I discovered in nature the same appeal I found in books. Both were engrossing, filled with the richness of particularities and yet mysteriously universal. Both were the stuff of perspective.
I didn't realise that my brand new ARC of Birds by the Shore (to be released May of 2019) is actually a slightly revised and renamed re-release of Jennifer Ackerman's 1996 book Notes from the Shore; and that's not a problem, as I haven't read the original, but having now finished I have to wonder, “Why the new title?” The original suits the material so much better; this is about so much more than shorebirds. Essentially a collection of ten essays that Ackerman wrote during her three year stay on the Delaware Bay, each contain precise observations of the astounding abundance of nature (birds and beyond), intertextual connections (scientific and literary), abstractions to humanity at large, and brief forays into Ackerman's personal life. Like spending the day at the tide's edge, the writing ebbs and flows and washes over you; this work is calming, knowing, and wise. I loved every bit of it. (Note: Passages quoted from this ARC might not be in their final forms.)
For people like me who measure their land in square yards, not acres, who have lost the rhythm of harvest, the surge and drain of tides threads the day, gives the place a kind of meter, as in poetry. The sea is Conrad's accomplice of human restlessness. Its briny surf and shifting sand correspond to a memory as deep as any we possess. Solid as we seem, we are liquid beings, three-quarters water like the planet, and composed of motion down to the agitated atoms in our cells. Perhaps that is why we like to sleep where the thunder-suck of waves fill the night.Ackerman does, naturally, remark on the birds she observes on the shore – ospreys, and gulls, and the various LBJs (little brown jobs) – but she's also fascinated by tiny crabs, worms, snails, and mosquitoes. She marks the mass migration of sand on land and in the water (which never seems to go where the engineers try to force it), and she notes the amazing array of life clinging to each grain of sand itself. In addition to the multicelled nematodes, protozoa, and tardigrades that live there, “A single grain of sand can support hundreds of colonies of bacteria, each composed of hundreds of individuals, as well as twenty or thirty diatoms of different varieties – all residing in the craters, scarps, and troughs of the grain, where they are protected from abrasion as the sand knocks about.” Anyone who can make me excited about a grain of sand is writing in a language I love. At its most enchanting, Ackerman's writing reminded me of what I treasured in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Humans, it has been said, lie midway between the sun and the atom, in terms of both mass and diameter. Narrow is the world with whose dimensions our lives, our limbs, our senses are in tune. So much that matters is invisible by the yardstick of human life. How to shatter scale-bound thinking, see more deeply, widely? Writers have defamiliarized the world in this way, made us see our surroundings in a strange new light. Think of swimming in a sea of tears, rolling with a worm in a giant peach. Think of Blake's world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. There is a deep hunch here, more than meets the eye.There is much on how human intervention has changed the Delaware shoreline over the years – from accidentally transplanting invasive species to purposefully draining the “miasmic” saltmarshes – and also much writing on how species adapt (or fail to adapt) to changes in their environment. Often, Ackerman will write “The latest studies suggest...” or “Scientists have recently discovered...”, and this is the only area that felt a bit weak to me: if you're going to re-release a sciencey book, you ought to update the science. Ackerman writes of acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer as though they are the greatest threats to Delaware locally and the planet at large, and while she was writing at the leading edge of discussions around “climate change” as its own distinct crisis, she didn't have much to work with (“even the latest supercomputers”...in 1995) and could only conclude that this Earth will go on spinning with or without us.
In some way all creatures bear traces of their past; ghost crabs their gills, whales their vestigial limbs, humans our liquid cells, the saltwater running in our veins, our feeling for the sea. “Why upon your first voyage as a passenger,” wrote Melville, “did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration when first told that you and your ship were out of sight of land?”Reading Ackerman reminds us to slow down, remember the sea we crawled out of, and marvel at the universe residing on a grain of sand. I'd say that's worthy of re-releasing.
