It’s August on Nantucket, and to find a place where you will be alone and undisturbed, you need one of two things. You either need a four-wheel drive or a boat. The other Saturday, thanks to a good friend and some borrowed kayaks, we set off from Barrett’s Pier and headed for the Madaket Ditch.
In all the times I have kayaked through the waterway, I have never seen another person unless they are part of our small fleet of plastic kayaks. The channel runs from Hither Creek to Long Pond, and was dug in the 1660s by Nantucket Wampanoags and English settlers.
It was one of the first cooperative projects between the two groups that used to inhabit the then-wild island. The Wampanoags and English worked to dig the ditch, connecting the freshwater pond to the saltwater creek, creating a run for alewives and eels. Alewives live in saltwater and spawn in freshwater. Eels do it the other way around.
It was a hot, windy morning when we set out. A good day for drying clothes. The cormorants seemed to think so, too. The regal birds stretched their wings out long to dry as they perched on two-hundred-pound mooring balls. Over by Madaket Marine, racks of dry stacked boats rose high above the creek, waiting in a different sort of suspended animation.
Bright green cordgrass swayed with the breeze. Emma and I kayaked further along the waterway, under the North Cambridge Street culvert, where every paddle stroke and water ripple echoes across the corrugated steel. On the other side of North Cambridge Street, a series of mosquito control ditches, dug in the 1930s by those employed by the Works Progress Administration radiate out like crop formations. From above, these ditches look like hieroglyphs. Blue muscle cling to the sides of the marsh.
There has been a moratorium on taking alewives for almost twenty years, and during this visit to the ditch, we saw none. The population of American eels is historically low, but we saw a handful of them slithering along the waterway. They permitted our visit, and we hoped all the more not to fall in. Though, I am more afraid of the water quality of the ditch, given its proximity to the Nantucket landfill, than the eels.
The ditch is quiet now, but hundred of years ago it would have been the source of much activity. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would have been like during a spring herring run three hundred years ago. The sounds of work, and the excitement at catching enough fish to sustain two distinct communities.
The Madaket Ditch is perhaps the first engineering project on Nantucket, and the one that has survived the longest. Funny that one of the busiest places on Nantucket hundreds of years ago is now one of the loneliest. Except, that is, for the creatures below the water.
