When Salmon was King: Voices from the Clyde River – About to Hit the Bookshelves

We were the children of the Skunk Hollow section of Newport, children of struggling yet hardworking parents. None of us was voted most likely to succeed, and I suspect that other people in the community didn’t expect much of us because of where we lived, in a neighborhood that until the turn of the twentieth century was a thriving industrial center.
When I was growing up on Clyde Street in during the 1970s, few of us who lived there had much money so we had to find our own sources of entertainment. We didn’t have to look further than the Clyde River to keep us occupied and entertained, whether it was fishing, swimming, hunting for crawfish, or shooting the rapids in inflated tractor tubes.
Most of us grew up in homes that were originally constructed decades earlier, some during the 1800s by people who worked in the factories and mills of the neighborhood. We were a tight-knit group of kids, and it was a closeness that binds many of us to this day. Some of us still call the hollow home. Others have wandered away, but none of us has wandered very far. My parents, Wayne and Pauline Wheeler, still live there, and I live only three miles away.

We all found our own paths in life. Some dropped out of high school while others graduated from college. Among us today are laborers, business people, tradesmen, teachers, nurses, and some have even whistled the jailhouse blues. I doubt I would have ever become a writer and a Vermont legislator if it wasn’t for the cast of characters that I grew up with in the hollow. It was a great chapter of my life.

It’s unlikely if one looked at a map of Newport that one would find a neighborhood called Skunk Hollow within the Clyde River basin. Since it isn’t found on a map, there are no set boundaries to the hollow but in general it is located in Newport in the natural hollow formed by the Clyde River as it flows sharply downhill from the Clyde Pond in Derby into Newport.

Some people might argue that I am not truly a child of the hollow because I actually grew up halfway up on the high ground overlooking the lowest point of the hollow in a house built in 1826. For many years it served as the Arnolds Mills schoolhouse, a one-room schoolhouse built to accommodate the children of the workers who found employment in the then thriving industrial center of Arnolds Mills. In my heart and mind I am a Skunk Hollow boy.

Many of the young people of the hollow of my generation looked forward to the annual spring migration of walleye. The walleye ran thick, their dorsal fins sometimes jutting out of the fast running water. I believe that most of us realized the importance of leaving these fish alone while they spawned—fish that weighed anywhere from a pound to well over ten pounds. There were others of us, though, that found entertainment in poaching the walleye in an illegal “game” that pitted us against the Fish and Wildlife wardens who patrolled the river, a game that most likely had some long-term impact on the health of the walleye population.

The warden that those of my generation remember the best is Normand Moreau. A chapter about his life and work on the Clyde is included in this book. Although we were once friendly adversaries when I dabbled on the wrong side of the laws governing the walleye runs, I now consider Normand a friend and a man I respect tremendously.
There is not one of us who poached the Clyde that I have spoken to that now doesn’t realize that our illegal actions were wrong. Many of us blame ourselves in playing a role in the demise of the walleye runs, runs that are only a shadow of those of the days of my youth in the 1980s. We certainly weren’t totally to blame for the destruction of the walleye population, but we didn’t help it either.

Life on the Clyde wasn’t without its complaints. As sure as we were of the return of the walleye each spring, or so we thought, there was as just as much certainty that complaints would arise about the river conditions that the walleye and other fish faced. Most of the accusatory fingers were pointed directly at Citizens Utilities, the utility that for decades operated a hydro project, including several dams, on the twenty-five-plus-mile river as it flows from Essex County to the south end of Lake Memphremagog, a lake that stretches about thirty miles from Newport, Vermont, to Magog, Quebec. Much of the anger was focused on the Number 11 dam—a small dam built in 1956 that was blamed for creating a fluctuating water flow in the Newport section of the river.

Some of my earliest memories, beginning in the late 1960s or early 1970s, are of hearing my father and other older residents along Clyde Street complaining that once again the utility had dropped the water so rapidly, and to such an extreme, that fish were left on a dry riverbed. Although I was only seven years old at the time, I remember the nightmare that struck the Clyde on April 30, 1973. The river was dropped so rapidly that hundreds of walleye and other species of fish were left on dry land. I remember going with my father who, in his zeal to save as many of the fish as possible, threw the land bound fish into the water. There were fish everywhere. When my father brought this episode to the attention of Citizens officials he was practically told he didn’t know what he was talking about, the officials essentially insisting that such a nightmare scenario never happened.
Possibly the utility would have avoided wider public scrutiny and been able to get off telling my father and others who lived along the river that they were mistaken, but Roger Cartee’s camera didn’t lie. As an employee of the Newport Daily Express, Cartee captured the story and images of the fish slaughter in photos and words. That episode created in me a lifelong passion for the Clyde. It also helped transform me into a longtime skeptic of the utility. It bothered me to see fish eggs left on dry land, becoming almost a yearly occurrence. To make matters worse, during the heat of summer, the utility used the Number 11 dam to reroute so much of the river water down a short canal bypass that a several hundred yard stretch of the river was sometimes left little more than a dry riverbed. The rocks and bottom of the river were covered with slimy green algae. Fish were rare in this watery summertime wasteland.

