Karl Meyer Writing Blog

Connecticut River special: “Season of Secrets” with writer Karl Meyer, airs Wednesday, August 4, at 5:30 pm, on Local Bias:  www.gctv.org

(this local Greenfield cable show can be downloaded after tonight’s show, please share the link!)

Greenfield, MA.  August 4, 2010.  Environmental journalist and author Karl Meyer spent this spring and summer blogging and following the Connecticut River’s migratory fish runs, by bicycle, from Long Island Sound at Old Saybrook, CT  to Bellows Falls, VT and North Walpole, NH (www.karlmeyerwriting.com )  This was a follow-up to Meyer’s “Turners Falls Turnaround” in the March 2009 edition of Sanctuary Magazine.  Meyer spends a half hour with GCTV’s “Local-Bias” Host Drew Hutchinson talking about this year’s fish run and the secrecy and cover-ups shrouding the Connecticut River migratory fish restoration–on both the corporate and public agency levels.  Topics include:

• Salmon farming: a river’s ecological pyramid stood on its head

• An extinct hybrid at $300,000 per fish in public funds

• Northfield Mountain-Turners Falls pumped storage operations grind to a halt for an entire migration season and fish passage at Turners Falls skyrockets 800%–from an average of 2000 American shad annually, to nearly 16,000 this spring

• A year’s worth of American shad at Turners Falls disappears from the record

• How FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain operations and impacts on river ecology and fish runs remain hidden from the public

• Fisheries commissioners and Turners Falls Conte Lab scientists fail to respond with science to the most profound experiment handed to them in decades, i.e: What does the Connecticut River and fish passage at Turners Falls look like without Northfield Mountain pumped storage effecting river flows and levels?

“Season of Secrets,” airs Wednesday, August 4, at 5:30 pm; and repeats on Thursday and Friday August 5 & 6, at 9 pm.  The program repeats in those time slots the week of August 8^th, and will be available for download on the video on demand page at gctv.org.

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© 2010 by Karl Meyer

Fishway Lock Outs: three dams by bike on the May full moon

May 28, 2010.  The full moon is a trigger for spawning in many fish species.  It can have a strange pull on mammals too.  Its light can cut into a deep sleep and leave you awake at 3:18 a.m.  Such is what occurred with me on the night of the May full moon.  I knew I had the following day off, and had wanted to do more low/no-carbon fish run tracking.  “What more could I witness?,” I’d asked myself.  I could take off by bike to Holyoke again, but I knew what I’d find there—guys fishing the run, and windows full of passing shad.  Nothing new.

Then I started thinking about completion—what could I do to begin to complete this journey.  There wasn’t time to reach the headwaters.  But the headwaters are really not what the heart of the Connecticut’s runs are about.  What I could do was ride to Bellows Falls, the last historically-accepted upstream falls and dam site accepted as passing spawning American shad back into pre-colonial times.  But it was 45 miles upstream, and that’s direct by interstate highway.  What it would mean was a minimum of 90 miles of cycling for me.  The idea drew me in, but I was skeptical about pulling it off.  Did I have the energy?  Was my bike up to it?  It has been slightly clunky since the trip to Old Saybrook.  I’d sleep on it.

But not much—as dictated by that full moon.  At 3:18 a.m., I was somehow awake and alert enough to know the weather would be pretty warm, but good, and that I should probably take this challenge.  As I once heard a birder say, “You are only allotted a certain number of Mays in a lifetime.”  I figured, if I have the inclination and the energy, better hop back on that bike.  I also loved the idea of a symmetry developing for completing the shad’s upstream run—and mirroring it against my trip to the Connecticut’s mouth on the first day of the month.

So, out the door I went—on the road north through Greenfield at 5:15 a.m.  The bird migration would soon be ramping up into full song, but the sun had not come up yet.  Robins were doing their early pumping, in the 50 degree chill.  Along the edge of a golf course I thought I caught the last beeps of a woodcock, displaying in low light to find a mate.

What was stunning on this upstream ride, mostly on Rt. 5 as I went north, was the damage of the great wind and lightning storm two days earlier.  Street after street in Greenfield was blocked by cones and tape, trees toppled over power lines and roads.  I saw three cars sitting idle in driveways with tree trunks and heavy limbs toppled onto them.  Heading north into the farms of Bernardston and Guilford, many were without power—generators droned in the background.  What was pleasantly interesting too was a lack of traffic on this early Friday before the Memorial Day weekend.  I listened to thrushes and warblers, grosbeaks and wrens, orioles and sapsuckers, as I made my way silently northward.

I was in Brattleboro Center before 7 a.m., not having had much more than a cup of coffee.  The place was quiet.  My foraging led me to a little bakery behind Main Street that didn’t have open hours until 9 a.m.  Nonetheless, as I peered in the window I was signaled to enter, and there had a tasty wild cherry scone and a good cup of coffee, brought to me by a pleasant couple who were busy readying the day’s baking.  It’s called Common Loaf, and I had a hint of a religious theme inside.  No matter to me at this juncture.  I sat for 10 – 15 minutes and enjoyed the break, the scone, and the coffee.  I thanked them for their hospitality, and headed out.

I zipped through the rotary at the north end of Brattleboro; then began the hills that you find in Dummerston and further on into Putney.  The day was warming and the sun was now out.  Traffic remained light.  I rolled into—and out of, Putney, just as that village was getting its day underway.  School buses and dump trucks were whining into gear.  The hotdog-coffee cart guy was just getting set up south of the library.  I slipped right through without a hitch, besting the siding that houses Basketville without an inclination to shop.

Hitting the steep part of Putney Hill, I long ago found a much-preferred alternative when biking north—it’s a right turn at the sign for Landmark College onto River Road.  What it saves is the chug up a long, punishing hill that—at least back in the day, had very narrow shoulders, and lots of trucks, as you pumped your sorry way up past Santa’s Land.  I honestly don’t know if Santa’s Land exists anymore, and its doubtful, but I had some long runs up that hill and have preferred River Road—even though its dirt in places, for decades now.

There’s a wonderful, long, long, paved downhill into the Connecticut’s broad and fertile floodplain to start.   What’s not to like.  I swooped along quietly, being passed by maybe two cars, a truck and a school bus over the next half hour.  Wonderful!  The farms roll out, ancient and sprawling, in the flats.  Spring birds sing in the woodland hollows and uplands on the west bank of the road.  Here too, I find a lovely patch of hemlock, still seemingly unaffected by the wooly adelgid plague, but for how long?  I enjoy it for its marvelous, dappled light, and the song of a black throated green warbler nearby.

Swinging back the last uphill mile to return to Rt. 5, I’m on the approach to Westminster, VT, which sits amidst the flat upland of a spectacular old oxbow of the Connecticut.  In the curling wetlands that surround it, green frogs call, and a kingfisher scoots away with a small fish in its bill—returning to its tunneled nest.  In the air, tree swallows dance among the early dragonflies.

When I hit Westminster Station I’m still just cruising—happy to have decided to make this run.  River tunes and music play across my brain.  I decide to take the bridge here over to Rt. 12 in North Walpole, NH, mostly just to add another state to this upstream run.  It will add another mile or two on the route to Bellows Falls, but I’m practically there now.  This detour swings me away from the river, into farmland and a wide road with logging trucks and some commerce.  But the shoulders are wide.  As I tool along, looking for the next bridge that will bring me back toward Vermont, I come hard up against a big shopping center.

Deciding I could use a break, I lean my bike and head into one of those big discount stores that has a bit of everything.  What I’m looking for, strangely, is a cheap pair of waders, or at least some of those water shoes, for some fish scrambling I’m intending to do.  This is, of course, a long shot, and they have neither, so I head back out without even finding a decent energy drink to bring along.  My watch says 9:10 a.m.  Not bad.

Quickly I find my way to the Vermont crossing—the Villas Bridge, which has been closed for months due to structuring erosion.  It is blocked by Jersey barriers, but they are not a hindrance to passing a bicycle over, and walking the bridge.  But, first, I park my bike and grab my camera, deciding to take a few shots of the mostly-waterless gorge here beneath the bridge, and the Bellows Falls dam, canal, and power works on the opposite shore.  As I walk back downstream for a better angle, I am pleased to be serenaded by the rough calls of a common raven, circling above.  I call back to it.

Walking across the Villas Bridge I look for the first entrance down to the water.  It comes as a gravel road, heading down along the factory brickworks of the power complex.  I take the steep route down to the riverbed rocks, looking for the public fishway, or at least a path to the water.  There’s a lot of still water below, and nothing coming through this section of riverbed.  Down somewhere on those rocks are some of the few petroglyphs found in this region of North America, some simple depictions of humans dating from a time unknown.  There’s no fishway down this chute, but I do get a chuckle out of the woodchuck scrambling out of site along the rocks.

So, I walk my bike back up the steep gravel, and head west again, going through a little brick canyon in the old complex, and coming out on a town Bellows Falls thoroughfare.  Here, quickly, I find the power company’s office, and also the sign leading to the Bellows Falls Fishway.  That peppy little sign for public visitors sits on the front of a chain link gate that is unceremoniously padlocked at 10:00 a.m., on the Friday of the start of Memorial Day Weekend, smack in the middle of fish passage season.  I guess they don’t have much visitor demand here—either for seeing fish, or access to the public’s river.

What’s pretty much known by all is that you will be lucky to ever see a migratory fish in the windows of the Bellows Falls Fishway.  Still, I’m surprised to find the place padlocked.  I look a little closer and find that the power company does do a tiny bit to accommodate the public—the viewing site is open for a part of the day on Saturday, and open for shorter hours still on Sunday.

It’s a crime that folks here in Vermont and New Hampshire have been duped out of their right to meaningful migratory fish runs.  That connection to the sea has been robbed from kids who might be inspired by it.  They could be inspired seeing American shad here, or get hooked by pulling one up on a line in the currents below.  But there’s no one fishing at Bellows Falls this day.  Just me, I guess.

Nonetheless, I’ve completed the top part of the day’s journey.  I take a little time and walk my bike along the central streets of Bellows Falls, and neat little town center.  I head over to the train depot and visitors info center, where there actually is a decent public restroom, and someone who can provide a map and information.  My main interest is a Vermont map though, which is supplied.

I bicycle up to the north end of town, looking for place to get one of those energy drinks.  Grocery stores are not apparent, so I end up in a big drugstore, and come out with a quart of cold Gatorade.  I sip my water, stuff the cold drink in my bike bag, and I’m off south.  Its 10:45 and getting warm.  Next stop: the Vernon Fish ladder.

The ride back continues my decent luck as far as traffic goes.  I again take the River Road cut-off to avoid Putney Hill.  My energy is good, but I’m now wondering how close I’ll be cutting it if I want to visit both the Vernon Fishway and the Turners Falls Fishway—which closes at 5 pm.  I’m hoping to spend a little time at these sites.  I’m passed by a total of two vehicles in the course of taking this route alternative.  Uncharacteristically, and with a nod to the heat, I take off my helmet and ride with the wind in my hair for the whole five or six miles.  There’s a satisfying freedom to such interludes.

As I pump back up the last mile to rejoin Rt. 5, there’s a modest sized office-warehouse with a company sign outside that advertises, “Mailing, Printing, Fulfillment.”  I’m thinking I might like to go in and get some fulfillment.  And, I take this a bit further in my thoughts and think its high time the power companies at Turners Falls, Vernon, and Bellows Falls start fulfilling their obligations to the public—to future generations.  We are all owed a meaningful river, living migratory fish runs, and the right to participate in the Connecticut’s ancient connection to the sea.  People here in Putney, Westminster, Walpole and Bellows Falls were once fed by spring runs of American shad.  Fish passage, public access, life-sustaining flows–its time those obligations were filled.

I’m back through Westminster and Putney in pretty good form, and chug up the last hills into Dummerston before the drop into Brattleboro.  I move through the noonday traffic and reach the town center, where I decide to take a break in the shade of the public library.  Sitting on the wall, people watching, I’m doing little more than chugging some energy drink and chowing on a gluey peanut butter sandwich.  I look up, and across the way a tall gentlemen is dodging cars and crossing toward the front door of the library, “Hey Fred!,” I call out.

