Читать книгу Rising - Elizabeth Rush - Страница 15
ОглавлениеThe Marsh at the End of the World
Phippsburg, Maine
A GNARLED OLD PINE MARKS THE ENTRANCE TO THE Sprague River Marsh. It is high summer, a short season of riotous green in Maine. But the tree hasn’t taken any cues from the tilting of the planet, the long hours of sunlight, or the sudden warm spike. Its branches extend empty and bare. This pine must be about a hundred years old, but as with so many others I saw lining the banks of tidal marshes up and down the coast, too much salt water had too regularly soaked into the ground around the tree’s root system, killing it. On the surface, this single tree might seem inconsequential. But its death is a sign of a much larger transformation—the disintegration of tidal marshes all along the coast, from the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the eighties hardwoods and pines often thrived along our marshy shore. Now they do not. It is still hard for me to believe that a departure this big began in my lifetime. I’ve encountered so many of these rampikes that I have come to think of them as a series of memorials, a supersize Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation that spans the entire country, from the Louisiana bayou all the way to this remote corner of the Gulf of Maine. Together they commemorate the tipping point: the moment the salt water began to move in. And now that sea levels are rising more quickly than they have in the last three thousand years, an even bigger change is happening. The ground itself has begun to rot.
I walk through a patch of poison ivy and over a weathered outcrop of granite into the marsh. The moment I step onto the upper portion of the Sprague I know that it is in trouble. There I am met by the musky, almost strawberry scent of decomposition. Most marshes smell a little bit, but here the scent is overwhelming. A healthy marsh is firm underfoot. Here the earth quakes like Jell-O. With every step bubbles burble from the accrued depths, releasing the captive sulfur that lies beneath.
For the researchers I will visit at the Sprague, the smell of the rotten marsh is halfway normal. For me it conjures up images of a neglected compost bin.
In my mind, rot is something vegetables do. The fruit arranged for a still life will rot, which is why some artists prefer to paint plastic apples and pears. Limbs rot when gangrenous. I did not think, until coming to the Sprague, that it was possible for the ground itself to rot. Or that when it does it might just help heat up this precious pebble even faster.
“Welcome to our rotten marsh,” says Beverly Johnson, a professor of geology at Bates, the small liberal arts college about thirty miles inland where I too teach.
Beverly speaks a kind of hybrid language—half scientific fact, half casual like a block-party conversation. Her wardrobe is a similar mix of business and pleasure. She wears knee-high wading boots, long black shorts, and a maroon T-shirt with a hiker and mountain peak airbrushed across the front. She carries in her periwinkle Osprey pack a change of socks, three water bottles, and a yellow hardcover all-weather geological field notebook, the words Gulf of Maine scribbled down the spine in black Sharpie.
Dana Cohen Kaplan and Cailene Gunn, two of Beverly’s students, who have been studying the relationship between marsh degradation and the release of greenhouse gases for their senior thesis projects, accompany her in the marsh. Bates students and faculty have been conducting research in and around the Sprague since 1977. Forty years ago their concerns were notably different; one of the earliest theses written about the greater Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area investigates porcupines and their food preferences. Today, most who make the journey to the coast study how and why the area is changing as a result of human activity. In our era of unprecedented geologic transformation, the very act of scientific observation has taken on an added sense of urgency. In the coming years, portions of, if not all, places like Jacob’s Point and the Sprague are likely to be underwater. We will want to know why, but we need the data first. The chance won’t come again.
In recent years scientists have discovered that coastal wetlands—salt marshes, but also mangroves and saw grass meadows—store a quarter of the carbon found in the earth’s soil, despite covering only 5 percent of the planet’s land area. That means that an acre of healthy coastal wetlands will clean far more air than an acre of the Amazon. “They sequester about fifteen times more carbon than upland forests,” Beverly tells me. “But how effective are these ecosystems when they have been dammed, diked, culverted, or drained? That’s what we’d like to know.”
