Continued, Birds by the Shore

The sea has gone the color of pewter. A sharp, clean wind blows scuds of foam along the beach and forces my gaze downward; fine sand stings my legs. It is spring, a day or two after a violent storm. Near the waterline are scarps two feet high, miniature cliffs where the charged-up surf has gnawed its way into the continent. I have come down to the shore with my father, who is visiting for a day or two. We have brought binoculars in the hopes of spotting a storm waif, a petrel, perhaps, or a shearwater—some birds will fly for days before a storm at sea, then drop as soon as the storm hits land—but we see only Bible black grackles fighting the wind, and a knot of three gulls hunkered down on the sand like feathered fists. The storm has resculpted the contours of the beach, scoured it of all familiar form. The beach grass is scribing arcs in the sand like dark circles under tired eyes.

The storm was born when a cold front moving in from the northwest collided with a mass of hot, muggy air from the south, prompting a line of violent thunderstorms. At the ferry dock, on the fishing piers, people dropped what they were doing, stood and watched the huge black curtain move across the water. Soon they were standing in freakish noon darkness as complete as a total eclipse of the sun, and in stillness, save for the steady tick and creak of boats on their moorings and the tide slip-slapping beneath the piers. The moment had that dreamlike quality of a luminist painting where time stands still. When the storm finally struck, rain lashed down, pelting the sand like buckshot. Winds gusting to eighty miles per hour fueled ten-foot seas that took the beach apart.

Our footsteps break the crust of the upper beach with the good crunch of dry sand, but as we head down toward the water, we slog along in the softer sediment, and my dad’s breathing grows heavy. He has recently recovered from an allergic reaction that nearly killed him. During a routine diagnostic test, so small a wrench as iodine—an element in seawater, rocks, and soil, and in small amounts essential to our own well-being—produced an anaphylactic attack that unhinged his whole system, swelled his throat, shut his airways, made his heart stop cold. My father is an energetic man with a keen intellect, a good sense of humor, and passion for his work. He is careful in his habits and attentive to his health. But here was something utterly beyond control, a case of mistaken identity by his immune system, a small blunder that nearly cost his life.

When my stepmother, Gail, called with the news, I thought: No. Not him. Not now. By the time I reached the hospital, my father’s heart had stabilized, and the threat of death had passed. Gail and I stood by his bed in the critical care unit waiting for some sign of consciousness. Between us hung the deep unspoken fear of mental diminishment. When he finally stirred, he said in a voice muffled through tubes and masks. “My first sick day in twenty years.”

As we round the cape, my father’s chest is tense and heaving. For rest, we find a log thrown up by the sea and sit looking down at the little wrecks beaten by the surf: legless shells of lady crabs, mermaid purses torn from their moorings, the busted-up helmets of horseshoe crabs.

The last hurricane-force storm to hit this region was a giant northeaster that struck hard on Ash Wednesday, 1962. The U.S. Weather Bureau called it an extratropical cyclone, “unusual in composition and behavior.” It was a saucer-shaped affair, a strong circular low-pressure system reaching up to forty thousand feet that moved out of the Midwest the first weekend in March, crossed the Appalachians, dumping three feet of snow in Virginia, and then traveled east toward the coast. Monday night it joined another, uncharted storm developing in the Atlantic, forming a giant trough of low-pressure air from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod, six hundred miles long and three hundred miles wide. Winds blowing down the long fetch of that trough whipped up thirty-foot waves that crashed down on the coast.

All day Tuesday, the rain fell, and the waves came closer and closer upon each other, slamming into the shore every six or seven seconds. With the new moon of Ash Wednesday came heavy tides, five to ten feet above normal, which sent the sea sliding far up into the bay, into salt creeks and marshes. In Lewes, the swollen bay cut straight through the beach and moved in to meet the canal, carrying with it porches, roofs, and trailers. Up the coast at Bowers Beach, the high tide pushed houses off their foundations and ferried them a mile or more back into the marshland. Downcoast, the sea dredged new channels through the barrier beaches and reduced boardwalks, houses, and hotels to rubble.

At daybreak on Thursday, people emerged from shelters to survey the damage. They moved about numbly in the dull, sodden morning, stopping and standing before front doors banked by mountains of sand, cars submerged in seawater, boats torn loose from their moorings and splattered against pilings. In Bethany, Rehoboth, and Ocean City, six feet of sand packed Route 1 and some of the lower streets, topped by chairs, cocktail tables, books, kitchen utensils, and hotel beds still perfectly made. Off Lewes Beach an eight-room house unfamiliar to townspeople rose and fell in the surf.

