Notes from an Environmentalist.
"Living on the water is like being a Parisian, Living half a Mile Away is like being a tourist."
The House on Pleasant Bay
“Living on the water is like being a Parisian, living half a mile away is like being a mere tourist.”
I’m extremely fortunate to have grown up on Cape Cod’s Pleasant Bay. The house was modest but the view was spectacular. We looked twelve miles down the bay and only saw three houses, the rest was uninhabited islands, the backside of Nauset Beach, the Atlantic Ocean, marshes, and the rich shallow waters of Pleasant Bay.
In the mornings I would sit in the sun enveloped in the fragarent smell and taste of sun ripened tomatoes while their warm juices dribbled down my bare chest.
I would investigate the lives of ancient pill bugs between my bare feet until my reverie was broken by my family clambering downstairs to gobble down tons of unconsumables. I would never let on I had just been feasting with the gods.
After breakfast I would load up our old wooden wheelbarrow, and trundle down to the shore where I kept my flat- bottomed marsh boat on a jury- rigged pulley system.
I would load the boat with food, fuel, fishing rods and clam rakes all the necessities for any opportunity that might arise.
A cough, a sputter, a puff of blue smoke and my 3 horse power Evinrude would spark into life.
I would meet my friends in midbay. All we had to do was avoid being shanghaied into crewing for some sailing race and we would be on our way, fishing, clamming, ambushing each other in the labyrinth of creeks behind the bay’s islands.
On my return, I would clean the fish on the old wooden bridge that spanned a creek behind our house, and feed scraps to the crabs, minnows and shrimp that I knew by name and temperament.
I would drag a plankton net through the creek keeping track of how the population of larval crabs, fish, euphausids and amphipods changed as the summer progressed. I would bring them back to my homemade lab and scrutinize them under my microscope and draw and label them in my lab book.
Back in school I always had the “What Did you do on Summer Vacation?” essay knocked. I would write up our adventures and throw in a few latin binomials to wow and confound my teachers. Other than that, I would keep my lab secret because it was decidedly uncool.
My summer experiences became cooler in college when I took an invertebrate zoology class and realized I knew more than the grad students teaching the course who had never seen many of the specimens, alive and behaving in their natural environment.
After college I set up a marine biology project on Pleasant Bay. After being told we couldn’t house students in tents we crammed them into our attic and turned an extra room into a wet lab.
Under the tutelage of Harvard’s George Buckly we collected ten years of data which we incorporated into a NOVA film and my first book. “Shallow Waters; A Year on Cape Cod’s Pleasant Bay”.
I used the same formula for writing books about horseshoe crabs, barrier beaches, Plum Island and New Hampshire.
All this came about I had the extreme good fortune of growing up on the water. I would look out the window every morning and the time, tide, birds, fish and weather would shape my day.
Anyone who has had the good fortune to live on the water as opposed to half a mile away knows that the first is like being a Parisian, the second is like being a mere tourist.