Dana unloads a large Plexiglas box and an eighty-thousand-dollar machine that looks like a waterproof stereo receiver from the back of the college van. “It’s a cavity ring-down mass spectrometer,” says Joanna Carey, a biogeochemist who, like the machine, is on loan from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “We use it to measure carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor levels being ‘respired’ by the marsh so we can get a better idea of how higher sea levels will alter the net balance of greenhouse gases in these already-altered coastal ecosystems.” As the marsh is further destabilized, it is possible that the organic matter that was stored in and around the root systems will decompose, releasing back into the atmosphere the very gases—carbon dioxide and methane among them—the marshes once sequestered.
Dana places the contraption into a wheelbarrow. “Cailene and I nicknamed it the Science Box,” he says. It used to be that we thought the earth’s climate and its underlying geology changed slowly and steadily over time, like the tortoise who beat the hare. But now we know the opposite to be mostly true. The earth’s geophysical makeup doesn’t tend to incrementally evolve; it jerks back and forth between different equilibriums. Ice age, then greenhouse. Glaciers covering the island of Manhattan in a thousand-foot-thick sheet of ice, then a city of eight million people in that same spot. The transition between the two is often quick and relatively dramatic. Contraptions like the Science Box help us keep track of just how fundamentally things are changing, illuminating the ways in which human activity is pushing the planet beyond “greenhouse Earth” into some even warmer, preternatural state.
The Science Box takes various vapor emission readings at a rate of one per second. From these readings Dana will generate one “flux,” or an image of the overall rise or fall in the methane and carbon dioxide coming off one square meter of marsh. Then he will compare the fluxes gathered in healthy areas against those in places that have already begun to rot from within, creating a picture of the potential impact sea level rise will have on a tidal marsh’s ability to sequester greenhouse gases.
The amount of data the Science Box generates in four minutes would take a human 3,600 minutes to collect by hand. Which is exactly what Cailene spent her summer doing in Long Marsh, a “fingerling” tidal wetland about ten miles northwest of here as the crow flies. There is no road to the marsh’s terminus; to reach the transition zones where the readings are most telling, Cailene must drop down the side of a culvert near the marsh’s mouth. Then she hikes through the waist-high grasses, hopscotching across rivulets and drainage ditches until she reaches the end. It takes her thirty-three minutes to travel from stem to stern. She can’t safely cart the Science Box all the way back there, which is why she collects her readings the old-fashioned way—with a twenty-five-milliliter syringe and an Exetainer vial. Tapping away at the calculator app on her cell phone, she says that it took her months to produce one-tenth of the data the team will collect today.
Cailene and Dana will devote much of the upcoming academic year to better understanding what separates a healthy tidal marsh from one that is not, and the rate at which each releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Or, as Beverly describes it, “They are filling in the equation that describes today’s carbon cycle.”
As I drove down State Route 209 and out on the fog-struck peninsula that morning, the local NPR radio personality likened the weather to pea soup. The midday heat was bound to break records, he warned. Now, listening to Cailene, I understand that it is going to be not only the hottest day of the summer but also one of the most important, at least for these young researchers. As we prepare to walk, Dana adjusts his straw cowboy hat and tugs at his sun-bleached Cisco Brewers T-shirt, pulling it over his belt. Then he looks out across the sea of saltwater cordgrass and black needlerush, places his hands on the wheelbarrow handles, and enters the humming midmorning light. Not only will today’s work net the raw material of his yearlong thesis project, it will hopefully help illuminate how drowning tidal marsh ecosystems could inadvertently contribute to the ongoing inundation of the coast.
For much of human history we have had very little sense of the dynamic nature of life on the planet. Three hundred years ago we didn’t know that the earth has been regularly covered in massive sheets of ice that pulse in and out from the poles like a scab forming and retreating. We didn’t know that the continents were in constant motion or that animals could go extinct. We didn’t know that light traveled faster than sound or that bacteria caused disease, and we didn’t know that the universe began not with God’s word but with a big bang.
