Swimming to the Top of the Tide Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Swimming to the Top of the Tide

  “There is nothing quite so wonderful as slipping into a creek and letting it carry you upstream until the tide imperceptibly turns and carries you back out toward the ocean. It is doubly wonderful to discover someone who describes this experience with such love, lyricism, and scientific curiosity. Let Hanlon be your guide to this world.”

  —William Sargent, author of The House on Ipswich Marsh and Plum Island: 4,000 Years on a Barrier Beach

  “Hanlon, in a year of swimming her way through marshes, across tidal rivers and sculpted granite quarries unique to Cape Ann, observes with a remarkably steady gaze all the world has to offer—the beauty and losses both. In clear, spare prose and fine-tuned observation, she takes you on a journey you won’t soon forget.”

  —Tim Traver, author of Sippewissett: Or, Life on a Salt Marsh and Fly Fishing and Conservation in Vermont

  “In her charming debut … [Hanlon] turns the quotidian details of marriage and family life into a lyrical investigation of ‘something bigger and more complex than oneself.’ … Merging leisurely seaside adventure with ecological sensibilities, Hanlon delivers a lyrical ode to a changing environment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Hanlon] is as skilled at demystifying complex scientific concepts as she is in portraying goldspangled waterline sunsets and muted winter compositions of marsh grasses. The whole is enriched with personal reflections on raising a family, aging, and the changing nature of marriage.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE

  SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE

  Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet

  Patricia Hanlon

  First published in the United States in 2021

  by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  90 Broad Street

  Suite 2100

  New York, NY 10004

  www.blpress.org

  © 2021 by Patricia Hanlon

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hanlon, Patricia, author.

  Title: Swimming to the top of the tide : finding life where land and water meet / Patricia Hanlon.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020035027 (print) | LCCN 2020035028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658870 (paperback) | ISBN 9781942658887 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Salt marsh ecology—New England. | Marsh ecology—Conservation—New England.

  Classification: LCC QH104.5.N4 H36 2021 (print) | LCC QH104.5.N4 (ebook) | DDC 577.690974—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035027

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035028

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  First Edition

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-87-0

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-88-7

  For our children and grandchildren

  We shape the world by living.

  —Jedediah Purdy, After Nature:

  A Politics for the Anthropocene

  CONTENTS

  Land and Sea: An Overture

  PART 1

  Bedrock

  River Basin

  Tidal Strait

  Ebben Creek

  Tidelog

  September

  Biologist

  Cold

  Fall Equinox

  November

  Winter Solstice

  January

  Swimming in Parentheses

  Quarry

  Late Winter

  Spring Equinox

  The Return of Green

  Walking to the Bottom of the Tide

  Full Circle

  PART 2

  Ground Truth

  A Longer View

  Nassau, Again

  Areas of Critical Environmental Concern

  Channels

  Airborne

  Earthbound

  Swimming to the Top of the Tide

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  SWIMMING TO THE TOP OF THE TIDE

  LAND AND SEA: AN OVERTURE

  With our extended family now scattered across five states, my husband, Robert, and I fly more often than we used to. If it’s a daytime flight, we book seats in consecutive rows, so we’re near each other but have our own window seats. If he’s in the seat ahead, I talk to the edge of his face: the back of his ear, a bit of graying hair, the slight curve of an eyelash. If he’s behind me and I’ve gotten absorbed in some reading, I might feel a nudge (or vice versa).

  Look, that nudge says. Something interesting down below.

  Not so long ago, on a cloudless spring day, we flew back to Boston from Tampa. After crossing upper Florida, the plane followed the coast and we had the rare treat of watching a thousand-some miles of continental edge—all the way from Georgia to Massachusetts—scroll by down below like a story.

  Along the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, that story unfolds at a leisurely pace. Rivers flow seaward. The sea, with its twice-daily tides, pushes back. Matter is shaken up and rearranged, but the whole thing stays more or less in balance, sustaining a permanently impermanent coastal band of thresholds facing both ways: watery land and “landy” water.

  North of Charleston, South Carolina, there is a subtle change in the shape of the coastline. It begins to “scallop,” with the pointy parts, the spits and shoals, facing more dramatically seaward. There’s a pronounced swoop from Myrtle Beach to Frying Pan Shoals, in North Carolina, then another one beginning at the sand spit near Harkers Island, where the intertidal zone swells out into the Atlantic like a pregnant belly, forming the combined Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds.

  Another shift occurs near Virginia Beach, where the continental-edge story begins happening on a more epic scale. The interfingerings of land and sea coalesce into much larger “innies” and “outies,” like the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, separated by the Delmarva Peninsula.

