Swimming to the Top of the Tide Page 2

  We emerged from semidarkness into humid brightness and a sweeping view of the Essex River Basin. It was an hour or two away from low tide, and the water had distilled to a few looping channels. Docks stood at steep angles. We made our way down boulders covered with slippery ocher seaweed, pausing at the water’s edge. When the channel was clear of boat traffic as far as we could see or hear in either direction, we pulled on our fins and slid into the briskly flowing current, entering in real life one of those word problems that were the bane of my adolescence: If a current is moving eastward at a certain rate, and you wish to travel across to the sand flats on the other side, at what angle and velocity must you swim?

  I was stroking hard, aiming west even as I was pulled due east—it felt like a combination of swimming and skidding on ice. Robert’s head appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared in the chop. “Don’t get pulled into the chute,” he yelled, meaning the fifty-foot-deep strait between the tips of Crane and Wingaersheek beaches, where swells were breaking over an offshore sandbar and roiling the channel.

  The fins were a necessity now. Like any lever, they multiplied the unaided force of the human body, allowing me to push against a strong, buckling current that otherwise would have overwhelmed my foot and thigh muscles.

  We just made it into the shallower, gentler current that ran between the back side of Crane—all chalk white sand and heathery swaths of dune grass—and the highwalled east coast of this vast sand flat. We found an inlet and scrambled up, pulling off our fins and tossing them up onto land. As I straightened and stood, my heart was still racing, spots pulsing in my field of vision. To the northeast of Crane Beach lay the distinctively drumlin-shaped Hog Island (also known as Choate Island), blue-green with densely planted Norway spruce. To the west and south, the low, wooded hills of Essex and West Gloucester. The tapered end of Wingaersheek completed the circle.

  We set out, our bare feet meeting hard ribs of sand in places where the tide had receded rapidly, and sinking into soft places where the water had moved more slowly. We loomed over rivulets moving chaotically in different directions. We forded a channel that bisected the bar like a waist-deep Mississippi River.

  We reached the western side of the flats, its California. Conomo Point, a summer colony five miles by road from where we’d parked our car, seemed close enough to swim to. Farther away, between Conomo Point and Hog Island, we could make out a string of small motorboats hauled up on a long, sandy, muddy spit, and men bent over, wielding their clam forks in search of the soft-shell clams (Mya arenaria) that are the signature species of our area. We’d dug them ourselves a few times. Holes and squirting water mean “clams at home,” so that’s where you’d wield your clam fork. Fork still inserted, you’d pull back a slab of mud and remove any embedded clams. But professional clammers break far fewer shells than we do.

  On the rising side of the tide’s bell curve, the boats would be in navigable water again and the clammers would head into town, where they have arrangements with local restaurants and shellfish companies. Unlike the summer people at the Point, when they’re zipping around in their boats, they’re commuting, not pleasure-boating.

  Across the channel, near where we’d started out, something shimmered intermittently—one of Bill Wainwright’s outdoor kinetic sculptures, made of steel, aluminum, and reflective surface coverings. Even far out in the Ipswich Bay you can often make out “Essex Light,” a daytime star uncommonly close to Earth.

  We drove home by way of Concord Street, which threads together the juts and inlets of the coast. On our landward side were West Gloucester’s rugged uplands, once divided into large tracts for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century homesteads and farms.

  But humans had been living in these parts long before the newly incorporated town of Gloucester handed out land grants to the Coffins and Coles and Herricks and Haskells. Genetically modern humans had, in fact, arrived in New England some twelve thousand years ago. It was a pivotal time: The Laurentide glacier was retreating north into Canada, and small groups of spear-hunting nomads roamed what was then still semiarctic tundra, chasing caribou and woolly mammoths. It was the dawn of what we now call the Holocene epoch, that arc of time, continuing into the present, when Homo sapiens began colonizing the planet both by its cultural and technological innovations and by its sheer numbers.