Right up through the middle of the eighteenth century, Westerners thought the earth began roughly four thousand years before Christ. But unearthing evidence of species that modern humans knew absolutely nothing about—such as a massive mastodon molar found in present-day Kentucky—hinted that there had once existed many other worlds, which had flourished and vanished over a previously unimaginable length of time. One of the earliest books to acknowledge the idea that the earth’s history might be much longer than our own was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, written just over a century and a half ago. It popularized the work of William Smith and James Hutton, who spent decades comparing the appearance and disappearance of different fossilized animals in the red sandstone cliffs in Devonshire, England, in the late 1800s. As John McPhee writes in Annals of the Former World, “Some creatures … had appeared suddenly, had evolved quickly, had become both abundant and geographically widespread, and then had died out, or died down, abruptly. Geologists canonized them as ‘index fossils’ and studied them in groups” in order to get a better sense of the age of our planet. The earth scientists at Devonshire painstakingly compared these “index fossils” against each other and in doing so started to divide geologic time into different epochs. Their studies suggested that, contrary to popular belief, the earth had likely been gyrating just outside the asteroid belt for the better part of four hundred million years.
Of course this estimate of the earth’s age was not accurate either. It wasn’t until radiometric dating was pioneered by Arthur Holmes at the turn of the last century that we improved on this rough calculation—by a huge margin—and discovered that our planet actually came into existence roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Though our tools have progressed, most nongeologists, me included, are still likely to wildly misidentify different events in geologic time, often by orders of magnitude.
Four thousand, four hundred million, or 4.5 billion years—it is all the same to us. We tend to think in human lifetimes, and even there our scope is limited. We are individually preoccupied by the lives of those we know and expect to know: our grandparents, parents, children, and, if we are lucky, grandchildren. Which is why it is so fantastically difficult for us to recognize that in our frenzied attempt to keep nearly eight billion people fed, watered, clothed, sheltered, and distracted, we are fundamentally altering the geophysical composition of the planet at a pace previously caused only by cataclysmic events, like the massive asteroid that smashed into eastern Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago.
Lately, Earth-minded scientific researchers and activists alike have taken to condensing the history of the planet into a single calendar year to explain just how temporally insignificant human civilization is and how profoundly we have changed the planet in the time it takes, relatively speaking, for a rufous hummingbird to beat its wings. In this version of history, the planets are formed at the very beginning of January. Sometime during the first week of the year, a giant object collides with Earth, and out pops the moon. It isn’t until late July that the first cells form. In August coral creeps across the ocean floor. Late in October multicellular organisms appear. Plants make their way onto land close to Thanksgiving. Around the first of December come the amphibians and insects. Dinosaurs arrive on December 12, and by December 26 they are gone. On the evening of December 31 the first hominoids emerge in East Africa. At ten minutes to midnight Neanderthals spread to Europe. We invent agriculture one minute before the clock strikes twelve. Shortly thereafter we start to write things down. All it takes is five short seconds for the Roman Empire to rise and fall. We enter the industrial era two seconds before midnight, the petroleum age a half a second before the year comes to a close. And in that fraction of a second we cause the end of an entire epoch.
The Holocene closes and the Anthropocene (or the Capitalocene, as environmental historian Jason W. Moore suggests calling it) begins, launching a geologic period defined by the complete and utter dominance of certain human beings and our endless accumulation of resources. In that fraction of a second, we open the earth’s veins, exhume as much energy as possible, and pump various byproducts into the air, causing the atmosphere to warm twenty times faster than normal. We cause the polar ice caps to melt, the oceans to heat, and the coastline to change its shape. We alter the very makeup of the biosphere, the twelve-mile-deep sliver of the earth that is home to all known life that has ever existed in the entire universe. “Abundant” and “geographically widespread” are two ways of describing the extent of humans’ impact on the planet. Lately I have been wondering whether the descriptor “index fossil” might also soon apply.
Global sea levels have risen about nine inches since we started keeping track in 1880. If they were to keep rising at this rate, by century’s end they would be roughly five inches above where they are today. But most scientists expect to see anywhere between an additional twenty-four to eighty-four inches of sea level rise by 2100, and every year the estimates creep higher still. Between the turn of the last century and 1990, sea levels rose, on average, 1 to 1.2 millimeters per year. Then the rate of the rise itself started to increase, rapidly. In the intervening quarter century, the per-year increase has risen to 4 millimeters, and, like so many other climate change signals, it shows little sign of slowing down.
