Taking Stock of a Downeast River

Five degrees above zero and the wind peels northwest. Sky and river both black dark. Headlights shine in the small parking lot. The wind howls, rocks the truck. Out there in the headlight shine lies a slick mud bank and a river of churning brown water.

Bobby Beal’s at the wheel. He’s a local clam digger and lobster fisherman and tuna fisherman; a hunter and trapper and taxidermist and registered Maine guide.
If there’s an animal that needs to be tracked, caught, trained, tamed, saved, or killed, Bobby is the man to do it.

With him is Dwayne Shaw, the executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation (DSF), a grassroots conservation group that he’s headed since its inception in the early 1980s. A mix of mountain man, fisherman, redneck, hippie, and environmentalist, Dwayne may very well know more about the waterways that lace the coast of Maine between Bar Harbor and Canada than anyone.

“Cold out there,” Bobby says.

The heater’s on full blast and inside the truck has to be over 90 degrees.

Dwayne laughs. “But it’s a good smelt tide,” he says.

I lean back in the truck seat, watch the water roll by, the streaks of wind flipping wrinkles of wave and skating piles of dark foam across the water and mud, both. The arm of the river in front of us—the West Branch of the Pleasant River—is dammed by a clapper that allows water to exit but not enter, thus destroying what was once a tidal estuary teeming with life. Not good, Dwayne says, for smelt, and he and the Downeast Salmon Federation have been lobbying for years to remove the clappers, but thus far to no avail.

The main branch of the Pleasant lies to the east, an exposed corridor sided by long stretches of treeless marshlands that flood with the full and new moon tides.   

It’s dark now, and we can see little of the river, only feel the wind that howls over the icy marshlands, the water riotous, the waves bristling and breaking.

We untie the boat and flip it to the ground before the wind can take it. Bobby and I drag it over the riprap and down the smooth, hard mud. It’s half tide, and the seawater presses upward against the river fall.

We load anchors and gillnets into the canoe. Dwayne hands a spotlight to Bobby and says, “Don’t forget to rescue us if we flip.”

A streetlight glows on the few homes that make up the current village of Addison, just across the West Branch from the parking lot. At the light’s edge, the derelict shape of what was once the town’s clam shucking house looms atop the mud bank, sided by ages of clamshell midden.

We nose against the tide. Dwayne drops an anchor and begins working the net out as we back. When the net goes tight, he drops the second anchor and buoy. We do this two more times, laying out all three gillnets with the current, an anchor and buoy marking each end of each net so that if you were to see them from above it would look like the raking of a three-toed claw.

Several miles up the main branch of the Pleasant River stands the town of Columbia Falls, and the head-of-tide pool into which the namesake waterfall tumbles. The pool is circular, roughly a half-mile across; the wedding place of fresh and salt water. Above the pool and falls, the Pleasant River runs fresh and brown with tannins, an artery pumping out of a sprawling heath watershed of oak and red maple; below lies salt marsh and tidal waters and ocean.

There was once a small hydroelectric dam blocking the waterfall, but the dam is gone and all that remains are remnant fractions of concrete, the failed fish ladder, and the building that now houses a portion of the Downeast Salmon Federation’s facilities, including its former salmon hatchery. A state of the art facility in nearby East Machias holds the DSF’s new, high-tech hatchery, together with a host of additional offices.

Since the DSF began in 1982, it’s grown from three dedicated people trying to lend voice to Downeast Maine’s struggling Atlantic salmon population into a thriving network of a dozen full-time employees and a host of volunteers and communities fighting for rivers and salmon and public lands; and the DSF’s fight has gone well, with nearly 3,000 acres of waterfront land and 23 miles of streams and rivers conserved—not bad for a small town, grassroots group operating in one of the poorest counties in the nation.

The truck idles. The heater blasts. Bobby turns to Dwayne and says, “Think we’ll catch any smelt?”

Dwayne rubs his beard, doesn’t answer.

Finding out where the smelt run is exactly what Dwayne’s been doing, and what Bobby and I have been helping with. The Pleasant River is home to the last commercial smelt gill-net fishery on the eastern seaboard, and that fishery takes place exclusively in the head-of-tide pool just below the old hatchery and clock tower. In the lee of the colonial homes of Columbia Falls, a row of small tarpaper fish shacks hugs the pool’s eastern shore, each with a small, crude deck and a similarly crude wood stove. The shacks have been there for generations, and have been used each spring by the last of the smelt fishermen—a school principal, an oil truck driver, a disabled war veteran gone poacher, a man dying of cancer who could barely walk or talk but nevertheless maintained his nightly smelt vigil.