  During the Late Woodland period (between three thousand and five hundred years ago), Cape Ann rejoined the Temperate Zone, and was inhabited by the Algonquin. With Arctic big game long gone, they had become farmers of corn, pumpkins, rye, beans, and squash. They hunted deer and other woodland game; they fished for cod, mackerel, herring, and bass. They dug clams for the meat and used the shells as tools. Saltmarsh hay insulated their houses and fed their livestock. They made arrow shafts, baskets, and other household items from the reeds that grew in brackish zones. In short, they adapted to the contours and materials of a particular bit of coastland at a particular evolutionary moment. Their impact on the land was minimal.

  The first colonists continued the Indians’ subsistence farming, hunting, and fishing out of necessity. Yet they’d brought with them some of the tools and, even more important, the mindset of late-Renaissance England, where agriculture had been boosted by waterpower for centuries. It was not long after the initial settlement of Cape Ann that the colonists began constructing their own water-powered mills. When William Haskell surveyed Walker Creek in the late 1600s, he may have paused to take in its beauty, but it’s fair to assume he mostly saw the creek as a source of food, a means of travel, and a way to harness the energy needed to turn a mill wheel—greatly reducing the effort and multiplying the yield of what one person could do with a mortar and pestle. Upriver, where water flowed down from the West Gloucester hills into the creek, Haskell’s neighbor Henry Walker was running a sawmill, processing the area’s pine and white oak into clapboards, hoops, and staves, as well as the ribs and planking for boats.

  We’d paused on the bridge, engine idling. I caught a whiff of dank marsh mud, a hint of sulphur. Now at dead low tide, Walker Creek was little more than a tea-colored ribbon winding through mud.

  At high tide the neighborhood kids have always cooled off here, leaping off the stub of plank wedged under the bridge railing, getting swept by the current under the bridge to the other side, and then scrambling up the stone embankments to do it all over again.

  To our left was the dock that had belonged to the poet Peter Davison, the gable end of his yellow Georgian Colonial just visible behind a stand of cedar trees. Another car approached up ahead, and we pulled over the bridge to let them by.

  This area has stayed quiet. Small farms here never scaled up much beyond providing for a single household. There was nowhere, really, to expand operations: All the tillable land is squeezed between puzzle pieces of marsh and swamp and ledge. The area was too far from open water to compete with Gloucester proper as a fishing port, or with Essex as a shipbuilding empire. Haskell’s gristmill ground its last corn somewhere around 1860, and Walker’s sawmill ceased operations not long after.

  The railroad from Boston to Gloucester, completed in 1846, brought not only cheaper goods from far away but also tourists to the Cape. In 1852, the first summer-houses appeared at Coffin’s Beach. During the twentieth century, Bostonians built second homes on the water side of Concord Street; tradespeople built year-round houses on the landward side.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, more and more former farmland was subdivided, including some acreage west of Sumner Street, bought in 1940 by one Charles Newman. His son Merrill, known as “Tink,” sold us five acres of that land in 1979. We met and became friends with other couples, all of us baby boomers or a little older. Though we sometimes fished for stripers, dug for clams, and gathered up marsh hay for mulching our gardens, we did not actually need these riches of the marshland ecosystem to survive.

  TIDAL STRAIT

  The next day we were back in the water, possible museum visits and other vacation pla
ns set aside. This time, we stood on the sun-warmed planks of the public dock at Conomo Point, watching pleasure boats putt through the “No Wake” zone. A cabin cruiser pulled up alongside the dock to let out sunburned, sandy passengers. When the lull in boat traffic came, we slid into the turbulent passage between the Point and Cross Island. In the middle of the channel, we were swept into a small whirlpool, a churning ring of current surrounding a flat, smooth oval, the water equivalent of the eye of a hurricane. I yelped, backpedaling, but was swung around like in a game of crack the whip, then shot out on the other side.

  Reaching the shoreline of Cross Island, we made our way against the current by clutching seaweed and barnacle-encrusted rocks. The face of the island was sheer granite, sea-foam green lichen at the top edging into a peachy orange, a horizontal zone above the water most of the time. Then a sooty orange at the mean tide line. At the low-tide line, the rocks were a glistening black, skirted with kelp.