As the rate of the rise continues to accelerate, tidal marshes are becoming inundated and, as here, they are starting to rot. If you drill into a healthy marsh you quickly encounter a network of rhizomes and black, iron-rich sediment. This sediment, which cements most marshes together, is so dense it doesn’t contain any oxygen. And this anoxic environment is, in part, what makes marshes such good carbon sinks—whatever organic matter is stored there decomposes extremely slowly because it is never touched by air. But when salt water sits on a marsh and cannot drain, as is happening in tidal wetlands the world over, the marsh grass rhizomes either retreat or rot.
Some places, like the southern edge of Louisiana and the Isle de Jean Charles, have already passed through this transitional process. Others, like vast swaths of the Everglades, are just beginning to show signs of collapse. As these marshes become flush with salt water, they are contributing to atmospheric warming—but just how much, and at what rate, remains unclear. That’s partly because each location is unique, with different kinds of flora respiring at different rates, and also more generally because throughout Western history tidal wetlands were thought to be the homes of swamp serpents and marsh monsters, the boggy, slimy sources of malaria, disease, and death. As such, they have long gone overlooked, which is why the research taking place out here in the Gulf of Maine is so important.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t understand the connection between marsh rot and climate when it decided to “plug” a ditch in the Sprague likely dug by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1930s. The Sprague River Marsh is not unique in this way. By the end of the decade following the Depression, over 90 percent of New England’s saltwater marshes were grid-ditched, mostly in attempts to reduce mosquito populations in coastal communities. All along the Eastern Seaboard, workers took shovels to swampy land, hoping to drain the sections prone to retaining water.
The Civilian Conservation Corps didn’t care that ditching would transform the hydrology of the entire ecosystem. The standing water in which mosquito larvae hatched was greatly reduced—and with it went hundreds of other species. Dragonflies and water beetles. Mummichogs and silversides. The seaside sparrow. The great egrets and white ibis. So, over a decade ago, the US Fish and Wildlife Service started plugging the ditches. They thought intervening in an already altered hydrological system might be able to return the marsh to a state of equilibrium. They thought they might be able to bring back the water beetles and wading birds. But, it turned out, layering one kind of human intervention on top of another only dragged the Sprague further from its starting point.
Not much more than a four-foot-by-eight-foot piece of plywood, a ditch plug is a simple-enough idea: it is meant to stop tidal flow through man-made channels, reintroducing an element of standing water into the marsh. But ditch plugs are too effective at restricting flow. Fresh water from the upland side filters into the marsh and does not continue toward the sea. And whenever an exceptionally high tide or storm surge arrives, breaching the barrier, salt water gets stuck in place there too. As a result everything above the plug is permanently inundated with saline-rich water, and as the water starts to evaporate, the saline concentrations shoot even higher. The rhizomes in the marsh grasses, unused to these conditions, begin to decompose; the ground around them collapses; and the greenhouse gases long stored in the sediment are released into the air. At least that is what these scientists suspect is happening.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service really screwed this up,” says Beverly, straddling the channel behind the plug, bloated with brackish water. “Though they know this now.” The edges of the plywood in front of her are egg-yolk yellow and dusty green, the center buckled.
Later, when I type “what rots” into Google, the search engine tries to finish my question, suggesting What rots teeth? What rots first when you die? What rots quickly? I discover that acid rots teeth. Cell membranes in the liver are the first thing in the human body to rot. When improperly stored, potatoes rot quickly, and I don’t need Google to tell me that they smell bad when they do.
Google does not suggest making my sentence What rots marshes? It is not the first time the search engine—thanks in part to its millions of users, whose habits dictate the autocomplete option—has been, in my humble opinion, misleading. Because if marshes are among the largest carbon sinks in the world, and if rot transforms them into huge carbon sources, then we surely do want to know what rots marshes and, perhaps more importantly, if there is anything we can do to better prepare them for the future that is already here.