Fred Taylor is my old writing instructor and one of my advisors from my days at Antioch, up the road.  It’s been about four year since we’ve seen one another.  We hug.  “So, what are you up to?” he asks.  I tell him about my shad run upstream, broad strokes. “Well, that sounds like you,” he says, “ You certainly are holding down your carbon footprint!”  He nods at my bike.  Fred used to live and teach college writing in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve read some impassioned writing by Fred on the importance of the half dozen species of Pacific wild salmon to the cultures of native people there.  Most of those species are now struggling for survival, endangered, in good part, by a hatchery system put in place long ago at the base of every massive power company dam.  Those fish factories now pump out poorly-adapted, farmed salmon that don’t survive in the wild.  But they make new fish each spring.  The hatchery system thus becomes the excuse for not fixing these broken river systems.

Fred tells me he’s been doing quite a bit of work in local churches around the issue of climate change.  This sounds like the Fred I know.  He’s in the line up on honest thinking about this issue here, along with the likes of Bill McKibben.  We talk about getting a boys night going, me, Fred, and Tom Yahn, who is from Brattleboro, and my advisor from UMass days.  Somehow we seem to cob together an outing a few times a decade, usually for beer, BS, and politics.  Maybe it will happen this summer.  “Hey,” Fred says, “I read something you wrote recently.  I really liked it.”  He can’t remember the topic though.  “Maybe fish?” I smile.

We say our goodbyes, and within half an hour I’m pulling past the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, and rolling up to the driveway at the Vernon Dam and Fishway.  As I approach I’m wondering if there might be a few shad in the windows to cheer on this day—or even just a smallmouth bass.

It’s 1:00 pm when I turn into the driveway, and I quickly have my answer: the chain link gates are padlocked shut, there’s not a soul around.  So, as a citizen, a member of the public, a customer—I’ve been shut out twice now in a day.  It’s the height of fish passage season, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, and I’m not even offered a drink of water on my home river.  “Move along folks, nothing to see here,” that’s what the power company might as well post on their sign, which clearly states this fishway is open to the public, the gates close at 3 pm.  I biked here a week ago Saturday, and at 1:50 in the afternoon those same gates were barred.

But, face it, just 16 shad that managed to squeak through this fishway last year—in all the thousands of hours that comprise an eight week fish migration on the Connecticut.  This just reaffirms the obvious—the power companies do whatever they please on the river, the state and federal agencies sit idly by–mute on all meaningful issues other than pumping out hatchery fish and experimenting on them.  There is no meaningful fish passage on the Connecticut River beyond Holyoke dam, and that was fixed in 1955.  It seems no one cares.  I look below the dam and there is not a fisherman on the beach.

My energy holds for what will be pretty much a hundred miles of biking this day.  I’m pleased with that, and knowing I’ll make the Turners Falls Fishway with time to spare.

I get to their gate at just before 3 pm, and these folks are open for business.  I lean my bike against the bricks, pull out my notebook and a pen, and head in.  I’m standing, slightly surprised, copying down their updated fish numbers.  They have actually passed some shad here in the past two days, over a thousand spotted by the guides.  It’s a drop in the bucket, but it is something.  Those tallies: shad seen today: 250; yesterday: 950; for the season: 2,582.  Blueback herring: 0.

One of the guides, Terry, who I have known for years, sees me and is suddenly all flustered and fall all over asking me to hold on.  She starts erasing numbers, and adding the next few fish she can remember—then stops and tries to think if she missed including three or four shad.  “Terry, relax, it’s not going to make a whole lot of difference.”  But Terry’s a true believer, the perfect person to have offering the power company’s line here.  Her son’s middle name is Salar, the Latin for salmon.  Seriously.  Her husband is one of the chief proponents for pushing the salmon in the schools, hatchery egg program in Massachusetts.  The Kool Aid has already been drunk here.

Ironically, I worked for a time at the Northfield Mountain Visitors Center.  I loved being around the fish migration and would offer to substitute if fishway guides needed a day off.  There was one catch though: I was only willing to work at the Holyoke Dam.  But they never asked me to substitute at Turners Falls—they knew I would tell the public the truth about this tragedy—the decades-old farce of this failed fishway.

I head down the stairs to look in the windows.  Also to my surprise, it’s dim in this cavern.  There is no power, another remnant from the storm at this power company site.   But there are shad in the windows, and the pass along in small, regular pulses, in groups of five, six, and eight.  Nice to at least see some fish, even though I know there are thousands left behind, just downstream.  Meanwhile, Terry is giving her professional explanation of why the fish are finally running through here, “The river temperature really warmed up.  They just wanted to get upstream,” she tells a handful of eager visitors.

These folks don’t understand they are not looking at the Connecticut River, just some of its water.  That water is pushed through here in generating pulses from the company’s upstream pumped storage plant, and for the powerhouse adjacent, as well as to feed the turbines at its Cabot Station plant downstream.  What they are seeing is about money and power.  The river and fish are peripheral considerations here.  But, as I watch the fish in the afternoon’s dim light, it seems the current is slow this day.  The fish are not repeatedly making a few feet of upstream progress, only to be pushed back downstream and out of sight in the powerful flow.

I’m tempted to contribute, but don’t quite have the energy to give a decent lesson to these folks.  What Terry the true believer is leaving out, are a handful of things I’d mention.  The power company adjusts flows–and can let water over the dam and down the river, or send it pulsing through this canal at punishing rates, as it pleases here.  The fed scientists at the Conte Lab just downstream have had the evidence for years, but have remained publicly mute.  As to the power company, what’s different this year is that they’ve gotten a little bad press this spring for their poor passage, as well as last fall when they killed thousands of baby shad by draining their power canal last September.

And, kept largely from the media, the company stopped pumping the river up and down for a full three weeks at their adjacent Northfield Mountain plant just upstream this May.  They were draining their reservoir for the first time since the 1990s.  Their pumped storage operation is the single most immediate source of disruptive water flow impacting this section of the Connecticut.  With the disruptive pumping fluctuations virtually stopped just upstream, there seems to be a wide-eyed common sense relationship with more shad being able to swim upstream here and reach the canal—waiting then for the power house folks to ease back on the money-making gas pedal.

As of yesterday there were still 16,000 local customers without electricity, so demand is down–less need to be flushing money for dollars down the canal this day.  That quiet could help a few fish.  Ironically, these numbers are looking better than they have in most of a decade—since they deregulated the site and the fisheries officials looked the other way when passage already-crappy passage numbers dropped by 85%.  With a million dollar migratory fish lab next door, you would think they’d be all over this.  But I guess it’s nothing you want the public to be able to speculate on–it has no effect on the river’s 60 hybrid salmon.  Rather feed them the power company’s line, delivered with a smile, the shad arrived here–just in time for Memorial Day visitors, simply because, “The river warmed up.”

I take off, but stop on the low fishing bridge on the canal, just below the bridge.  The canal water is not teased up into what is often a froth of tiny whitecaps at this site.  Four people are fishing the bridge, one a middle-aged, shirtless guy I’ve met before, “I’ve had three,” he says, signaling with his hand, “I threw them back.”  This crew has been here a couple of hours, and they are in good spirits.  One younger kid says he’s been seeing “thousands” in the dim canal waters.  “Well,” I say, “there are fish going by in the windows over there, but not in thousands.  For every hundred fish you see here, there are ten thousand that don’t make it.  These are the strongest of the strong.”

Then I explain the 30 year old salmon ladder mistake here, and how the shad are starved for oxygen trying to come through, “They do know the right conditions and how to pass more fish here.  The power company used to do it ten years ago.  But it’s all about the cash,” I tell them.  I linger a minute or two, looking for shad along the canal.  I don’t spot any.  I bid them adieu, and they thank me for the info.

At 3:58 pm, I’m back in my door in Greenfield, a hundred biked miles behind me.  It’s a satisfying way to greet celebrate a full moon and begin saying goodbye to May.  Sadly, I can’t say as much for the two locked fishway gates at dams in Vermont, and the tiny–and ironic, burst of a few more shad passing Turners Falls for the first time in a decade.

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THE HOLYOKE FISH LIFT: 55 years of simply lifting fish–the only migratory fish passage success story on the main stem Connecticut River; CRASC public meetings in Turners Falls, MA: the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission’s (CRASC) Technical Committee meets June 17, and the CRASC Board meets June 22–witness the officials and the politics steering decisions affecting your river.  They meet just twice a year.

The migration season on the Connecticut River is far too brief–and far too thin, these days.  It must be highlighted and enjoyed within a narrowing spring window.  For a perspective on the beauty, and the myths, and the half-truths that are eroding migratory fish runs upstream on the Connecticut River, visit: www.billdwightshow.com , “Jurassic Park on the Connecticut” from June 4, 2010.  This is a river system that is seeing its runs of federal trust fish wash away.  It suffers desperately from waste, dishonesty, a lack of common sense science, and a dearth of public information and agency oversight.

There are two public meetings of the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission this month.  The CRASC Technical Committee meets on Thursday, June 17, 2010, at 10:00 a.m., at the USF&WS Conte Anadromous Fish Lab in Turners Falls, MA; and the full Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission meets on Tuesday, June 22, 2010, at 10:00, at the Silvio O. Conte Anadromous Fish Lab on Migratory Way in Turners Falls.

CRASC is the tiny collection of state and federal fisheries representatives that have been making decisions about Connecticut River fisheries science, spending, and public policy for decades.  Their accountability, advocacy, and credibility would benefit from members of the public and the media attending meetings.  CRASC oversight is supposed to serve as the river’s–and the public’s, protection from environmental damage by the power companies operating on the Connecticut.

Out of 24 positions on the CRASC Board and Tech Committee, not one is held by a woman.  There has not been a public representative on the CRASC Board in Massachusetts in nearly three years.  Sound fishy?  Help the river: pay them a visit.

For the birds: For a more generalist and aerial perspective on migration in the Deerfield River Valley, you might pick up the May/June 2010 issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest and read my, “Sitting Down with Nighthawks.”

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The shad abattoir: the final leg home, May 5^th: Rainbow Dam “fish ladder” on the Farmington, to Holyoke Dam, and on to the confluence of the Deerfield and the Connecticut at Greenfield, MA

© 2010 by Karl Meyer

May 5, 2010.  The shad abattoir and home: including a visit to the deadly Rainbow Fishway on the Farmington River in East Granby, CT

I am out the door of the Iron Horse in by 6:15 the next morning.  In truth, any lurking axe murderers did not seek me out.  I had a decent shower, the TV came on, and I was able to air out the room without turning on the hotel AC—something I pointedly abhor.

There is a small gas station/convenience store a block away.  I mix myself a coffee there.  Along with water, this will be my only fuel for the next five hours.  Then, I head off a little north and east, toward the little village of Tariffville and what I’m hoping will morph into a safe route to Rainbow Dam at the back of Bradley Airport.  It’s already warm, and the day will quickly work towards hot.

With my old fashioned highway maps I’m a bit handcuffed as to local roads, relying much on my general sense of direction and landscape.  That will only get you so far.  I’m in the bedroom community corridor for Hartford, just down the road, as well as Bradley Airport—just across the way.  A poor choice here could get me hammered by commuting traffic once again.

But it’s still early, and the shade near the Farmington River is lovely.  I pull into Tariffville at just before 7 am, stopping to puzzle at maps that aren’t going to give up much more information.  This is a refreshingly modest village, with homes that are older, and built on a human scale.  From the look of it, this is a small town of regular working people.  Tariffville does not put on airs.

Just a bit up the street a pick-up pulls into the only open store, a small convenience-variety place.  I waste little time in accosting a guy in his late-forties as he exits his truck.

He’s wearing a Connecticut State Corrections uniform, and I’m guessing he’s just off-shift.  “Excuse me, but would you know how to get over toward Rainbow Dam?”  He stops, thinks a minute.  “Keep going straight up here.  At the light go right, Hatchet Hill Road.  You’ll go over the mountain.  Just stay straight on that.”

I thank him, and let his errand continue, not mentioning that I was a guest at the Hartford Correctional Center some decades back—the result of a protest over the billions spent on yet another Trident sub at the Groton Naval Base.  It’s a bit early for that kind of small talk.  I’m resettling my maps and already gulping water when he comes back out, “At the bottom of the hill, go straight.  You’ll come to a stoplight—keep going straight.”  I thank him again, and I’m off, crossing the shade dappled Farmington.

