Swimming to the Top of the Tide Read online

  We floated past the backyard of a small raised ranch house, where a woman (too far up to see us) paused for a moment behind a push mower. After that, we passed a 1970s A-frame with a satellite dish. One more house, its backyard deck barely visible through cedar trees, and then it was just the creek snaking through fields.

  Snaking is the operative word for how a tidal creek cuts through a flat land at sea level, veering around obstacles rather than over them. Swimming these meanderings, we retraced the geological history of sediment deposited and worn away with the twice-daily tides.

  Another sharp turn brought us to a grassy promontory and a fifty-foot-tall oak tree.

  “Red-tailed hawk,” Robert said, pointing to a broad-winged bulk on a branch near the top. Not far from the hawk, a turkey vulture was circling.

  “They’re watching us,” I said.

  “We must be moving too slowly to look healthy.”

  We rounded increasingly circuitous bends. Turning a corner, we surprised a cormorant, which immediately dove beneath the water to avoid us. Two bends later, like bulls in this ecological china shop, we disturbed the peace of two white egrets.

  We were floating barely forward, watching the flecks of marsh grass and air bubbles on the water’s surface slow down and finally pause. All but the top foot or so of the marsh grass was flooded. The stillness pulsed with life sounds normally too faint to hear: the beating of birds’ wings, the drowsy hum of a jet, the slight tinnitus that has been with me as long as I can remember, a mind event that skates the edge between real and unreal.

  Some time later—three minutes? seven?—a single air bubble drifted past my nose, seaward. My suspended body began floating seaward, too. I flicked a fin, swiveled onto my front again. Robert, too. Our bodies grazed.

  (A lot can be said about marriage, but fundamentally it has to do with two human bodies in close proximity over many years. From time to time as you’re borne along, you catch and hold a gaze, regarding each other from a foot away, twenty feet, an inch or less. Years ago, when we were courting, testing out the edges between friendship and romance, I could not hold the gaze for long. It was too soon. There was not enough “there” yet between us.)

  As we retraced the creek’s hairpin turns and bow bends, the water level dropped, the change barely perceptible at first, then revealing a bit of glistening waterline on the cordgrass. More and more of the grass resurfaced, along with the tops of the creek’s mud walls, exposing their erosion-formed juts and hollows.

  Around another bend, the Farnham’s sign reappeared.

  Back at the bridge, we pulled off our fins in the water, tossing them up on the shore. We hoisted ourselves up onto wet rocks, watching for slippery spots as we clambered up out of meandering geological time and back into cars streaking by and people crossing the street and an amplified voice calling out an order ready for pickup: “Sixty-two! Sixty-two!”

  In the hour we’d been in the water, the tide had dropped half a foot. The customers and cars that were at Farnham’s when we set out had been replaced with new ones.

  The power lines buzzed faintly, an electromagnetic phenomenon called “corona discharge.” My heartbeat pinged in my ears. It is a fact that the human circulatory system looks strikingly like an aerial view of an estuary’s branching channels and countless tiny capillaries. We had, in fact, traveled down one such tiny capillary, toward the farthest and subtlest instances of land meeting sea.

  TIDELOG

  The arc of daylight shrinks by about one-third from the summer solstice to the fall equinox. On the first of September, sunset had been at 7:17, dark at 8:20. By the end of the month, the sun would set at 6:26, and darkness would fall at 7:27. Even in early September, we’d have only a small window of time after I arrived home from work—usually by 5:30—and before dark. But that window would shrink even further as the month progressed.

  I knew all of this because of the Tidelog Robert uses as his date book. It shows not just high and low tides but also sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. All of that information is available elsewhere, but the Tidelog provides it all in a snapshot: two bell curves for each day, representing the swell and fall of the tide, one slightly larger than the other, like two uneven breasts. Sometimes the tallest tide was the earlier one, sometimes the later.

