Rising. Elizabeth Rush
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hit. It was a hot August day. Perfectly calm, perfectly clear. But I could hear big waves. I looked up from the desk, out the window and across the marsh, and saw these huge waves crashing on the other side of the dunes. The water was coming into the marsh really fast because there was suddenly so much of it to move within the twelve-hour tidal cycle. I ran over to my sister’s and she and her husband were up on the roof photographing these big whirlpools swirling in the marsh. It was somehow so magical I jumped in. But I got scared immediately—and I never get scared swimming. I remember thinking, This is not any pretty water.
So I came back here, got my kayak, and paddled out into the marsh. It was completely, utterly covered. It looked like a big solid mirror. I remember floating past patches where just a few inches of grass stuck out. Because the rest of the stalks were submerged, the tips of the blades were absolutely covered in bugs. As I floated by they tried to jump into the kayak. I realized then that there is so much life in these marshes that is not prepared for higher waters. I mean, I never even thought about the insects. Where are they going to go?
After that I had a real spike of something like fear. I thought if I were to be honest with you I would admit that I don’t know what is going to happen to the marsh in front of my house. I don’t know whether some big surging wave is going to spill over that little peninsula and come pounding through my windows. I don’t know if the marsh will be able to keep up with the rise. I actually think it is years away, but I am not so sure that someone buying my house could say it is a generation or two away. And that is how the houses down here are thought of, in generational terms. So what is scary, in an immediate sense, is that I may not have the retirement funding I thought I had by virtue of selling this house. I don’t know what is going to happen with that. I have no uncertainty about the climate science, but I do have a lot of uncertainty about what to do.
I have watched a brand-new pool form on the marsh; I see the land being eroded. Right on that edge over there, eleven feet have been lost since 2004. Some people say I am in denial. But that is a really ineffective and inaccurate way of referring to a particular psychological process. Living here is not denial. It is a choice. I am sixty years old right now. I could watch some really amazing change in the time I have left and I could stay until it gets washed away. I would be, I don’t know, say eighty-five by then. It just might be perfect. I don’t have kids so I don’t need to pass anything down. It is a very self-centered perspective, I know that. But it is not denial.
These decisions are complex because there are a lot of factors to take into account. For one, I have to take into account my incredible love for sitting right here. I feel so privileged to be observing these changes so immediately. It is frightening but it is also incredibly interesting, awesome really. There is something magical and enlivening about seeing how dynamic life is on the planet. You think of animals running around but you don’t think of plants moving. See that big patch of brown grass over there? It is migrating uphill because it is not super salt resistant and where it used to be is a relatively low part of the marsh that now gets flooded more often than before. So I am seeing a different kind of grass, Spartina alterniflora, come in behind it. I am literally watching the ocean encroaching right here in front of my house and it amazes me.
But there are also nights in the winter when the wind will be blowing so hard I fear that my metal roof is going to rip off and be shredded into pieces that pierce through the windows. This fear drives my spiritual work. Where I go with it, on a personal level, is toward making peace with uncertainty, toward being more fully in the present, and toward living a life where gratitude is near the surface.
I came across this old reminder; do you know Brother David Steindl-Rast? His work has a theme that I love. Essentially, he says that it is not that you can have gratitude for everything all the time but that there is always the possibility of gratitude; there is always something that you can tap into to feel your gratitude, no matter what. Thinking in this way takes care of so much of my anxiety. It is very easy for me to feel gratitude for the place I live, at least when I have time, when I am not consumed by work. There have been too many days in this last year where I was grumpy.
It had nothing to do with where I was but with the fact that I didn’t have time to appreciate this place. I was locked into the computer or the tasks. And so many of them are uninteresting. Lately my feeling is that I need time to just be here before I can decide whether to stay or not. My guess is that I will tap into so much gratitude for my life alongside this marsh that I may just become an old lady who drowns right here.
The 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