Hatchet Hill is a decent climb.  It’s narrow and winding, and a bit tight in places while people head to work and school.  It is, however, a neat biking run, on a road that at least carries the cachet of some historical and landscape significance, though I don’t know its history.  I crest Hatchet Hill, rolling up from farm into mixed woods.  That pattern reverses as I head down the other side and pass through the stoplight mentioned.

There is a small crossroads with a neighborhood, then a few old houses and farmland, with development encroaching.  When I pass the Poquonock Fire Station, I’m beginning to get hopeful that this trip to the Rainbow Dam Fishway on the Farmington will not become a dreaded death-defying race against rush hour airport commuters on a crappy four-lane.  Then, things turn quickly from open field, to modern, mega-industrial.

I hear the roar of the first jet taking off, high, and a little northeast of me.  The road is newer with wide shoulders, to my delight.  But, I’m quickly turning into an ant riding into OZ—on a flat, massive, industrial sweep of pavement bordered by giant warehouses with acres of sodded lawn spaced widely across what were once ancient agricultural lands.  This is about as far away from the idea of nature and thriving fish runs as this odd cyclist could imagine.

And, it’s a damned peculiar place to find oneself in.  As I methodically make my way across these giant fields of industry I know I don’t want to make any wrong turns and find myself on the wrong side of the Farmington, or in the pipeline of rush hour traffic.  I see a FedEx truck rumbling down from the security gate of one of the warehouses.  The guy is coming to the stop sign at the main drag I’m on.  I wave him down.  “Rainbow Road?” I query, “You don’t happen to know if this is the road to Rainbow Dam?—I don’t want to miss the turn.”  He doesn’t have a clue, but points, “Why don’t you try the guy in the guardhouse?”

So, on my fully-bagged bike, in bright morning sun, sometime after 6:30 am, I begin rolling toward the big guardhouse astride the huge fence, surrounding the lawns of a towering warehouse.  There’s a big sign that says, “NO WEAPONS.”  This is slightly intimidating.  I have a moment of worry about how my bagged-approach will be received.

What I get is a man in full security garb stepping from the modern, kitchen-sized security shack.  I’m hoping not to be mistaken for a warehouse attacker.  Turns out he’s pretty peppy, mid-thirties, and likely amused at having this grey-haired guy stop.  I ask my questions, saying again that I don’t want to end up on the wrong side–of the river.  He doesn’t know where the river itself is, but he does know where the reservoir is, “If you keep going up here and head straight after the circle you’ll be on Rainbow Road.  I don’t know about any fishway, but there’s a sign on there for launching boats.”  “Perfect,” I tell him, “That’ll get me there.”

So, I’ve made it!  This will get me to where I did my scouting some weeks back.  I can get to the fishway this May 4^th, when the fish are running.  I thank him and head on, enjoying what is not at the moment big commuter road in this industrial sector, at least before 7 a.m.  Soon, I’m around that traffic circle and onto narrow Rainbow Road, the speed trap I’ve been on before.  It’s flanked by cookie-cutter houses that back up tightly against what should be a vegetation-buffered Farmington River.

I reach the fish “ladder” at 7:15.  They gates are locked tight, but there is no way I’m going to be denied the right to visit the river at this juncture.  By its own statements the site is open during the May-June fish passage season.  So, I walk my bike about 100 feet into a tiny patch of woods and weeds to keep it out of anywhere where someone could accost it.  I grab my camera and hop a small, cursory fence, then take the gravel-dirt trail toward the fish ladder.

Yellow warblers, catbirds, robins and yellow throats pump out their spring songs.  The fish ladder sprawls out straight ahead and up along the big monolith of a dam to the right.  There is chain link fencing up flanking the ladder, wrapping back around downstream to lock off the counting and trapping facilities.  To the left are three large “salmon imprinting pools.”  They look like sludgy, forgotten wading pools and don’t appear to be used any longer.

I approach the fence and hear gurgling Farmington River water vented here from the north side of the dam.  That moving water has a wonderful spring voice as it pulses through the tight slots of this decades-old fish ladder patterned from those used for Pacific Northwest salmon.  But that water comes through in a veritable torrent in the narrow slots of this human designed cataract, 66 feet long.  And it is this that makes this structure a veritable train wreck of fisheries restoration in the Connecticut River basin—and one of the first.

The Rainbow Dam Fishway is a fish killer, a veritable abattoir for American shad.  It is so steep, and the slots so narrow, that the fish actually die trying to ascend.  This has been known by Connecticut fisheries biologists for 30 years.  Among those long in the field it has been called the “world’s best shad de-scaler.”  Few successfully spawn after the ordeal of a match with the Rainbow Fishway—upstream or down.  The fish literally scrape their bellies raw trying to ascend a mountain so long and turbulent few make it out the other side.  And most of those who do are in fatal condition.

More American shad have died in their repeated attempts to best this torture chamber than have ever been helped in the Farmington River.  It is the largest single cause of the decline in shad on the Farmington—the state’s largest tributary.  One more cut to the fecundity of the Connecticut River’s federal trust runs.  Blueback herring suffer from the impassible damage done by the Rainbow ladder too.  Its sort of like “New York, New York” in reverse—they don’t make it here, they don’t make it anywhere.  Hardly.

What makes it up the Rainbow Dam Fishway are one–sometimes two or three, hybrid salmon, fish whose lives began in a hatchery.  And, for this reason, there has been this massive run of lies and silence about the Rainbow ladder for decades.  This elite dream of a few, now this salmon hoax, has robbed this entire system of meaningful, native fish runs.  For three manufactured fish per season…  The salmon has been extinct here since 1809; I guess we’re just waiting for the same to occur with the herring and shad.

Why have real, self-sustaining populations of native fish when you can have hatcheries instead?

I look in the roaring slots of the ladder.  No struggling shad visible, though I can only view the top three-fifths of the fishway from this vantage, the rest is gated off below.  I’m wondering if they make it this far up and die, floating back down to the base, or whether most simply don’t even make it to this point.

And, or course, there are no salmon, the species this entire structure was built in deference to in 1975.

In good sunlight though I do see the one species that’s destined to gobble up all the hubris and mistakes of the salmon priesthood and spit them out the other side: sea lamprey.  Clamped to the cement walls, resting and waving like downstream streamers in this tumult are dozens of sea lamprey.  Most are clamped onto the structure just outside the turbulence of the ladder’s slots.  Occasionally you will see one or two jockeying for a new position, one up hard against another.

My regard for these fish only ramps up the more I encounter them.  What adaptation!  What tenacity!  There is no arguing with their pluck and spawning impulse.  They have returned to the sea to get it done, and by god they will.  And die afterwards.  This is a fish that has succeeded across an arc spanning hundreds of millions of years.  Unfortunately, it’s not a species with the boutique cachet of a salmon, nor, unfortunately, is it a federally trust target species—lest the old-boys salmon network would have stumbled across some success.

Staring in wonder, I occasionally see a lamprey reach its disc-mouth past the water line to clamp onto the walls, just above the pulsing current.  Looking down on these fish from above, I can’t help but be reminded of a “spy-hopping” hump-backed whale on a Cape Cod whale watch.  Those rows of rudimentary gills pump furiously as they wait for their opening.  Then, several times, I hear a crackling snap–and a spray of water patters my face as one ropey fish makes its lightning bid to best the next slot.

I keep waiting for a tap on the shoulder here, a call over some speaker, telling me I’m unwelcome in the morning sun.  I am, in a way, the enemy at the gate of course—witnessing this folly and tragedy.  That tap never comes.  A state fisheries salmon truck sits parked and idle on the other side of the fence, awaiting its next, precious cargo run.  I see about all I can see from behind the chain links; celebrate the triumph of the lamprey, and feel the heat of the stupidity that’s killing shad and herring.  I take a few pictures, and retreat.  When I’m outside the locked gate I re-read the sign.  It says the gates open at 8:00 a.m.  I look at my watch.  It’s 8:10.  A lone jet roars loudly overhead.

Once again I ferret my way back over Hatchet Hill, finding the carcass of what appears to be a wood turtle on the pavement out by that wide industrial park maze.  How strange.

I get back on Rt. 189, and quickly re-intersect the Farmington Bikeway.  It travels some lovely woods and wetlands in this section of East Granby and Suffield—quite an early morning pleasure.  I know I’ve crossed into Massachusetts when the bikeway almost seems to narrow.  The pavement is newer, there’s a yellow stripe now down the middle, but it continues.  There’s a brand new sign board—but without any info on it.

About 150 yards into the Bay State, a large oak is sprawled across the trail from last night’s storm.  There are two older men and a woman standing around the blocked path.  One man has a saw, but this is a huge tree.  “You can get by,” they tell me, and you can, barely.  I want to ask about the path ahead, whether it’s complete through Westfield, but they are pretty wrapped up in talk.  I bid them goodbye.  Things are going fine for a mile or more as I’m into Southwick past Congamond Road, when suddenly, and without warning, the path turns to a dirt trench near an underpass.  Dead stop.

I head back, and decide its time to reenter the world of the road biker.  I take the right at Congamond and decide I’ll just keep heading west and north, until I intersect with Routes 10 and 202, a familiar path in this region.  I know it well by both bike and car in places.  By back roads I reach Southwick Center by 11:00 a.m.  The sun is bright, and the day is getting warm.  I need to replenish, since I’ve been running on just water and a cup of coffee since leaving Simsbury.  I grab a fat muffin at Dunkin Donuts, and refill my water bottle in their restroom, then stand outside, taking a last look at my maps and wondering if I’ll make it to Holyoke by noon, in time to catch my friend Tony shad fishing.  It’s not looking good.

What I do know is that this road will take me–though not far out of my way, into downtown Westfield, which is currently a mess of construction.  Out of the question, I say to myself.  Then, as I’m back on my bike I start figuring I should be able to lean a bit on landscape memory, common sense, and my experience out here when I used to meet my old friend Carol for lunch now and then.  I grab this back road, and that back road, and finally come to some known turf: Shaker Valley Road, and Little River Road.  I now know where I am, and have the rest of the route in my head.

I scoot through the main Rt. 20 intersection in Westfield and over the Westfield River, and proceed down back roads just west of the ridge that leads over to the Connecticut River.  I re-intersect Rt. 202 and begin grinding my way up the steep side of East Mountain, where the road is totally torn up, and in full repaving mode.  Cops and workers wave me through this stretch and that.  It’s hot, and time is running short for my noon deadline.

Finally, I crest East Mountain, and check my watch.  A few minutes past noon.  Not bad.  I figure another 15 – 20 minutes to Holyoke Dam—nearly all those last miles either downhill, or flat.  Triumphant, its just 12:23 when I pull up to the Rt. 116 Bridge downstream of the dam.  A small string of guys are fishing below, but Tony will be further down.  One guy lands a shad.  I head to the parking lot and check for Tony’s truck; then gamely leave all my bags on my bike, unlocked, and scramble down to the river.

A dozen guys are in the water, downstream of Slim Shad Point.  One, I recognize as Tony.  There’s the quiet banter of fisherman, as birds chirp in the margins.  The Connecticut has its own music too, where it’s been released to come through down the tailrace.  I’m in my bike shorts, looking a bit shaggy.  With a grin I say to their backs, “Anyone seen a guy named Demick around?  He kind-of flicks his rod??”

Tony turns, smiling.  “Hey Karl!  You still on the road?—just getting back?”  “Yeah, I came to catch you—didn’t Alan give you my message.”  “Oh, I got it,” Tony says, “Hey Karl, you’ll never believe what just happened, right down here.”   I’m quick, “Someone caught a salmon.”  “You got it.  Thirty-three inches.”  I chuckle, wryly, “Did they cook it up?  I hope so.  I hear they’re good.”  A few fishermen laugh.

I’d brought my camera down with me, thinking I might get somebody to take a picture of me and my pal Tony.  I figured we would maybe get some lunch.  But I’m mistaken, badly.  “Tony, you want to take a break—get some lunch?”  Tony is still thigh deep in the river.  There’s a pause, then, “No Karl, sorry, I really can’t—I want to keep fishing.  I’ve only got three this morning.”

