by Danielle Denenny ’99

In just one tidal breath the Cape Cod shores are both consumed and created; if you observe one tiny grain of quartz sand for time enough, an ancient creationary tale belonging to that geographical space will unfold before you in rhythmic play to the lappings of this sea's currents. One, two, three eighth-note wavefronts promulgate from the dawn horizon toward the barrier beachline, followed by a measured pause, and forever through time this same simple signature theme recurs.

To a well-trained musician’s ear, deciphering and capturing the striking variety of texture within these ceremonial strides would truly be maddening. Subtle nuances of tone are barely audible, yet they sketch the most brilliant flecks of colorcolour into this romantic dialogue between green grassy salt marsh fields and the sensate world of the sea.

My unabated enjoyment of this resonating place owes much to the scientific training that has wired my brain to savorsavour very regular patterned physical processes such as wave trains. I long to fit them to models reducible to just a small number of key components that explain these systems in full. I orient myself northwards toward the mouth of the winding inlet with a Brunton compass in palm, for I need it to find my bearings and to lay out the transects for the study–a checkerboard grid of bright pink flags fly upright to battle the onshore wind. I am but a late summer migrant with a topological map, newly reading the landscape for clues to its lengthy ecostory, relishing in my knowledge that many of the answers are buried in the fine layers of decaying salt marsh soils lying just beneath my sandaled feet.

I have learned through my work that to truly understand a coastal landscape, I cannot rely solely on field observations of the stratigraphy, contours, and cordgrass in isolation from the living human characters that are integrated into her ecosystemic cycles. I must turn to the old narratives passed along through her townspeople, to the relic remains left behind by a series of cultures, like stone tools and other paleoindian artifacts, agricultural seeds, pollen grains, printed records, diaries, literature by Thoreau, Bessford, and John Hay, and historical maps. Humans have left an archaeological footprint of their own in Brewster dating back to around 10,000 years before present, when a sea level nearly fifty meters lower than today’s allowed for a stretch of continuous landscape that enveloped the now-islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Our generation must visit these places by ferry.

By 10,000 years ago, a gentle topography of open pine forests, grasslands, and freshwater wetlands had succeeded the post-glacial forests and tundra. Now drift forward through the Archaic time period, past the cleavage of the islands, past mixed oak and pitchpine on which white-tailed deer populations flourished, past the first fires set by humans to create forest clearings and to control the diversity and productivity of the environment...to a time 3,500 years ago when sea level first began to stabilize, to erode sediments from marine scarps, and to redeposit these sands in the form of coastal barriers to the pawing open ocean along Cape Cod Bay.

This protective setting was ripe for the formation of the Cape’s biologically plentiful estuaries and salt marshes. The decomposing remains of early descendants of those ancient marshes now lie deeply buried beneath this new season’s wondrous growth. Just one acre of salt marsh fertilized and cultivated by the tides produces over ten tons of plant material in a year that serve as a food web foundation for this -teeming habitat's community of shrubs and plants, migratory waterfowl, fish, horseshoe and fiddler crabs, molluscs, insects, coyotes, fox, and deer.

On the day of my visit to the salt marsh just adjacent to Paine’s Creek, I am conducting a senior thesis experiment to investigate whether this 3,173-year-old marsh is doomed to drown. This marsh seems unable to deposit and decompose each growing season's vegetative and biotic development into sediment at rates fast enough to keep up with the sprinting pace of modern sea level rise. Nature has instilled each and every physical process with a unique timing of its own; most of these individual clocks connect by physical, biological, and chemical interplay to create a grandfather clock whose precision pendulum swing does not nearly reveal the great complexity of the whole Gaian mechanism. Ignorant human tinkering with this biological clock–much involving the developed world’s pillaging of natural resources for ignoble economic "progress"–has led to a more rapidly warming climate.

Today, melting glacial ice and thermally ballooning oceanic waters are rapidly filling the oceanic bowl and drowning many shallow areas of the continental coast, including many marshes on the outer lip. The amount brimming over the bowl or the length of stay of the high tidal waters on these submerged land edges dictates a recipe for what plants will grow there. This is because the competitive hierarchy among coastal marsh plants is a function of their unique salt and submergence tolerances. And so with the aid of my eyes, my hand lens, my mentors, and my microscope, I am mapping the number, elevation, body size, and location of each specialized grass, forb, and succulent species to collect clues to the past and future appearance of this spot. Will it soon be hidden underneath bay waters like the land that once connected it to Martha’s Vineyard? Will it be an island? Or will it stabilize as a thriving marsh community ringed by scrolled sassafrassassafrass stands in which Great Blue Herons build their nests and spy the annual herring run up the fish ladders? Do we humans have a preference or even a choice?

Digging up secrets from the sands affords much intellectual excitement, no doubt. However, it offers little compensation for the burden I fear finding in my hands, in these buried, fragmented remains for all of humanity to bear. At a time when even conservative national policy recognizes the need for "no net loss of wetlands" we must redouble efforts to understand what we face to lose together. The future is as yet unsung.

Wings Island Marsh has supplied Brewster residents for thousands of years with verdant and golden hued beauty, with fish and marine life, with salt marsh hay harvests for Plymouth colonists and descendants, with oak, cedar, and pine timber for houses, churches and a lengthy shipbuilding trade, with salt for trade, with cattle and sheep grazing grounds, and with an outdoor classroom landscape in which to teach natural history. We are left today with pieces of a reconstructed history, a small dangling sign saying "Do not pick the endangered sea lavender," and a foreboding reminder from the wagging tidal creek finger that humans are just one of many species that interact with and require the salt marsh environment to survive and to flourish.

We must remind one another that our shared ownership of this public land necessitates responsibility to her health and maintenance and prevention of potential causes of her demise. Mankind may hold a paper title to this land indefinitely (until it biodegrades); however, the Cape Cod salt marsh shores will not be able to indefinitely absorb the enormous weight of our heavy human foot pounding on her. The power of the tides to carry away singular sand grains slipping from between our toes is so great that we may soon be left standing knee-deep in salt water, staring dumbly at cold wet feet beneath a murky surface. We must now think fast together on those planted feet, for the day after tomorrow just might become the tragic one forever referred to as "the first day that mankind watched the tide come in but never run out."