Today I had my first experience at the fish elevator at the Holyoke Dam in Holyoke, MA.
I have lived in Western MA my whole life and somehow missed out on this curiosity until today.
At the Hadley Falls in Holyoke Ma the annual migration of anadromous fish is no small affair. A visit to the website explains the technical aspects.
I stood watching the fish through the observation windows with my daughters and I listened to my guide and date explain to us that these fish are swimming up the river to mate and then die. This brutal trip takes them up the rocky Connecticut River where they cease to eat. Eventually they make it to Holyoke, where the dam constructed in 1849 prevented them from migrating. The once plentiful shad and salmon of the river valley were extinct to this region until the first fish lift was built at the Holyoke Dam in 1955.
After watching the complicated process that ushers the fish into the elevator and seeing them deposited into the tank, we made our way to the viewing windows. There we were met with busy scene encompassing hundreds of shad, one salmon, many lampreys and some tiger striped bass. The shad, in particular, were looking worse for the wear on their journey.
Several seemed bitten, one had almost lost an eye and another had a fish hook hanging from a side gill.
I can’t relate to their ultimate and undeniable goal of mating, but I have swam upstream. I did it for a long time and I think I have a few scars from the hooks and bites along the way.
I am unsure about the nature of these fish or what drives them upstream to fullfil their destiny. But I did get a glimmer about myself during my observations today: I swam upstream HARD for years. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. I made promises and set goals and was determined that I would do things RIGHT.
Well, that didn’t work out much better for me than it does your average salmon (except of course I don’t have to expire), but it did teach me a lot.
As I stood next to this great man watching our children meet for the first time it occurred to me that life doesn’t have to be a constant struggle with unattainable goals at the brink. Life can be spontaneous, sweet and easy:if you let it.
You can swim upstream….I am going to follow the course downstream and guide it the best I can while I let life ebb and flow around me in a beautiful froth.
So, thank you Morriss for sharing today with me…you teach me something new all the time, even when you don’t realize that is what you did.