I am a bit surprised.  “OK,” I tell him, “You know your brother Alan was really good with the hospitality stuff.”  One of the other fishermen pipes in, understanding I’ve just biked all the way from the mouth of the river, “Geez, he wouldn’t even leave the water to shake your hand!”  “OK, Demick,” I say, “I’ll see you.”

Snapping a few pictures at the bridge, I head over to the fishway.  Two of the guides know me well.  It is “Opening Day” at Holyoke Fishway, the first public day of the season.  I chat with the guides a bit, and mention the salmon, which gets their attention– especially the third one, who I’ve never met.  “My friend told me it was 33 inches,” I tell them.  “Did they put it back?” they ask, two of them knowing my intense regard for this hybrid, “No, they cleaned it, and cut it up to share for barbecue.”  Later, I learn this little joke and interaction started quite the argument between the young salmon-head and these other two.  The kid stopped talking to them for the day.

I head up to the viewing windows for my first look at the run from the inside.  And there they are—American shad.  The window is busy with them, schooling nervously, as they wait for this rectangular prison to be unlocked.  They are graceful and silver-shiny.  This is not a super-heavy day, but there are hundreds before me.  They’ve already lifted 15,000.  There is one banged-up shad in the window, perhaps from an encounter with a hook.  A lone, white sucker rests on the bottom, back from the viewing windows—and I’m not referring to myself.

I’m tired; ready to be home, so I don’t quite take in fully that these are the fish I’ve been riding after all these days—don’t fully enjoy the spectacle in the way I might have if this was the sole amusement of the day.  There’s still the work of completing the trip.  I thank the two friendly guides who have watched my bike.  Vinny, the older of them, maybe sixty, says chidingly, “Drive carefully–there are people out there aiming for you!”  These two have enjoyed reading my stuff on the restoration program, and they know it’s unwelcome exposure for many.

I decide on the east side of the Connecticut for the next leg—up through South Hadley.  It’s now after 1 p.m., and I’d like to get through that town before the high school gets out.  I know this route by bike so well I’m counting in my head the number of hills for the next 35 miles upstream.  It’s not many, but, so close to home and with the tougher riding yesterday and this morning, they loom a bit larger.

I plod along up to the crest at Mt. Holyoke College; then continue along Rt. 47 up the end blip of the west end of the Holyoke Range that forms half of the water gap here as the Connecticut sweeps in between this, and the Mt. Tom Range.  Swinging widely to the west is the land once roped in by the loop depicted in Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow.”  Once Hadley farmland, it is now the property of Northampton, and largely overrun by a marina and soccer fields.

At the Hadley Common I stop and grab a sub at a place recommended.  The guy gives me half on a plate, and half wrapped.  The heat of the day is upon me, it’s a little after 2 pm.  I sit on the Common, laid out in 1659, that I’ve written about in the past, and enjoy a good sandwich–washing it down with part of a quart of chocolate milk.  Tired but a bit refreshed, I decide to stick with River Road, Rt. 47, all the way through Hadley and Sunderland.  Ironically, a USF&WS pick-up with a trailored boat passes me as I head north.  Tracking salmon today?

As I blunder the final twenty miles or so, I’m happy that the wind is at my back for a bit. It’s hot, and I’m going through some open farmland on the Connecticut’s vast floodplain.  What is noteworthy, and has been for much of today, is the number of trees taken down by yesterday’s line of storms.  As I reach Sunderland Center there are two crews working the ancient, shattered sugar maples and stringing up utility wires.

At the Sunderland Bridge over the Connecticut it occurs to me that a ceremonial picture is required.  I look south to the knob of Mt. Tom, but its directly in the sun.  I sit for a minute, propped up against the bridge railing and drink the last of my chocolate milk, still respectably cool.  Then, I face upstream, and point my camera toward the mid-stream island and valley beyond, and snap a photo.  It later turns out to be a very satisfying shot.  As I bike down the other side of the bridge I almost miss the two fishermen casting for shad in the afternoon shadows below.

I reach South Deerfield Center and there drop in on my friend Sara, who directs the library.  She’s just over in town running a few errands, I’m told.  I decide to sit in the shade and wait.  I crunch down the last of that very good sub, and then stretch my legs walking back toward the town center.  I don’t see Sara, and start back when I hear my name called.  I wait while she catches up, and we chat a bit.  I run down a few highlights of my trip.  Nice to see an old friend as you near home.

Then, I’m back on the bike, tired, for what are truly the last miles.  I take the back roads into the south end of Old Deerfield, tract housing that morphs into rural farmland and old dairying tracts at Stillwater.  But, here too, the modern, consumptive age is at work.  Huge, rolling sprinklers, in attached, 100 foot segments, are spraying ornamental flower “crops” in two different fields.  Each, with linked segments, is about 500 feet long.  It’s a scene you might imagine in the Central Valley of California, but hardly what one envisions here to grown boutique flowers by drawing deeply on the waters of the Deerfield, not a mile from that river’s mouth.  I have to snap a photo.

At last, I pull up the final hill into Greenfield at Bank Row, and head the last blocks to my apartment.  There’s a bunch of mail in the box and I somehow decide to grab it now, since I don’t think I’ll have much energy to walk back down once inside.  I am literally stumbling up the fire escape stairs under the weight of my loaded bike when I hear a car pull up.  It’s my friend Tonia, who’s come to pick up my mail.  She can’t believe I’m back already.

Later when I’m checking phone messages there’s one from Tony, from this afternoon:  “Karl.  I’m really sorry about lunch today.  I don’t know.  I just start fishing and I can’t stop.  Obsessed, I guess that’s the word for it.  As my wife just said to me, “Once an asshole, always an asshole,” I do apologize.”

I understand Tony’s obsession with shad, they just took me on a 250 mile bike run, and I’m hardly done with the journey yet.

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Rundown on the run–three fishways by bicycle: Holyoke, Turners Falls, and Vernon; a.k.a., Thousands, a Handful, and None…

© 2010 by Karl Meyer

May 24, 2010

For a little ground truth this late May, the height of this year’s Connecticut River migratory fish season, I undertook some field work.  On May 21^st, I bicycled from Greenfield, MA, south to the Holyoke dam and fishway; then back north to the Turners Falls dam and fishway.  The next afternoon, Saturday, May 22^nd, I biked from Greenfield to the Vernon Fishway in Southern Vermont.  On these visits to the three lower-most dams on the Connecticut River, here’s a report on what I found:

At Holyoke, on a Friday morning at 9:15 a.m., the fish viewing windows are full—jam-packed with fidgeting, agitated American shad, nearly two-feet long.  The silvery fish shimmer in nervous schools, veering to and fro–anxious to be set free and upstream of this rectangular trap.  At times the shad literally form a wall of glistening bodies and fish scales pushed against the glass.

The visiting adults and children here are all mesmerized by the life–the seeming plenty, in these windows.  There are many ooohs! and aahhhs!   The fishway guides note that there were a few even blueback herring were in the windows minutes ago.  None are visible now.  But, mixed in, is a good compliment of ghoulish-looking sea lamprey.  Nearly three feet in length, they blindly snake along the fishway glass.  The kids whoop at the sight of them.  A lone smallmouth bass lingers at the bottom of the tank.  There are no salmon in the windows, though one was counted yesterday.  They sent a truck over from Farmington, CT to pick that salmon up and haul it away to one of the hatchery farms for breeding.

The total fish numbers counted here as of May 21^st are written on a tally board: American shad 103,216; sea lamprey 9,737; blueback herring 55; Atlantic salmon 23.   Today, I watch as two trucks are loaded with American shad—to be taken to either New Hampshire or Vermont because of the fish passage failures at the Turners Falls-Northfield hydro complex and further up at Vernon dam.  Some of these Connecticut River shad are also be trucked as seed-fish for runs that have failed or disappeared on rivers in Rhode Island and Maine.  This day, with the river temperature nearing 60 degrees and flows low, but steady at peak season, the guides say they may get 10,000 shad today, maybe more.  I head back north, cycling along the east bank of the river past the Holyoke Range.

I reach Turners Falls Fishway in late afternoon.  At 3:40 p.m. the fishway windows are a pale, blank screen, filled with the streaming gold current sent down the Turners Falls Canal via this Northfield Mountain-Turners Falls hydro complex.  Looking closely I pick out the shadows of a few American shad treading water in that current, hovering dimly in the background.  I count five shad, nothing that could remotely be termed a “run.”  They shad try and keep pace with the current, but are soon pushed downstream out of view.

Fully half of the shad that pass the Holyoke dam reach this Northfield Mountain-Turners Falls hydro site.  Studies show that only about two shad out of a hundred make it through these grinding currents of the two salmon ladders built here three decades back.  Those numbers were slightly better here before the site was deregulated a decade ago.  Back then, 5 or 6 fish of every 100 shad might make it through.  Still, these are all terrible odds if you are a shad trying to spawn successfully upstream.  It’s such a poorly designed system–built for the non-existent salmon here (less than 10 salmon came through Turners in 2009), that it’s a bit like water boarding for American shad.  The shad deplete all their oxygen and float back downstream, spent; exhausted.

This is why The US Fish and Wildlife Service traps a few thousand shad at Holyoke and drives them upstream for release above Turners Falls in New Hampshire and Vermont each season.  Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) officials try to lay claim to that as a “run” or “restoration”—but in truth those are terms that shouldn’t be used anywhere but in the stretch downstream–between here and Holyoke dam to the south.  From Turners Falls north to Vernon and Bellows Falls, restoration is an abject failure–over a half century after success was achieved at Holyoke with simple fish elevators in 1955.  Today, with just 2% of the shad reaching Turners Falls successfully passing–and with just 19 shad passing Vernon dam in 2009, dismal is the only word to describe the “restoration” in this–the still remaining 60% of main stem Connecticut River habitat that should have become shad-accessible decades back.  Vermont and New Hampshire would have had something to invest in.

At FirstLight’s Turners-Northfield complex you find a massively failed system that fisheries and power company people have tried to keep quiet for decades.  For ten years the public has had the right to get a new design installed here, but fisheries folks have essentially stayed quiet, with little word to the media or outreach to the public.  Their record of advocacy and effort these past decades on behalf of shad and herring here has been as lifeless as the runs here.  If these were hybrid salmon, millions would be spent on them—millions are spent hatching tiny hybrid salmon to be dumped in the Connecticut annually.

But, as to these runs of native shad and herring—a shadow of what they were twenty years back, our public fisheries guardians appear content to wait another decade to address the failures of restoring federal trust runs upstream here.  No wonder it’s now years since there has been a Massachusetts “public representative” on the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission–the federal-state entity responsible for the federal trust shad and blueback herring.  People have just stopped believing them, as they’ve watched numbers flatten and wind backward–while hearing tales of promised salmon.  It seems Bay State fishermen have stopped buying the myth Connecticut River salmon.  They’ve been extinct since 1809.

The tens of thousands of shad that reach Turners Falls will try to pass here for days–sometimes weeks, lingering in pools where the pulsing currents of the ladders exhaust them, pushing their oxygen-deprived organs to the limits.  Only the toughest and the luckiest of the lucky make it through Turners Falls.  And it’s impossible to know the damage that exhaustion and all those expended resources will have on their spawning success—for those few thousand that may squeeze upstream here over the course of a season–or those tens of thousands that will be repulsed and pushed back downstream.

In the half hour I’m at Turners Falls, seven shad–after trying, and trying again, actually do appear to make it out the up-side of the “fishway.”  We give them a cheer.  They don’t so much swim through as finally appear to float upwards and out.  I’m on the river deck talking to the fishway guides when a man–the lone visitor at the moment, comes back up from the viewing windows.  He’s puzzled, “Which way are the fish trying to go?”  “Oh,” I say,”actually it’s accurate to say most are heading downstream.  Only about two out of a hundred that try can get by.  They built the wrong ladders 30 years ago, based on salmon.  It doesn’t work.”