  I liked thumbing through it like a flip-book, watching the slow swell from neap to superhigh full-moon tides, which in our area can reach twelve and a half feet above the mean low tide level. I learned to read a steep curve as more water than usual moving in and out of the bay in the same amount of time. That meant a stronger than normal current, and barely a pause between incoming and outgoing tides. A less steep curve, on the other hand, represented a more leisurely pace, a longer pause at the top of the tide. These are all things you want to know in great detail if you are actually down in the tides, and wanting to “go with the flow” as much as possible.

  I also liked fast-forwarding into the fall and winter: same pattern of tides, but a shrinking arc of daylight, and plummeting water and air temperatures. There was the sense of things both known and unknown, of human events intersecting with celestial ones. How many more of these tides were we going to swim? That was the question that kept me flipping pages as if it were a novel.

  SEPTEMBER

  Labor Day was windy and only in the low seventies, and the Essex River Basin was flecked with whitecaps. Our oldest son, Jim, had brought his wife, Susan, home for the long weekend and rented a small motorboat so he could take her on a tour of the local waterways. Susan is from New Orleans, the youngest of six children in a family that has lived there for generations. They picked up Robert and me at the end of Water Street, just a short walk from where we live, and we all sped off into a blue that seemed to have shifted just slightly toward navy, a hint of the end of summer.

  We hauled the boat up and stopped for lunch near Twopenny Loaf—the thumb of beach at the inland side of Wingaersheek—and afterward swam the sparkling, churning waters, though we mostly just got tossed around by a swirl of opposing currents.

  Afterward, wrapped in towels, Susan and I sat on a dune and talked about the crawfish boil she was planning for us for dinner. She’d had ten pounds of the creatures FedExed from Louisiana in an insulated, gelcooled container, and they were waiting for us in the fridge back home. They would be boiled in our twenty-gallon lobster pot, along with corn on the cob, red potatoes, andouille sausage, and a spice brew of cayenne, dill weed, paprika, clove, and coriander.

  It would be a communal meal, she explained. No need to set the table except to cover it with some newspaper: After draining, we’d just dump the contents of the pot onto the middle of the table.

  As we talked, I searched out the sand’s warmth with my fingers and toes. The tide was creeping back in, shrinking the beaches and swallowing up the sand flats. Sailboats tacked into the wind. Cruising boats were anchored in a row along the back side of Crane Beach, a temporary neighborhood. A flotilla of kayaks headed for the beach. Gulls dove down for the flotsam of our lunch: curls of bread crust, potato chip bits. Face turned to the sun, I breathed in salt mist.

  But then a Jet Ski came buzzing out of nowhere, a red-and-yellow juggernaut veering close to shore and then swerving away, a rooster tail of spray flung out behind it like fireworks.

  It must have felt so perfectly, perfectly glorious to the rider.

  A week later, it was dead low tide in the evening, and so it was a Conomo Point swim. As we sat on the dock, pulling on our fins and gloves, Robert noticed several 747s overhead, more large planes than usual, circling slowly like the turkey vultures that routinely scouted the marsh for carrion.

  “Sometimes there are a lot of them when there’s a prevailing wind in a certain direction,” he said. “The air-traffic controllers send all the planes coming in from the west up our way, northeast of Logan, so they can turn around and land against the southeast wind.”

  It wasn’t until we were back from swimming and eating dinner that we remembered it was September 11, the seventh anniversary of a day when there’d been plenty of birds in the sky but no planes, not for the rest of that day or for three days afterward. It had been an almost preternaturally beautiful late-summer day, the wrong kind of day for a disaster. Our daughter, Mary, was living a few blocks up from Ground Zero at the time; she’d just moved to Manhattan the week before. Jim worked in the Hancock Building in Boston. After we’d heard from both of them, we remembered to call David, still in high school, to let him know his siblings were okay.

  I was supposed to go to my twenty-fifth high school reunion out in Southern California and had tickets for American Airlines Flight 11, Boston to L.A., a week later. I never went, partly because I couldn’t imagine flying ever again, but also because the flight no longer existed. I’ve told this story many times to other people and heard their stories of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news about the World Trade Center attack.

