Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring and The edge of the Sea, spent summers in Southport, Maine from 1951 until 1963. A tidal salt pond in nearby New Harbor was a cherished spot. Thanks to the Maine Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, which Rachel helped found, this beautiful tide pool is now part of the Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve and is open to the public. A few weeks ago, on a perfect mid-September day, 15 USM students, staff, and faculty traveled to the preserve and waded in the bare footsteps of this famous author and biologist. The field trip to the pool and a cruise on offshore Muscongus Bay began USM’s year-long Convocation on Environmental Sustainability. By all measures, it was a wonderfully successful start of the Convocation year.
Criminology Professor Sandra Wachholz and History Professor Emeritus Fred Padula spoke of Rachel Carson’s contributions to science and society as event participants sat on the warm, rounded stones at the edge of the pool. The comfortable group ate their lunch and then gently explored the complex and fascinating tide pool community. Periwinkle scraped algae off rocks, which were worn down by the snails file-like tongues. Small shrimp swam through the clear water, perhaps wary of the more numerous, and much larger green crabs. A small eel, briefly spotted, disappeared into a dense cover of rockweed. Rachel Carson would have been pleased to watch both the year-round tide pool residents and the summer people, particularly these courteous, curious, USM students from away. Although the visitors left the edge of the sea as they found it, they, themselves were changed.
Some left understanding that the osprey that once again regularly fly over Maine harbors are a living legacy to Rachel Carson.. Without Rachel’s Silent Spring, Maine’s osprey might have disappeared from our own springs, silenced forever by the shell-thinning DDT that had made its certain way from our yards and fields into these graceful neighbors. Some in the group left with a greater understanding that they are a part of global forces that threaten to change the very atmosphere that plays a part in the regenerative tidal rinses that keep the pool alive. All left with a deep appreciation of Rachel Carson’s ability to translate the features within a small tide pool on the Maine coast into global concerns, as their reflections suggest:
* I have lived in Maine my whole life, however, I have never visited a more beautiful place. My eyes have been awakened to the beauty of the coast. We should all spend a day with an environmentalist so that if we are lucky enough, we can see half the beauty they see in a single half-inch of earth.
Kelly Stevens
*The afternoon was like rediscovering my childhood again, looking at the creatures in the tidal pools and lifting up rocks and seaweed to observe the life underneath…I really felt rejuvenated after being asked to simply absorb my surroundings, to listen to the water slap against the rocks and smell the fresh salty air.
Jen Logan
*The tidal pool was a mirror of another little universe. I felt overjoyed that my fellow companions could be amazed as I could by the magic of nature. You do not feel the urge to move a rock or jump into the pool. The feeling is integral or even miniscule to nature, just as Rachel probably felt.
Rachel Sachowitz
*After the field trip, I thought more about the species that are only visible with a microscope. I wondered about what I had missed at the pond. What role do they play in the lives of what we could see? So I went in search of a description of a salt pond and what you could find there.
Melissa Gates
*I think that schools and universities should have more trips; they should encourage people to get out and explore the environment that surrounds us…We are drifting away from the real world into one-track lives.
Irina Kladova
*Altogether this trip was a great experience. I learned many things about the environment and scientists struggling their whole lives to overcome issues and preserve wild life.
Derick Beverly
These remarks give one hope that Rachel Carson’s tide pool, and the world that supports it, both face a promising future. We thank the students for their contributions to FootPrint and give the honor of having the last words to Rachel Carson:
Now I hear the sea sounds about me; the night high tide is rising, swirling with a confused rush of waters against the rocks below my study window. Fog has come into the bay from the open sea, and it lies over water and over the land’s edge seeping back in to the spruces and stealing softly among the juniper and the bayberry…Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know…On all these shores there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before; of the sea’s eternal rhythms – the tides, the beat of surf, the pressing rivers of the currents – shaping, changing, dominating; of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.
Rachel Carson in, The Edge of the Sea, (Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
Dudley Greeley can be contacted at [email protected]