  The East Coast turns a corner at the slender barrier spit of Sandy Hook, near the New Jersey–New York state line. This is also where the Laurentide Ice Sheet halted twenty thousand years ago, before beginning its long retreat. From here on up, the coast shows the influence of glacial flow and ebb. The shoreline includes exposed bedrock, deep natural harbors, and large rivers reaching deeper inland. Just past Sandy Hook is the New Jersey–New York Harbor. Unlike the vast salt marshes of the South, the ones here are fewer and farther apart, tucked between rocky coasts and urban hardscape.

  Toward the end of that flight, I must have nodded off, because when Robert nudged me, we’d flown past Boston and were forty miles north of the city, in a holding pattern. At one mile above sea level instead of five, waves now unfurled, boats cut through the water, and cars slid like beads on the highways. While I hadn’t been watching, the view out the window had become much more local—our local, in fact. The plane banked, the porthole briefly framing a thousand-some acres of tidal estuary sheltered by the two barrier beaches we know well, Wingaersheek and Crane.

  For just that instant, it appeared to be its own little planet, perfect, whole, self-evident.

  In the forty-plus years we have lived here and raised a family, we’ve explored these waterways, first in an eighteen-foot sailboat, then a fourteen-foot motorboat, and, later, slender ocean kayaks. But it wasn’t until our three children were grown and had become visitors in our lives that we started regularly swimming the estuary’s creeks and channels. Over the years, our boats had become smaller and smaller, until finally our own bodies—altered slightly with gear—became our main watercraft.

  We made a pact with each other to swim every time we possibly could. After a summer idyll of blue skies and marshes as lush as Kansas cornfields, we swam later and later into the fall, matching the dropped temperatures with heavier wetsuits, boots, and gloves. We took for granted that we’d eventually hit a wall that would stop the swimming until the ocean warmed up again the following year. But as we swam in rain, darkness, and, a few times, slushy water just above freezing, we discovered that walls are relative. Or, as Robert declared one night, stoking the fire, “Walls have doors. Or if you can’t find the door, you can go around it.” Even the coldest and stormiest conditions were navigable with the right gear and the mutual desire to be there. As we sw
am into the winter and then into a spring that was agonizingly long in coming, the practice became what Wendell Berry has called a “journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

  Part 1 of this book is the chronology of a particular year, from July 2008 to the following summer. It’s about exploring the same landscape over and over, noticing more and more about its materials and its creatures, its cycles and patterns and processes. It’s about the vibrant energy of a place where two ecologies blend, jostle, and bring forth new life.

  But prolonged exposure to an estuary also reveals the human interventions that have affected this critically important ecosystem, the disconnects and disruptions. Part 2 is necessarily less linear; it is a citizen-scientist’s attempt to understand—through the lens of my own local environment—something of our current cultural and evolutionary moment, with both its tragedies and its possibilities. It is about how the habit became, as the philosopher David Abram has put it, “a dialogue where the environment puts questions to the organism and the organism, in answering those questions, puts new questions to the environment. The environment, in turn, answers with further questions.”

  A final note: I say “we” a lot here. In part that’s because outdoor swimming is generally a buddy-system sport, especially during New England’s cold months. And fellow travelers can, at times, function as a kind of two-brained, four-eyed observing organism. Much of what I have recorded here exists in a matrix of shared experience, and retains that texture.

  PART 1

  For unless one is “placed” one merely collects sensations as a sightseer, lacking the local knowledge that grounds and measures global knowledge.

  —Gerald W. Schlabach, “The Vow of Stability: A Premodern Way through a Hypermodern World”

  BEDROCK

  You don’t have to look far anywhere on Cape Ann to see granite. You find it in the craggy upthrusts that form the Cape’s high places: Poles Hill, Mount Ann, Red Rock, Thompson Mountain. Along the northeast-facing coast, constant wave action has exposed it and polished it to a lapidary beauty. But in the sparsely populated interior of the Cape, you can actually climb down into granite bedrock by visiting the pits—now beautiful pools—left behind by the quarrying industry.

  Our swimming practice began here, in the Cape’s rocky interior. We were taking a week-long vacation at home, hoping to revisit local places we’d known over the years but mostly, these days, just passed on our way to somewhere else. We were squarely in midlife, with demanding fulltime jobs and children in college.

  Day three was especially hot and humid, and we were on our way to the property of friends of ours, where we have a standing invitation to swim anytime. Harry and Judith live about half a mile inland from the seaside town of Lanesville, up a winding gravel road, and have two small pits on their property.