  “Every one of us occupies a portion of space,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in The Sabbath. “He takes it up exclusively. The portion of space which my body occupies is taken up by myself in exclusion of anyone else. Yet no one possesses time. There is no moment which I possess exclusively. This very moment belongs to all living men as it belongs to me.”

  BIOLOGIST

  “Swimming in them? Really?”

  It was mid September, and I was telling a friend about Robert’s and my obsession with swimming the saltwater creeks. We were having lunch at Panera, catching up.

  “Not at low tide,” I clarified. “At high tide, it’s like this long, looping lap pool.”

  “Cool.” Dorothy Boorse is a biology professor and textbook author whose research specialty is wetlands and invasive species. She has spoken in ven
ues ranging from her classrooms to town halls to the halls of the U.S. Congress. But no matter where she is, she’s street theater, a scientist with a wide-eyed urgency about getting people outdoors so that they’re in a position to care about the places where they live, move, and where they exist. From time to time in a conversation, she will pause, tilting her head ever so slightly, scanning around for the part of the big picture that might best connect with this particular human.

  “Edge ecologies are so important,” she said. “Things happen there that don’t happen anywhere else.”

  And just like that, she had found my soft spot. Maybe she’d pegged me as an edgy creature, a boundary stalker. I’d been an odd kid, drawn instinctively to any of the world’s hinterlands that were available to me: the barranca that ran like a jagged gash behind our upscale subdivision in Southern California; the quiet, hot middles of lemon orchards; the outfield of softball games, where I rarely had to chase a ball, and where I could pay attention to crabgrass and anthills.

  “Salt marshes are particularly rich ecotones,” Dorothy was saying. “Eco- is from the Greek oikos, for ‘household’; tonos means ‘tension.’ Two ‘households’ in a fertile sort of tension.”

  Because the Spartina species (and a few other plants) are adapted to handle twice-daily immersion in salt water, she explained, they dominate the coastal marshes. Each year, marshlands convert enormous amounts of solar energy into grass, and although few creatures directly eat the grass, as it decomposes it becomes a vast, nutrient-rich environment for bacteria, algae, and fungi. These organisms, in turn, are food for snails, shrimp, oysters, clams, and hermit crabs—and so on up the food chain to muskrats and foxes and humans.

  “More than two thirds of marine fish start their lives in estuaries,” she said. “They wouldn’t exist without this environment as a nursery.”

  Even aside from its roles as feeder and protector of species, she went on, this thick peat bed was also unequaled as a kind of continental front bumper, a shock-absorbing barrier to storm surge.

  “Levees and seawalls are our human attempts at the same thing, but they’re nowhere near as effective as healthy marshes. Katrina, in 2005, for example. That was much more severe than it would have been if Louisiana hadn’t lost so much of its wetlands.”

  In Louisiana, nearly two thousand square miles of wetland habitat had been lost, mostly because of human activity, to the Gulf of Mexico between 1932 and 2000. Adding insult to injury, Katrina had destroyed many more thousands of acres of wetlands after the fact. Though Louisiana was the canary in the coal mine, wetland loss there mirrored a more general loss nationwide: Only half of the nation’s original salt marshes still exist.

  “Here’s the thing: Marshes perform ‘ecosystem services’ that are impossible, or at least unfathomably expensive, to re-create with technology,” Dorothy said. “Plus, at least forty percent of the world’s economy and eighty percent of the needs of the poor come from biological resources. With climate change and sea-level rise, we’ll need these resources more than ever—but we continue to lose them. Later on, we’ll wish we’d treated them better.”

  In nearly an hour, neither of us had made much of a dent in our salads. As we waited for containers to take our leftovers home in, she started to tell me about carbon sequestration, but she must have read something in my gaze that meant incomprehension.

  “We’ll talk more,” she said. We both had things we needed to get back to.

  I have mentioned conditions for keeping a practice going—removing obstacles, having a buddy, and so on—but my conversation with Dorothy that day provided the most important one: What you are doing needs to matter, to connect with your sense of the work you have been born into the world to do.

