intertidal

Maine took hold of me before I got here. I've dreamed of this place, years of vivid scenes, and have been aching for closeness to its bluffs and lighthouses, its particular geology.

Five days in Maine, and I feel at home near the rocky shoreline and the bay. Something in me feels deeply connected to how much depends on the tides. I love the salt air and pines and mists. There are cormorants and huge laughing gulls, crows by the dozen. 

I've felt very drawn to this place, I said yesterday to a woman who has lived on Peaks Island for 32 years. I said this with some embarrassment, knowing how many other vacationers probably feel and express similar sentiments. It's got something to teach you, she said. 

The only book I have on this trip is a borrowed copy of The Edge of the Sea, a 1956 book by environmentalist Rachel Carson. Best known for Silent Spring, Carson's first three works were a trilogy of books on marine natural history. Jill Lepore called her a "scientist-poet of the sea."

In the opening chapter of The Edge of the Sea, Carson writes, "The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continent, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same."

I have read this passage over and over since arriving in Maine, wondering if it is the restlessness and capriciousness of this stretch of coast that compels my imagination. 

I spent one morning in a tide pool. I thought I'd remembered reading somewhere it was best not to wade into a tide pool, but it was hot despite the thick fog shrouding the island, and my shoes were already off. I stood at the pool's edge, promising to be as still as possible, not to disturb or disrupt. 

And in that stillness, so much surprise: Three small crabs and a handful of snails, blue mussels, periwinkles, dog whelks, sea glass, wrack, seaweed in dozens of shades of green, so many lovely stones, so much beauty exposed. 

I walked to the edge of the cove and cupped water in my hands. Carson wrote, "Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden." Back we go to the natural world, looking for answers.

Life in these intertidal zones is evidence of what Carson called "sensitive adjustments," how creatures adapt to their environments. I found a history of Peaks Island, a book with chapter titles like Early Houses, Alarm, Shipwreck, and Harbor Frozen. Sensitive adjustments. Many houses around Peaks Island are named: Selkie's Rest, West O' the Moon, Chanticleer. Walking the island, I wondered what I'd name a house or a boat.

On the mainland and further south is Scarborough Marsh, the largest salt marsh in Maine, a coastal wetland comprising layers of detritus and decomposing grasses. Scarborough Marsh results from two rivers—Dunstan and Nonesuch—converging with the Atlantic. Visitors can explore by canoe or kayak, depending on the tides, and might see osprey, red foxes, and river otters. 

One morning, I stood outside the Audubon Center at Scarborough Marsh and pointed my binoculars toward a perch—a pair of cormorants. I watched them resting, probably drying their feathers, when a naturalist beside me cried out, Look at this. Great Blues! 

I looked up to see half a dozen Great Blue Herons flying just above us.

There was an intimacy in his abbreviation of their name that touched me. Great Blues. They are giant birds, some four feet tall with six-foot wingspans, and their flight over us appeared unhurried in the heat, almost slow-motion. 

The naturalist was grinning. Six of them, he said. Together! They're usually solitary. Really strange to see six of them flying together like that. His delight and surprise struck me. How interesting to study something, then to see it behave in ways that are out of the ordinary. I thought of Jane Hirshfield, her poem, I Wanted to Be Surprised, and its opening line: "To such a request, the world is obliging."

I’m discovering so much reverence for the ultimately mysterious conditions under which things either survive or don’t. There is order in the natural world, yes. But there are variations, too, and so much complexity. It becomes almost necessary to love the things we can’t predict.

The tides ebb and flow with regularity. The fog burns off and rolls in again in a way that seems driven more by passion and whim than anything else. We can observe shorebirds and recognize patterns in their behavior, and witness with awe what is uncharacteristic. 

What is exposed and what we have in this hour will disappear again. I'm learning to witness what is elusive and how to allow surprise. Carson wrote, "Today a little more land may belong to the sea, tomorrow a little less. Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary." We don't know what awaits us the next time the water recedes.