Mike Syslo motors down a western finger of Tisbury Great Pond in his aging Boston Whaler, pushed by a throaty thirty-horse Evinrude outboard. He’ll beach the Whaler at Long Point Wildlife Refuge on the far side of the pond, and then he’ll start walking. And he’ll keep walking – and walking – most of the perimeter of the pond, which embraces some acres along the southern shores of West Tisbury and Chilmark.
He’s a marine biologist, working for the state Division of Marine Fisheries, and he’s looking for problems – “a swimming pool, a house too close to the shore, a pipe running into the pond from a downspout from a roof, septic systems, a parking lot, a guy putting in a farm right next to the waterfront, over-fertilizing because you want to have the greenest lawn on the pond” – anything that might pour, dump, or leach pollutants such as nitrogen or coliform into any pond that produces even a single edible shellfish on Martha’s Vineyard.
Mike Syslo is neither a busybody nor a trespasser. The walk along the shoreline is a crucial part of his triennial report to the federal government on the health of Tisbury Great Pond, and all the other shellfish-producing ponds on the Island. If the feds don’t like something they see in his report, they can shut down the shellfishing in the pond until the problem is dealt with. For this reason, Syslo is empowered by the state – which actually finances his inspections – to walk (or, where the coastline offers a too tough a slog, boat) wherever he wants along the shoreline. If the pond in front of your home produces harvestable quahogs, bay scallops, or oysters, Syslo can cross your beach, traverse your lawn, walk your deck, look behind your house, and follow your drains from wherever they start to wherever they lead. He may do this whenever he pleases, as often as he pleases.
“A lot of people are absolutely amazed,” says Syslo. “I’ll be walking along the pond, and somebody will say, ‘What are you doing?’ I’ll tell them. ‘Oh, really? Wow. There’s somebody who does that out here?’ They’re totally baffled by that. But that’s the only way it can be done. You can’t just do a fly-by. You can’t just look from one spot: ‘Oh, yeah, that looks okay.’ You’ve got to get out and walk and look at the thing.”
He anchors the Whaler off Crab Creek, a rivulet snaking down from a reedy beach into the pond. Syslo, fifty-two, dressed in a sweatshirt and waders, sloshes ashore with a clipboard and a four-foot dowel. With a magic marker, he has ticked off the inches at one end to measure the openings of pipes draining into the pond. He has wired two thermometers, plus a small basket designed to hold a water-sampling cup, to the other. “Very high-tech,” he says.
At the delta of Crab Creek, the brothy water drifts slowly toward the remnants of a seasonal opening cut into South Beach which, half a mile southward, defends pond from ocean in the narrow, shifting, uncertain ways of a barrier beach. Syslo took note of the falling tide at four o’clock this morning at his Chilmark home. A falling tide flushes creeks and drains, making it easier to see sources of pollution. “I like to do these shoreline surveys in the spring, winter, and fall, because a lot of the vegetation, the leaves, are off the bushes along the shoreline,” he says. “A guy who might have a big swimming pool over there with a four-inch pipe discharging into the pond as he’s draining his pool – it’s easier to spot something like that in the bushes than it is during the summer months when all the leaves are on it.”
God almighty: do people really believe they can get away with an ecological affront like that nowadays? Would anyone who’s paid a trillion dollars for a waterfront home want to do something so abominable to the pond that gives his property so much of its value?
Syslo wants to be charitable. “Most people want to do the right thing,” he says, making his way north along the margin of the Long Point refuge. “Sometimes it’s a matter of education – this is the way you ought to do it. ‘Oh, oh, I didn’t know that. Okay, I’ll do it that way then.’”
At Deep Bottom Cove, he crosses a stretch of beach exposed by the tide, wet and soft, despite the coolness in the air. On the far shore, he uses his boot to unearth from the sand what appears to be a cable television line. He writes it down on his clipboard: “Potential: it’s not a contributing source of a problem. Code: no activity – no animals, dredging, shellfishing, boats in the area, waterfowl, people.” He looks up at the peninsula before him. If the pond looks like a hand, this point divides one finger from another. All he sees is shrub and grassland tumbling down to flat water. “Out here it’s beautiful, just beautiful,” he says. “Some of the stuff off-Island – like Westport, or Fairhaven, or the New Bedford area – it’s a nightmare. This stuff here is pristine, for the most part. There, you can’t walk a hundred feet without finding four or five pipes lying around that you’re concerned about. Nothing much changes down here.”