When I look out across the white slime that coats the once-loamy ground above the ditch plug, I know that what is happening in the Sprague is, in a very basic sense, what will happen to many of the world’s marshes as the height of our oceans continues to climb. My fever dreams of tidal wetlands—and all the species endemic to them—drowning, of our coastlines contracting, and of mass migrations inland return with prehensile force. They drag me deeper into the marsh, out into the rotting cordgrass where the ground quakes like chocolate pudding. There, at the decomposing center of the Sprague, I stand dumbstruck by our planet’s transformations.
I am starting to be able to see not just the dead trees sprinkled along the shore like so much confetti, or the fistful of decaying grass I hold in my hand. I am beginning to make out the rough outline of our future coastline. Everywhere that once was a tidal marsh will likely be open water. The words of Ben Strauss echo again in my mind: “It is not a question of if but when.”
“We know that healthy marshes have historically kept pace with moderate changes in sea levels, but how they respond to those kinds of changes when ditched, plugged, and tidally restricted is another thing,” says Cailene. The two tiny silver geckos tacked to her ears reflect the sun. “And that’s important because, for example, of the hundred and thirty-one marshes here in Casco Bay, one hundred and twenty-eight have been altered.”
“There are twelve ditch plugs littered throughout the Sprague,” Beverly chimes in. “And hundreds throughout marshes up and down the coast.”
A recent study released by the National Academy of Sciences predicts that as coastal wetlands continue to be transformed by atmospheric warming, they will release more methane into the air. But what makes a wetland vulnerable may be more complicated than its height and altitude. As Kimbra Cutlip wrote in a recent issue of Smithsonian magazine, “How much carbon wetlands take up, how much they release, how quickly soil accumulates … are all factors that are intertwined with one another and dependent upon a variety of influences. Like the tugging of one line in a tangled web of ropes, as one loop loosens, another tightens, changing the shape of the whole bundle.” When humans interfere with marsh hydrology—by ditching, plugging, draining, diking, culverting, and developing alongside and in these unique landscapes—they are yanking, even severing, the ropes that tie the marsh together.
In the short term, widening the culverts that restrict tidal flow, removing man-made infrastructure—things like ditch plugs and roadways—and reconnecting marshes to the rivers that have long provided the silt that fuels accretion would likely increase these important ecosystems’ ability to keep pace with sea level rise. However, as the rate of the rise itself accelerates, what tidal marshes will need more than anything else is space, room to migrate up and in. And, though few want to admit it, providing space will likely mean relocating some of the human communities we have built along the seashore.
Just below the buckled piece of plywood, Dana drops a Plexiglas chamber over a preselected square of healthy marsh vegetation. Joanna, who has spent much of the past year using the ring-down mass spectrometer to calculate net fluxes all around New England, lays the Science Box on two milk crates. She plugs the machine into a set of tubes that connect to the chamber. Then she presses a button and the Science Box begins to whir, almost immediately producing data. Everyone crowds in to look at the stream of numbers scrolling up the screen.
“Right now we aren’t seeing any methane emissions, which is what we want,” says Beverly. A molecule of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases on the planet, can, over the span of a decade, heat the atmosphere eighty-six times faster than a molecule of carbon dioxide. “And the carbon dioxide is dropping too, because the plants are photosynthesizing,” she adds. In essence, they have verified what they already know—healthy marshes are good at sequestering and storing greenhouse gases. The data gathered here, below the ditch plug, will serve as a control to measure the rest against. It takes only a few minutes for a heap of healthy cordgrass to become a set of numbers, a kind of bottom line.
After sampling three different areas where the ground is firm and the grass luxuriant, we move the field station back two hundred feet or so, above the ditch plug. The land starts sucking at our boots again, squelching and giving way beneath us as we plod in.
“An alternative name for my thesis might be ‘Measuring Marsh Farts,’” Dana jokes as he tries to keep his balance near a particularly pestilent pool covered in brown scum.
As the group prepares the fourth test site, a lanky research technician who hasn’t said much all morning points at the hollow of my throat and asks, “What’s with that necklace?”
For a second I am confused. I reach up and grasp a silver hexagon hanging on a silver chain, a Christmas present I hadn’t taken off since receiving it. “It was a gift,” I say. “Why?”
