Chelsea Green, 2006
Home on the Marsh
Tim Traver, a science writer, attempts the near-impossible with this first book. Consider the word “dumbstruck” and what it means: something hits us so hard that we are unable to find adequate words to describe it. Does this lead to an eventual effusion in an attempt at articulation? As Traver documents the story of a salt marsh, it is not just about the place and its ecology but also its role in his life and that of his family. He has known and loved Sippewisset his whole life, annually spending time at a family home in Falmouth on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. By combining the personal with the scientific, Traver ambitiously attempts to fit all things Sippewisset into his book, and therein is some charm, but also overload.
Details come to feel heaped upon each other and begin to lose their clarity and vigor; the result is an overload of information. The story is engaging enough to keep a reader interested; at least, one interested in learning the rudiments of salt marsh ecology and some history of summers spent on the Cape. But the things that excite Traver most seem to come with the most burdened of descriptions. While his enthusiasm is admirable in suffusing some zest, his language becomes almost clumsy in places and suggests some tighter editing would strengthen the prose. An emotional investment in one’s topic can have, one supposes, its pluses and minuses.
Traver may, on some level, recognize that verbose tendency. In one chapter, he muses about the experience of a conversation with two teenagers he encounters when they show up at the marsh. He shares his telescope with them, helping them observe ospreys. In his comments about that interaction, he writes that he told them how the use of DDT as a pesticide had thinned the eggshells of ospreys and threatened to eradicate them, and how scientist Rachel Carson, a hero of his, had spent time at a lab in Woods Hole studying Sippiwisset, and wrote Silent Spring to expose to a wider public the dangers those chemicals posed. He concludes, “I talked too much. I overwhelmed and ultimately bored them. But the osprey story, and Rachel Carson’s triumphant Silent Spring: These stories must be passed down.”
That Traver feels a lot of heartfelt affection and passion for salt marshes is obvious. One of his most touching pieces recounts a sensual moonlit outing in kayaks with his wife, suggesting a marsh’s aphrodisiac attributes.
There are a lot of prosaic and practical lessons to learn from his book. Chapter headings suggest the range of topics: fishes, birds, mud, microbes, quahogs, crabs, eelgrass, dunes, beach houses, sand, clams, storms, fire. Hopefully, sharing these stories will inspire others to be more interested in this fragile and incredibly important ecosystem. In that this book could spur better protection of salt marshes, Traver’s homage makes a homespun contribution to environmental stewardship.