Syslo came to the Island in 1977. He and his wife Janis have two children – Allyson, seventeen, and Benny, thirteen. He was originally hired to raise and research lobsters full-time at the state lobster hatchery on the Lagoon in Oak Bluffs. He loved the work, but in 2003 it was shut down; it was the last hatchery in the state, and no one could prove that the investment was making much of a difference to the fishery, now in sharp decline. Captive lobsters require that fresh seawater be pumped through their tanks all day, every day. The tanks are dry now, the seawater system silent, the brininess in the hatchery overcome by the smell of Clorox.
“Not hearing the water running is something that you can never get used to,” Syslo says of his life in the office now.
“The downside is yes, it would be great to get the seawater system back running and doing some work with it again. The upside to that is I don’t have alarms going off in my house 24/7.” Whenever the power failed, Syslo had to make a cross-Island dash to fire up the generator. “Unless someone’s ever done it before, it’s impossible to adequately explain what it’s like to be tied in to a year-round seawater system – essentially with what used to be a two-man staff.”
When the hatchery closed, the state Division of Marine Fisheries asked Syslo, a marine biologist, to take over walking all the shellfish-producing ponds on the Island and file the reports – one set every three years and another, even more detailed, every twelve.
He also takes scores of water samples from every productive pond five times a year. He works year-round with town shellfish wardens to make sure all the permitted shellfishing areas are safe and healthy. Before he took on the job, it was done by three mainland biologists. “When I used to see these guys from our Pocasset office come out, I said, ‘What a sweet job! They come out on the ferryboat, forty-five minutes of sitting around, having a soda; they get off, run around with the town shellfish wardens, dunk some bottles, and go back home. This is beautiful!’ Never in my wildest dreams did I have any concept at all of what went into all of that bottle-dunking. The reports, the meetings – I was just flabbergasted, frankly.”
There can be no delay in the filing of a triennial report. With each water-sampling visit to each pond during the course of the year, he gathers data and adds information to the next report. Each trip, he notes how many boats lie at anchor or at piers, the use of boat ramps, the renting of kayaks, the building of houses, the paving of roads, the laying down of parking lots, the appearance of swimming pools, the arrival of horses, even the migrations of waterfowl. Some twenty-five Island ponds require triennial reports. Syslo walks about a third of them each year; eight were due last August alone. Budgets are tight and getting tighter. Syslo is the only man doing this job on the Vineyard now.
The Whaler buzzes west toward Plum Bush Point. Roughly one third of Tisbury Great Pond is open to shellfishing year-round. Another third is open seasonally, after the water cools, killing off the nitrogen that encourages bottom-killing algae blooms. Cool water also knocks down coliform, the bacteria from animal waste that can infect the digestive systems of shellfish, threatening the people who eat them. The Whaler turns and heads north into a shallow finger of the pond, far from any exchange with fresh seawater. No need to walk here. This area is closed all the time. Syslo is an affable man, but here, closer to the main roads, new houses have gone up, and his voice rises over the engine as evidence of man’s handiwork goes by:
“You can see these houses have all been built relatively recently on the left-hand side. Green lawn, green lawn, green lawn. The guy way up on the far right – he’s since passed away – he’s got a little golf course, with a green right down to the waterfront. That’s the type of stuff you go crazy when you see it. But it’s new money, it’s off-Island money, they’re convinced that’s what they’ve got to have – a nice, beautiful expanse of green lawn. Nitrogen, right into the pond.”
The Whaler curves toward a beach overhung with oak and scrub. The outboard quiets, the engine is lifted up, the Whaler grounds at the home of a friend. Syslo ties a clove hitch to a stump and looks back at the pond. “What’s the old saying? We’ve met the enemy, and it’s us. Man’s influence on a lot of these bodies of water – the long-term trend is probably not much for great improvement. And I hate to sound fatalistic like that. We work with the wardens, we try and monitor it, we try and be vigilant at it, we try to nip problems in the bud and rectify it. The Vineyard’s in a terrific situation here. Most of the ponds are in great shape. But it’s hard enough to maintain the status quo, let alone trying to make things better,” Syslo says, then turns and walks up the path to his truck.