“It looks like a shorthand representation of the atomic structure of benzene.” Then he adds in a wooden voice, “It’s classified as a carcinogen in California.” The research technician breaks out into a wry and knowing smile, claps a hand on my shoulder, and laughs. I have come to adore science-geek small talk almost as much as I enjoy learning about the inner workings of these often-overlooked landscapes. Those who are devoted to tidal marshes are members of the same scattered and idiosyncratic tribe. They are more at home thigh deep in sulfurous mud than they are at the local shopping mall, and increasingly—as they bear witness, if not to the end of the world, then certainly to the end of one world—their humor has taken a turn for the macabre. “You have to laugh to keep from crying,” a geologist in the Everglades once told me.
The cavity ring-down mass spectrometer beeps, a warning that there is humidity in the lines. Benzene Man turns away from me and faces the malfunctioning machine. The crew disconnects and reconnects the hoses. The beeping continues.
“Science,” Beverly says over her shoulder. “Winging it every day.”
Once the water is cleared from the lines and we have all eaten a snack, the Plexiglas chamber is lowered over another square of marsh grasses. This time nearly half are rotten. For a moment the world goes silent, everyone leaning in toward the bleached-out computer screen. The first reading is 1.55 parts per million of methane, then 1.6 parts per million, then 1.7 parts per million. All the scientists let out a little yelp.
“It’s kind of twisted,” Beverly tells me, chuckling. “But when we see that methane increase, it’s good, in a way, because it means that our hypothesis is at least partially correct.”
Just as they supposed, the rotting patch of marsh grass above the ditch plug is contributing more methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sample plot of the same size below. Beverly and her students suspect that the water infiltrating the marsh and now impounded by the ditch plug stimulates methanogens to spring into action, breaking down the organic matter the Sprague has long stored. A kind of fermentation follows that causes the marsh to decompose from within while also releasing methane and carbon into the atmosphere at an unprecedented clip. Tug at a couple of ropes and the shape of the whole bundle changes.
“I’m not opposed to the idea of ‘monkey wrenching’ the ditch plug,” says Laura Sewall, an eco-psychologist and the caretaker of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, who has joined us for the second half of the morning. Laura is advocating the kind of small-scale act of eco-defense Edward Abbey once encouraged to reestablish healthy hydrological patterns in the American West. While localized interventions of this sort won’t do much to stem the threat sea level rise poses to our most vulnerable coastal landscapes, they can help to temporarily preserve a world worth rescuing. Removing the ditch plug surely is a step in the right direction: coaxing saltwater marshes back toward their original hydrology in the hopes that they will be able to, at least in the short term, rise with sea levels as they have in the immediate historic past.
Whether that immediate past is an appropriate analog for the future is an important question to ask. Sea levels are currently rising much faster than was previously predicted. James Hansen, a former NASA scientist who now teaches at Columbia University, recently published a controversial paper that suggests that the rate of the rise will continue to accelerate exponentially in the coming years. So much so that he predicts that by century’s end the world’s oceans will likely be many meters higher. In which case monkey wrenching the ditch plug isn’t likely to save the Sprague. Removing the human infrastructure, and in particular the road that runs along its upland edge, would provide space for migration, and might be the only chance the marsh has to make it into the next century.
Dana stands next to the Science Box and does some rough calculations on his phone. “It looks like the area above the ditch plug is releasing significantly more methane than the area below.”
“Methane,” Beverly reminds me, “is, generally speaking, thirty times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, making it the most potent, if short lived, of the world’s greenhouse gases.”
In that moment my desperation, of the monkey-wrenching sort, gives way to monumental uncertainty. If what is happening right now on the Sprague is also unfolding in impounded tidal marshes the world over, then the likelihood that we will witness widespread marsh collapse goes up. But no one knows whether it will go up by a factor of one or one hundred, because humans have never recorded these kinds of events before.
