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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Adrift in a Tidal Creek, Amid Shimmering Light and Teeming Life

William Rogers / flickr
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CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I had spent the afternoon walking a barrier beach on the bay side of Eastham, casually watching the shorebirds flock and feed: yellowlegs, semi-pals, black-bellied plovers, ring-necks, and various small sandpipers. Their year’s breeding already finished on the muskeg and tundra of the high North, they were working their way leisurely south, passion spent, the season now all downhill.

It had been a hot day on the beach, and I had thought to end it with a swim in Hatches Creek. The tide was coming in, pushed by a strong, hot, westerly wind, so that the bay rolled and lifted with summer whitecaps. At the mouth of the creek I dove in, relaxed, and gave myself up to the landward movement of the tide. The water was quite warm, almost bath-like, as it can be on the bayside on a sunny summer’s day. I floated buoyantly, swiftly, on the incoming tide, surrounded by seaweed and patches of furred algae as the current carried me inside the spit. This, I thought, is the way to see a tidal creek – by becoming part of it, floating like a piece of flotsam, buoyed up by water so warm as to give the illusion of weightlessness.

Now the birds seemed to come to me. A flock of grackles flew by, heading out towards the beach. A green heron, burnished to dark copper in the sun, crossed the creek directly over me with deep, arched wing beats. A small flock of roseate terns chivied and circled above me, perhaps thinking me some kind of strange fish. A few least terns joined them with their sharper, scissor-like cries.

I turned over on my stomach and saw the dark, darting shapes of killifish, the short bright forms of silverside minnows, and, right below me, a small school of sand eels – small, thin eel-like fish that glistened and undulated in the deep, green, clear waters. They blend remarkably into their element and even seemed to align themselves with the wavering patterns of light refracted from the surface ripples that flicker along the creek’s bottom. Talk about adaptive coloration – these fish appear to be evolving into mere shimmers of light!

In the main channel the strong current keeps the bottom of the tidal creek sandy and swept clean. In the side channels, however, where flushing is weaker, the bottom turns mucky and the water Sargassoan, discouraging exploration. The main channel was about nose-deep in the center, and I found that I could “run”, as it were, along the bottom, a kind of slow-motion aquatic jogging. In this manner I alternately ran, floated, sculled, and dozed  as the tide continued to carry me several hundred feet up the creek, like a white corpuscle swept along in that great, winding, green artery.

This is part one of a two-part account, “Metamorphoses in a Tidal Creek.” Check back next week for part two. 

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.