Karl Meyer Writing Blog

This article appears in the current(May-June) issue of the Pioneer Valley News, a small, bimonthly news-magazine available, free, at various Valley locations.

The Devolution of a River Restoration: killing the Connecticut softly

by Karl Meyer                                   Copyright © 2011 by Karl Meyer

May 5, 2010.  7:30 a.m:

THWACK!  Standing next to the pulsing waters of the Rainbow Fishway on the Farmington River in Windsor, CT, I’d just received a watery slap in the face from a 280 million year-old living fossil.  I was travelling by bicycle, heading to the Holyoke dam from Old Saybrook, CT at Long Island Sound.  I’d left the Sound the day before, with a final destination of Bellows Falls, VT, following the Connecticut River’s fish migration upstream.  But I just had to stop at this storied tributary.  Astonished, I stared at the frothy spot where a 2-1/2 foot sea lamprey had just been cemented to the concrete wall of a 34 year-old salmon ladder–its suctioning mouth holding it in the wild current.  Now, it was gone.

Wiping the spray from my cheek, I look upstream to the next frothing pool.  There, peeking just above the water like a spy-hopping whale is my lamprey.  Its snakelike body flutters in the current while its round, jawless-mouth keeps it fused to the concrete as if joined by Crazy Glue.  Two flooded basins downstream, three more lamprey do the exact same thing; in the pool beyond, another, nearly as thick as my arm, waves like a streamer in violent water.

THWACK!—another sprits of Farmington water hits me.  In a flash, the ropey, mottled-brown fish disappears, only to emerge a second later in the next higher pool, glomming onto the steep wall.  Its rudimentary gills writhe like bellows in the froth as they siphon needed oxygen.

I am witnessing a miracle of tenacity and evolution as these ancient fish scale an impossible fishway.  I’m also witnessing everything that is wrong with the Connecticut River basin’s failed 44 year-old federal-state migratory fish restoration here at the first dam on Farmington River–the longest tributary in the state of Connecticut.

This fishway is a trap.  It kills fish.  In fact, the Rainbow Fishway kills most of the fish the New England Cooperative Fisheries were charged with restoring way back in 1967—the American shad and blueback herring that once fed humans along 172 miles of the Connecticut River, as well as up tributaries like this one–all the way from Long Island Sound to Bellows Falls, VT.

In 1976, state and federal fisheries officials came up with the design here—a ponderously steep ladder with punishing flows charging through rasping, pebble-ridden concrete slots not much wider than a splayed hand.  It was based on West Coast ladders designed for Pacific salmon–here to be used for the Atlantic salmon, extinct in the Connecticut River since 1809.  From day one, Rainbow proved a killer.  For the past 35 years this ladder has drawn spawning-run shad and blueback herring upstream to its watery promise by the tens of thousands—only to flay them alive in repeated attempts to pass.  Those that succeed expire soon after reaching the top, their reward for tenacity.  In total, Rainbow Fishway has quietly killed more migrating shad and herring–classified as “federal trust fish,” than it has ever assisted.

Lacking scales, a’ la salmon, the scrappy sea lamprey is this fishway’s—and the Connecticut River restoration’s, single, unequivocal, unintended success.  By the end of the 2010 spawning season Rainbow had passed a grand total of 4 hybrid salmon.  But 3,090 sea lamprey made it out the top of Rainbow–exhausted, but otherwise uninjured.  Concurrently, those narrow, flaying, concrete slots injured and likely killed all 548 American shad and 25 blueback herring that were counted as “passing” the fishway.  That number is a trick.  The counting window is located in the bottom third of those 64 treacherous pools–where hapless, de-scaling migrants still have a wrinkle of life left in them when the staff checks them off.

By 1970, just three years after its start, fisheries officials had turned the basics of Connecticut River migratory fish restoration on its head–placing the extinct salmon as priority one, and relegating American shad and blueback herring to poor step-child status.  Their overarching federal mandate was to create “high quality sport fishing opportunities” in the Connecticut basin, and to “provide for the long-term needs of the population for seafood.”  The large, sporty American shad was the top fish named in that mandate; followed by the extinct salmon, and then those migratory herring.  Federal and state managers were entrusted with both river ecology and fish runs. At Rainbow, they crushed the possibilities of both.