What we do know is this: each molecule of methane released into the air warms the oceans and the atmosphere, speeding up the rate at which glaciers and ice sheets are melting, which in turn accelerates the rate at which sea levels are rising, which diminishes the chances that a marsh will be able to adapt, raising the likelihood that it will rot and drown instead—which brings us back to the methane readings on that dimly lit screen on the edge of the Sprague: 1.55 parts per million, then 1.6, then 1.7. Another feedback loop closed and amplifying.
After lunch, Laura and I split from the group for an afternoon kayak. We launch from her house, which sits just across the Sprague River on a small mound of land overlooking the marsh. Laura’s ancestors were some of the first Europeans to settle permanently along the Gulf of Maine, but she grew up on the other side of the continental United States.
“When my parents got married, they drove west until they hit water,” she tells me as we dig our paddles in deep and pass the breakers where the Sprague pours out into the gulf. “Too much family back here.”
I pause and watch a line of terns riding the air currents that rise from the waist-high waves as they curl and break. In the sheltered dunes between the beach and the marsh, a handful of piping plovers are beginning to fledge. Where the cordgrass gives way to woods, pitch pines twist along the edge of a slice of gray granite that looks like a whale’s back.
The scene reminds me of the opening lines of one of my favorite children’s books, Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder. He writes, “Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day, season to season.” As a child I used to camp with my family a hundred miles north of here, on the quiet side of Mount Desert Island. Returning to this rocky coast makes me feel a little as if my life is on repeat, as if what has happened is happening again. Though when I think about the preliminary findings procured on the marsh that morning, I realize that my familiarity and comfort are illusory; the Maine of today is not the Maine of my youth.
Together Laura and I cruise along the offshore spine of Sewall Beach, the largest undeveloped spit of sand in the state. Like the Sewall Woods in nearby Bath, this place is named for her family. You can’t throw a stone around here without hitting something tied to the Sewall legacy. It is a history that Laura finally started to embrace about fifteen years ago. After decades away, working on environmental projects around the world, she returned to Maine, and has begun to act as a kind of liaison between this marsh and the surrounding community, carrying news of the environmental changes taking place in the Sprague to the folks those changes will most immediately affect.
“The people who live out here, from Phippsburg all the way to Small Point, they are starting to pay attention,” she says. “In part because the road out the peninsula is already flooding during storms. They even formed an advisory board on the ‘New Environment’ and asked me to be a member. I’m not sure what the committee will be able to achieve, but at least they’re asking the right questions about mitigation, marsh migration, the impact on local fisheries, insurance, infrastructure, all that stuff.” Laura is easily one of the most well-informed and deeply committed citizens I have encountered since I started writing about sea level rise. She filters every bit of information she receives, every lived experience, through the lens of climate change awareness, and in so doing gives the seemingly cataclysmic a different sheen.
Together we travel between two distinct but continuous realms—the land-bound marsh and the open ocean. Out here the surface of the water is pure glass, spotted occasionally by the passing of a cloud. Every time I pull my paddle from the sea a tiny wave travels outward and dissolves. Something happens as I nose my little boat closer and closer to the blue-on-blue horizon, where water and sky become indistinguishable. I begin to feel as though I am paddling straight into the heart of a Rothko painting, or a landscape where all traces of memory have been wiped away. The sun strikes the bay, filling my vision like a bell, and the morning’s worry momentarily disappears.
It takes us about half an hour to reach the Heron Islands, a set of four granite outcroppings approximately a mile from the shore. Laura has never been out this far before in her kayak. As we approach the islands she tells me that the Herons aren’t known, despite their name, for wading birds. Twenty feet to my right, the snout of a horse-head seal slowly rises out of the water. He stares up at me and I stare right back, watching the little wakes that radiate out from where his breath hits the sea.
This day is anything but ordinary, I think. Dulse-colored plumes of rockweed rumble beneath our bows as we slide between the largest of the islands, through a slender channel no wider than a school bus. I look down into yet another little universe at the edge of things: the seaweed below waves brilliant maroon, and a couple of rock crabs scuttle sideways. For a long time, Laura and I say nothing at all. Wordlessly, we head back toward the shore. About halfway there she dips her hand into the water and out come the words, “I’ve never felt it so warm before.”