The man is surprised and interested–just as the young boys and two moms were when I stopped by here yesterday.  The kids kept trying to cheer the flagging shad up-current, groaning when they got pushed backwards repeatedly.  I offered an honest answer to one’s question, “Why are the fish going backwards?” telling them this system doesn’t work for the fish–a new one is needed, “You should tell your teachers, and write a letter to the newspaper.”  Most often kids have this question deflected here, going without a direct answer, offered instead a ready-tale of excuses and promises of what the future will bring.  I tell this gentleman today about the thousands of shad in the viewing windows at Holyoke this morning, “Check it out tomorrow.  They’ll still be coming through.”  He intends to, saying thank you, “Hey, I live right near there, in South Hadley.”

Reading the Turners Falls tally-board for fish the guides have spotted here is a very short story: American shad today, 28; for the season, 82; sea lamprey today, 12; for the season 23.  Eighty-two shad does not a “fish run” make. None of the nine salmon released upstream at the Holyoke dam have been spotted here, a mere 36 miles upstream.  They have counted six carp however.  Later, someone gets around to viewing the fish videos–used to make full counts here when no one is around evenings and Mondays and Tuesdays.  As of Friday, May 21^st, the total numbers of federal trust fish that have passed Turners Falls as of this mid-season point: 303 American shad.  No blueback herring, and not a single salmon–in a fishway built for salmon 30 years back.

The next afternoon I’m back on my bike, heading from Greenfield to the Vernon dam and fishway, just below the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.  It’s a bit over 40 miles round trip.

I reach Vernon Fishway at 1:50 p.m.  It’s a late-May Saturday; you’d think the site would be bustling.  The place looks derelict.  The gate is padlocked.  A sign on the chain-link fence reads: GATE WILL BE CLOSED AT 3 PM.  I take a picture with my watch in the foreground–1:54 p.m.  I’m left with the feeling nobody gives a damn.  Honestly.  I’d imagine after passing a total 19 shad last year, they are not anxious to have the public see what’s going on here.  Back in the early 1990s they passed 37,000 shad in one season.

Last year I bicycled to this Vernon site a half a dozen times between early-May and late June.  On all but my last visit, the gates were open.  And I did not see a single fish in the viewing windows on those trips.  They were empty–save for swirls of tiny, rising, bubbles.  Below me this day three fishermen are strung out along a sandy stretch of downstream beach.  One, a shirtless guy at the base of the dam, notices me, “You getting anything?” I ask.  “Nah!  The guy down there caught a smallmouth though, about an hour back.”  And that man’s fishing report seems about as good a snapshot of this migratory fish “runs” and “restoration” prospects in May 2010–anywhere from Turners Falls north to here, and beyond, along the Connecticut.

But that’s not completely true…  Sea lamprey—a fish that nobody eats and nobody fishes—and most find them repulsive, do quite well moving upstream past the Connecticut River’s perilous fishways.  Sea lamprey are ancient jaw-less, fish—native migrants here.  They’ve changed little since the time of the dinosaurs.  Though not a named species in the federal trust mandate, they are this river’s accidental restoration success, returning annually in the tens of thousands.

This shouldn’t be embarrassment to public fisheries officials, who are always claiming they’ve turned straw into gold with a couple dozen, million-dollar, hybrid salmon showing up.  Tough as old tow-rope and built for the ages, sea lamprey are one fascinating and integral part of this river’s restored biology.  Though incidental and mostly-unmentioned, lamprey do seem destined to survive and thrive despite the track record of this restoration program and its myopic fixation on an extinct salmon.  So, lamprey–that’s one down!  Now, how about a lift for those shad and herring?

How about it CRASC, FirstLight, Conte–USFWS??  The kids would love cheering on real fish runs at Turners Falls and Vernon.  Kids in Bellows Falls and Charlestown, NH would love that too.  It’s their river, and their future.  It’s time to recognize that, and stop squandering resources on yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s Connecticut River.

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May 11, 2010

The myth of Atlantic salmon

I was a preschooler when I teased apart the whacky logic of an Easter bunny delivering eggs–a little absurdity all kids eventually figure out.  Today a different mythology is being offered in dozens of Massachusetts schools.  It’s ASERP, the Atlantic Salmon Egg Rearing Program.  Fertilized hatchery eggs are brought into classrooms.  Kids feed them as they hatch and grow to tiny, hybrid salmon.  Those that survive are released into streams.  ASERP teaches that salmon are the key to restoring migratory fish populations here; that salmon hatcheries are critical to a healthy ecosystem.

Hatcheries are potential dispersal points for diseases that can spread to other river fish and onto ocean populations.  Since 2007, Connecticut River salmon hatcheries have had these emergencies: IPN, a deadly, highly-contagious virus discovered in Sunderland—all breeding salmon plus 700,000 hatchery eggs destroyed; station flushed with disinfectant.  In 2009, 10 of 21 salmon adults captured at Holyoke turned blood red and were dying when they reached North Attleboro for “reconditioning” prior to breeding: cause unexplained.  Cold Water Disease discovered at Palmer, 300,000 salmon fry destroyed; station “disinfected.”  At White River, cataracts discovered in 60% of a sampling of 1 year-old salmon, thousands destroyed.  Rock Snot, an easily-spread, habitat-smothering, alga was found in the White River upstream of the hatchery; a new water source had to be found.

After 43 years and over a half billion dollars spent on salmon, 60 adult hybrids returned to Holyoke Dam last year.  Yet students are told humans will evolve a new, self-sustaining salmon hybrid—to replace a minor strain that died out here 200 years ago.  Kids think it’s the river’s most important resurrection.  ASERP was first leveraged into classrooms 13 years ago.  Many students are now adults, perhaps wondering: what happened?  While kids may be buying the program, fish clearly are not.

Begun in 1997, ASERP is a partnership formed by angling groups and federal and state salmon hatchery operators, biologists, and research employees to reach into schools.  It offers a tidy niche for teachers, incorporating basic science principals, but its message is self-promotion.  The science and math paints a stilted river picture—salmon, and more salmon.  Teachers are encouraged to submit PR photos and stories; even advised how to stall difficult media inquires asking more than a one-fish tale.

What kids aren’t learning is that 97% of all the Connecticut’s federal trust fish reaching Turners Falls dam today are stuck there–where they’ve been pinched-off since 1798 when John Adams was President.  Virtually none are salmon.  They are American shad and blueback herring, the very foundation of the Connecticut’s migratory ecosystem.  Literally millions of fish have been turned back there in the past 40 years alone, while dam owners reap their own millions.

Its clear teachers aren’t offered the big picture either.  Still, if it’s about science and math guidelines, the same concepts can be conveyed raising aquarium fish.  Or study vernal pools where native amphibians and eggs can be experienced in the field.  Kids get all the concepts without coming away thinking hatcheries and classroom “chillers” are keys to evolution and healthy wildlife populations.  Native blueback herring passing Holyoke dam have plunged from 65,000 in 1997 to 39 last year; 620,000 passed in 1985.  It’s important to know 720,000 shad crowded Holyoke in 1992, while in 1997 just 300,000 returned.  That run dropped to 160,000 fish last year.

I’m all for spending on native, wild fish.  But five dozen hybrids–after decades and millions of fry fertilized at the hands of humans dumped in, is a myth gone terribly wrong.  Each spring government staffers and kids release clouds of tiny fish, and the same rabbit remains stuck in the same hat.  Spend that money, and teaching effort, saving the still-living shad, blueback herring and alewives—fish runs disappearing today.  Don’t shackle kids and the river to a coldwater fish lost centuries back when a briefly-colder climate warmed here.

Meanwhile, kids should know that Turners Falls-Northfield Mountain hydro owners are mandated to get fish safely upstream, and that fish elevators are ten years overdue there.  Tell them the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission and the New England Cooperative Fisheries are responsible for protecting those runs since 1967. And FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is mandated to enforce license requirements.  Kids deserve to know too that the river is being unnaturally warmed by effluent from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, just upstream.  Just 19 shad swam past Vernon dam there last year, compared to 37,000 in 1991.  Most importantly teach them that those fish–and this river, belong to them, not the corporations.

Award-winning children’s author Karl Meyer of Greenfield taught preschoolers at Northampton’s Vernon Street School for five years.  He is following this years fish runs at www.karlmeyerwriting.com.

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Long Island Sound to Simsbury, CT and the Farmington

© 2010 by Karl Meyer

May 4, 2010:

I wake up early in Old Saybrook, and spend a good hour writing in my journal.  Then, there’s checking the weather, which is not as straightforward on a multi-channel TV as one might expect.  But the weather looks clearing, and humid, with a few, pop-up “afternoon thundershowers possible for those heading north.”  No big deal.  I shower, and sort through the small pile of maps I’ve accumulated.  Brewing the final motel coffee, I down that, pack my bike, drop my key-card at an empty desk, and finally hit the road at 8:45 a.m.  So, I’m not the early bird.

I get my last looks at the mouth of the river off Rt. 154 in the Otter Creek area, and I’m moving north again on a lovely morning.  I quickly scoot by Essex and head north toward Deep River on the left bank of the Connecticut.  Traffic is light.  I’ve already missed the rush to schools and work.  Orioles and yellow warblers chirp.  I hear my first scarlet tanager and prairie warbler of the season.  There’s also a roadside feeding cottontail, and a cutely-clumsy and confused young chipmunk, surprised by an old guy on a bike.

As I near Deep River I take a chance at an intersection and choose what looks like a promising, old “upper” road, which veers a bit west of Rt. 154.  It allows me to miss Deep River center, and will perhaps show me something new.  This is an old thoroughfare, the 18^th century houses telling me it won’t take me far from the river’s reach.  I follow Union Street which eventually merges into to Straits Road.  Along the way I’m treated to one of the startling spectacles of the trip: the disaster eliminating the Easter hemlocks.

I’ve written about this in Sanctuary, even spent a day nearby with Harvard Forest biologist Dr. David Orwig in Killingworth, Ct., documenting the devastation of this plague caused by a tiny insect that we imported from Asia–the woolly adelgid.  Here, in stark contrast to a rocky hillside that spent decades sheltered in the shade and diffuse light of hemlock needles, the bare, rock-bone of this roadside escarpment is baking in mid-morning sun.

Bleached and blown-out trunks of hemlock lay quietly scattered up the hillside, as a once-thick forest duff dries to a dusty consistency in May light.  A whole suite of plants, birds, and amphibians will be lost in this corner—one of many thousands of like corners, the result of our heedless globalization and lust for cheap commodities.  This scene will repeat, again and again as I bike northward, but to a lesser scale.  The adelgid is a cold sensitive insect.  But this hemlock plague is an easy case in point: it is creeping ever further northward as we continue our rapid, seemingly-incremental warming of the planet—on a time scale we pointedly refuse to comprehend.

I snap a few photos of this emblem of a global holocaust, and head on beneath blue May skies.  At one point a woman out for a bike ride passes me, and I ask if the road will take me into Chester.  The question is timely, as I’m at the intersections where I should turn east, Spring Street.  I thank her, and head down a shady, winding lane with a stream that trips along next to me wherever it is not ponded by little, colonial mill dams.  This, I know, will be the same alewife stream that bisects Chester itself.

Three minutes later I’m in town–on a Chester, Monday morning.  It’s just after 9:30 and I’m off my bike and ordering coffee and a thick-looking square of bread pudding at Simon’s Market.  I ask for the cook, and am told to find him out back.  There’s Alan Demick, brother of my buddy Tony.  I’d met him on the ride down.  He sits for a few minutes as I try his bread pudding—quite good.

Alan notes I look a lot better this day, but that’s only because I had a shower two hours back.  He takes me out and shows me the scenario on the deck at the rear of the store where he first met one of the State of Connecticut’s prominent fisheries biologists—and likely its biggest, salmon proponent, walking up that alewife stream looking for signs of a run.  They had a very funny interaction over the failures of the restoration—likely quite the surprise to a biologist who thought he was just talking to the odd chef!

I shake Alan’s hand, get some last minute directions, and remind him to email his brother Tony that I’ll be seeing him fishing below Holyoke dam tomorrow, “Tell him not to leave before noon,” I say.  The continuing run up Rt. 154 is pleasant through mid-morning.  There are some wonderful views of the river, and the bridge and Goodspeed Opera House looking into East Haddam.  Coming into Haddam village I just had to take a picture of the old jail, soberly constructed of slate and granite at the foot of Jail Hill Road, sometime in 1800s.