Historically, for millennia, American shad fed Native Peoples and later European immigrants throughout the Connecticut Valley.  Herring were salted and eaten too, and used in livestock feed and fertilizer. Here, that extinct salmon had colonized the Connecticut River system just a few hundred years prior at the very southern edge of their cold-water range–during the Little Ice Age in New England, 1400 – 1800 AD, a time of shifting ocean currents and unusual cold for Northern Europe and Northeastern North America.

The salmon were large but few—amounting to perhaps one fish in five thousand in the annual runs of migratory fish.  Though tasty, they never fed the populace.  And, with warming Atlantic currents and the first dams on the Connecticut, the salmon run had died off by 1809.  Yet, in 1976, fisheries officials built this fish trap in the name of salmon, fueled by their trophy fish desires.  It flew in the face river ecology principals, and it has crippled fish restoration on the Farmington and depleted the Connecticut River’s migratory fish stocks for decades.  Four salmon used this ladder in 2010.  Four.

One biologist refers to Rainbow Fishway as “the world’s greatest shad de-scaler.”  That’s what it does–it rakes the scales off hapless two foot-long American shad, drawn into those narrow slots by the upstream current.  Thousand perish annually.  With bellies flayed raw in the effort, they either wash back down downstream, or expire after reaching the top of the dam.  The smaller, foot-long herring receive the same fate.  And the public hasn’t a clue.  Remarkably, Rainbow holds an “open house” each June, with smiling state fisheries personnel standing over a few listless shad, live-trapped at the base of the dam.  They politely explain how the system functions…  The place is a PETA protest waiting to happen.

Though few people admire this member of an ancient order of jawless fish, I’m watching a miraculous creature—one that does nearly everything a salmon restoration effort on the Connecticut never will.  The wonderfully adapted sea lamprey is ghoulish-looking.  They appear more eel-like than fish, but they are fish indeed.  They were thriving before the glaciers arrived here—indeed, living-well before even the molten rise of the Holyoke Range and the ancient layers of earth rose and parted to later become Turners Falls. Sea lamprey were making a good living 200 million years before dinosaurs laid tracks here in the fogs of Valley pre-history.

Lamprey are large, but hardly sexy.  They are writhers, not leapers.  Indeed, upon hatching they will spend well over half an unglamorous decade rooted and waving like worms in riverbed silts, growing slowly as they filter nutrients and detritus from the downstream current.  Then, in an amazing transformation, they head to the sea to spend the final two years of their decade-plus lifespan in the open ocean, maturing quickly into two- and three- foot fish who making a living as ocean parasites attached to larger fish–using their sucking-disc mouths full of hundreds of needle-like teeth to draw in nutrition.

Then, come spring– blind, fasting, and loosing those teeth, they return to the Connecticut River tributaries of their birth to spawn.  Using their powerful sucking jaws, the male and female will move fist-sized rocks to create a rounded rock nest called a redd– remarkably similar to one a salmon would make.  That rock-corral will catch the doomed couple’s fertilized eggs after spawning.  Their life-cycles complete, upon spawning all adult lamprey perish, leaving both their thousands of tiny eggs and their rotting carcasses to the clear-running reaches of Connecticut River tributaries.

In a 2007 study, Drs. Keith Nislow and Boyd Kynard of the UMass-Amherst Dept. of Natural Resources and Conservation surveyed the results of 20 years of sea lamprey spawning research on the Fort River–a Connecticut tributary in Hampshire County, MA.  Their findings show that the quick-rotting carcasses left by spawned-out adult lamprey contribute critical ocean-derived nutrients–including phosphorus and nitrogen, to freshwater systems at a time when other spring nutrient sources are largely unavailable to freshwater organisms.  In short, dead, unlovable, lamprey carry needed “seafood” to our streams—like salmon on the West Coast.

Though you can’t hook’em, sea lamprey were eaten in former times in Hampshire County, and also fed to the hogs, according to Sylvester Judd’s posthumous, 1863, History of Hadley, 1905 edition: “Lampreys came above the falls in great numbers, and entered the streams that run into the Connecticut, until the Holyoke dam was built in 1849.  They were very numerous in Fort River in Hadley, below Smith’s mills, and were caught by the light of torches, sometimes several hundred in a night.  Men waded into the stream, and grasped them with a mittened hand and placed them in a bag…  Some were eaten in a few towns in old Hampshire, but most were carried to Granby, Simsbury and other towns on the Connecticut.”

