I’m continuously amazed by how many coastal dwellers have such scant genuine understanding about the place in which they live or visit. Particularly for those privileged enough to live on an actual barrier island – one of the most dynamic, complex and fascinating places on earth to call home – I think it’s essential or a civic or social duty almost, to possess at least a rudimentary understanding of what the place is all about. So I strongly encourage you to get your hands on the following four books and read them cover to cover.
I hope you’ll to buy them, not just borrow them from the library, because they are each worthy of being highlighted, dog-eared and bookmarked to note those passages that intrigue and move you the most.
• The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson, 1951 Oxford University Press.
In my 1961 special edition reprinted in 1989, there’s an introduction by Ann H. Zwinger: “It is hard to put ourselves in the context of the 1950’s, it is hard to realize how much we didn’t know when The Sea Around Us was written, how new so much of Carlson’s information was to the general public. She introduced concepts and gave us words that have since become common in our lexicon, words like ‘ecology,’ ‘food chain,’ ‘biosphere,’ and ‘ecosystem.’…. In The Sea Around Us, there is not a paragraph or a sentence out of place. Everything is where it needs to be, and this sureness enhances the reader’s pleasure, that of reading a writer in control.”
Chapters have names like “The Grey Beginnings,” The Sunless Sea,” “The Long Snowfall” (has nothing to do with ice crystal falling from the sky), and perhaps my favorite in the face of all the manmade global warming/climate change hullabaloo spewed about these days, “The Global Thermostat.”
In the last, after an entire chapter consistently backgrounding the matter, she concludes: “For one thing, it is almost certainly true that we are still in the warming up stage following the last Pleistocene glaciation – that the world’s climate, over the next thousands of years, will grow considerably warmer before beginning a downward swing into another Ice Age. … We have therefore begun to move strongly into a period of warmer, milder weather. There will be fluctuations, as earth and sun and moon move through space and the tidal power waxes and wanes. But the long trend is toward a warmer earth; the pendulum is swinging.” That was written in 1950. 1950!
The Sea Around Us is a remarkable book, written by a remarkable woman who can easily be credited with being among the very first true environmentalists, well ahead of her time, with an intuitive understanding of the sea that runs as deep as it is.
• Alongshore, by John R. Stilgoe, 1994 Yale University Press.
With chapter titles that read like a mouth-watering literary menu – “Guzzle,” “Smudge,” “Quaintness,” “Bikinis” and “Risk” – this intriguing volume possesses what I’d call “intellectual quirkiness” as Stilgoe, a Harvard professor in the history of landscape and native of the Massachusetts coast, explores the coastal realm with pertinent references to Thoreau, Chopin and Hardy Boys mystery novels.
His observations are colloquially worded, describing the beach as “the last place in which adult Americans walk barefoot.” More intriguingly, “Where else do strangers lie nearly naked within arm’s reach of one another? Where else do parents allow their children to play and splash within grasp of voracious wild animals? Where else is a zone so marginal in every way?”
After over 400 pages, Stilgoe concludes, “Only those locals and visitors who actively engage the coastal realm develop any deep acquaintance with it, and with the realm itself. Only they get well and truly salted, get the taste of the realm in their mouths, the feel of it under their bare soles, the swirl of it over their skin. Only they put themselves in the sway of the coastal realm, temporarily accepting their marginality in a realm of immense force. Only they know how puny, how marginal inland technology and inland thinking become when set down alongshore. Only they know something of gunkholing and guzzles, marsh islands and salt creeks, wharf pilings and watch towers, pirates and breast strokes. Only they know that all along the coastal realm small boaters probe as explorers probed centuries ago, in a marginal place, in the limicole zone between sea and land, all alongshore.”
• The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth, by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, 1998, Viking Penguin Books.
The ancient Greeks and Romans considered the sea and seashore to be a place of healthful rejuvenation and built grand coastal structures to celebrate and enhance the experience. Centuries later in medieval Europe, the sea was thought to be a place of pestilence and misery, evil creatures and deadly storms. Yet by the 17th century, the coast was rediscovered as a healthful place for both the body and soul, and for social activity. And today, well, waterfront real estate the world over is the most sought after and expensive.
