Tides, along with the seasons and the diurnal rhythms, are one of the few dependably regular reciprocal rhythms in nature. One can journey into winter, or midnight, knowing one will be returned, in time, to summer and the light of day.
With the tide, it takes a conscious timing and positioning, but a round trip ticket on of the Earth’s great forces is equally available.
I experienced this one day in early June when I put my canoe in at Hemenway Landing on Eastham’s Nauset Marsh. Nauset Marsh is unusual among large Cape Cod salt marshes, because there is more water than marsh in it, with deep and navigable creeks around its perimeter and large bays at its upper end. By contrast, in most large marsh systems, such as the Great Marshes of Barnstable, one enters a main estuary and paddles up any one of a branching network of gradually narrowing, dead-end creeks.
But Nauset is younger than most major marshes on the Cape and so has not yet taken on the classic configurations of a mature salt marsh. Here the marsh grass is divided into several large blocks, and many smaller hummocks, forming a kind of peat archipelago, around which one can navigate in a canoe or a small boat even at low tide. Such a configuration invites voyages of exploration and investigation. It also invites local names for the various bays, inlets, creeks, marshes and hummocks, some of which make geographical analogies with the larger world outside the marsh.
For instance, the largest of the contiguous marsh islands in Nauset Marsh is called “Porchy Marsh,”a wide crescent- shaped peat island well over a mile in length. Porchy Marsh is shaped roughly like the South American continent, and therefore its tapered southern end is called “The Horn” and the narrow passage at its very tip the “Straits of Magellan.”
The tide, when I arrived at the landing, looked about an hour past high. I figured I had about four hours to paddle down and explore the outside of the marsh, and then return on the incoming tide.
It was a perfect day to be out on the marsh, warm but not humid, early enough in the season to avoid the greenhead flies, and with a wind light, but strong enough to keep away whatever insects there might be. The sky was clean and new, as yet unglazed by summer, washed with high horse tails and embroidered with fair weather clouds. I was accompanied by small pale-blue butterflies that tumbled along lightly through the air. The peat banks of the creeks were exposed and riddled with thousands of burrows of fiddler crabs.
I drifted with the outgoing tide a hundred yards or so down the inside border of the marsh to the little twisting cut-through called “Northwest Passage.” I stopped at one or two inlets to explore the marsh and to examine the so-called “salt pans,” small depressions in the marsh that are clear of grass and contain shallow pools of salt water full of periwinkles.
Eventually I emerged into the main channel and was immediately lifted and carried southward along the east coast of the main marsh by the broad gentle sweep of the ebbing current. The marsh here is smooth and rounded on its outer side, a testimony to the trimming power of the main tidal currents on that side. I put my paddle down and enjoyed the beauty of the marsh.
This is part 1 of a 2-part essay. Listen to Part 2 here.
