Now in Paperback: The World of the Salt Marsh
Now in Paperback:
By Charles Seabrook
University of Georgia Press, 2012
Anyone who has ever greeted a wet dawn out in the twisting vastness of Massachusetts’ Great Marsh, all along the Plum Island Sound from Dole Island to Holy Island down to Dilly Island and Great Bank, will know at once what Charles Seabrook is talking about in his comprehensive and indispensable book The World of the Salt Marsh when he writes of “all those whose spirits are uplifted and whose weary minds are refreshed when we gaze upon a vast marsh stretching to a far horizon” – and it will hardly matter that Seabrook concerns himself only with far more southern marshes, the wetlands stretching from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida: the spell of salt marshes is the same whether it’s cast in Portsmouth New Hampshire or Portsmouth England.
That spell is exceedingly difficult to quantify, although Seabrook’s book frequently comes close to doing it (with a few timely assists from Sidney Lanier, the 19th century bard of the tidal marsh who wrote so movingly about “a world of marsh that borders a world of sea”). Seabrook grew up on John’s Island, South Carolina; he has the rhythms and beauties of the place in his blood, as have some distinguished chroniclers before him – his book joins the likes of Harry Thurston’s A Place Between the Tides, or Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History by Judith Weis and Carol Butler, and of course John and Mildred Teal’s seminal classic, Life and Death of the Salt Marsh.
A shelf of such great books might lead a newcomer to think that the spirit-uplifting Seabrook invokes is a universal reaction, but if that were the case, salt marshes all over the world wouldn’t have taken such a beating from humans over the last four hundred years – until comparatively recently, coastal wetlands were seen as unproductive blights in need of ‘reclamation’: tons of garbage were back-forked into their waterways, compacted, covered with dirt, and sold to home-buyers eager to have a place by the ocean. Seabrook describes a blight far less merciful than anything a ravaging fungus could do:
Development will breed more development. More people will want to use the coast for recreation, homes, commerce, industry, and waste disposal. Golf courses that require tones of herbicides and fertilizers will be must-have components of the new developments. But new residents will also want drug stores and supermarkets and hair salons and gas stations and shops of all kinds.
Yet The World of the Salt Marsh is not a rancorous book, far from it: the author’s personal reminiscences give these fact-filled pages a warmth and charm:
As I walk across a clump of saltworts, they crunch under my shoes like frozen grass in winter. I pick a stem and nibble it – salty but tasty, like a most potato chip. Great in stuffed crab.
And some of his reminiscences convey a very enjoyable sense of our author’s wryly comic take on life:
Scores of shrimp constantly run into you, their sharp tails and spines pricking your skin like so many stickpins. If you swim at night, their little red eyes surround you, thousands of tiny points of light darting about like tiny little spooks. Many times, creek shrimp got inside my swimsuit – if I was wearing one – and their flipping and jabbing required quick action to protect certain parts of my anatomy.
There are adventures aplenty recounted in these pages. Seabrook spends a lot of time with the men and women whose lives are vitally connected with the marshes – shrimpers, scientists, engineers, conservationists (he’s also refreshingly bipartisan when it comes to praising wetlands defenders – appreciative nods go Presidents George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush). But as interesting as some of those portraits are, the book’s brighter attraction is Seabrook’s casually encyclopedic evocation of the natural history of the place, from the meiofauna that include the marsh’s smallest burrowing animals to the host of creatures who make up the area’s staggeringly rich biodiversity, from the little tidal creek fishes called mummichogs (one of which can consume more than 2000 mosquito larvae in a single day, for which, obviously, three cheers for the mummichogs) to the grass shrimp, diamondback terrapins, oysters, shrimp, fiddler crabs, blue crabs, and ribbed mussels whose biology and behavior Seabrook illuminates with such ease.The University of Georgia Press has recently re-issued The World of the Salt Marsh in a sturdy paperback. All nature lovers, conservation advocates, and especially marsh paddlers (or even armchair marsh paddlers) should order a copy without delay: Seabrook has written a book that’s very nearly as alluring and multi-faceted as its subject.