  Half swimming, half crawling, we spotted a great blue heron up ahead on the rocks at the waterline, watching for fish in the current flowing from around the bend in the island. Gunmetal blue with a white head, it stood about three and a half feet tall, its spearlike yellow bill poised downward. We approached slowly, not kicking now, just pulling forward on our elbows, barnacles scraping our palms and forearms. The current combed over the rocks and parted around our bodies.

  Far above the waterline, a banded kingfisher perched on the branch of a dead tree, peering down, waiting for dinner to appear in its crosshairs. It shot up into the air and hurled itself down into the water like a spear, emerging a few seconds later with a small, flapping fish.

  Meanwhile, the heron had not budged. But it had finally noticed us. You can hold a gaze for a long time with a cat or dog, but a wild animal is another story: The animal is always the first to break away. We crawled closer, till we were just a few feet away and could practically count the feathers in the black plumes running from just above its eye to the back of its head. Finally, the heron lifted off and flew away across the channel, a lumbering flight, landing on a pile of rocks on the opposite shore.

  We headed back, borne along with the current. The receding tide had exposed a mussel bed near the dock—dark, dense clusters of them covering the rocks.

  Unlike clams, mussels don’t hide from you. We quickly filled the mesh bag Robert had brought along. Wet mussels are a glistening blue-black, their smooth, slightly pear-shaped shells scored with fine concentric growth lines—like tree rings. They are lovely to hold, a satisfying heft in your palm. Before slipping them in the bag, we tested each one, pressing the shells together; the dead ones full of mud easily slide apart. The largest were about three inches long.

  We were feeling the cold. After nearly an hour, it was time to get out. Even in July, you don’t warm up swimming the way you would if you were running. We reached the dock and heaved ourselves up. Water streaming down his body, Robert plucked up the towels we’d left near our shoes, and tossed me one.

  “I’ve heard you can swim even into the first part of October around here,” he said, drying off his head and putting his glasses back on.

  “We could,” I said, wrapping my towel around my torso, slipping into my flip-flops.

  “Well, I’m not going to be the one to quit.”

  Back home, Robert rinsed the bagful of mussels with the garden hose, then shook them from the bag into our kitchen sink, which I’d filled with water—to give the mussels a chance to filter out sand inside their shells. Rechecking each mussel to make sure it was tightly shut, I tugged off the “beard,” the cluster of threads protruding from the hinge of the shell. The sink water swirled with bits of seaweed and stray barnacles. A fine layer of sand covered the bottom of the sink.

  After pouring an inch of white wine into a heavy pot, Robert transferred the mussels from the sink to the pot and shut the lid. The smell of wine and garlic filled the kitchen.

  I sliced a single large tomato into translucent red wedges, then set the table. Because there are just two of us most of the time, our dinner table is our kitchen island, where we sit on tall stools facing each other. The island’s top is a piece of gray-and-white marble. It makes an attractive matrix for plates, glasses, and candles. Against the backdrop of the marble, with its clouds and swirls and faint lightning bolts, these objects form the stage set on which our dinners are enacted each night. And Robert and I are the human subjects among the ritual objects.

  We feasted on meat that ranged in size from a quarter to a silver dollar; in color, from white to tan to russet. The meat was mild and sweet like scallops, piquant with bits of garlic.

  As we ate and talked, the world outside the kitchen window darkened; candle wax pooled and spilled. The pile of empty shells grew, iridescent with the same substance, nacre, that also coats the outsides of pearls.

  “We could live on these,” Robert said.

  After dinner, I gathered up the shells and dumped them outside in an inconspicuous spot where they would shed their last bits of flesh and, over time, become pure calcium. We would add them to our driveway of crushed shells.

  I had set several mussels aside that were opened up a little too far to be safe to eat. They had a faint pungence that may or may not have signaled decomposition. I have a visceral horror of seeing any creature in the throes of dying, but something made me pry one open. Splayed like a pinned butterfly, it was all glistening sushi colors, the flesh completely filling the shell. The pale orange mantle attached to the edges of each valve cradled the visceral mass, the animal’s soft metabolic region: stomach, lungs, intestine, heart, kidney. The magenta foot lay limp. I felt I wasn’t done looking, so I put it in a small bowl, covered it with water, and left it in an inconspicuous place in the kitchen.

