Quenop's Vision

The Fish Weir
2500 BC

Quenop sees the high mountain with three rising hills and feels a surge of joy. He watches a flight of geese cross the marshes and mudflats below the hills. Everything is as he remembers, yet he has a presentiment, nothing he can discern then or there. Quenop knows it will be different this year.
 

In spring, Quenop and his family come down from their winter quarters in the Charles River valley to the shores of Massachusetts Bay, where they join other bands of hunter-gatherers on a wooded peninsula at the mouth of the river. Thirty-two-year-old Quenop – “Quiet Hunter” – heads a group of nineteen people, including two brothers and their families. Quenop and his wife, Netami, have three children of their own; their firstborn, Pimokha-suwi, “Stirring About,” is fourteen, as restless as his father is quiet.

The morning after arriving at the headland, Quenop climbs the mountain that provides a vantage point to the far reaches of the great bay. He watches women and girls collect shellfish on a beach below; others harvest blueberries on the hillsides and pluck edible plants from freshwater ponds. Men and boys fish the waters, spearing their catch from canoes. At an outlying island, duck hunters drift between the reeds, flushing out flights of yellowlegs.
 

Quenop’s glance shifts from the bay to the river mouth. In that instant, the sun’s rays slice through the water and catch the backs of a myriad school of shad. Quenop’s eye locks on the silver stream as it rounds the point of the peninsula and curves in toward a deep bay behind the headland.

It’s now that Quenop gets the idea for his fish weir, not a small stone barrier across a stream, but a structure of incredible size erected on the tidal flats. The weir will require no less than 65,000 wooden stakes, trimmed of branches, sharpened and driven into the blue clay bed, all with handmade stone and wooden tools. – In 1913, workers digging a tunnel for the Boylston Street subway in the Back Bay found the first traces of the stakes, buried in mud twenty feet below the modern sea level.


 

Imagining Boston - 1
 
Images: Boston Bay - MWRA; Ancient Fish Weir

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