Laura and I cruise along the offshore spine of Sewall Beach, the largest undeveloped spit of sand in the state. Like the Sewall Woods in nearby Bath, this place is named for her family. You can’t throw a stone around here without hitting something tied to the Sewall legacy. It is a history that Laura finally started to embrace about fifteen years ago. After decades away, working on environmental projects around the world, she returned to Maine, and has begun to act as a kind of liaison between this marsh and the surrounding community, carrying news of the environmental changes taking place in the Sprague to the folks those changes will most immediately affect.
“The people who live out here, from Phippsburg all the way to Small Point, they are starting to pay attention,” she says. “In part because the road out the peninsula is already flooding during storms. They even formed an advisory board on the ‘New Environment’ and asked me to be a member. I’m not sure what the committee will be able to achieve, but at least they’re asking the right questions about mitigation, marsh migration, the impact on local fisheries, insurance, infrastructure, all that stuff.” Laura is easily one of the most well-informed and deeply committed citizens I have encountered since I started writing about sea level rise. She filters every bit of information she receives, every lived experience, through the lens of climate change awareness, and in so doing gives the seemingly cataclysmic a different sheen.
Together we travel between two distinct but continuous realms—the land-bound marsh and the open ocean. Out here the surface of the water is pure glass, spotted occasionally by the passing of a cloud. Every time I pull my paddle from the sea a tiny wave travels outward and dissolves. Something happens as I nose my little boat closer and closer to the blue-on-blue horizon, where water and sky become indistinguishable. I begin to feel as though I am paddling straight into the heart of a Rothko painting, or a landscape where all traces of memory have been wiped away. The sun strikes the bay, filling my vision like a bell, and the morning’s worry momentarily disappears.
It takes us about half an hour to reach the Heron Islands, a set of four granite outcroppings approximately a mile from the shore. Laura has never been out this far before in her kayak. As we approach the islands she tells me that the Herons aren’t known, despite their name, for wading birds. Twenty feet to my right, the snout of a horse-head seal slowly rises out of the water. He stares up at me and I stare right back, watching the little wakes that radiate out from where his breath hits the sea.
This day is anything but ordinary, I think. Dulse-colored plumes of rockweed rumble beneath our bows as we slide between the largest of the islands, through a slender channel no wider than a school bus. I look down into yet another little universe at the edge of things: the seaweed below waves brilliant maroon, and a couple of rock crabs scuttle sideways. For a long time, Laura and I say nothing at all. Wordlessly, we head back toward the shore. About halfway there she dips her hand into the water and out come the words, “I’ve never felt it so warm before.”
And with that the spell is broken. My hand follows hers, breaking apart the clouds that slide across the surface of the sea. I think of my childhood summering along the Maine coast. The gulf was usually so cold I couldn’t bear to stay submerged for more than a second. Now, as I look down at my fingers comfortably wriggling below, I realize that this too has changed.
These days all it takes is a little unusual warmth to make me feel nauseated. I call this new form of climate anxiety endsickness. Like motion sickness or sea sickness, endsickness is its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon. A burble of bile rises from my stomach and a string of observations I have been hearing in these parts adulterates the joy of our afternoon adventure. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the bottom-dwelling cod, pollack, and winter flounder are pulling away from shore. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the shrimp fishery has been closed for years. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, phytoplankton are disappearing, green crab populations are exploding, and sea squirts are smothering the seafloor. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, the lobster are moving into deeper, cooler waters, keeping the lobstermen and women away from home for longer. Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, everyone and everything that lives here is changing radically.
When we arrive back at Sewall Beach, Laura and I throw our exhausted bodies on the hot sand and stare up at the sky.
“We have to become more comfortable with uncertainty,” she says, as if reading my mind.
“Those who lived during the plague were probably a little uncertain about their future prospects,” I say with a snort. “Maybe we can try to channel them.”
Ten feet away, a seagull picks a clam from the surf, flies over the shingle, and lets the shell fall. It drops to the ground, picks the shell back up, and rises then releases it again two, three, four more times.
“For most of human history, mankind hasn’t been half as sure of civil order or reliable food sources as we are today,” Laura says. “And maybe that sureness isn’t such a good thing. Maybe it dulls the senses, makes us less aware of what’s happening right in front of us, right now.”
Finally the shell the seagull has been struggling with breaks open. A slimy clam belly glistens on the wet sand. The gull calls to a friend and they feast together. For a moment I revel in the beauty of this basic ritual, happening right in front of us, right now. Then I think about how the ocean is, like the marsh, one giant carbon sink. When it absorbs carbon dioxide it becomes more acidic, which makes it difficult for bivalves like clams to build their shells.
“What about those guys?” I ask. I gesture to the seagull duo digging into their lunch.
Laura drags her fingertips through the sand and doesn’t answer my question. Instead she squints into the sun, stands, and says, “Let’s bodysurf a little before we head in.”
And that is exactly what we do. It is this moment that I will remember in the middle of winter, when I wonder whether I made good use of my time, whether I lived fully in the few short months of riotous green here in the northeasternmost corner of the country. We play that afternoon, seal-like in the unusually warm surf. Our bodies held aloft in the curl of a spitting wave, while on the other side of Sewall Beach, salt water sits in the Sprague River Marsh, rotting the land from within.
That night as I lie in bed, I remember a Hindu fable about the origins of the universe. It says that every four billion years a flood completely dissolves the earth. Vishnu returns after the deluge in the form of a tortoise. On his back he places Mount Mandara, which serves as a churning rod around which he wraps a snake. Gods and demons grab hold of opposite ends. They tug against each other. The rod turns. The ocean roils, releasing amrita, the nectar of life. And the great earthly dance begins again.
I think then of a perversion of the story popularized during the British colonization of India. It picks up where the original left off and is often recalled as a conversation between an Englishman and an Indian sage.
Question: What does the great tortoise whose back supports the world rest upon?
Answer: Another turtle.
Question: And what supports that turtle?
Answer: Ah, sahib, after that it’s turtles all the way down.
I think the exchange is designed to poke fun at the Hindu religion and also at any argument built upon an infinite regression. But I have always been inclined