At final count, the storm left sixteen hundred people injured and twenty-five dead. It was the storm of the century, the sort that drives home the foolhardiness of getting mixed up with the coast on anything like a permanent basis.

I pick up a tiny seastar on my finger, an apparent casualty of the recent storm, but it soon curls one arm, and I set it down in the damp sand near the surf. A grackle straddles an overturned horseshoe crab, cocking its head upside down to get at the meat. Another one plucks a rolling mole crab from a retreating wave; there’s a quick flash of orange innards before the bird swallows. The day my father left the hospital, he found that everything he touched and smelled gave him intense pleasure, even simple things, like the smell of the earth before rain. The experience had the effect of a kind of scouring, a sloughing off of layers. It made him look at things he had been running past for years, made him rethink life and vow to savor what remains. That meant focusing less on what is considered productive in the narrow sense and more on the ordinary, the everydayness of life. It meant more time with Gail, more birdwatching, and more Bach. Also, more lovingness.

This wind could drive a straw into a tree. My dad’s hat blows off and skips toward the surf. I run after it, miss it on the first grab, and plunge into the waves to retrieve it, soaking my sneakers. It took me a long time to forgive my father’s leaving; it is only in recent years that I have come to know him well. The love I felt for my mother was a kind of blurring of boundaries; her death came close to self-erasure. Looking up at my father over the chiseled beach, I realize that I love him not only as a child loves a parent, but as a good companion in this shifting world. I want to see him finish out his odyssey, see the wisdom of his later years. He stands to take the water-soaked hat, still breathing heavily. He hugs me tight, and I feel like leaping in a frenzy of feeling, of urgent love. Instead I lean in, and together we set our shoulders against the wind and go the short way home.

WHEN MY HUSBAND and I came to Lewes three years ago, it was with the hope of having a child and giving it an early dose of salt air and warm sand. But nature at first didn’t cooperate. Now it’s time to leave here, move inland to the mountains, knowing that the first outdoor smells of this baby finally growing inside me will not be the sweet stink of mudflats but some waft of woodsy soil or meadow clover, the smells I grew up on.

This place has taught me: If there is some design in this world, it is composed equally of accident and order, of error and deep creativity, which is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. I have been able to see this more easily along the littoral, where the meetings and transitions are everywhere apparent.

“It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through or satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat,” Loren Eiseley once wrote. Things are still shifting and changing, still coming ashore. I learned recently that marine biologists exploring the continental slope a few miles off Cape Henlopen and Cape May made an astonishing discovery. In the cold, the dark, the density at the bottom of the sea, a zone once thought utterly lifeless, they found an amazing array of creatures. From an area of soft ooze roughly the size of two tennis courts, they pulled 90,677 animals (not counting the little things, the nematodes, copepods, ostracods, and other meiofauna). In the group were representatives of 171 families and 14 different phyla (land has only 11 phyla). Each of the more than two hundred samples brought up something different: jellyfish, anemones, corals, snails, clams, peanut worms, ribbon worms, beard worms, and lamp shells—bivalve creatures that look like mollusks but are in fact brachiopods, animals of deep antiquity. Of the 798 species, 460 had never been seen before.

It seems that the life of the deep sea has diversified by distributing itself over countless little environments, many of them created by the animals themselves: mounds of sediments, depressions, empty worm burrows, patches of seaweed, glass sponges rising on graceful stems. Food drifts down to these seafloor habitats in erratic pulses—a decaying fish head or the carcass of a seal—creating tiny local communities different from those just a few meters away. Scientists estimate that they’ve surveyed less than a tenth of one percent of the deep sea. Given the area of the seafloor, something like 300 million square kilometers, this vast domain might hold a reservoir of 10 million undescribed species. And not all of them small. Some giants lurking in the deep sea pastures have recently surfaced in human awareness: tube worms ten feet long with furry blood-red tentacles living around deep-sea vents, the giant squid Architeuthis, big as a city bus, which has never been seen but has yielded up a monstrous tentacle or two. News came this spring of the first new species of whale to be discovered in nearly three decades, an elusive beaked creature with a tiny cranium, a long jaw, few teeth, and an appetite for squid.

Imagine inventing water—two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom in a V-shaped molecule with an odd electrical asymmetry that makes one molecule bond with another and thus holds the ocean together, along with salt and all the other earthly elements in seawater—and then on top of it a hammerhead shark, a sixty-foot squid, this whole rich broth of life!

