Low Tide

High tide gets all the glory, all the stories, all the press clippings.  Extremely high tides are destructive and dangerous and irresistible.  Extremely photogenic, and susceptible to manipulation of tales about hubris and inevitability and the follies of man.  Those who think at all of tides, usually think of them high and roaring higher.

Low tides can be more deeply fascinating, not least because there is no element of danger involved, and almost no direct impact on the works of civilization.  The mudflats or the sandy beaches or the marshes are exposed, revealing a temporary,  alien world, where even the life we glimpse on its glistening floor seems to be waiting for things to return to normal, while it hides from what will take advantage of the loss of concealment.

Clams hide under the mud, throwing up occasional squirts, and would be desperately hoping (if they could hope) that the bipeds with rakes along the shore do not find them.  The hermit crabs scurry about mysteriously.  Barnacles close up tight, safe from everything except a too ferocious sun.  Bits of exotic seaweed,  green algae coating rocks,  dogfish eggs dry in the breeze.  All sorts of interactions take place out of sight.

And the flats themselves tell a story not unlike that of the fossil record.  There are strange tracks and stranger artifacts.  The hollows dug by horseshoe crabs, mysterious trails of worms and birds, empty shells for seagulls to investigate, always trying to find unfortunates which were stranded by the receding waters.  Skeletons of fish, and of course the various flotsam and jetsam of nature and humankind _ wood, seeds, leaves, plastic, rusting anchors, old hulks, bottles.

And it will all go away in a few hours, and come back again, a more frequent cycle than the days, repeating and repeating for as long as there has been and will be a moon.  It whispers that whatever we build will be undone by the rising water, and the next tide is for whatever comes next, but it will not be us, and will never be exactly the same.
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I did not grow up next to the seashore, although I was privileged to spend a month each summer at my grandparent’s house on the Jersey shore.  That spit of a sand bar at Lavallette encompassed all the mysteries of the tides _ on the ocean side it would be full high tide, while a few blocks away on the other side of the strip Barnegat Bay would be near (not exactly at) low tide.  What was revealed at low tide varied tremendously between the two, and the way the tides came in at each spot totally difference.

It was possible to find out many odd things about the bay during low tide, such as the best spot to catch crabs (or avoid them if we were swimming.)  Fishing at the bay dock was pretty useless when the water was low; as was surf casting when the ocean was out.  Sand crabs, shells, and jellyfish were abundant on the wide sandy ocean beaches, but the bay was just mud flats, eelgrass, and a generally scary hidden bottom in which almost anything might be lurking.

After I moved to Long Island, I was near the tides again but pretty much ignored them for years.  The ebb and flow of rush hour traffic, the rhythms of a working day, the cycles of corporate accounting, our kids’ school characters were much more important than whether the harbor was full or empty, and where the moon might be.  Now I have the time to understand and appreciate everything and its interconnections.

So now I watch each day as the tide is far out, or high, and worry about super high tides, and marvel at the exposure of the flats and the docks and their pilings so far up when the sea recedes.  I see the follies of man revealed in old wrecks, and the continuing cycle of nature in whelk, clam, and oyster shells.  It is a comfort that so much is the same, a frustration that so few ever notice, a sadness that it could all end soon _ for me personally, of course, but also for civilization itself and everyone else if people continue their destructive ecological paths.

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The water’s out, the beach is wide,

Kids play, build castles on the shore
Splash into waves of muted roar
The world seems perfect, sun sublime,
Wondrous moments out of time
No work, no worries on our mind
Forgetting that in a few hours
Our marks will all be cleaned and scoured
With ocean cover as before
Relentless cycles of the tide.

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Statistically,  I can safely state that you are not a harbor pilot nor tidal fisherman, and thus have little or no need to understand the complexities of the tides in a particular locale.  And they are complex, having to do with the phases of the moon, delays caused by inlets , relation of the moon to the sun,  the local winds, and the weather farther out in the ocean.  But you don’t need any of that to turn on the lights and drink a cup of coffee. 

This is just another example of “wild” nature that you can tune out at will, along with the rain and cold, along with the smog or sound of crickets.  You have undoubtedly constructed a set of comfortable cocoons for yourself,  physically soft and safe.  In these various comfort rooms you enjoy an electronic ambiance of music or news or social connections _  that screen out what our ancestors had to endure as reality.  And, most of the time, this works well for you.

It’s debatable whether this is a healthy situation for sane humans.  When you dump all of your natural, evolved characteristics you may be losing more than you suspect.  And it is not enough to try to recover them by watching nature programs in high definition or once a year engaging in a year-long adventure.  If you are smart, you have discovered that already.  It may not require tides to accomplish, but reconnecting with the physical world will probably make you a happier and more effective person.

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Fossil evidence would seem to indicate humans evolved far from ocean shores, spending eons emerging from jungle to savannah before their final mad dash to conquer every available niche on the planet.  Surprisingly, although people still like to be surrounded with memories of jungle and savannah (trees and lawns), those who can afford to seem to want to live by water, preferably the dramatic and ever changing sea.  Prehistoric communities on all the continents (and ocean islands) happily lived on shells and fish and  other marine bounty.

