Paddling Through Time
Some thoughts on rounding the Delmarva Peninsula by kayak, a 500 mile journey at a few miles an hour that gives you ample time to think.
I once read in a canoe magazine of a famously difficult passage in New England across fifty miles of open water. Most modern paddlers who tried it failed; yet Native Americans had done it routinely.
Most likely it was not skill or endurance we moderns lacked. It was time we were short of. Less obliged to clocks and back to work deadlines, ‘primitive’ paddlers just hung out, hunted, told stories until conditions for crossing were ideal.
They had lifespans maybe half ours, as we measure such things; but I suspect, having experienced days evaporate while staring at a computer and rabidly multi-tasking, that they moved more slowly through time than we know.
Perhaps they moved more richly, too. Paddling the long and mostly lovely edges of Delmarva this past September and October with the nonprofit Upstream Alliance, we are seldom more than yards from marsh and bluff and dune and beach, even as we float with the whole Atlantic to the other side; or the 25-mile broad lower Chesapeake. Moving thus at walking speed, amid dolphins and hawks migrating and ospreys diving, becomes at times a meditation, an appreciation.
Just a couple mile an hour tide pushing your little craft along, a breeze at your back, a mile of lee in the shore’s curve affording escape from relentless headwinds—these become gifts to savor. Likewise a chance encounter with Latino aquaculturists harvesting oysters from a cove, who for a few bucks pour half a bushel into the hatch of one kayak. We’ll slurp them, fat and salty, at camp a few hours later.
“We live in the age of estuaries.” I read that in Arthur Sherwood’s 1974 book, Understanding the Chesapeake, at a bayside home where we took refuge from an approaching nor’easter. The speaker was the late Donald Pritchard, the eminent Johns Hopkins University oceanographer.
Pritchard meant that in geologic time, coastal estuaries like the Chesapeake are ephemeral creatures, rare flowers blossoming only during that ten per cent of time between Ice Ages when the ice melts and the seas swell to inspire the world’s coastlines with life.
The Holocene, as this interglacial is known, is increasingly called the Anthropocene, as humans come to dominate natural processes. Indeed, Pritchard ventured that without human intervention, dredging channels for shipping, the Chesapeake’s fate would be to fill in with sediment coming down its rivers, becoming a marsh.
But times have changed since the Hopkins scientist said that. Human-caused climate change is raising sea level, perhaps extending the life and scope of estuaries everywhere in a way unanticipated until very recently.
So we paddle: through time both intimate and geologic, through the marsh guts and past the mouths of creeks, through the Age of Estuaries.
At kayak speed the Bay’s edges quickly become either welcoming or hostile, because you are always looking for places to rest, to stretch, to lunch, to take respite from heat and headwinds. ‘Hostile’ shoreline is that which property owners, from individuals to the Army at Aberdeen and NASA at Wallops Island, have armored with wood and steel and rock.
That trend has increased by the dozens, more likely the hundreds of miles since I last circumnavigated Delmarva a decade ago. It is the final stage of attempting to repeal climate change and sea level rise and the increased shoreline erosion that is resulting. Later will come acceptance, adaptation, retreat; but before that, we’ll spend billions more dollars trying to hold the (shore)line, armoring, diking, pumping up sand.
Fight or retreat, deny or accept? Speed up or go slower?
David Orr of Oberlin College wrote a memorable essay called Speed. He drew a common thread among water running too fast off a paved landscape, destroying streams; money leaving local economies too fast, eroding communities in an age of global banking; information flooding us via the internet faster than the human mind can process, the volume of knowledge becoming the enemy of wisdom.
This increasing speed, Orr concluded, is driven by minds “unaware of the irony that the race has never been to the swift.”
As I write we are recalculating our paddle, mindful that to honor everyones’ schedules we must make it back to the Bay Bridges, where we started, in another week; savoring slowness rapidly coming to an end.
