in Arlington, nearly identical in size to Horn Pond.
When I ask Hrycyna this question, he starts to explain the history of Alewife Brook – how it got straightened and channelized to control flooding, how the wetlands around it got drained and paved over to form places such as Fresh Pond Mall. But then he sighs and says, “The first and most important thing is to stop the combined sewer overflows. All that organic matter going in … it’s not going to be good fish habitat.”
We’ll find out this year what plans the cities of Cambridge and Somerville, in partnership with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, propose for dealing with those overflows. Local activists anticipate with dread the likelihood that the cities are going to throw up their hands and declare the most thorough solution – full sewer separation – too expensive.
Meanwhile, though, there may be more hope than most of us think. As part of my research for this article, I asked people who live and walk alongside Alewife Brook to keep their eyes open for signs that the herring are at least exploring the space. Some did far more than that. One self-described “fan of Alewife Brook” pointed out that on the banks of the Little River, upstream of Alewife Brook, people frequently encounter freshwater mussel shells – specifically, those of Alewife Floaters, which in their larval stage are transported via the gills of herring. “It’s a sign herring have, at some point recently, made it through,” she wrote.
And then comes the most interesting observation of all: Last winter, someone snapped a photo of juvenile herring in Spy Pond. To get there, their parents must have struggled through not only the stinking, oxygen-starved waters of Alewife Brook, but made it through the dark culvert underneath Route 2 and fought their way up the wooden structure through which Spy Pond drains.
Talk about incredible journeys! Imagine what could happen if we helped the herring along with a few key interventions. Hrycyna says, “This is one of the region’s great migrations – but it happens invisibly. Most people have no idea the herring are there.”
I’m grateful for those who are keener observers, and grateful for the efforts over the past 50-plus years that have transformed a space of industry and pollution into a river with real recreation possibilities.
In fact, if you want to experience those – and learn more about the river, the restoration and the opportunities to volunteer, join on Sunday for the Mystic River Herring Run and Paddle. It’s a chance to school with fellow citizens and aim feet and boats upstream to get as close as humans can to the herring experience.
Greg Harris is the founding editor of the literary magazine Pangyrus and the founder and co-director of Harvard LITfest. His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Review, Jewish Fiction, Earth Island Journal and elsewhere.
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