I’d actually left Simsbury, CT that very morning—biking the six miles to Rainbow Fishway.  It was still early, 8:10, but no one was around.  The gate, supposedly open at 8 a.m., was still locked.  I’d snuck in.  Special “salmon transport” trucks sat idle in a fenced-off area.  The thwack-splash of lamprey was ever present–but no sign of a single shad, herring or salmon, living or dead.  I backtracked over Hatchet Hill to the Farmington River bikeway as jets from nearby Bradley Airport roared above.  I’d make my way through Granby, then across Southwick and Westfield, MA on my way to the Holyoke dam, some 30 miles distant.  I’d told a friend I’d meet him by noon.

By 12:15, I was rolling through the streets of Holyoke, down to the Connecticut and the Holyoke dam at South Hadley Falls.  Grabbing my wallet, I left my loaded bike, and headed over the cement wall to the river near Slim Shad Point.  There, a dozen guys are waist deep in the river, flicking shad darts into an ample current.  My friend Tony is one of them.  They’ve had some luck this morning.  Upstream, the river makes a low roar rolling over the dam and through the spillway at Holyoke Gas & Electric’s generating plant.

I was hoping to catch Tony for lunch, but he’s too involved.  Shad fever, they call it.  He greets me, can hardly turn around—so intent is he on the catch.  “Sorry, I can’t stop,” he says.

One of his compadres, getting that I’d biked from Long Island Sound just the day before, chides, “Geez, he won’t even leave the water to shake this guy’s hand.”  Tony does offer me one tidbit though, “Karl, you’ll never guess what a guy caught this morning.”  From his tone, it’s obvious, a salmon.  “Thirty-three inches,” he laughs, “tossed it back in.”

Though classified as “extirpated” by the USFWS, you still cannot catch or keep the Connecticut hybrid they’ve created through a series of $ million-dollar hatcheries across New England.  Just a few dozen from the millions of industrial-hybrid salmon fry dumped in Connecticut River tributaries each spring grow and survive to adulthood to swim back from the ocean each year.  “Too bad he didn’t keep it,” I say, “We could’ve had a barbeque!”  The fishermen laugh.

I grab my bike and walk the quarter mile back to the Holyoke Fishway next to the dam.  This fishway is the prototype for what should have been the Connecticut River’s successful fish restoration.  Built in 1955, it is the East Coast’s oldest and most successful fish passage facility.  Since 1848, all migratory fish here had been blocked by Holyoke dam.  In its first year, the lift installed here passed over 5,000 American shad–more than the total number of hybrid salmon that have returned over the entire 44 year salmon program—a hatchery based effort that has cost taxpayers well over a half billion dollars.

Simple, direct, elegant—over the last half century the elevators have successfully passed tens of millions of fish upstream here—all kinds, all species—including shad, herring, lamprey, salmon—even endangered shortnose sturgeon.  The design is common-sense-simple: a square, water-filled elevator with one swinging-door side that closes behind fish drawn to it by an ample flow of downstream “attraction” current.  You corral the fish; close the side door–and lift them over the dam.  Done.  A winner, this design is what they might have copied 21 years later, when they built Rainbow.  But they went for sexy, they went for salmon.  Today, they are left with a festering, open sore.

A public viewing site, this is opening day at Holyoke Fishway.  Two of the fishway guides greet me as an old friend, “They’re here,” they assure me.  I climb the stairs.  Scores of shiny blue-green shad are nervously milling in the windows.  A few lamprey are here as well–all waiting to be released upstream.  There are no herring, no salmon, but a lone white sucker lurks near the bottom of the tank.  Still, this window is full of promise–agitated, determined life.

It’s early in the run; the shad are mostly males—sleek, wiry, “bucks” about two feet long.  I check the bulletin board: already 15,000 have passed here.  By season’s end that number will be 164,000, hardly a record.  In 1978 this fishway was further improved by adding a second fish elevator.  The fish runs blossomed.  By the mid-1980s totals of shad and herring here averaged nearly a million fish passing annually.

In 1992, a record 720,000 American shad were lifted at Holyoke dam, as well as 310,000 blueback herring.  But it’s been downhill ever since.  The key reason: in 1978–two years after the Rainbow Fishway became operational, federal and state fisheries experts ordered a second fish trap built—this one at the Connecticut’s next upstream dam from Holyoke’s simple fish elevators: Turners Falls.  If Rainbow proved an ugly slap in the face for the Farmington, the design they insisted on for passing migratory fish blocked at Turners Falls since the time of George Washington proved a devastating blow to fish restoration throughout the Connecticut River basin.

