Matthiessen Peter - Tides: the science and spirit of the ocean

Praise for Tides

Jonathan Whites tidal explorations drew me in with just the right mix of science, history, and storytelling, propelled throughout by the authors infectious curiosity and sense of wonder. Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and filled with unexpected connections and discoveries, Tides is a splendid bookhighly recommended.

Thor Hanson, author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds

I loved this book. As a physical oceanographer, I understand tides from a scientific viewpoint. I enjoyed learning the history of tidal theories, the spiritual meaning the tides have for many people around the world, and how the tides affect so many places in such varied ways. I recommend it to both scientists and nonscientists alike.

Sally Warner, Ph.D. in physical oceanography, Oregon State University

Tides is an enriching meditation on the motions, eccentricities, and ebbs and floods of the 71 percent silent majority covering the planets surface. In clear, poetic verse, White paints the ocean for what it really is: less a static mass and more a living, breathing being swayed by the rhythms of the universe that, in ways large and small, interconnects all life.

James Nestor, author of Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves

Let me be clear. This is one of the most fascinating, engaging, relevant, and impeccably brilliant books I have ever read. It has profoundly changed my sense of the earth, the oceans, the sky, and how they are deeply interwoven with the course of human thought and history.

Richard Nelson, author of The Island Within

Published by Trinity University Press

San Antonio, Texas 78212

Copyright 2017 by Jonathan White

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Jacket design by Ann Weinstock

Book design by BookMatters, Berkeley

Cover art: moon, Colourbox.com; water, exsodus/123rf.com

ISBN-13 978-1-59534-806-7 ebook

Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.

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CIP data on file at the Library of Congress

21 20 19 18 17 | 5 4 3 2 1

For Donna and Matthew,

my loves

The sea has many voices,

Many gods and many voices.

T. S. Eliott

Table of Contents

Contents

The mysterious workings of the tides are among my own earliest memories. On childhood days on a sand edge of Fishers Island, off the New England coast, I would sit mystified by the waters unaccountable retreat just as it touched the entrance channel into my sand castle. In boyhood summers on fishing excursions with my father off Race Point at the west end of that island, I observed with dread the relentless shifting of dark muscled waters all the way west to the lighthouse at Little Gull Island on Long Islands North Fork, three miles away. Through this great tideway called the Race, twice every day, the broad sound between Long Island and Connecticut empties itself into the Atlantic, only to return on the flood tide six hours later. The sheer might of this current, with the groan of fog horns and the distant gong of the gaunt bell buoy at Valiant Rock, had such a grip on my imagination that I named my first novel after the Race Rocks Lighthouse for no better reason than its evocation of the fathomless power of existence.

The Race was forever in a state of change, and its faces were gray and blue and black, and red with torn menhaden when the bluefish ran, and scarred with white. Its force gave him the feeling that nothing lost there was recoverable but would fade into some deep oblivion of anonymous salt tatters and marine rust. Once he himself had clutched at a green glass net float from another ocean only to see this unsinkable thing drift down from the light into the shadows of water rushing hard upon Race Rock...

South and west across the Race, passing south of Little Gull, then westward down the long rough reach north of Gardiners Island toward the South Fork and the old whaling port of Sag Harbor: only rarely in six decades as a boatman have I made that voyage west or east without first consulting with the tide and current tables of my coast pilot.

On the South Fork, as a young writer, I worked the seasons for three years as an ocean haul seiner and scalloper and, in summer, as a charter boat captain out of Montauk Harborand those work days were all at the beck and call of tides. For the past fifty years I have lived year-round across the South Fork from Sag Harbor in what was once a small farming community behind the dunes where, on certain winds, the explosion of breaker is clearly audible; sometimes, in a storm, the rush of ocean, obliterating the rumble of the surf, sounds like an oncoming avalanche, threatening to overwhelm the world.

How fitting, then, that on a stormy evening I find myself immersed in Tides, an excellent new book on the earths tides by Jonathan White, a veteran mariner who for many years at the helm of his schooner, Crusader, has navigated the strong currents of the Pacific Northwest archipelago, notably that monumental passage that extends from the state of Washington and Vancouver Island to the glacial coast of southeastern Alaska.

Happily, he is also a fine writer and reporter, pursuing his elusive subject all the way from southern China to Ungava Bay on the Arctic coast of North Quebec, where a differential of over fifty feet is among the worlds most extreme tides; here, near the village of Kangiqsujuaq, he follows an Inuit shellfish forager down a hole chopped through the thick onshore ice that forms a roof over the exposed mussel beds in the eerie chamber left behind by the ebbed tide.

Whites book begins sensibly enough with fascinating discussions of the nature of tides and the relation of their moon-led cycles to the cycles of all forms of life, including man. The precise timing of certain bird migrations linked to the breeding cycles and abundance of food species is well knownthe dependence, for example, of the northbound red knot and other sandpipers on the myriad eggs of the horseshoe crab at Cape May (New Jersey) in the spring and the explosion of small mudshrimp on the tide flats of the Bay of Fundy in fall migration. Years ago I was lucky enough to see a green turtle haul herself ashore in the Red Sea and lay her eggs in the warm sand above the tide line, the hatch perfectly timed to that high tide months later in the dark of the new moon, when the new turtles will dig their way free of the wet sand and rush toward the safety of the sea.