That I should be surprised by the sea’s diversity is a sign of deep land bias. After all, life was born in the sea, and evolution’s big bang, that explosive radiation of animal forms in which nearly all the major groups now on Earth first appeared, took place in primordial waters. Of these groups, only a small number evolved the basic trick of living outside the ocean. Movement to land was the exception, not the rule.

The sea has a habit of upsetting expectations. Among my favorite new findings is one that has stood on its head the traditional view of ocean life as a linear or pyramidal food chain, in which plankton are eaten by tiny crustaceans such as copepods, which feed the larger animals, and so forth, in an uninterrupted line from smallest algae to largest whale. That idea goes back a long way. Pieter Bruegel the Elder drew the first picture of it in 1556, a nightmarish image of an enormous glassy-eyed fish beached on a riverbank, its gaping mouth regurgitating a cornucopia of smaller fish, which are in turn regurgitating even smaller fish. Some early species of marine pathologist is slicing open the belly of the big fish with an oversized bread knife, while his unfortunate partner stumbles away, half man, half fish, his piscine appetite apparently having gotten the better of him.

This pyramidal view held for centuries until those marine ecologists charged with the duty of finding ever smaller particles in the sea discovered picoplankton, bacteria less than two microns in size—hundreds of millions in every liter of seawater. These marine bacteria are too small to be eaten by the tiny crustaceans that are the major food source for much of the marine web. The bacteria feed on waste produced by algae and protozoa, and are, in turn, eaten by some of the same organisms.

Then came the discovery that in a single teaspoon of seawater there are more than 75 million viruses, those tiny particles composed of gene and protein that exist somewhere between the living and the dead. Viruses do not eat, move, or reproduce on their own. When they invade a living cell, they commandeer its genetic machinery and reproduce. The cell dies and its membrane bursts, releasing a flood of new virus particles, which go off by the thousands. We are swimming in a sea of DNA. The chief aim of these marine viruses, it turns out, is to infect their larger microbial brethren, the bacteria, and also phytoplankton. In so doing, they may determine the mix and abundance of those organisms that feed so much of marine life. Since a virus can destroy a whale as well as a bacterium, it’s not at all clear what sits at the bottom of the pyramid or the top. In fact, the only certainty is that the marine food web is no pyramid at all, but an immense tangle of biological activity from surface to floor.

Among those hordes of viruses floating in the sea today are perhaps the descendants of some that moved into the earliest cells, carrying bits of foreign genetic information, wayward genes that eventually led to the whole multifarious tumult of life, including our own odd species, with its tendency to find more meaning in life on the other side of stopped breath.

EDWARD O. WILSON has said that the human mind does not have an instant capacity to grasp reality in its full chaotic richness, the accidents and quirks, the unruly elements, the organisms imperfect and emergent. The world abounds in phenomena that are still mysterious and unpredictable. What happens to a person in anaphylactic shock is well understood, but not the question of why the same allergen will produce body-wracking in one individual and no response in another. That is still a puzzle having to do with the question of genetic individuality. We have only a ghost of an idea of what triggers the differentiation of cells into a photosynthesizing cell in a strand of marsh grass, the sperm of an osprey, or the cell of a human heart. The full spectrum of life—its subtle relationships, strange couplings, chains of dependence, as evident on a mudflat as in a rain forest—remains unplumbed.

Weather, too, is a conundrum. We can restart a man’s heart but can’t precisely forecast the landfall of a hurricane. Some climate experts say that weather is simply a seamless web of abnormalities, affected by each gust of wind, each flap of a butterfly. And now it’s apparent that things could be even more iffy than they are. Scientists studying the planets of our solar system have found that they tend to tilt chaotically on their axes. The accumulation of small gravitational tugs from neighboring planets, coupled with each planet’s own wobbly rotations, sets up resonances, which change the shape of the planet’s orbit and the tilt of its axis. A planet’s tilt angle determines the seasons. Mars may undergo chaotic variations in its tilt angle of up to eighty-five degrees, causing wild extremes of climate. Fortunately for us, the moon, so big and so close, exerts enough gravitational pull not only to heave the oceans twice daily, but to keep Earth’s tilt from varying more than a degree or two. So in a sense, the moon is our climate regulator, stabilizing us enough to permit our own familiar brand of chaotic weather and the evolution of life.

Given all the confusion and complexity in the world, so much at sixes and sevens, so much wild change and variety—given all this, the wonder is that there is order or structure at all, likenesses or rules, universals on a giant scale.