Renamed the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) in 1983, it was this same group of federal and state fisheries directors in 1978 that insisted Northeast Utilities build another system based on Pacific salmon and the Columbia River at Turners Falls.  NU was obligated to create and improve fish passage under federal environmental law and regulatory statutes.  It is an ongoing obligation of all owners of federal generating licenses on the Connecticut, including the current owner—multi-national FirstLight GDF-Suez, a mandate that operators must accept for being allowed to profit from use of the public’s river.  NU, and now FirstLight-GDF Suez, derive great profits from using our river’s power at their Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage-Turners Falls hydro generating complex along a 7-mile stretch of the Connecticut.  Once this new design was completed as requested, it was agreed that no major changes in fish passage would be advanced again until mid-way through the 40-year Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license—1998.

Completed in 1980, the Turners Falls Fishway proved another day-one disaster—but on a much grander scale.  Federal-state studies from the 1980s quickly documented the failure.  But fisheries officials took little action.  Though the new Turners Falls fish passage complex didn’t kill fish outright, it essentially strangled this river migration’s ancient, upstream connection with the sea right where it had died when a dam was built here in 1798.  Rather than build a proven elevator at the dam suited to all species, they turned the migrating runs out of the ancient riverbed and forced them to attempt an upstream run through the punishing flows and the barren, silt-and-muck habitats of the Turners Falls Canal.

Annually, hundreds of thousands of shad would arrive, but 98 fish out of 100 fish would repeatedly attempt to pass that two miles of alien habitat and fail—met by the harsh pulses and quick-changing pond levels sent downstream from the unchecked operations at the upstream Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage facility.   That promised ocean-fish sport and seafood connection never reached Vermont and New Hampshire.

So intent was this group on resurrecting extinct salmon, that the pact they made with the power company to get their salmon ladders actually yanked the fish out of the Connecticut River.  They forced them up the impossibly treacherous steps of the “Cabot Ladder,” built at the downstream end of Turners Falls Canal.  The design proved so useless that–other than a handful of hybrid salmon and that ever-remarkable, unfishable, sea lamprey, it has crushed any hope for meaningful fish runs to Vermont and New Hampshire waters for these last 30 years.  That tragedy too, continues.

By utilizing the simple lift design achieved at Holyoke 23 years prior, fish officials would’ve restored the remaining 60% of historic upstream spawning reach for American shad and blueback herring all the way to Bellows Falls, VT, 172-miles from the sea, in a single stroke–a site unreachable since 1798.  Today, shad passage continues to teeter at anywhere between 0 – 5 percent at Turners Falls “fishway.”  Though it doesn’t de-scale shad, its series of ladders and jumbled currents so stresses and depletes shad energy reserves that they simply stall in the lower part of the system, and eventually wind back down to the bottom—only to begin the whole ugly gauntlet over again the next day.  The few that reach the top and enter the canal simply stop migrating at that juncture, languishing for weeks in mud-barren habitat that is nothing like a river.  The herring no longer arrive.

The Turners Falls boondoggle was such an embarrassment that CRASC has worked mightily to keep it quiet.  Responsible US Fish and Wildlife Service and state fisheries officials kept mum, partly because the system DID at least work for the few dozen returning salmon.  Costing taxpayers some $10 million per year via hatchery operations, salaries, and grant studies funded through NOAA, the National Science Foundation, state programs—and a byzantine money pipeline, the 44 year-old effort today known as the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) restoration produced 51 returning hybrid salmon last year.  The numbers reaching Holyoke, the first dam on the main stem Connecticut remain startling: 2005—132 fish; 2006—115 fish; 2007—107 fish; 2008—86 fish; 2009—60; 2010—41 fish.  After decades and over a half billion public dollars spent.

The other federal trust fish included for restoration in their mandate—the shad, the herring, continue their inexorable drift toward eventual failure below Turners Falls dam.  CRASC partners at the $12 million federal Conte Anadromous Fish Lab adjacent to the power company’s canal at Turner Falls, continue to do experiment after experiment on the behavior and genetics of tiny hatchery salmon fry and smolts.  They’ve become quite cozy with the recent and current owners of Northfield/TF hydro operations—who donate a paltry tithing of $40,000 per year for fish counting personnel and a few dilatory experiments proving what we knew in 1980—turning fish out of the Connecticut River and into the Turners Falls Canal is a fatal restoration choice.