And then there was the town historic marker, quietly not explaining how the town managed to get a small group of Native Americans, mostly matriarchs, to deed over their lands to these colonists in 1660.  The downstream annihilation of the Pequots by the United Colonies just two decades earlier, and subjugation of the nearby tribal people may have played a small part in those concessions.  That story will not be enshrined on a road marker.  We erase and exclude our own history in the landscape in a way that seems to connect to our environmental miasma as to our real predicament here.  Just across the river, tons of deadly nuclear waste containers sit—stored, and largely forgotten by the public, at the site of a nuclear plant that closed after nearly exposing its core through lax safety checks some 15 years back.  There’s no road sign for that either.

Just up the two-lane I note two cars parked along a siding that leads down to a steep pitch over railroad tracks, and to the riverbank.  There’s a big hoop net in the back of one.  I lean my bike on a post and scramble down.  Two retirement age men are talking quietly, one with a line in the water.  I hover above them, and cough to make my presence less surreptitious.

When they give me a hello I ask how the fishing is going.  They are just getting started, says the one—in what I hear as a Polish accent.  He says no, they are not going for shad, he’s after striped bass, fish that are here for the river herring, and to a much lesser extent, the shad.  No luck this morning just yet, but the do pull them in here.  I thank them and head on, soon into more of an urban landscape, as Rt. 154 finally peters out.  This morphs into a poor biking stretch of old macadam that is Rt. 9, south of Middletown.

Middletown Center is dense, and busy, but the construction that is fouling up Main Street slows everything to little more than at crawl–something cyclists get to glide through.  But, I realize I’m a bit information-challenged, and make my way to the tourist info office, at the Chamber.  There, I pick up a newer state map, and a local street map of Middletown and Cromwell, which hopefully will get me out of town going west—with my destination somewhere near Farmington, so I can eventually see Rainbow Dam fishway on the Farmington River.

I get into a conversation with a black man who likely has just a couple of years on me.  He tells me he used to bicycle regularly, for about three or four years running, but it’s been some time since then.  “You can still get out there,” I tell him.  He smiles.

The route is now uphill and away from the Connecticut.  This will be an afternoon that sometimes finds me in knots, and negotiating seeming dead-ends, faced with busy, four-lane traffic and tiny shoulders to ride on.  Its unpleasant, to say the least, at times, but you just persist—turning back and trying again where things get too dicey.  In the world that exists all around me, people would be traveling without taxing their landscape sense and travel wits at all—a cell phone or GPS readout telling them what to do.  All decisions coming from outside.

I clear the density of Middletown, and head through busy Cromwell on a spider web of roads I’m piecing together.   I crisscross the floodplain of the Mattabassett River, a small artery I’ve written about in my work perhaps a dozen times.  I’ve never seen the river though.   At one point, as I’m trying to find my way across the barrier of Interstate 91, I pick a small side-road called Pasco Hill.  Finally cresting it zipping to the bottom, I cross a little bridge in the midday heat.  I look to my right and there’s a small dam, just upstream of the crossroads of what was once a little industrial section, now somewhat derelict.  There’s something about that dam…

I curve back on my bike, and there’s the picture–one I’ve put captions to: the StanChem Dam on the Mattabessett.  This is a tiny dam that–with a fishway project that is currently in something of a stall and waiting for more funding, “will reopen the entire historic habitat range for American shad on the Mattabesset.“  Those are my own words.  Shad would regain over 16 miles of this river, right to their full, historic range.  Were these fish salmon, Connecticut fisheries would have had this site on the fast track decades ago…

This is a very busy travel corridor, and the biking is somewhat less than satisfying at times.  But seeing the dam site is a bonus, offering a bit of quiet in a hurried landscape.  I get directions from a town DPU guy having an ice cream in front of the locked, StanChem property gate, and head off uphill once more.  Ultimately, I’m at a busy spot in Berlin, trying to find my way along busy Rt. 372, when the Berlin Bike Shop comes into view.  The proprietors–like me, solidly in their fifties, are affable and interested in a bike traveler.  Mike takes the time to give me a couple of maps, and point me in the right direction.

Those directions hold through Berlin, and into a corner of New Britain, but my brain can only keep so much in play, and the maps are still fairly general.  Skies that I mistakenly thought were deep blue, are darkening to more of a powdered coal with banks of clouds.

One bonus though, as I make a small rise, is the red barn of an old siding that reads, “Avery’s Beverages.”  I’ve read about them somewhere by some coincidence, likely National Geographic.  It’s a family soda making and local market operation that’s been in business since 1904.  I have to stop.

What I again find is a couple-of-three guys, near my age, two of them from Avery’s, standing inside the old barn filled with wooden crates of soda, and two genuine, old style refrigerators stocked with cold pop in a rainbow of flavors mixed on the premises.  Again I’m treated with some deference, likely due to white hair and my odd journey.  I’m offered the best new directions that these three can chart in a round-robin discussion.  I try to keep it straight in my head as I suck down a tasty Avery’s orange soda.

Soon, I’m following a thoroughfare past hospitals and housing projects that I thought was one marked route, only to find that the street name has become an unfamiliar one.  The skies are spitting, the wind is picking up.  I’m bouncing around like a confused ping-pong ball.  Finally, an old Latino man in a car gives me a good spin and I’m heading in the right direction.  I few more turns and tries and the rains have come.  I take shelter under the large portico of the Connecticut School of Broadcasting—letting the woman at the front desk know I’m out there, and not homeless.  She smiles.  In a half hour, that downpour is done.  I head out.

More crazy roads and bouncy directions come into play as I try and make my way to Farmington, and the Farmington bikeway.  Finally, after a long, curving downhill, I’m in Farmington itself, facing the well-appointed Miss Porter’s School.  Soon I’m heading down a main drag toward Rt. 10, which should bring me up to the bikeway.  It’s drifted into late afternoon now, with a lot of stops and queries along the way, but I’m finally on the trail.  It’s great being out of traffic.

I think of my old friend Carol Hurst, now gone, who wrote a children’s book, “Through the Lock,” about the canal that was the original thoroughfare this rail trail is built on.  She may have even made me a minor character in that book.  I’m in one of them.  I think too, of Sylvester Judd of Northampton, whose journals I studied for my master’s degree.  Judd was an investor in this ultimately cash-poor and failed canal back in the 1840’s.

The real challenges of the day come in Avon.  Tired, I’m trying to make my way through an incomplete section of the trail which sends you briefly onto streets.  I must’ve mis-heard directions from someone and find myself following busy Rt. 44, a real mess of traffic on a four-lane at rush hour.  And, the rains return.  Determined to not soak my entire rig and take on pounds of water, I stop, jumping into the local D’Angelo’s, and ordering a sandwich—both for sustenance and shelter.  It’s quiet at the moment.  The two middle-aged guys behind the counter offer me a phone book when I ask about motels, but one warns that none will be cheap on this stretch.  How true that proves!

Here, I’m stuck for 45 minutes until the next storm clears.  Then I’m off, but still confused, and heading wrong, ultimately finding myself stymied by a sea of traffic.  I pull of into a mall lot, the acres of pavement offering very little in the way of relief.  Happily, a young woman inside the doors of Barnes & Noble takes a minute, and offers me a course that seems promising.  I have to backtrack through the mess I’ve just finished.

Again, finally back on the rail trail, I’m heading north.  But the skies are darkening once more, and the wind is picking up.  I’m hoping to beat them into Simsbury, but its still a few miles away as the storm bears down.  I turn back, recalling a small shelter at the side of a trail intersection about a mile distant.  Here, at a site bordered by a broad field and tobacco barn to the west, I take cover in a lean-to built by the Avon Rotarians.  I share it with sheltering bumblebees as the storm swirls.  It hits hard–almost all wind.  Dust fills my eyes as I peak around at the clouds.  Trees are bending in gusts that near 50 mph.

I snap a few pictures and wait.  And wait, as the wind rages.  I finally take to my bike after almost an hour, thinking it’s done.  Then, the rains finally come.  I run back.

In another ten minutes, all is over.  Unbeknownst to me, trees are down all along the valley heading north.  I’ll see them all the way home–road and utility companies will be out clearing them right up through Sunderland, MA, and I’ll come across one sprawled over this rail trail at the Massachusetts border in the morning.

I head on.  It’s now after 6:30, damp, and still windy, plus its gotten cool–to say the least.  I have nowhere to stay, but I do have my tent and bag for a damp night in the buggy brush if all fails.  Perhaps this trip is conspiring to have me spend a night camping.  This won’t be pretty–or scenic, though, just ditch camping.  At one juncture the trail moves parallel to Rt. 10, and I take to the road, my best shot at finding a room on the edge of town.  I come across a Marriot someone had mentioned, but when I ask the desk woman about a single rate she quotes me $189.00.  A bit much for a few hours and a shower.  Back on the bike.

Simsbury is another private school town, and my hopes for a reasonably-priced stay quickly go south.  A picture perfect history is manicured into the town’s presentation, though its plaque mentions that Native Americans put the torch to it a couple of times– see the first writing on the wall way back in the first part of the 17^th century.  I come upon a bed and breakfast.  What the heck?—I set myself a limit; I’ll offer $90.00, take it or leave it.  No one comes to the bell.

As I near the town’s northern edge there is something looming on the left, a blue-gray building, perhaps 1970’s vintage, three stories tall.  The Iron Horse Inn.  It looks a bit like a low-to-mid priced place you might see in the denser towns of Cape Cod.  But it’s mostly empty at 7:05 p.m., just three cars sit in a large parking lot.  Still, I have nothing to lose.  I walk in to a modestly lit lobby, the other corridors are dark.  No one is at the desk, but there’s a phone, and a sign: for service, pick up the phone.

A young woman answers.  I ask if they have a single rate.  Yes, she says quickly, its $84, including tax.  Despite the thin carpet and sparse presentation, this may be something.  I mostly ignore the air that seems like it could use a good venting by merely leaving the lobby door open.  “Where are you?  Downstairs??” she asks.  They are not used to people walking in, apparently.  “Are you interested?”  Yes.  “I’ll send someone down.”

And down comes Melind, perhaps Indian or Pakistani, in his young thirties, I’d guess.  He too wonders, “How did you find us?”  They are right on Rt. 10, but it seems not a popular stop.  I start to give a tale of biking and wind, but cut it short.  “So, what does $84.00 get me?”  “Would you like to see a room?”  Melind takes me up a flight of stairs, then starts toward another, “Do you have anything on this floor?”  The place is empty, after all.  I figure one car is the woman’s on the phone—likely Melind’s girlfriend, the other is his, and the third…is the killers.  “Well, if you don’t need a king-sized bed I can grab another key.”   He runs back down the stairs.

The room is large, suite-sized—long, with a fridge, stove with two burners, microwave, writing table, etc.  I can’t completely ignore the musty air, the stain in the ceiling tiles.  I ask if the doors open.  They do, onto a deck overlooking a pool that doesn’t look like it’s primed to open this spring.  There’s a TV, “but the cable went out about an hour ago.”  “Sure,” I’m thinking.  I’m also thinking this place may be in receivership.  But the bed looks clean, and the price is right, and Melind seems willing to bend the rules a bit and allow me to bring my bike into the lobby for the night.  I guess they worry about the plush state of the indoor-outdoor carpet throughout.  I tell him we have a deal.

In truth, the TV cable did come back up later.  I got to watch the weather.  Melind sent me to a pizza joint that actually had reasonable prices, and I walked out, dead-tired, with a chicken-pesto sandwich on fancy bread, and a dose of curly fries.  That, and a bottle of beer, conspire make my return to the Iron Horse a minor triumph of bike travel for a white-haired guy.  Surviving a rough day on the road is part of the adventure.

I set aside the beer, eat half the large sandwich, and take a satisfying shower.  The double doors are thrown open to the damp, cool, clearing night.  Wrapped in a towel, I take the only two snapshots I have of myself on the journey—reflected in the long bathroom mirror.  A tired man, but satisfied to have pulled this rabbit out of this hat.  Hotel stalkers, be damned!  I sprawl on the bed, write in my journal for most of an hour and a half; then have that beer and a bunch of cold, curly fries while looking at the weather—along with reports of the thickening oil-spill disaster in the Gulf.  Somewhere toward midnight I switch off the light, coming to life again just before 6:00 a.m.