“Nature’s most potent antidepressant, the beach moves us with the power of a drug, the rhythm of its tides and shifting margins reorienting our sense of space and time, its aphrodisiacal cocktail of sun and water firing our slumbering hedonism,” the authors write. “With its retina-searing vistas and exotic spectacles, it lies at the creamy center of American and European leisure destinations.”
The book examines the development of the great seaside places in the world, from San Tropez to Miami – and of greatest interest to me and probably you, the mid-Atlantic shore from Coney Island to Atlantic City. The close proximity of the major population centers of New York and Philadelphia had a massive influence on beach towns on Long Beach Island and other places today.
Since I first read it – and especially in light of the beach replenishment that took place after Superstorm Sandy – this passage from Chapter 12 is most poignant: “Beaches, dunes, and barrier islands must move or they die. We humans think we must stop beaches from moving or we will die. Or, at the very least, lose our possessions and imperil our fortunes. And so we have been erecting breakwaters to create safe harbors. We have been removing sand from harbors, bays, and estuaries with dredges and jetties, and moving it to beaches, where it belongs, and where we secure it by groins. … But, as beach conservationists Wallace Kaufman and Orrin Pilkey tell us, by immobilizing our beaches, we only hasten and, in many cases, even cause their destruction. Beaches must move – or die. Since the mid-19th century the New Jersey shore has had the dubious distinction of leading the field in beach erosion …”
The book concludes, “Whatever the beach, it is still possible, in the presence of the timeless wash of waves, the sibilance of sand, and the warm kiss of the sun, to forget the nagging sense of fealty to cash, work and responsibility. After all is said and done, we still come to the beach to slip through a crack of time into the paradise of self-forgetfulness.”
• Ocean Almanac: Being a Copious Compendium on Sea Creatures, Nautical Lore & Legend, Master Mariners, Naval Disasters, and Myriad Mysteries of the Deep, by Robert Hendrickson, 1984, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.
I proudly claim that my copy of this wonderful volume is the most marked-up, tattered and taped-together book in my library, and for good reason. It’s not the kind of book you read once, front to back. Rather, it’s a reference book cracked open and sifted through, time and again and again. From biblical passages to the most extensive list of watery facts you could imagine, it is truly a thought-provoking compendium.
“One mathematician has calculated that if Columbus spilled a glass of drinking water into the sea back in 1492 – and if that glass of water was by now thoroughly mixed in all the oceans and rivers of the world – then every glass of water drawn from every faucet in the world would contain as many as 250 molecules from the original water Columbus had spilled from his glass. Just a single drop of water has 1,700,000,000,000,000,000 (1.7 quintillion) molecules,” Hendrickson writes.
A little too scientific for you? Then try chapter 5, “Superstitions, Strange Customs, and Mysteries of the Seven Seas,” with sub-sections titled “The Fisherman Who Became a Sea God,” “Outwitting the Sirens,” “Interviews with Mermaids and Mermen” and “Of Mariners and Man-eaters; The Cannibal Isles.”
But for all its whimsy, the book is encyclopedic, explaining the origins of the compass and other great marine inventions; the history of basic navigation; understanding the Gulf Stream; charting mountains beneath the sea; and the naming of the winds. Throw in the great ships and shipwrights, sea battles, navigators, explorers, a complete chapter on pirates and mutineers, a listing of the world’s greatest marine museums and shrines plus some quotes and outtakes from the greatest of nautical literature and you could spend days flipping back and forth through this book. It’s akin to “reading” Poor Richard’s Almanac with the attendant sidebars, graphs, pull quotes and illustrations. Although it’s impossible to contain the ocean in a single book, this one comes very near to doing just that.
I’m hopeful to have piqued your coastal curiosity enough to seek out these books. Happy reading!
Although he is a Floridian now, L.J. Wallace Jr.’s family maintained a residence on LBI for five decades. He can be reached at editorljwallace@gmail.com.
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