“By daylight the sunlight filters through the jungle of rockweeds to reach its floor only in shifting patches of shadow-flecked gold,” she writes, “by night the moonlight spreads a silver ceiling above the forest….”Ĭarson breaks her book into three main sections, each one focusing on a different type of coastline: the rocky coasts of New England, the sandy beaches of the mid- and southern Atlantic seaboard the coral and mangrove coasts of Florida’s tip. Such places are, for Carson, places of wonder, and she invites readers to take a peek. First published in 1955, it is a love letter to lovers of the sea, to those who find joy exploring tidepools and beaches. If Robert Frost had gone to work writing nature guides for Roger Tory Peterson, the result would have probably resembled something like this book.
The Edge of the Sea is a magnificent little book, so to read it here, even if I’m shut away from the sea in my car, is a treat. Sitting on the edge of the sea to read her work might be an appropriate way to try and channel her a little bit. You just never know.Ī trip to the coast always recharges me, and I thought Carson might make a particularly good traveling companion. I’ve walked through feet of snow to sit, in shorts, on Sand Beach on warm March weekends. From Acadia’s mountaintops, I’ve seen fogbanks roll in from the open sea and swallow entire islands in Freshmen’s Bay in a matter of minutes. It’s pretty much what I expected, although you can never really be sure what the weather’s doing at the coast until you get there. The cold weather has forced me to spend most of my time huddled in my car with the heater going as I’ve read. I’ve also brought Carson’s first book, The Sea Around Us, although for most of the day the sea is safely out there. I’ve come here, to the edge of the sea, to spend some time with Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea. Desert Island, near the western end of the natural seawall. There’s a booming flash of white-and then the wind erases it. As the waves hit, the same wind that’s numbing my fingers is sheering off the tops of the whitecaps before they hardly have time to spray. I wanted to grab a couple snapshots with my Blackberry of the waves as they roll in and hit the granite shoreline that the receding tide has been slowly revealing. I can hardly feel my fingers though my deerskin mittens have been off for less than half a minute. The thermometer says it’s 23 degrees, but the wind blowing east off the Gulf of Maine says differently.
#9: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1961) #8: The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1953)
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