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A day at the mouth: Old Saybrook                  © 2010 by Karl Meyer

May 3, 2010.

Waking up to rain on a Monday morning at the Liberty Inn on Springbrook Road in Old Saybrook can be a comforting feeling.  It comes not so much from seeing the mist rise from trucks passing on I-95, not 100 yards away.  It simply delivers the message you get to relax in a bed for a bit, and stay for a full day along the Sound and the tidelands.  So, you tell the front desk you’re in for more, make the three cup hotel-coffeemaker coffee, and have leftover pizza for breakfast.

The rains nominally clear this section of coast around 1 pm, at least according to the radar.  Unloading the tent, pad, and sleeping bag from my bike, I ride off in a rain slicker, toting two mostly-empty panniers along.  First stop is North Cove, fairly close to town.  To get there it’s back up Rt. 1, and over the concrete Amtrak/Conrail bridge.

It’s still a bit damp and misty, but there are hints of sun–muggy for early May.  This is an old town dump, now turned into an overlook park, with a side path leading a ways out to the marsh and cove.  It’s a good two miles to the opposite shore.  Walking along a little grass spit its obvious the tide is just past high.  A muskrat trails in and out of the marsh grasses, seemingly not too intimidated by my presence.  Neither are the salt marsh mosquitoes—happy to have an early visitor.

After the rain it is fairly quiet here.  I hear song sparrows calling, and a red-bellied woodpecker up on the lookout above.  But shorebirds from where I am are silent.  I head back along the muddy sure, and then up on the rise to the overlook.  Here, a pair of osprey make tight circles, giving their hollow calls.  There are several platforms out in the cove along the water and placed among the marsh grasses.  One is occupied.

I read a bit of the interpretive signage and see that there are two uncommon salt marsh sparrows here, plus three species of rail: king, clapper, and Virginia.  Rails are never easy to see, and this is not the hour to be easily picking up bird song.  I take them at their word—this was, after all, Roger Tory Peterson country.  I bid the mosquitoes, and the yellow warbler, and the Carolina wren farewell, and head back toward town.

I’ve grabbed a little historic walking tour brochure, and thus note the old buildings and colonial sites as I ride along.  I’m hungry, and there’s a restaurant called One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest that may not be too far out on Rt. 1, South, but I can’t be sure.  I’m not really up for a trafficky-ride along a damp shoulder.  There are still a few showers in the area.

When I’ve gone a ways, I note that I’m still a couple of thousand street numbers from reaching the address of Cuckoo’s Nest.  I decide I’m not up for the traffic.  But, I’m right near Atlantic Seafood, which is advertising Connecticut River shad and roe.  I stop, on the outside chance they actually have some cooked.  Of course they don’t, but the woman mentions two places that serve it.  I thank her, but already know they are both high-end places—not the right fit for this road biker.

As I’m standing outside asking myself if it’s going to rain some more, and what I want to do about food and more exploring, I hear a sharp pop—like someone has thrown a firecracker.  I look for the culprit, but there is none.  I look again.  I look at my bike.  In particular, I look at my front tire.  It is flat.  What days are these—what gods??  How does a tire spontaneously combust?  Still, I do comfort myself that it didn’t happen in the middle of nowhere, though I kind of am in the middle of nowhere—3 – 4 miles from my motel.

But, across the way—voila, is a bike shop.  Now, surely I can fix a tire.  And, I have a spare tube and tire irons in my panniers.  But I’ve showered this morning.  Plus, I’m wearing my cleanest dirty shirt and it’s muggy and might rain some more.  By decree, I’m letting myself let them fix this flat.  And they do.  The tire had a big cut.  It was just itching to bust.  I guess I was lucky to witness the event, rather than wonder what had happened.  New tire, new tube, and $25 bucks later I’m on my way.  Nice folks.

I stop for a bottle of Berkshire Ale to bring back to my little room and the ballgame at the Liberty Inn and then head back over the railroad bridge on Rt. 1.  Waiting for the walk light at the busy crossing I see a sign in front of Pat’s Kountry Kitchen: we have shad and roe.  This really must be a sign(of course it literally is a sign!)  They are also advertising half-price cocktails for early birds, and its just 4:45, I’m the early bird.  I ask if a beer can be a cocktail, and that seals the deal.  Shad is ordered, though I can’t bring myself—philosophically, to order the roe.  Not with a struggling species.  I dive into a good salad.

When my shad comes, I’m surprised it’s delivered by the cook—this is a pretty big place, though there are only a few of us blue hairs on the premises at the moment.  He tells me to enjoy.  I’ve left the beer untouched so that I could sample the shad—my first ever, with a clear palate.  And it is good.  Alosa sapidissima—Latin, for most-delicious herring.  I’m impressed.  Just a little seasoning, and its delightful.  I savor it; take a picture even.

When I’ve paid the young, slightly-stiff waiter, I notice the chef at a nearby table, talking to old acquaintances.  He’s obviously part of this family operation, somewhere in his late 40’s and just a regular guy, with his chef’s shirt a drooping a bit hangdog in the heat.  I motion politely to see if I can get a word.  When he comes I introduce myself, compliment his shad and ask where they get it.  From across the river in Old Lyme, he says.

His name is Dave–very likeable, ready to talk.  I tell him what I’m doing and tells me what he knows about people going out to net shad commercially here.  “Hey,” he says, “go talk to Ted at Ted’s Bait and Tackle.  Right down Rt. 1 in your direction.  They go out.  He’ll tell you about it.”  I thank him again and head on my way.  I’m a bit pooped, and the late still has a showery feel to the sky.

When I get back to my room I turn on the weather.  It looks like whatever showers are around have already cleared Old Saybrook.  I get back on my bike and head toward the mouth of the Connecticut River—the actual place where the Sound and this ribbon of water merge: Ferry Point.  That’s where Ted is.

It’s a bit tricky, but I find Ted’s tucked up beneath that classic rail trestle that’s the last thing you see before Long Island Sound when you cross the 1 – 95 bridge here.  That’s where Ted’s is, the sign reads, “Hunting and fishing licenses.”  There’s a house, and a separate bait and tackle shop that’s as big as a house, one floor, all brown.  As I approach a young woman on the house steps brings a very interested and large German shepherd inside before it finds me too enticing.  I thank her.

Inside the shop a woman is buying night crawlers, she has two kids in tow.  I figure she’s either the mom, or their aunt.  She’s obviously excited to be taking them fishing.  I’m the only other visitor at 6:30 pm.  Ted’s is a full service place, bait, rods, lures, boots—all standard fare, not the glossy magazine type of outfitter.  Live bait, frozen bait, fish– there’s a good bit of all things serviceable here.  It’s a general store for fishing.

I introduce myself and ask the burly, late-20’s guy if he’s Ted—thinking he’s likely not.  “I’m one of the Teds,” he says.  Telling him I’m interested in the shad netting operation he tells me that his father has gone out for 50 years, “Not because it makes a lot of money—there’s little money in it.  But, partly it’s the tradition.”  They won’t be going out tonight, but likely tomorrow night, he says, “You want to come along—we’ve taken you guys out with us before?”  Alas, I tell him, I’ll be back on my bike tomorrow.

“We go out two hours after mean low-tide.  Tonight, that would be about 11.”  Then he add that there are still 5 – 6 people that gill-net shad here and across in Old Lyme, plus one up by Haddam.  I thank him, ask for a card, and say I may be calling his father.  The young woman holds the German shepherd as I’m getting on my bicycle.  She’s now talking to a couple of guys on motorcycles who are lounging about.  “Just give me a head start,” I say.

I stop at the town landing and fishing pier beneath the I – 95 bridge.  There are two guys fishing.  One is likely my age, sipping on a quart of Bud, though I definitely have more teeth.  The other is young, in his early 20’s.  They are not fishing together, just fishing amicably.  That may be the core of what fishing is about.  The older guy doesn’t know much about shad; has never tasted one.  “They’re a weird fish,” he says.  He doesn’t catch them.  These are salt water guys.  The young guy says he has had a few bites this evening, pulled in one perch a while back, “The stripers were hitting pretty good right here last week.”  I thank them, we trade a few more observations, and am on my way.

There’s one more little salt wetland I want to see, Otter Cove, a bit upstream on the river.  I pass a marina with scores of fat pleasure boats wrapped in thousand of yards of plastic.  I reach Otter Cove itself through a neighborhood that all but says “we’re money people,” some homes with actual gated drives.  But a lovely bit of low sunlight slips beneath the clouds when I do reach the small cove.  It illuminates that far shore, bathing it in warm gold.  I snap a picture.  The next time I move there is a slap in the slowly receding tide beneath the little bridge.  Thick and ropey, I again guess that it’s an eel, darting for the reeds.

The sun is about to set.  I turn my bike back toward Rt. 1 and I – 95, and the surprising, relative quiet of my room for the last night at the mouth of the river.

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Enfield to the Sound                                        © 2010 by Karl Meyer

May 2, 2010

This will prove the downstream ride’s best day—actually the best day of the trip.  At 6:00 a.m., I check the skies above the sprawling pavement surrounding my Enfield address.  There’s high, grey cover.  It’s humid and cool, but already in the upper 50’s.  The TV update says upper 80’s today, with afternoon showers.  I grab my own shower, and then head to check out.  The kind woman at the front desk tells me I get a free complimentary lunch at the chain next door, “Do you have time?”

I go and order up a cooked, breakfast sandwich, to go.  It takes about 15 minutes, but I pack it on my bike, grab a quick cup of the motel’s complimentary coffee, and I’m off, coffee in hand.  I scoot back down south through Enfield, a combination of newer homes, with the occasional colonial place delineating the original town layout.  I dive right, down Old Depot Road, to Thompsonville and Warehouse Pt., examining the landscape that dictated where humans first walked here, and fished, and where Pynchon found it necessary to build his trading warehouse in the 1630s, due to the rapids just upstream.

I intersect Rt. 5, and head south.  It’s 7:45 a.m., and traffic is generally light on this Sunday.  In places this road has a real urban edge, with stores and commerce spread broadly across the river terrace.  Other places are given over to pasturing horses, and idle land, with a few farms and garden center operations in between.  Most telling, to someone traveling in the silence of a bike, are the hundreds and hundreds of fertile acres given over to pavement—oil atop earth, for the sole purpose of auctioning off thousands of new cars, here sitting in storage.  As I ride past this, a great oil slick is spreading over the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

I keep watch for the Scantic River.  Dr. Boyd Kynard tells me there used to be a pretty good blueback herring run up this river.  When I finally dip into its crossing in East Windsor, I stop on the narrow bridge, looking down to the semi-dark waters as a scattering of trucks shoot past.  It’s a tripping little river here, semi-dark in the bottomland woods.  I can make out no fish in the morning light—not that they would be moving necessarily at the moment.  A mallard scoots away, and two Canada geese take flight.  There may be another dam between me and the mouth of the Scantic, but I think not, as I’m only a mile away.  Later I discover that the first dam is miles upstream in Enfield, and that this river had a pretty good run of shad in the 1970’s, and even today a few river herring knock on the door of the dam each spring.  Both, have been left hanging for decades without assistance.

Stripping down to a t-shirt, I head out of the bowl of the Scantic and quickly find my way onto North Main Street.  This turns out to be a wonderful secondary road, laid out in the mid-1600s above the Connecticut’s broad, flood plain.  It’s quiet, straight, and flows down through the old settlements, with many of the old houses still standing.  The East Windsor Hill Post Office, from 1727, is still in business, as is the refreshingly untidy Porter House, dating from 1694.  I follow south, largely untrammeled by traffic.

Other cyclists heading north for a recreational ride slide by in twos and threes.  At South Windsor I pass the birthplace marker for the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, born in the first years of the 18^th century.  This connects me back to an upstream town.  When I lived in Northampton, MA, Edwards and I were neighbors of a sort.  I lived across the tracks, less than 200 yards from Edwards Square–his old digs when he was an early fire and brimstone preacher.  The citizens of Northampton had the good sense to run Edward’s and his brand of fear mongering out of town.  His bloodline apparently continued though, as I read that Aaron Burr was his grandson.