That says something about our adaptability, and how little we are controlled by supposed genetic predisposition.  After all, people’s instinctual roots should not favor cities, yet most of the world’s population is urban.  The fact that we can ignore what we “should” be makes any future predictions hazardous.  It is likely that we could adapt just as easily to underground or spaceship or sea-floor living as to anything else.  And although people in those situations would miss something, such deprivations have seemingly had little effect in any environment up until now.

With the lack of evolutionary connection to tidal influence, most of the legends of our cycles being tied to the moon are pretty unlikely.  We do not procreate, nor eat, nor meditate, nor act in any way affected by the moon, other than perhaps using the light it provided for an occasional night attack in the days before electricity.  Romantic connections of love or anything else to the moon are pretty much fantasies, as most of us have learned to our chagrin.  A full moon is beautiful _ but so is just about anything natural.

Still, oceans and tides have been important to civilization, and still play a role.  They were necessary for exploration, discovery, and exploitation of resources; they continue to provide information on life at the edges and must be considered when construction buildings seaside, or when guiding large cargo ships through ports.  Those are the large and obvious effects.

But only now are we beginning to understand the vast importance of the oceans as the lungs of the planet, as reservoirs of carbon dioxide, as moderators of climate, and as vital elements in the food and oxygen chain that underlie our existence.  And their health is in danger, which is revealed by any casual study of tidal waters, where the pollution is worse, the ecology is thinned, and garbage litters the littoral.  The waters are murky with runoff, and oily from motors.  Pristine shorelines are vanished even in remote polar areas,  huge garbage matts swirl in a strange Sargasso in the Pacific.  We are right to be alarmed. 

The oceans are so gigantic that it seemed we could never damage them.  We were wrong.  Now the problems seem so immense that it seems hopeless to try to solve them.  Hopefully, that is wrong also.  It is a certainty that in the long run we must fix the problem of the oceans or perish.  The only open question is exactly how much time we have to effect that “long” run.
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The old man sits on a concrete wall on a bright cool April morning, watching the ebbed tide flow back into the harbor, carrying seaweed and junk inward as brown froth forms along the edge of the water.  Sea floor remains glistening and exposed, shells and dead horseshoe crabs, old rusty anchors and chains, rope, waterlogged wood, bright green algae and barnacles on the rocks.  The usual gulls traverse the shore, picking hopefully at whelks and clams _ the overwintering ducks are gone, the resident swans and whatever are engaged in mating rituals, the summer visitors like the terns not yet arrived.  Boats are beginning to fill the basin again.  A solitary treasure hunter roams the wet sand with a metal detector, clammers seeking pocket change are hauling their sacks onto pickup trucks, the rich are noisily having their waterside estates encrusted with additional tokens of wealth.

He remembers _ not long ago, a mere few decades _ when there was much more grassland in the tides, when working boats went out with traps for the plentiful lobster, when a weekly giant barge would deliver oil to tanks at head of harbor on the site of the old power station.  His wife, who grew up here, has told him of pristine eelgrass meadows and dolphins rollicking in sparkling clean water, only a few rowboats or barely powered outboards sharing space with the baymen.  But that was a half century gone _ nature cannot compete anymore.   Even in the last year, the grass dies back more, the old trees are felled in increasingly violent storms, the seawall itself is threatened by continually higher tides and surges.  Of course, that is hardly his concern, as this moment is.

He can dream _ of a few hundred years ago, clean water, seals and wildlife too teeming to count, natives in harmony with all that existed, even with the undoubtedly dense clouds of mites and mosquitoes now reduced to fractions of their original strength.  He can visualize all this beneath a vast ice sheet, with no wildlife at all.  He can imagine futures where storms have swept the hills clean of anything higher than grass and scrub, where humans are long gone in some catastrophe or other, where rising sea level has placed his current vantage point deep beneath the waves.  Whatever will be, will be, implacably and unknowably from his standpoint.

And, finally, like age itself, the old man accepts all that is, that was, that might be.  Enjoys the moment and the casual beauty of everything interrelated, for this moment is what he has, and he is grateful for it.  No matter what, it has been wonderful to be alive, to be human, to have existed.  No matter what, it is still miraculous to experience this exact time as completely as possible, ignoring all that is out of sight, out of sound, out of conscious thought.  He wishes others would understand _ but at least he has come to his own benediction.

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Low tide is Cinderella, dirty, smelly, ignored.  An inconvenience for harbor pilots, a boring expanse of greenish rocks for painters and tourists, a stretch of slime for those trying to swim, a poor time to catch most fish.  It comes around all the time, mysteriously and inconveniently and never quite on a schedule we understand.  Nobody gasps at the power of nature during an extremely low ebb, as we do at the heights attained by its opposite.

Part of that is because we are mostly so disconnected.  Most of us do not gather seaweed for a living, no dig for clams for sustenance.  We do not gather mussels and other shellfish in the exposed shallows, nor trap eels and small fish in tidal pools.  We don’t try  to locate bloodworms for bait.  The denizens scurrying around are basically harmless and beneath our notice.  We buy our farmed seafood at stores and markets, the rest passes us by, there are more important things to do in our busy lives.

But low tide is part of everything natural, and we should embrace it as we do any other part of nature, seek not only to understand its role but also its proper beauty, and the consistency it imparts to the whole of the environment.  It is an excellent lesson in the humility we should all seek when approaching the wonders of this planet and this existence, and gaining a foothold in understanding how to properly preserve the paradise which we (still) inhabit.