The Founding Fish by John McPhee

with community waste, spiked with industrial toxins. Square-rigged ships once came up into the fresh Kennebec to carry its pure ice down the east coasts of both Americas and around Cape Horn to San Francisco, and even across the Pacific, but by the nineteen-forties and fifties the Kennebec had developed such a chronic reek that windows in unairconditioned offices in the Capitol of Maine—six hundred yards from the river—were kept tight shut in summer. After the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Kennebec, like so many American rivers, steadily and enduringly cleared, and the scene was set for the dam destruction of 1999 and the restoration of this part of the river.
    We looked down through clear water, color of pale tea, at a variously rocky and gravelly bottom. In Maritime Canada, I had recently fished over a scene like that in a place locally known as the Shad Bar. Shad like to spawn over that kind of riverbed. In this river, 1837 was not a good year for anadromous fish. Something like a million American shad came up the Kennebec before the dam at Augusta stopped them. Immemorially, the Kennebecs themselves speared Atlantic salmon below falls upriver. The fish ladder at the Augusta dam may have helped to some extent, but it disappeared in a flood in 1838, not to be replaced.
    We saw and heard three crows charily screaming at a redtailed hawk—a sedentary drama enacted in a dying tree. A spotted sandpiper watched as well, from a newly dried rock in the fallen stream. Like a scale model of the Yukon River, the Kennebec was unfolding before us not in multiple twists and turns but in sizable
segments, long reaches—a bend, a mile here, another bend, two miles there. They quickly added up to Six-Mile Falls, a rapid that was covered over by the rising impoundment in 1837, and until just a few days ago had been an engulfed series of bedrock ledges under the still-water pool. In 1826, the United States Engineer Department surveyed the Kennebec River and mapped Six-Mile Falls, so named because they were six miles downstream from Ticonic Falls, at Waterville. The engineers’ report (1828) would preserve that name, if nothing else, while the surf-like sound and the roil of white water were taken away for a hundred and sixty-two years. Six-Mile Falls, the army engineers reported, were “three ledges of rock forming three distinct pitches.” Downriver, we heard them now—that sound of gravel pouring on a tin drum. You don’t need Sockdolager, the Upset Rapid, or Snake River Canyon to pick you up with that sound. Any riffle, let alone a small rapid, will do. I can feel adrenaline when I fill a glass of water.
    Six-Mile Falls was a white riverscape of rock and plunge pools, small souse holes, tightly coiled eddies, and noisy, staired cascades. As we approached, we had to stand up and look for the thread of the river. The place was making scenery lifted from the dead. For six, seven, eight generations, it had been as withdrawn from the world as Debussy’s cathédrale engloutie , but now, as in the time long gone, it was making its own music. Its higher rock, in broad, flat segments, was covered with filamentous algae, which under water have the look of long grass, combed straight by current. These algae were in thick brown mats, opened to the sky by the breaching of the dam and on their way to removal by the wind. We picked what seemed to be the most promising chute. The canoe slipped through it. We spun around and hung in an eddy. From riverbank to riverbank, water was falling in a hundred different ways. The truly moving fact that this scene, now restored, had been occluded for so much historic time was in an instant wiped
from my mind by an even more stirring thought. Migrating fish “bag up” at the base of any rapid. You could be here during the spring migration and catch the milling shad.
    From the bateaux of Colonel Benedict Arnold, coming up the Kennebec River, these impeding ledges of