  At night I burrow against Robert as he drifts off to sleep (he is usually first to go). In the early years of our relationship, when our bodies were younger and more nearly perfect, I needed to be alone—not touching Robert or being touched—when it was time to fall asleep. Now we sleep stuck together, front to back, and if we’ve drifted apart during the night I’ll seek out some skin like a swimmer heading for land.

  (A lot has happened between us over the years: intimacy, fertility, and, occasionally, alienation and a sense of the ultimate unknowability of the other. There will always be the shadow side, the places in the psyche too private or inaccessible to share.)

  We dream. This is categorical: All humans do it, along with—apparently—all mammals, and some birds. I don’t recall my dreams whole, but am left with a kind of afterimage, something barely perceptible and highly specific at the same time. Some of these after-images persist for years, a substrate to my life I know little about. It’s just out of reach as I get out of bed and feel about with my feet and hands for the pile of clothing I wear early in the morning—dark sweatpants, dark T-shirt or turtleneck, socks, and slippers. This is my early-morning persona: fuzzy around the edges, but alert and ready for (interior) action.

  Whichever of us is awake first in the morning starts the coffee. While it brews, we head in opposite directions to our studios. Mine is an attic on the third floor of our house, its large skylight facing the gable-end window of Robert’s studio, which occupies the second floor of the barn adjacent to the house. The two windows stand about thirty feet apart and at about the same height from the ground. At my skylight, I can track Robert’s shadow passing back and forth across the window as he paints and stands back from his work. In cold weather, the chimney shoots puffs of smoke into the early-morning sky. Painting is not his day job, as writing is not mine; we both struggle to protect a few hours each day for what we most love to do.

  My laptop sits on a small table to the left of a window overlooking our front yard. The plywood subfloor, painted brown, is covered with hand-me-down rugs, and the curtain on the small window is an India-print tablecloth, too long for the window, draped over two nails.

  It’s a protected space and a protected time, too early in the day for the tug of other obligations. Still, each day I have to shepherd myself into getting started. I thumb through little slips of paper with scrawled notes to myself, and scroll through the previous day’s work. If it’s a good day, the writing catches, like an engine starting up.

  Studios are not so much hermitages—fixed places for a fulltime vocation—as tabernacles, temporary shelters for devotion to something bigger and more complex than oneself. It’s not just the frame itself; it’s also the frame of mind it makes room for. It’s a safe place for chasing down an obsession that is often intensely private. You can stop looking over your shoulder and just dive down, trusting for at least a little while in the integrity of your own story, with its tenuous connections, rabbit trails, and dead ends—and its occasional epiphanies.

  It helps, of course, to live with someone who is in the same boat.

  “How are your little cars and trucks?” Robert and I sometimes ask each other. This translates roughly as “How’s your writing/painting/thinking going?” The metaphor comes from our oldest son who, as a preschooler, loved his Matchbox cars and trucks intensely. When he wasn’t playing with them he was arranging them: in rows, in a circle around the edge of the dining table, and into categories and subcategories. He carried them around in a wicker basket and asked any willing adult: “Do you want to look at my little cars and trucks, and talk about them?”

  One of us really should have had a gift for investment banking, but this is how two artists get through life: by splitting up the day-job obligations that keep food on the table, and practicing forbearance when a project stretches out for years, with no obvious payback on the horizon. This is a way of loving another person: to grant them the space and time for the pursuit of what they love.

  On work mornings, I have an hour or so—sometimes more, sometimes less. It has to happen here and now or it won’t happen. At exactly quarter to eight, I shower, the first ritual of leaving one world and entering another for the day. But the warm water pelting my head and back and torso extends the morning world a bit longer. I’ve got one eye on the clock (so easy to spend too much time in the shower) and one on the needles of water shooting from the showerhead, inches from my face. Then white steam clouds rise and fill the stall, for a few tantalizing minutes gathering up everything.