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THE HERRING RIVER, WELLFLEET
Millennia
Every spring sleek herring
in the millions swam from salty bay
four miles up the Herring River
to the spring-fed kettle ponds
of their freshwater birth.
Full-grown, finned, they let go
clouds of eggs and fertilizing milt
on the sandy bottoms. Weeks later
silvery small fry wriggled their way
out of the ponds, downriver,
into the bay, out past the Cape’s tip
to the Atlantic Ocean.
Do we know
where the herring go
in that vastness?
1908-1910
The town votes
to dike the Herring River:
for mosquito control, for land reclamation,
for income from tourism they hope.
“All work was completed
on May 24, 1910, the total cost,
including supervision
and incidental expenses,
being $20,548.86.”
The dike reduces the river’s mouth
from 400 feet to 6 feet
virtually ending
the daily flushing of the tides
to 1100 acres of marsh grasses.
Over the next decades:
invasive weeds, shrubs, trees,
sulfuric acid, stagnant waters,
the end to much wildlife,
no end to mosquitoes.
Fewer and fewer herring run
upriver to the ponds,
fewer and fewer each year.
2015 and Beyond: Restoration
Slowly the mouth
will be widened, over years;
effects monitored, analyzed.
Water will flow and overflow
in places it has not been
in over a century.
Will the river
be restored?
Will we ever fish again
at the eastern shore
of Bound Brook Island
below the Atwood-Higgins house,
near the shimmering birches?
Sharon Dunn
Sharon Dunn has just published An Island in Time: Exploring Bound Brook Island, Its Land & People, Its Past & Present
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