The hectic pace of life and a young family took over, and my life slowly turned away from life in Skunk Hollow and away from the Clyde, and away from the walleye runs that continued on a downhill spiral. My attention returned to the Clyde when my sons were able to first hold fishing poles. As my father had done with me, I soon found myself standing on the riverbank with them, and later with their sister, teaching them how to fish and untangling fishing line. It was also a time to teach them to value the entire Clyde River fishery and not one species of fish. They knew at a young age that to have a successful fishery it is important to have diversity.

Many of us who lived on the Clyde, including myself, for decades mumbled to each other that something had to be done before the Clyde was irreversibly destroyed by the fluctuating water flow created by the utility. Then sometime along, the Northeast Kingdom Chapter of Trout Unlimited added its voice, and it certainly was a loud and well-financed one. By the 1990s the mumbles that had rumbled up and down the Clyde for the utility to reform its operating procedures had become an undeniable roar.
Life is an adventure. My adventure carried me into the world of writing. When I was a reporter with the Chronicle in Barton I wrote on a multitude of topics. One of my most interesting assignments was the increasing chorus of those demanding the restoration of the Clyde River fishery. Tempers often flared as people berated Citizens for what they saw as the mismanagement and destruction of the Clyde River fishery. At times these meetings pitted fishermen against fishermen because of opposing philosophies.

Although I felt the utility should do more to balance the need to make electricity with the health of the fishery, I was occasionally a bit perplexed by how sometimes myths, opinions, and revisionist history of the Clyde River were substituted as sound facts. When some people spoke of the history of the Clyde River it was as if they weren’t even talking about the same river I had grown up on. Unfortunately, many of these distortions made it into the media to a far larger audience. These media accounts helped transform some of these myths, opinions, and revisionist history into the history and lore of the river. There is no doubt that the salmon fishing was good in the Clyde during the early half of the twentieth century but in time the salmon, and salmon runs, have taken on almost mythical proportions.

Regretfully I was not without guilt at reporting unsubstantiated facts voiced at these meetings as proven facts. For example, I wrote how people said they yearned for the days when the “native” salmon swam the Clyde River. If I had done a bit of research into the history of the salmon run, I would have felt obligated to note that while it is possible that salmon are native to the lake, there is no solid evidence that this is the case. However, there is concrete evidence that salmon has been stocked in the river since the 1860s, when salmon from Sebago Lake, Maine, was stocked in Island Pond and Salem Lake. Regular stocking took place throughout the decades, mostly in the Newport section of the river.

One thing I have found in researching old newspaper articles for this book is that little is mentioned of the salmon runs in newspapers published before the 1920s. Does this mean that there wasn’t a run sizable enough to mention? Was it during the 1920s that the benefits of an active stocking program finally paid off? Or is it simply that reporters of that earlier period didn’t see the value of reporting the catches of the day from the riverbank and railroad bridge?

One common theory about the salmon runs that a number of the old time fishermen shared with me—but that seldom came up during the heated debates about the future of the river and the utility—was that, in reality, the salmon runs of the early half of the twentieth century were little more than a tourist attraction designed to attract tourists to this northernmost reaches of Vermont. I found a newspaper clipping from the April 26, 1935 issue of the Express and Standard (an excerpt is included in this book) that suggests that, indeed, much of the run was created to attract tourists to northern Vermont. Considering the brutality of the Depression years, if this is the origin of the salmon runs of that period, it’s likely that the idea helped line the pockets of local businessmen after long winters.

By the late 1990s, I took it upon myself to try to better understand the history of the Clyde, not the lore and rhetoric that has transformed the river to mythical proportions. The more facts that I uncovered the more my views on the river mellowed. Instead of secretly wishing for the complete destruction of the utility, I realized that balance was key to the future of the Clyde River fishery—a balance of fish species and a balance in which fish and the utility can not only survive, but thrive.

In an attempt to better understand the story of the Newport section of the Clyde River, the section of the river that became renowned throughout New England, I turned to some of the people who spent much of their lives on the river. This book is a collection of memories, stories, and thoughts of some of those who lived the history of the Clyde. They are not experts, or knowers of all, and memories, some of them decades old, are not always without flaws, as mine are not, but those who lived the history of the Clyde are living time capsules to its history. The book is filled with stories and photos that capture the history and the people of the Clyde.

Hopes are to have the book ready for sale for Christmas. It will sell for $16.95 plus $3.00 shipping and handling delivered anywhere in the United States. Mail checks or money orders to Northland Journal, P.O. Box 812, Derby, Vermont 05829. The book can also be bought on the Journal’s website at www.northlandjournal.com. People with questions can contact me at (802) 334-5920 or at northlandjournal@gmail.com.