The Sea Around Us

2021-06-10

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry. –– Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

Just look at all of these amazing sea treasures. These are things just washed up to shore. Imagine what else is down there, things that could potentially have roamed the planet for a billion years.

Did you know that we still know less about parts of the ocean than we do about parts of outer space?

I’m not usually fascinated by the sea. A true Taurus, my personality has always been dominated by all things earthy. Mountains and forests have always lured me more so than any body of water. But that has been shifting over the last few years. Actually, I think it began when I became pregnant with my first child.

And then, during my last pregnancy – about this time last year actually – water actually took the lead for a while. Never had I felt so called by the sea.

It was also last summer that I first read Rachel Carson’s captivating book, The Sea Around Us.

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

Wow, this book. It is the 2nd in a trilogy of books Carson wrote on the sea. Many say that it is the more factual, most scientific, most non-fiction like, whereas The Edge of the Sea takes on a more literary, creative non-fiction flair. Carson offers more of herself in that book, but The Sea Around Us is more like a biography of the ocean in which Carson considers the ocean from every angle possible – ecologically, geologically, geographically, chemically, and culturally. She looks at waves, currents, tides, salinity, temperatures, sea layers and climate. She looks at the ways scientists have mapped and measured it. She considers the abyss as well as the surface. And she wrote it in the 1950’s, before the field of oceanography existed, when there was very, very little understanding of the ocean at all.

Like the sea itself, the shore fascinates us who return to it, the place of our dim ancestral beginnings…. When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself – the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.

So primeval even, that she talks about earth before there was a moon, when the earth was still changing from a liquid to solid state. We all know how much the moon influences the ocean tides, but I’d never considered it the other way around – that the tides could have given birth to the moon.

The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and the conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.

Carson – a storyteller who dreamed of the sea before she even saw it – was a biologist. She had completed her scientific studies in between world wars and took a job with the U.S. federal government to support her family. She helped edit, write and publish a ton of government information around wildlife, while squirreling away every dollar she could so that she could take her family to Maine for a four week “working holiday.” The coastline of Maine was rich with creatures and plants from both land water. There were ancient rhythms with tide falls and tide pools, where millions of stories were being told. Carson spent every moment there. She threw herself into the drama on those rich shores and filled up notebooks.

What drew her so fiercely to the sea? What is that siren song that enabled her to stand in that “raw, wild scrape of the sea against the granite coast,” giving herself so fully to that strange world that, by the end of her time there, she could sense things – she could sense when a school of herring had entered the cove based solely on the cries of gulls, and she could locate the dens of hermit crabs as if she were one of them.

Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.

That trip marked the beginning of the rest of her life.

Somehow, despite her many work and family duties, she got The Sea Around Us written and published. It became an immediate best-seller and remained one for 86 weeks. Finally, Carson was able to leave her tedious government job and purchase a bit of land in Southport, where she built a summer cottage on a steep ridge near Sheepscot. It was her shore, her rugged shore, surrounded by a forest of spruce trees and blueberry bushes, where she could always hear “the hollow boom of the sea striking against the rocks,” she wrote.

What I recall most often after reading the book is the natural cycles that are constantly occurring and reoccurring on every level below the surface. Like the most brilliantly devised recycling system that sort of mimics how nature works in the soil as well. But deeper. Because we are talking about the most ancient dwelling on our planet. Fossilized in marine clays, we find shark teeth belonging to species of white shark that lived about 30,000,000 years ago – that’s 30 x a million years! – so we know for sure that small foundational creatures have existed from much, much longer.

Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.

Carson viewed the shore not just with scientific acuity, but with wonder. She understood the emotional value of the natural world – not just how we need a healthy planet in order to survive, but also to thrive. I believe that’s what makes her work so special. Carson always knew what was at stake. Big business and their recklessness with chemicals and technology could – and would – and have wiped out everything she loved so dearly. The haunting song of the hermit thrush, schools of herring jutting through shallow waters, the beauty and mystery and wildness of Earth that we truly need to make life worth living.

To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalogue its life. Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculpted its land forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed, when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores.

Carson would go on to write Silent Spring – a book which arguably sparked the modern environmental movement. Not movement – that word isn’t enough. Consciousness perhaps, too. I don’t know where we’d be today without Silent Spring, without Rachel Carson. And as Jill Lepore wrote in the New Yorker, Carson couldn’t have written Silent Spring “if she hadn’t, for decades, scrambled down rocks, pulled up her pant legs and waded into tide pools.”

Now I’m reminded of a Netflix documentary I saw a few months ago called My Octopus Teacher. Have you seen it? That’s a whole other post I think, but I recommend the film, and of course anything written by Rachel Carson.

Her sea trilogy is for anyone who has a fascination with the sea, or who, like me, longs for more connection to the sea. I haven’t read the first one, but I loved The Sea Around Us and The Edge of The Sea. I loved reading these books at night before bed. They were so calming and sent me off peacefully into sea dreams.

The Sea Around Us

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