The ongoing failure of officials and environmental groups to demand the fish elevator owed to the public at Turners Falls dam these last ten years is a complete abrogation of responsibility.  The current flow regimes–ignored by fisheries and regulatory officials, and ramped-up by operators of the Northfield-Turners Falls hydro complex since deregulation in 1998, compounds the treachery of this fish trap with punishing downstream surges in violation of federal environmental laws license requirements.  When I visited the true riverbed at Turners Falls last April 23^rd there was virtually no river flow in the stretch of basin utilized by the federally endangered shortnose sturgeon.

It appears that, for the annual price of a mini-van, corporate donations are enough to keep dithering fisheries scientists and CRASC partners quiet next to that canal–experimenting on an extinct hybrid of a cold-loving species on a warming river in a time of documented climate warming.  At a CRASC meeting last year it was revealed that, under a bit of pressure, CRASC representatives from the USFWS and MA Division of Fisheries were beginning to talk with FirstLight about making long-overdue improvements for fish passage at Turners.  They’d already had an initial meeting—one behind closed doors and without public input.

Astoundingly, the solution they are now talking about is replacing the Cabot salmon ladder with a fish elevator at the same site–they are again ready to continue to steer those fish out of the river and into the same treacherous power canal system they abandoned them to in 1980.   Heck, it works for FirstLight–who can then use all the water they please for their 5.6 billion gallon pumped storage operations at Northfield and power generation in the Turners Falls canal, while ignoring the water levels and flows essential to the Connecticut’s biological integrity in the two empty miles of parched riverbed downstream of TF dam.  If that decision comes to pass, the river will essentially remain as it was upstream of the Turners Falls when that barrier was built in 1798–no shad, no herring, no fishing–no ocean connection, no sea food.  A restoration denied.

I hopped back on my bike that May 5^th at Holyoke dam, making the final 30 miles to Greenfield by mid-afternoon.  I’d spend a full day at Long Island Sound, and completed 250 miles of river riding in five days.  But it wasn’t until the Friday of Memorial Day weekend that I completed tracing the historic upstream migration route of American shad and blueback herring to Bellows Falls, VT.  That was a “century ride”—a 100 mile round trip in a single day.  I suppose you could say I could’ve saved the bother.  The gates at both the Vernon and Bellows Falls Public Fishways were locked tight.  The reason was simple: there literally are no fish to see.  By season’s end, just 396 fish had reached that Bellows Falls counting site—392 of them were blind, slithering sea lamprey.

Curiously, on May 1^st last year, Northfield Mountain ruined its pumping facility in an attempt to clear two decades worth of silt from its giant reservoir.  The downstream impacts of Northfield’s operations on fish migration were silenced for an entire season, into early August.  Even though state fisheries officials have abrogated all fish counting responsibilities to FirstLight, they were hard pressed to explain this amazing outcome: shad passage jumped an astounding 800% at Turners Falls, with nearly 17,000 fish swimming by—the most shad moving upstream since at least 1996.

What fish officials also couldn’t quite explain was this puzzling outcome: only 290 shad were counted at the next dam, just 20 miles upstream at Vernon, VT.   I’m thinking it likely had something to do with that silt from FirstLight’s Northfield Mountain.  Between May 1^st and August 4^th, FirstLight quietly flushed at least 45,000 cubic square yards of that muck into the Connecticut just five miles upstream of Turners Falls dam—that’s equal to 40-50 dump truck loads of mud fouling the river daily for a period of over three months.  Tired, and faced with that curtain of darkness, you might stop migrating upstream too.

The EPA finally ordered FirstLight to “cease and desist” their polluting of “the navigable waters of the United States” on August 4–the damage already done.

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The following essay/OpEd appeared in the Connecticut River basin this month–printed in The Recorder, Greenfield, MA; The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA; The Times-Argus, Montpelier, VT; and the Montague Reporter, Montague, MA, among others.  It was submitted with the working title: “A long-owed debt on New England’s River.”  Here I have used the tag-line that appeared in the Gazette.

