I grew up spending summers in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in a small cottage perched on a narrow granite outcropping that jutted into Long Island Sound. This headland of glacial moraine was surrounded by incredible habitat: salt water, tidal pools, beach, marsh, two brackish rivers, and woodlands.
Of all the pleasures inherent to summer, the ones I treasure most involve nature. The area was aptly called Point O’Woods; indigenous, wind-stunted red oaks, white pines, cedars, black walnuts, sassafras trees grew from rock crags and provided perches and nest holes for wood thrushes, wrens, red-tailed hawks, eastern screech owls. My two sisters and I would waken and fall asleep to the distant cry of herring, common, laughing, and black-backed gulls calling from their rookery on North Brother Island.
Here are some of the great moments: the August a silver fox prowled our yard; a family of pure white skunks living in a thicket behind my grandfather’s house; sighting a blue lobster while crabbing in a tidal pool -- berried with dark eggs, she’d come in to molt; a six-hundred pound sunfish cruising through our swimming area, white light glinting off its great back; one late-August when the food chain was most evident -- a thick ribbon of menhaden hugging the shore, chased by snapper blues driven in by larger blues, hunted by sharks -- we saw a lot of fins that year; the Perseid meteor shower, every August 12th or so, lying on a beach blanket, counting shooting stars overhead.
My mother, an English teacher, held writing workshops for my sisters and me. We’d sit at the old oak family table, notebooks open, and she’d ask us for ten words to describe that day’s sky. Or for three paragraphs describing an adventure we’d had that week. I’d begin each writing session hearing kids play on the beach below our cottage, mightily wishing I were down there with them. But then I’d get lost in the writing, in “skying” as I’d look out the window at high cirrus clouds, catching sight of an osprey gliding by.
My love of nature and passion for the environment affects my writing now more than ever. So much has changed. I’ve kept that family beach cottage. Good, quantifiable things have happened. Osprey, once terribly endangered, have come back in great numbers. Striped bass, once loaded with PCBs, are now considered safe to eat.
But there are losses and dangers as well. As the old cottages change hands there are many teardowns, rebuilt by huge houses that require cutting trees and blasting ledge. The trees and rocks provided habitat and soil containment, and without them the ecology has changed, and there’s runoff of fertilizer and other pollutants into the Sound. As one friend says, “It’s now Point-O-No Woods.”
Millstone Nuclear Power Station is two points of land away. I see the red and white stack from my desk in the kitchen. The plant uses water from Niantic Bay as coolant, and a plume of hot water rushes into the bay and sound. This warming has caused changes to the lobster, winter flounder, and tautog populations, among others, and has invited a species of sea worm, previously unknown in New England, to come north and bore into docks, piers, and wooden boats.
Global warming is apparent. Some of the old tidal pools are no longer -- the sea level has risen to a point where the pools are always underwater. Harbor seals, a joy to see, have become commonplace as they adapt to climate change and shrinking of the icepack. Lobster in southern New England, particularly Long Island Sound, can be viewed as our own private Polar Bear -- stocks are shrinking, dying off, affected by an unknown blight thought to be caused by rising sea temperatures.
When I was fifteen I’d go out with my father in our Brockway skiff to lobster. He’d be at the helm and I’d grab the buoy and haul in the pot. Lobsters were so plentiful, we’d eat them for dinner every night and give away plenty more to our neighbors. That experience taught me so much about the Sound’s ecology, and about the food chain. Pulling up the pots I’d see a passel of lobsters but also the picked-clean fish head we used as bait; large channeled whelks, their shells covered with barnacles, clinging to the wood slats. I learned to throw back juveniles and egg-bearing females.
Characters in my novels often live by the sea. They cherish the land, even postage stamp-sized lots, and the creatures that inhabit their trees, rock ledges, beach rose thickets. They see habitat being destroyed -- marshlands encroached upon by development, woodlands clear-cut, coves once brimming with marine life and now devoid of it -- and they grieve, and they try to save what remains.
And they love and celebrate what still exists: the osprey, gulls and terns, stripers in August, the Perseids, granite gleaming with rose quartz and mica, the full moon rising in the east, shining its life on the rocks and the living sea.
Luanne Rice's latest book, The Silver Boat, was released on April 5 and can be ordered from a variety of booksellers on the author's website.