Continuing on down South Main through East Windsor, the road grows slowly less rural, with less of the preserved, cookie-cutter, historic ambiance it cultivates at it most opulent horse-farmy acreages.  It was time to leave this quiet anyway.  Soon I’m in East Hartford, which would have been a real challenge on a weekday, but at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday, is highly doable.  I’m still on the old, historic path, but the road widens, merges with Rt. 5 as Main Street.  I cross the entrance to one sprawling Pratt and Whitney plant, and not long after, another.  It astonishes me at the time how much of our wealth is derived from the implementation of industry in service to warfare.  What a sad use of the earth’s good soil.

In the center of East Hartford, beneath its looming spire, I chat briefly with another cyclist while stopped at a busy intersection.  He’s pleasant, though he can’t offer much in the way of good directions heading south.  I just try to keep on Main Street, ever leaning toward the river, which should lead me into Glastonbury.  Though I do lose the trail at times, I eventually make it to a back street intersection that is tempting: Naubuc Avenue.  It’s again a quiet, colonial path—very likely of Native American origin, and it goes through an old, and unpretentious colonial neighborhood, interspersed with modest, early and mid-20^th century houses.  Plain, working people.

This is another fine, straight, route, which takes me a few miles, including down a short side chute to Keeney Cove, and old meander of the Connecticut.  Here, in the 80 degree morning sun, people have parked a few pickup trucks and cars.  They are angling for fish at the lip of the Cove, which has yet to be unburdened on the recent spring floods.  Part of the pavement is under water.  I ask one shirtless, tattooed young guy who has just waded in from a small, dry rise in his bare feet if the guys fishing there have caught anything.  He can’t say for sure.  I head back out, not knowing if this is a shad or herring site, with a connection to the main stem Connecticut.

It is warm.  I fidget my way onto Main Street in Glastonbury, where it’s sunny, flowery, and well-off.  Hills and narrow roads close in, a function of the ancient geology here, and plate tectonics.  The road gets busier as I head south toward Portland and Cobalt.  I pass Moodus, the place of a memorable earth quake in the 1700s.  Suddenly I’m adjacent to the motel/inn that I’ve scoped out for the end of today’s journey.  It looks ok, but a bit forlorn on its little siding, with the nearest commerce a gas station 1/3 of a mile away, and no where to walk on narrow Rt. 66.  It’s 11:15 a.m.; there are no rain clouds apparent.  If I stop now, I’m stuck in a boring pocket for the day.  I head on, not knowing where I’ll end the day.

I grab an iced coffee in Cobalt, against the heat, and find I’ve missed a turn south.  A woman tells me I can take the adjacent road I’ve been eying, back over the Rt. 154.  It’s Hog Hill Road, an interesting old colonial route dating back at least 2-1/2 centuries.  I hear wood thrush and oven birds, and yellow warblers.  Soon I’ve scooted down to my river route and the entrance to Hurd State Park.  It’s hot, but, I want to keep rolling.  One hill, then another, takes me over the ridges of Haddam Neck, a rocky ridge reaching to the Connecticut’s shore that once hosted a nuclear plant.  It was shut when valve problems threatened to uncover the reactor’s core, which the public never learned.  Repairs were too pricey to ever restart it.  Today, it has been dismantled, but its toxic nuclear legacy remains stored and guarded on site, costing citizens a million bucks a year to safeguard it.

I shoot down a long curve and up along the last few miles of the Salmon River, stopping on the bridge above to scan for fish.  I walk down an old side road, where the Leesville dam has long had a set-up to pass—wouldn’t you know, salmon.  The place is posted up and down about salmon, and how to ID them.  But I see not a single leaping salmon.  However, as I crouch down nest to the gurgling waters before the dam as silver-grey fish writhes and disappears in an instant.  Its perhaps a little more than a foot long, and the only fish I can equate with this behavior in the shallows is American eel.  Gone in a flash.  As I’m left pondering this I note the head of a smallish northern water snake lifted out of the water just a few feet beyond.

I drink in the heat and get back on the bike.  Soon I come abreast of Salmon Cove, the long marsh leading to the river’s intersection with the Connecticut.  Two boats sit fishing just beyond where the Salmon flows in.  Quickly, I’m in Haddam, tourist town and home to the Goodspeed Opera House, and a bridge across the river.  It’s busy.  I’m heckled by two punks in a pickup, and can’t resist giving them the finger.  Not a place for a cyclist to linger today.  I cross the river and bridge in good traffic, stop on the other side at Tony’s Market, where they have “Connecticut River shad and roe” for sale.  But I’m just there for a Gatorade at this point, which I slug down.

Quickly I’m heading downstream toward Chester, and traffic thins.  Pretty views of the Connecticut roll toward me.  One of the lovely things that you rarely get on roadways while moving through beautiful spaces is the quiet.  Suddenly, every now and then the cars disappear, and you can experience the beauty and the quite in tandem.  And it is lovely.

Chester is so compact, old, and set up so neatly in the landscape that it’s hard to deny its charm, despite the obvious tourist and money bent.  I stop to say hello to a friend’s brother, who I’ve yet to meet.  He the chef at little place called Simon’s.  I get the cook’s tour, including the little alewife stream out back that bisects the town center.  Alan buys me an iced tea, and tells me its not too many miles to the coast—I’m guessing less than twenty.

The roads continue good, and I pass through Deep River, and am just on a southward roll, smelling the salt and that final destination—the Connecticut’s mouth.  The skies are holding.  I reach the turn-off for Essex, which I’ve never explored.  The sign-posts say I’m only six miles from crossing into Old Saybrook, and the skies are holding.  There’s still a little gas in my tank so I pedal toward town.  It’s old, the architecture is interesting, but the place is so meticulously preserved, and already chockfull of tourists, that it’s hard to see beyond the opulence and check for a soul.  The landing and harbor in this tidal section look out on a broad reach of river.  There’s a regatta in progress, and I can already see that the water will be overwhelmed by the expensive boats sitting, Saran-wrapped in the marinas, within just weeks.  I quickly put Essex behind me.

The last miles into Old Saybrook are uneventful.  I find my way to a siding on the wrong side of the railroad tracks and Rt. 1, but get directions from a friendly woman who runs a bric-a-brac shop.  Tired now, she sends me back over the railroad bridge, and gets me on track to Springbrook Road and the Liberty Inn.  The place, it turns out, is curiously wedged between the road and I – 95.  It’s literally at eye level with the highway, and not 100 yards off.  Remarkably, it’s quiet in my room, and comfortable.  After a shower and the end of a losing Red Sox game, I drag myself, tired, back into Old Saybrook Center to pick up the family-size pizza special, advertised in the Inn’s pages.  The package stores are closed, so I am forced to leave my bike, pizza attached, outside, while I have a celebratory Sam Adam’s at a counter of Pat’s Kountry Kitchen.  The beer is cold, and goes down nicely in honor of the river, and a fine day’s ride.  No storms yet in sight.

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I reached the mouth of the Connecticut at Old Saybrook yesterday.

I left Greenfield on a packed bicycle at 6:45 a.m., Saturday, May 1st.  The farmers were just setting up the first market on Greenfield common.  Shot straight downstream, as I was expected at the Red Roof Inn in Enfield, CT that evening.  Not a huge hall, but there was Holyoke, Chicopee, and Springfield to bike through.  Still, black throated green warblers called, and bluebirds flitted near pastures.  Didn’t get my first view of the CT River until Route 5, near Mt. Tom in Holyoke.  But, I was standing on the Rt. 116 Bridge, adjacent to the fishway, by 9:10.  A couple of guys fishing from shore just downstream said they’d had on good hit.  Still early.  There was a small crew fishing Slim Shad Point, and two boats out at midstream.

I followed the river and Rt. 116 downstream, through the Saturday morning empty factories, and across the river into Cabottville.  I love going throug towns when its early and people are relaxed.  Stayed along the river by-ways as much as possible.  Eventually came to the partially finished bikeway in Chicopee, but then had to backtrack due to construction.  Nice views along the river though.  A few boats with lines in the water.

Made my way into Springfield’s North End along 116, and then fidgetted through that ripped up road in the industrial section.  Near the end a farmers market had been set up, rather spare.  But, just behind them was the dike work, and the bike/walk way.  Got on it.  Some nice views of the river, and the Memorial Bridge, and the railroad bridge that I once climbed out on to get the USGS benchmarks for a report.  Took some snaps.

Near downtown there are a number of homeless folks sleeping along the park-like section.  These are tough times.  I ask one if I can take the path all the way to the South End Bridge.  He’s not talking.  Another guy, not yet drinking, says it might be possible, but he’s not sure.  I take the chance, but I’m turned around just before the bridge due to construction.  Have to backtrack once more.

I walk my bike into the vast lobby of the Basketball Hall of Fame, where they say they have information.  I know some of the Springfield Visitor’s Center people.  None are present, but a knowledgeable guy, who used to bike and live in Agawam, gives me good directions.  Soon, I’m down to the end of Columbus Ave., and walking my bike across the South End Bridge.  I take a few snaps of the boats fishing upstream.

Agawam has a lovely bikeway along the river, though its short.  I take it, then continue south past an already-open Six Flags.  Soon I’m in Thompsonville, and its not yet 12:30.  I continue south, knowing I have a bit of slush time.  What am I going to do when I get to my room in Enfield.  So, I stay on the right bank, and head to the beginning of the Windsor Locks Canal, a state park.

I immediately hear the waters of the Connecticut gurgle as the river runs across the river cobbles and ruins of the former dam here.  When I reach the river bank I’m surprised not to find anyone fishing this section.  The shad run is still not in high gear.  I head downstream the 4-1/2 miles along the canal.  Its warm, hot really.  Two young guys are fishing in a boat just offshore.  I call to them to see if anything’s biting.  A couple of smallmouth bass is all.

Carolina wrens sing, and orioles tootle from the treetops along the canal.  For a road biker, this is not a very exciting jog.  The best part though, is that it is along the river.  I finish the trail, and don’t want to backtrack, but these are two busy crossings to get east across the river–the Rt. 190, and Rt. 140 bridges.  The Windsor Locks Library is open and I decide to give it a try.  The librarian is quite helpful, and gets me across the 140 bridge, and steers me around harm’s way when I get up to Enfield and the I-91 interchanges crossing Rt. 5.

I come up through Windsor, and Warehouse Pt., where Pynchon built his warehouse/trading house in the mid-1630′s, just below the rapids.  By 1:30 p.m., I’m ensconced in the unreality of a motel room, with 60 channels, surrounded by pavement, malls and interstates.  I go foraging and pick up a six-pack–of soda, really, Polar orange, and literally drink a six-pack, plus one more, before nightfall.  I also suck up seven–count’em, seven pieces of the colonel’s good chicken, saving one for the ride tomorrow.  You can do these kind of stunts when you are biking with paniers, tent, and sleeping bag.  I probably did 60 miles, but could have gone longer.  But I had the reservation, and E. Hartford might have been a tough place to conquer when tired.

So, it was an afternoon/evening of Red Sox, bad movies, going over maps, and watching the President address the press club in an annual roast.  Didn’t sleep all that well, but made it to Old Saybrook, where I am now, by 3:15 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.  That’s something over 70 miles.  Still haven’t seen anyone with a shad they’d caught on the water, but scattered fishing boats were out on the river all along the way.  Here, and upstream in Haddam, the fish markets do have fresh shad for sale.  The Atlantic Seafood place here says its Connecticut River shad, though I didn’t see any commercial seining going on.

I had a cold, Sam Adams lager in celebration of reaching the Sound.  Rainstorms came on overnight into this morning, so I’m spending one more night.  I’d scheduled last night to stay in Portland, CT, but I reached that place by 11:15 a.m., and just had to keep going, despite talk of afternoon thunderstorms.  Still gray here in late-afternoon, but front is set to pass soon.  Ospreys were calling over the North Cove here an hour ago.  It’s getting late in the afternoon, and I can’t find the spell-check on this library computer.  So, I’m just hitting the send button.  I head upstream in the morning.

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