  The next evening we went back to the dive shop and bought gloves. Our hands were scraped from gripping barnacle-covered rocks, and Robert had the additional challenge of arthritis in his hands—it was important that they stay warm. While we were there, we also tried on—and ended up buying—ankle-length, sleeveless “Farmer John” wetsuits, long-sleeve pullover wetsuit tops, and water socks thin enough to easily fit inside our fins.

  My nose remembered the bowl several days later. Grimacing, I poured off the cloudy water, flushed the softly decomposing meat down the toilet, and rinsed the shell. All that was left of the creature was its scaffolding: The sinewy adductor muscles, which had been the shell’s gatekeepers, relaxing to open it and contracting to close it back up. The gasket-like strip lining the outer edge of the shell. A few “beard” threads remained, too. These were the belaying line that the mussel had produced from its byssal gland, and used to lasso itself to rocks, pier pilings, and—because these are (in some sense) relational creatures—a neighborhood of other mussels.

  EBBEN CREEK

  At each rising tide, the Essex River splits into tributaries that meander deep into the uplands of West Gloucester, Essex, and Ipswich. Some untold tonnage of seawater passes in and out of these tidal creeks twice a day, saturating the peaty marshlands, filling them like sponges, working an array of biogeochemical magic. It’s a diffuse, squishy, soggy meeting between land and sea, a leisurely approach that nurtures life in innumerable soft, fecund places—the yin, perhaps, to Halibut Point’s yang. Here the intertidal zone can stretch for miles.

  As anyone who’s ever bought a gym membership knows, it’s one thing to start a practice. Keeping one going takes not just desire but also identifying and confronting the obstacles. I adjusted my work schedule to leave more time in the evenings to swim, and we also swam closer to home. If it was around low tide in the evening, we went to Conomo Point, just two miles away from our front door, where there was always water deep enough for swimming.

  Evening high tides, though, opened up a wonderful opportunity to swim the tidal creeks. Closest to home at the time was Ebben Creek, named for Ebenezer Burnham, a nineteenth-century boatbuilder. It passes under Route 133, a well-traveled state highway. Just off the highwa
y, tourists wait in long lines for fried seafood at Farnham’s (“Famous for Fried Clams”). The view from the picnic tables is a wide swath of the Essex River Basin, with upper Ebben Creek zigzagging picturesquely northeast toward Hog Island. This is the iconic view of the marsh, the view that turns up in Google Earth snapshots and in paintings by local landscape artists attracted by the lush beauty and the strong diagonals.

  The landward side of the creek, on the other hand, doesn’t attract much attention from either artists or the Farnham’s crowd. A few turns and Ebben appears to vanish into a soft, indefinite landscape of marsh edged by woods.

  One August evening, we ventured into the creek’s “B side,” stepping over a steel guardrail onto a sparse lawn. A passing semitrailer downshifted with a tuba-sounding rumble; the smell of fried food mingled with licorice whiffs of hot asphalt. Downhill a few feet more and the land grass gave way to Spartina patens, commonly known as marsh hay. (Spartina alterniflora, marsh cordgrass, is coarser and taller, and grows in the marsh’s lower elevations, often lining the channels.) The incoming current surged and buckled. We were swept out into the choppy, sparkling middle of the channel. Our bodies instinctively took on aspects of animals’ navigation: the powerful back legs of a frog, the torso swivel of a dolphin, the flutter of a fish’s tail.

  The ocean-chilled current carried us a hundred feet or so before it fanned out and began to blend with water that had been heating up all day in the sun. Farnham’s shrank, and the traffic sounds softened, absorbed into the great warm mass of mud, water, and vegetation. The creek herringboned around my outstretched arm, reflecting the saturated blue of the sky, the vertical slashes of grass lining the channel.