Karl Meyer                                                                 Copyright © 2011 by Karl Meyer

karlm@crocker.com

A long-owed debt on New England’s River

Given a chance to fix the ocean connection on the Connecticut River—the migratory fish link severed at Turners Falls, MA, since John Adams was president, wouldn’t you do it?  If that chance was blown decades back and you had a second shot to rescue New England’s River, you’d do the right thing, right?

The fate of our river for generations to come is currently being decided, out of the public eye.   Agencies responsible for the public trust are negotiating with global giant GFD-Suez/FirstLight.  Negotiators include Caleb Slater of the MA Div. of Fisheries & Wildlife, John Warner of the US Fish & Wildlife Service Field Office, Julie Crocker of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, and NOAA attorney Kevin Collins.  Talks center on crippled fish passage at Turners Falls–and the fix, long overdue there under provisions in the current federal license controlling Northfield Mountain-Turners Falls hydro operations.

But the proposals under discussion mirror the worst decision made for the Connecticut River since 1978: continuing to send migrating fish into a trap–the Turners Falls power canal.  The reparation talks were announced at a 2010 Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) meeting.  They should have been in place back in 1998, the halfway point in that license.  Ongoing fish passage improvements are a mandated part of FirstLight’s 40 year license, compensation for profiting from use of the public’s river.  Yet studies from the 1980s proved using that canal as a migration conduit was a mistake.

What’s under discussion appears a surrender of the river to conditions surprisingly well-aligned with the unencumbered water-use desires of a for-profit company.  It forces shad and herring into a stress-laden environment nothing like a river–leading to more roiling waters at the powerhouse, where this run has died for centuries.  The one difference is that fish would get an elevator lift into alien, muck-laden habitat–instead of up useless salmon ladders in place since 1980.  Federal Conte Fish Lab scientists continue repeating studies remarkably similar to those of two decades ago, with FirstLight helping fund them.  Yet “improvements” recently touted at US Fish & Wildlife symposium are worse than numbers seen a quarter century back.

Engineers and biologists refer to it as the “by-pass reach.” It’s the Connecticut’s dead reach, the curving, 2-mile, river chasm of ancient shale directly below Turners Falls dam.  It once teemed with migratory life.  Today, flying in the face of federal law, environmental statute and license requirements, this critical river segment goes largely ignored and unregulated–unchallenged in the courts by public agencies and environmental interests.

The “dead reach” is subject, alternately, to withering, water-starved days when flows are cut to a trickle beneath FirstLight’s gates—or, to punishing, quick-changing flood tides there, pushed downstream from their nearby Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage plant.  Giant surges of water pulse into the river through turbines beneath its 5.6 billion gallon mountain reservoir to take advantage of price spikes on the energy “spot” market.  It wreaks havoc with fish and the river.  Like prior owner Northeast Utilities, GDF-Suez wants to continue its punishing practices below the dam—a crippled trench used by federally-endangered shortnose sturgeon.

Those unchecked operations force most migrants to abandon the river below Turners Falls–tricked out of the channel by out-flow from the power canal downstream, and forced “upstream” into its pummeling flows.  Just a tiny portion of migrants succeed in that industrial “by-pass.”  Stressed, depleted, faced with confused currents and an expanse of muck-filled canal leading to more roiling waters near the powerhouse, the fish simply stop migrating.  Shad and herring surrender their upstream spawning impulse at Turners Falls, languishing for weeks in the wide sections of canal—habitat best suited to carp and pond fish.  Barely three fish in a hundred ever pass toward Vermont-New Hampshire waters.

The solution at Turners Falls is simple: build the long-overdue fish lift at the dam, and return regulated spring flows to the crippled “dead reach.”  That simple solution has been in place at Holyoke dam since 1955–the most successful fish passage on the East Coast.  FirstLight, sanctioned by the EPA for dumping 45,000 cubic square yards of silt pollution into the Connecticut last year, can then use that mid-May-early-June window of low electricity demand for mucking-out their power canal, as well as silt in that mountain reservoir.  They’ll then be in compliance when bids begin on a new license, for 2018.

This is New England’s River; these are New England’s fish.  Biologists agree a lift at the dam with ample water in that riverbed will restore the first a bona fide ocean connection to Vermont and New Hampshire since 1798.  With mega-millions spent on a federal program that produced 51 salmon last year, it’s time both fisheries officials and dam owners got the real job done.  Building that lift makes decades of failure and unfulfilled obligations a thing of the past.

