When you grow up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, you learn what a marsh is before you learn to tie your shoes.
Where I live, the beach closes at night. The dunes still thrum with insects and the waves still hum as they lap the sand—but for all intents and purposes, it’s closed. If you want to walk along the moonlit ocean, you have to sneak in. It’s a long, winding drive down Argilla Road, the houses becoming fewer as you close the distance between town and open water. As the trees thin, you will be able to see the black boxes dotting the marshes like small spaceships. Over 400 of these boxes are scattered on marshland along the North Shore, and they buzz with millions of greenhead flies that are trapped inside. For the entire month of July, the greenheads torment beachgoers; they bite with the ferocity of small dogs. But despite their toughness, they will all die with the full moon, a rhythmic and eagerly-awaited genocide.
Extend your arm out the open window so the warm, salty air can tangle through your fingers. No greenheads at night: they’re sleeping, like the town. You will pass by a castle perched on a hill. As you approach the gates, note how the Phragmites stand guard. The gates will be closed, and you will have to park on the sandy shoulders riddled with puddles. There will be at least two pickup trucks—the fishermen always get there first. The best time to fish is, according to the pickup trucks, any time when it is dark.
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Hop the gate, or simply slide beneath it. You are entering through the exit, walking against the ghosts of this afternoon’s beach traffic. The road, pockmarked with deep potholes, sits within dense sandy woods. You will hear noises, and you will worry about coyotes. It is very dark, and you will have to verbally confirm if your company is still with you. It’s lonely and intimate.
Like a river meeting the ocean, you will be spilled out into a parking lot. Where a river meets the ocean is called an estuary. It is a transition area, the boundary between riverbanks and the open ocean where salt and freshwater mix together. The banks of estuaries are among the most heavily human-populated areas in the world: 60 percent of the world’s population live along them. Perhaps we feel most comfortable in these spaces of uncertainty, where dichotomies exist simultaneously, where multiple parts of us can be true at once.
The star spread is suddenly wide in the parking lot. Vending machines blink from the sand by the snack bar. Find the boardwalk; proceed carefully, there are steps.
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I walked up these same steps on a March afternoon nine years ago. News had swept through our small town: a dead minke whale had washed up on the sand. I summoned the ten-year-old I was babysitting and we drove to the beach. A small crowd of people mingled as if attending a graveside service. I was struck by its size; it was smaller than I expected, about 20 feet long. Minkes, it turns out, are the smallest of the baleen whales found in North American waters. And so this whale existed in two relative spaces at once: a large animal, a small whale. It dwarfed the ten-year-old boy next to me, and yet I regarded the whale as I would a young child.
Its body was swollen. Somehow the crowd reached a silent agreement that we were allowed to touch. I stroked its bulbous tongue and shivered at the physical connection between two alien worlds. A volunteer from the aquarium arrived and admonished us coldly. It has been dead for several days, she said. It could explode. When a whale begins to decompose, gases build up inside its skin and are unable to escape the whale’s thick blubber. But explosions can happen when the skin is ripped, an occurrence usually caused by humans. Everything bursts out: a delivering of organs, a birth of death.
When you grow up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, you learn what a marsh is before you learn to tie your shoes. We are a community of 33 square miles, one-third of which is salt marsh. In fifth grade, we took a field trip to the marsh. We wandered through the stiff grass and rooted in its streams. Glasslike crabs tittered in the mud. Minnows crowded the water but dodged my fingers like rays of light. A few months later, my family would have our last photo shoot in that same spot. A framed photo hangs above our piano at home: mom and dad with arms around each other, me standing seriously nearby, my brother sitting by a stream.
What is our fascination with the sea? Perhaps we are captivated by the sheer number of living things hiding in its depths. For centuries, people considered the ocean’s resources to be limitless. Fishermen looked at the ocean and saw so much life that they couldn’t imagine having enough nets.
But we also associate the ocean with death. We have buried bodies beneath the water since ancient times, as far back as the Greeks and the Romans. Deceased Viking warriors of distinction were set sail and then set on fire. More recently, slave ships crossing the Atlantic would roll the dead overboard; the lack of grave was not a privilege.
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I too have buried a body in the ocean. When I was seven, my family boarded a schooner and sailed to a distant anchored buoy. I scooped my grandfather’s ashes with a shell and poured them into the water. Afterwards, my cousins and I scurried around the deck of the ship, and my mom ordered me my first ever Shirley Temple. When I wanted another, she let me have two.
In Ipswich, Massachusetts, the beach is associated with a sick boy and his birthday party. Everyone in town knows this story. The beach belonged to the man that owned the castle on the hill: Richard T. Crane, Jr., a wealthy man whose family sold toilets. He made such a fine living that when his wife hated their Italian villa for its draftiness, he tore it down and built her a castle instead. But his money couldn’t heal his sickly son Cornelius. The boy didn’t have many friends, so when Cornelius turned six years old, Richard T. Crane, Jr. put his money to use where he could and invited the entire town’s children to a day on Crane Beach. They sent row boats to the local wharf to pick up the school kids and bring them to Cornelius. Can you picture the small boy standing ankle-deep in the waves, wheezing through his asthma, waiting for the boats full of strangers to arrive? After the day’s success, Richard T. Crane, Jr. started a fund to make the beach trip an annual tradition. When I was 14, my school went to the beach to celebrate Cornelius’s birthday. He would have been 106 years old.
In the waves by our ankles: my grandfather’s ashes. A dead minke whale? A Viking? How many children? How many fish?
Four hundred years ago, my tenth-great-grandfather was born on a ship called the Mayflower. He was the first Pilgrim born in the New World, in the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was christened Peregrine White: “peregrine” meaning “wandering,” for the journey that preceded him—or perhaps the one still ahead. In the six months after his birth, more than 50 colonists would die, including his father. But the infant survived and continued his family line. Nine months after my mother died, her nephew Peregrine took his first breath. Peregrine: for the journey ahead. Or perhaps, too, the one that preceded him.
I have one more thing to show you. I left you on the boardwalk, climbing the steps. You can take off your shoes and walk through the cool sand that was blistering hours earlier. If it’s low tide, you will have to walk for a long time before you reach the water. Approach; walk in barefoot. It will be very cold, and you will suck in your breath.
If you look up to the sky, you will eventually catch a meteor from the corner of your eye. Scuff your feet in the sand: look carefully. Stars will blink beneath your toes. They appear like silent firecrackers. Sudden, bright, quick. The sparks are microscopic creatures that bioluminesce when distressed, Noctiluca scintillans, commonly known as sea sparkle. They are small and alive. They mingle with my skin, and my grandfather’s ashes, and the reflection of the meteor shower going on above my head.
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