  We pulled into their driveway and got out, towels slung over our shoulders, both of us in old, infrequently used bathing suits: faded plaid trunks for Robert, a nondescript black tank suit for me. All quiet except for the whistling of the breeze through the scrubby pines, the slap of our sandals on powdery dirt.

  Picture a hundred-foot-long lap pool, but with mineral green water reminiscent of mountain cirque lakes. One side of the pit is formed by a vertical purplish gray granite wall; the other, by a long, very regularly shaped rock pile, which intersects the water at about a forty-five-degree angle. This pit is spring-fed and stays mostly in shadow, so even on a hot summer day, it’s quite cold. There’s no good reason to enter it gradually. Robert had already leaped ahead, and I was close behind, letting out an involuntary shriek as the chill hit my skin.

  I stayed on the sunny strip along the side of the grout pile, the gray-and-white-speckled stones magnified underwater. I reached the end of the quarry and reversed direction. It was colder coming back because we’d stirred up the thin top layer of slightly warmer water. Robert was ahead, floating on his back.

  A few laps later, we got out, shivering even in the ninety-degree heat. We climbed back up the chute to the grassy path that led to the second quarry, a larger one fully exposed to sunlight. It felt like a bathtub, relatively speaking. I swam languid circles, surrounded by the rose- and caramel-colored granite walls. Tiny fish darted in and out of sunny spots in the water. I was in no hurry to get out, but Robert swam a few laps and headed for the shore and the sloping lawn of our friends’ yard.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, drying off, draping his towel over a lawn chair uphill from the pit. He pulled on his shorts, stepped into his shoes, and disappeared onto one of the paths branching out from the quarry into the woods. I knew he’d be flicking stones and snapping overhanging branches from the trail as he went, in order to make an easier way for the next person. This autopilot trail maintenance is as much a part of his gait as the specific swing of his arms.

  Just as I was beginning to think about getting out, I spotted a pair of swim fins that had been tucked into a cleft in the rock. They were torn in a few places and had been patched together with duct tape, but they fit okay. I slipped back into the water and swam to the far end of the quarry, then back again in what seemed like seconds. The fins gave each kick extra length and leverage, like a powerful new body part.

  It had taken me all of a minute to spot the fins, swim to them, slip them on, and experience the results. But hundreds more swims were contained in that intersection of chance and human choice.

  On the way home, we stopped at a dive shop in downtown Gloucester and bought three pairs of fins—two for us and one for Judith, a thank-you gift.

  RIVER BASIN

  A mile north of our friends’ quarries is a rocky jut called Halibut Point, one of many capes within the Cape. Here the intertidal band is narrow, and water meets land confrontationally. Inky waves split against orange granite; whitewater surges in and out of crevasses in the rocks like a washing machine on heavy-duty cycle. The only species that can survive the constant pounding and scouring are the barnacles and snails and starfish, the chitons and anemones and sea urchins. The enormous energy of the waves, powered by the gravitational tug of the Moon and the Earth, never lets up. It’s a dangerous place to swim, a violent place for creatures without shells or suction cups.

  Just a few miles away, though, at Wingaersheek Beach, the intertidal region is gently elongated. It involves the same overall wave force that pushes the breakers at Halibut Point, but here it’s attenuated, softened. That fizzing sound you hear when you are knee-deep in gentle surf, your lungs full of salt air, is millions of small collisions of water against tiny grains of silica, millions of air bubbles bursting in rapid succession. Creatures living in these shallow, sandy waters must be able to swim or burrow, since not a single sand grain stays in one place for very long. The burrowers—the clams and crabs—must also be able to filter-feed, straining the ocean water for plankton and detritus.

  If you walk to the northern tip of Wingaersheek—several miles from the public entrance to the private end of the beach—you will see the tip of Crane Beach up ahead. These two barrier beaches come within a few hundred feet of each other, creating a deep channel, or “hole,” where an enormous volume of seawater flows in and out of the Essex River Basin twice each day. The watery boundaries of three towns—Gloucester, Essex, and Ipswich—converge here in what is often called the Essex Bay, but the more geographically accurate name is the Essex River Basin. At high tide it does look like a bay, but at low tide the sandbars and sand flats turn into islands, and the river’s path through the basin is clear.

  The day after the quarry swim, we headed down a private drive off Concord Street in West Gloucester. It was a bumpy ride on a single-lane gravel road edged by cedar, scrubby red pine, and dramatic outcroppings of granite. The road forked like a bird’s foot, each toe leading to a different promontory of land. We followed the middle fork, which led to a parking area in a shadowy glade of cedar trees. One of the perks of living in the same place for decades is that you gain an encyclopedic knowledge of where you can trespass and where you can’t.