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Environmental journalist and award-winning children’s author Karl Meyer writes often about the Connecticut River from Greenfield, MA: www.karlmeyerwriting.com

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A RIVER RETROSPECTIVE

Copyright © 2011 by Karl Meyer                                                               January 2011

All Rights Reserved

(This essay, with small edits, appeared in The Recorder and the Rutland Herald in early January.)

The year 2010 echoed the worst of times for New England’s Great River.  Last January 7th, radioactive tritium was found leaking at Entergy’s aging Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, right to the river’s edge.  The plume continues.  As of December 15^th, still-rising tritium levels at wells next to the river registered 495,000 picocuries per liter–25-times the EPA safe drinking water standard.  Yet on November 18th, Entergy halted the groundwater extraction that slowed the radionuclide flow to the river.

May 3, 2010, witnessed Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage’s massive failure in what should have been routine maintenance.  They had not removed the sediments from their huge reservoir since 1990.  In this disaster giant turbines and the mile-long tunnel to the river were cemented shut by slumped, hardening sediment.  Owner FirstLight/GDF Suez began quietly shoveling the stuff into the river.  Daily, for 3 months, the equivalent of 40 – 50 dump truck loads of sediment poured in—up to 45,000 cubic square yards by its own estimate.

EPA counsel Michael Wagner says that on June 23^rd a boater’s tip noting “a very visible plume of turbid water coming from the area of the Northfield Mountain facility” arrived at its Office of Ecosystem Protection.  EPA’s initial inspection wasn’t until July 15^th–with a “cease and desist” order not coming until August 4^th for Clean Water Act violations “in the navigable waters of the United States.”  Only 1/3 of the pollution was retrieved; 30,000 cubic square yards were simply flushed away–an oxygen- and-light-robbing assault on the fish, amphibians and myriad invertebrates that are the life of a river.  FirstLight was not fined.

For seven months, silt-choked Northfield produced not a watt of electricity; yet there was no hint of an energy shortage.  It begs the question: how critical, and of what value to the public are these power plants–as they abuse the letter and spirit of federal licenses and environmental laws in profiting from the public’s river?  In the 1950s the Connecticut was famously dubbed “the most beautifully landscaped sewer in America.”  Industry used it as a latrine; agencies and officials ignored it.  The 50s seem to be creeping back.

A further example: a decade back, the already-dismal annual fish passage success for hundreds of thousands of American shad reaching Turners Falls began to hover around 1%–as close to a 1950’s dead-at-the-dam-run as you get.  That began in 1999, when electricity deregulation came to the 7 miles of river comprising the Northfield Mountain/Turners Falls hydro-complex, and Northfield ramped-up its up-and-down manipulation of flows and river levels to profit from short-term energy price spikes.  The rapid fluctuations are experienced acutely at Turners Falls, as the shad attempt to pass upstream.

Last May, without foresight or pointed experimentation from the $12 million federal Conte Fish Lab in Turners, or the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC)–the 40 year old state/federal fisheries partnership charged with protecting migratory shad, Northfield inadvertently created its own science experiment by shutting down for 29 weeks.  Some 16,768 shad–the most since 1995, passed Turners dam–an 800% –1,000% increase over the decade’s annual averages.

Those counts, made by Greenfield Community College with FirstLight funding, are suspect and likely low.  Counting equipment crashed on 17 different days at the dam’s “spillway ladder”–the one shad negotiate most effectively.  It’s accessed only when rare, ample flows are released at the dam to the river’s natural bed.  Shad will then by-pass a treacherous ladder two miles south at the canal, and swim directly upriver to the dam.  Shad surged there following a May 27^th deluge.  Sadly, 7 more days of data was lost when “gatehouse” counting equipment failed.  Turners “daily” fish counts were AWOL for nearly a month.  Yet even with broken data the impacts of Northfield-Turners flows–long-ignored in lieu of Conte and CRASC’s failed $500-million salmon restoration (51 fish this year), come into stark relief.

It’s 2011, not 1950.  Yet the year’s best river science arose from a giant mistake—and some of its best protection resulted from a citizen picking up a phone.  It’s time for an all-new fisheries commission–and for Northfield-Turners hydro owners to build the fish lift the public’s been owed there for over a decade.  Vermont Yankee’s record speaks for itself: it’s time to shut down.

Greenfield, MA writer and author Karl Meyer writes frequently about the Connecticut River. He followed the shad run by bicycle from Long Island Sound to Bellows Falls, VT, last spring.

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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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