And with that the spell is broken. My hand follows hers, breaking apart the clouds that slide across the surface of the sea. I think of my childhood summering along the Maine coast. The gulf was usually so cold I couldn’t bear to stay submerged for more than a second. Now, as I look down at my fingers comfortably wriggling below, I realize that this too has changed.
These days all it takes is a little unusual warmth to make me feel nauseated. I call this new form of climate anxiety endsickness. Like motion sickness or sea sickness, endsickness is its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon. A burble of bile rises from my stomach and a string of observations I have been hearing in these parts adulterates the joy of our afternoon adventure. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the bottom-dwelling cod, pollack, and winter flounder are pulling away from shore. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the shrimp fishery has been closed for years. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, phytoplankton are disappearing, green crab populations are exploding, and sea squirts are smothering the seafloor. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the lobster are moving into deeper, cooler waters, keeping the lobstermen and women away from home for longer. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, everyone and everything that lives here is changing radically.
When we arrive back at Sewall Beach, Laura and I throw our exhausted bodies on the hot sand and stare up at the sky.
“We have to become more comfortable with uncertainty,” she says, as if reading my mind.
“Those who lived during the plague were probably a little uncertain about their future prospects,” I say with a snort. “Maybe we can try to channel them.”
Ten feet away, a seagull picks a clam from the surf, flies over the shingle, and lets the shell fall. It drops to the ground, picks the shell back up, and rises then releases it again two, three, four more times.
“For most of human history, mankind hasn’t been half as sure of civil order or reliable food sources as we are today,” Laura says. “And maybe that sureness isn’t such a good thing. Maybe it dulls the senses, makes us less aware of what’s happening right in front of us, right now.”
Finally the shell the seagull has been struggling with breaks open. A slimy clam belly glistens on the wet sand. The gull calls to a friend and they feast together. For a moment I revel in the beauty of this basic ritual, happening right in front of us, right now. Then I think about how the ocean is, like the marsh, one giant carbon sink. When it absorbs carbon dioxide it becomes more acidic, which makes it difficult for bivalves like clams to build their shells.
“What about those guys?” I ask. I gesture to the seagull duo digging into their lunch.
Laura drags her fingertips through the sand and doesn’t answer my question. Instead she squints into the sun, stands, and says, “Let’s bodysurf a little before we head in.”
And that is exactly what we do. It is this moment that I will remember in the middle of winter, when I wonder whether I made good use of my time, whether I lived fully in the few short months of riotous green here in the northeasternmost corner of the country. We play that afternoon, seal-like in the unusually warm surf. Our bodies held aloft in the curl of a spitting wave, while on the other side of Sewall Beach, salt water sits in the Sprague River Marsh, rotting the land from within.
That night as I lie in bed, I remember a Hindu fable about the origins of the universe. It says that every four billion years a flood completely dissolves the earth. Vishnu returns after the deluge in the form of a tortoise. On his back he places Mount Mandara, which serves as a churning rod around which he wraps a snake. Gods and demons grab hold of opposite ends. They tug against each other. The rod turns. The ocean roils, releasing amrita, the nectar of life. And the great earthly dance begins again.
I think then of a perversion of the story popularized during the British colonization of India. It picks up where the original left off and is often recalled as a conversation between an Englishman and an Indian sage.
Question: What does the great tortoise whose back supports the world rest upon?
Answer: Another turtle.
Question: And what supports that turtle?
Answer: Ah, sahib, after that it’s turtles all the way down.
I think the exchange is designed to poke fun at the Hindu religion and also at any argument built upon an infinite regression. But I have always been inclined to find some truth in this tale of turtles upon turtles, supporting our earth. When I hear the line “It’s turtles all the way down,” I don’t balk. Humans are nothing more than atoms come together to make life. The things we eat, the air we breathe; it is all made of the same manna. I think of the seagulls and the clams, and wonder what happens to the seagulls when the clams can’t make their shells. What happens to Mount Mandara and the sea of milk if the tortoise’s back dissolves in an acidic ocean? Perhaps when it dissolves, the world floods and the cycle starts again. Perhaps that is what is happening right in front of us, right now.
