A Mess of Edges

Walking the shoreline at low tide this week, I couldn’t help but be mindful again of edges, how an island has a mess of them. Many are distinct. Others, less so, blur.

As I sloshed among the vast fields of rockweed, bladder wrack and mussel beds, among legions of periwinkles and exposed barnacled boulders, among myriad crevices and tidal pools where, for a few hours, sea stars and limpets and sea urchins are seemingly inert, it was hard to say at what place exactly I’d gone from land to water. Where, I wondered, is the demarcating, distinguishing edge of what Rachel Carson called, “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water?” Where is, as Walt Whitman wrote of the sea-shore – “…that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid…?”

On our shoreline, a few feet below the tangled tidal wrack, is a sensible spot, if I had to choose, to define an edge. But this one changes, too, depending on the time of day, the season or phases of the moon. If, as certain as a surveyor with his orange-flagged stake, I were to wedge a piece of driftwood into such a spot, tomorrow at the same hour I’d discover I failed in determining the new tide’s precise edge, where exactly the tide obeyed its mistress. Daily, tides advance, recede. Water levels change. For no two successive days at the same hour is the tide line precisely the same. What’s observed as an edge today is tomorrow erased, smudged. Our visiting grandchildren find such daily revisions magical. They’re naturally enthralled by how the water retreats, how it rewrites the shoreline, exposes tidal pools where they poke and pry. Places that with the incoming tide disappear. Like them, I love these mutable edges the tides make of our shoreline.

Elsewhere, things are a little more certain. Or shall I say, I know I’m on land when I tramp in our woods amidst spruce and balsam and lichen-spackled granite, ankle-deep in ferns and bunchberries, or when attempting to step gingerly over spongy pincushion moss. And if I continue my walk to the shore, and there, on a dare or suffering a lapse of good judgment, plunge into the cold Atlantic, I know for certain I’ve crossed over into water, no matter how brief my encounter. And definitely, were I to lean over the side of our island bridge spanning the Reach’s watery expanse or Town Pier’s end in Stonington Harbor, that edge would be distinctly defined.  

At the edge. On the edge. Such phrases in themselves suggest tension, energy. Scientists have long confirmed that in places where one thing ends and another begins, the greatest potential for change resides. Within our individual anatomical geography, intense energy concentrates at the edges of things – in the outer membranes of cells, in our skin with its proliferation of nerve endings or our important world-touching appendages. There, things are more likely to happen. So, too, in the world around us.

On the shore, at its shifting tidal edge where two ecosystems abut, life is always in flux, a literal back and forth movement ecologists refer to as a pulse. Unlike a distinct boundary of, say, the forest-meeting-field “abrupt edge” familiar to birders, the tidal edge is a zone of transition between land and water communities. In places where water in swirls, slaps and surges presses up to land then retreats to expose mounds and rocks, holes and tracks, only true edge species can survive. Uniquely adapted to fully inhabit the tidal margin, not just dip a toe in or survive an occasional plunge, edge species twice daily belong alternately to water and land, to life between two distinct communities. To do so, a giddy amount of activity takes – must take – place as one ecosystem shifts to another. Among the green crabs scuttling for cover in the rockweed, among the calcerous-tubed worms sealing their entrances with gill filaments as securely as if they were double-bolted locks or the periwinkles retreating behind closed operculums like afternoon nappers drawing the blinds, a staggering number of changes and transitions occur, each as complex and common as my taking a next breath.

Routinely, I walk this sloshing margin abuzz with energy and churning with change. Outfitted with a walking stick and comfortable shoes, inhabiting my dreamer self in a seemingly aimless meander or my productive writer self who needs to hear the rhythm of new lines in her head, I hike the wrack line or wade out deeper and bend over exposed tide pools. With my body of specific weight and scale, with its arteries and muscles, its inner and outer edges, with corporeal senses that enable me to feel the Atlantic’s icy grip around my ankles, to inhale and touch, listen and look, to be open to color and swirl, hum and chuff, and even with my clicking mind I’ve hauled along, too, I’m not equipped to permanently dwell there. I’m not an edge species. A resident of one element, I can cross a threshold when for a time borders relax and edges blur, but no matter how much I might want to linger, prone, on a warm granite ledge, I can only stay for the time a tidal margin allows.        

Of course the shoreline is only one of many shifting edges where in the marginal zones, differences mingle, overlap. A neighbor and I share this road but we’re worlds apart in many of our beliefs and practices. I’ll never understand his support of baiting bears as an ethical practice or share in such recreational urges as tearing up the forest floor with an ATV. He’ll never understand my desire to post my land in November. Fellow beings in our similar, hominid, mind-containing birthday suits, we may have the ability to articulate such differences to each other, but we seldom do. Still, in a small community of complex relationships and connections, where you can’t help but bump up against edges, he and I occasionally mingle, hang out with our differences, dwell, if only for a time, in the margins where our worlds overlap – on the shared road, at a town meeting, in the post office or the aisles of the local food store.

In such island mingling zones, I’m often jostled in the ebb and flow of new ideas, of other meanings, different needs – a clammer’s desire for access over private property to the mudflats, the wish of a few village property owners for a treated water project at the expense of a favorite shade tree and community message board, the split opinions over higher taxes and school consolidation. There, the waters of opposing viewpoints slosh over from either side. Sometimes borders relax and individual desires wade out into the deeper waters of compromise and common purpose. Recently, I was surprised to learn my neighbor supports the move to conserve an important piece of island land even if such action removes it from the tax revenue base and I had to admit that I may have been nudged closer to his stance on certain school issues, even if, as though stepping over an edge, we’ve since retreated behind the borders of our differences as surely as if we were bivalves clamping shut our shells at low tide.

Here, without fail each year, the island surprises me, reveals parts of itself I didn’t know existed – secret pocket beaches, tidal pools, hidden inlets. I discover roads, trails, low tide bars I’ve yet to explore. I’m drawn along unfamiliar shorelines, down paths and wooded trails where I’m often surprised at each turn. Not long ago, on a trail new to me, I felt disoriented. I fought the urge to turn around, and, as though stepping away from an edge, to retrace my footsteps to some familiar, known place. Elsewhere, mindful of the path’s edges, even if blurred beneath the forest floor’s detritus, I dutifully followed wherever it led. And there, as happens sometimes, at a wooded trail’s end or at an edge where land abuts ocean, I was stunned to step out of dim light into a bright, glimmering expanse. As though into an unexpected happiness. Into a place and vantage point that in a seemingly familiar landscape I’d not known existed, or that, for too long, had been invisible to me.

After years of returning here, I’m still often reminded that an island is a mess of edges and so, too, a heap of margins, ever-evolving mingling zones of overlap and opportunity.