It’s a nocturnal fishery, and the tides have to provide a high tide in the dark of night. The nets are set on the rising tide in order to fish through the high water, then they’re hauled on the outgoing tide. When the tide is right, the fishermen pile their nets into their skiffs and drag the skiffs down the gravel to the water’s edge, row out and set the nets in the pool, then return to their smelt shacks to talk and nap, drink and smoke, until it’s time to haul the nets back up.

The tide creeps up the gravel banks, floats the skiffs that lie tethered to trees or posts, laps at the shacks’ decks and front steps, nearly floods floors on a full or new moon tide, then recedes. A couple hours after high water, the fishermen stand from their wood stoves, bundle into warm clothing, and again row out into the darkness, the clock tower shining above them, to haul the nets that are hopefully stuffed with shining and flipping rainbow smelt.

Why the Pleasant River is such a viable, healthy smelt fishery—with neighboring rivers not producing anywhere near the numbers—is about the pool that’s been created by the falls, and about the tide that comes flushing in twice a day, its nutrient-rich currents meeting the river’s own nutrient-rich currents; it’s about the salt and tannic waters mingling, swirling, stirring.

Unlike surrounding rivers, the Pleasant River’s head-of-tide pool has a gravel bottom on which the female smelt drop their roe; they’re the first round of smelt that the fishermen see, followed soon after by the males, heavy with the milt that’s released onto the eggs. Each spring, the pool becomes a frenzy of reproduction; the currents mix the eggs and sperm as if in a great cauldron, and the fertilized eggs drop to the gravel bottom—as opposed to the ubiquitous mud and clay bottom found in neighboring rivers—protected between individual rocks.

Sewell’s stories were glimpses at the history, the culture of the river, the interaction of the people and the waterway, good and bad, and Dwayne listened. He cared. Cared about the fish and the river and the people along the river.

In 2004, other regions on the eastern seaboard realized population declines or even river-wide extinctions (mostly caused by the perpetuation of dams with inadequate fish passage), inciting the National Marine Fisheries Service to list the anadromous rainbow smelt as a species of concern, and the Maine Department of Marine Resources decided to shut down the commercial gillnet smelt fishery.

Few would have noticed the closure; it’s a small, isolated, quiet, fiscally worthless fishery. But Dwayne noticed. He cared about the fish and about the culture surrounding the fishery, and since scientific understanding of rainbow smelt and their habitat was lacking, he offered to work with the DMR to find out if—as he believed—the Pleasant River’s anadromous rainbow smelt fishery was indeed viable. In addition, DSF would work with DMR to develop a framework for ongoing management and conservation.

Although DSF would be the major facilitator of the smelt research, the small group already had its hands full and a budget strapped by its conservation projects. So Dwayne used mostly his own time—and that of volunteers like Bobby Beal—to collect the data. And that time came in late nights, eating gas station food, driving river to river along Downeast Maine’s unlit byways with a canoe and a truck bed full of smelt nets; headlamp scrambles down riprap river banks and bridge abutments when everyone else was home in bed; early mornings sampling fish, eating cold pizza, and drinking to-go coffee, logging data, evermore data.     

From 2012 to 2018, Dwayne and DSF worked with DMR to survey 90 coastal rivers and streams in Washington and Hancock counties, and Dwayne canoed his gillnets into many of those waterways to learn first-hand what numbers of smelt were moving upstream, thus proving to the state that the Pleasant River was in fact an anomaly, that it could support the small-scale localized commercial fishing that it received.

The idea, if unspoken, was that the perpetuation of the culture that appeared to have no young recruitment was worth the hundreds of pounds of smelt that were landed each year—a drop in the bucket compared to the biomass the river supported.

Ironically, the local Pleasant River fishermen Dwayne was trying to help were his largest critics; not only was he trying to prove to the state that these guys weren’t hurting the river and the fishery, he was trying to prove to these guys that he wasn’t the one at fault for the regulations they were facing. To many of them, a scientist was a scientist, be he or she federal, state, or local.

The DSF, its small office building looming above their smelt shacks, represented science and regulation and change, a breach in the way things had always been done. No matter that Dwayne, with his thick beard and calloused hands and working-man’s frame, looked like any one of them; never mind that he’d sat night after night, year after year, in their smelt shacks, drinking beer and listening to stories; never mind that he’d accepted them, accepted their tales of poaching and misconduct; never mind that he was, literally, the only thing standing between the fishery they loved and the guillotine regulations that were headed their way.