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 porcupines and their food preferences. Today, most who make the journey to the coast study how and why the area is changing as a result of human activity. In our era of unprecedented geologic transformation, the very act of scientific observation has taken on an added sense of urgency. In the coming years, portions of, if not all, places like Jacob’s Point and the Sprague are likely to be underwater. We will want to know why, but we need the data first. The chance won’t come again.
In recent years scientists have discovered that coastal wetlands—salt marshes, but also mangroves and saw grass meadows—store a quarter of the carbon found in the earth’s soil, despite covering only 5 percent of the planet’s land area. That means that an acre of healthy coastal wetlands will clean far more air than an acre of the Amazon. “They sequester about fifteen times more carbon than upland forests,” Beverly tells me. “But how effective are these ecosystems when they have been dammed, diked, culverted, or drained? That’s what we’d like to know.”
Dana unloads a large Plexiglas box and an eighty-thousand-dollar machine that looks like a waterproof stereo receiver from the back of the college van. “It’s a cavity ring-down mass spectrometer,” says Joanna Carey, a biogeochemist who, like the machine, is on loan from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “We use it to measure carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor levels being ‘respired’ by the marsh so we can get a better idea of how higher sea levels will alter the net balance of greenhouse gases in these already-altered coastal ecosystems.” As the marsh is further destabilized, it is possible that the organic matter that was stored in and around the root systems will decompose, releasing back into the atmosphere the very gases—carbon dioxide and methane among them—the marshes once sequestered.
Dana places the contraption into a wheelbarrow. “Cailene and I nicknamed it the Science Box,” he says. It used to be that we thought the earth’s climate and its underlying geology changed slowly and steadily over time, like the tortoise who beat the hare. But now we know the opposite to be mostly true. The earth’s geophysical makeup doesn’t tend to incrementally evolve; it jerks back and forth between different equilibriums. Ice age, then greenhouse. Glaciers covering the island of Manhattan in a thousand-foot-thick sheet of ice, then a city of eight million people in that same spot. The transition between the two is often quick and relatively dramatic. Contraptions like the Science Box help us keep track of just how fundamentally things are changing, illuminating the ways in which human activity is pushing the planet beyond “greenhouse Earth” into some even warmer, preternatural state.
The Science Box takes various vapor emission readings at a rate of one per second. From these readings Dana will generate one “flux,” or an image of the overall rise or fall in the methane and carbon dioxide coming off one square meter of marsh. Then he will compare the fluxes gathered in healthy areas against