I never fully understood my father’s love for mathematics until I read about pi, that transcendental number with its digits marching to infinity in a pattern as yet unfathomable. Pi seems random but embodies order, the order of a perfect circle. It appears everywhere in nature, present in the pupil of the eye, the disk of the moon, and the double helix of DNA. It exists in a heartbeat and Earth’s orbit around the sun, in river forms and waves of light and sound. Math is the language that describes the workings of the universe.

The shore has taught me this, too. Out on the tip of the cape one morning, cloudy gray but gleaming, I saw things the way physicists say they are, when a dense cloud of shorebirds appeared, then vanished, then appeared again like a flash of mercury, their swerves and dips and semaphore twists so unified they seemed a single wave rolling from light to dark to light again.

The evolutionary reason for flocking is defense; hawks seem confounded by the unity of the flock and are unable to concentrate their hunger on any one individual. A flock may rush an attacking raptor, bursting apart in its face. The phenomenon has been noted in fish, too. Minnows zip into a compact quiver when alarmed by the rising shadow of a predator, and perform complex maneuvers in the face of attack, splaying apart like a fountain, or exploding outward radially like a bursting bomb. The fish rely on their sense of distant touch, the lateral line, to “know” where their neighbors are. No collisions have ever been observed.

Flocking birds and schooling fish seem to have entered a dimension in which signals are superfluous. A zoologist who filmed a flock of thousands of dunlins discovered that the swerves and turns spread through a flock from bird to neighboring bird in a seventieth of a second. That’s about three times faster than the speed at which a single bird can react to the movement of its neighbor. The high-speed patterns of motion in flocks and schools are so fluid, precise, and well-coordinated that they have suggested to some scientists ideas of thought transference and electromagnetic communication. But the patterns more likely result from individual birds and fish following a few simple behavioral rules: Avoid predators, match the speed of your neighbors, and don’t collide with them. The patterns unfold on their own, from the bottom up. Beautiful they are and yet, presumably, they depend upon no puppeteer, no “higher intelligence” at all.

Little examples abound of disorderly systems crystallizing into neat mathematical order. When waves encounter some random variation on the shoreline, even something as diminutive as a child’s sand castle, the water will reshape the anomaly by depositing sand or carrying it away until it has sculpted evenly spaced scallops along the beach. Drizzle sand grains on a pile in a steady trickle, and the pile will grow into a cone-shaped mound with a characteristic slope or angle, the angle of repose, a convex version of the ant lion’s pit. The pile will reach this state all by itself, without any hand shaping it. Add one more speck of sand to the pile, and it may cause just a tiny shift in a few grains or, if one collision leads to another in a chain reaction, a catastrophic landslide. Scientists note that little shifts are common; big ones, rare. The law dictating the frequency and size of the avalanches is ubiquitous in nature. It’s seen in the flow of water through a river, the pattern of energy release during earthquakes and forest fires, the ebb and flow of sunspot activity, even the evolution of species.

It seems to me that the mind is peculiarly well equipped to find beauty in the unity among vastly different things, to take pleasure in the discovery that we are 70 percent water, like the planet, that the chemical composition of our blood is strangely similar to that of seawater. The more unlikely the likeness, the more beautiful.

Take chaos, the amplifying of small uncertainties in dynamic systems like water and weather and the oscillations of the heart, which results in behavior that cannot be predicted in the long term but follows mathematical laws nonetheless. Chaos is everywhere in the natural world. When blue mussels bunch together higgledy-piggledy in chaotic fashion on the sea bottom, the bumpy, irregular surface of the thicket causes turbulence in the water flow, a maelstrom of eddies and whorls still not fully understood. There’s so much going on in turbulent water flow that not even the world’s fastest supercomputers can track a cubic centimeter of water for more than a few seconds. It turns out that the chaotic flow draws phytoplankton from the surface down to the bottom dwellers, enhancing the mussels’ food supply. So a mollusk finds chaos a part of its essential everyday equipment.

The same may be true for us. Some scientists are convinced that our minds spend much of their time in a state of chaos directly analogous to that of the weather or the turbulent flow of water over a bumpy bed of mussels, that this is the very property of the brain that makes perception possible. In response to the smallest of inputs, vast collections of neurons shift their pattern of activity, allowing the brain to respond flexibly to the outside world.

WHEN I RETURN to the cape a week or so after the storm, the scarps are mostly gone, dissolved again into the beach face, but the ocean is still roiling with several days of wind and rain. On the way here, I saw two male summer tanagers razzing each other, staking out their spring territory, and a collection of kingbirds on the phone wires above the beach plum, which has erupted in full white bloom.

A light breeze is blowing as I head out along the ocean side toward the tip of the cape. Bits of spindrift blowing across the sand lodge and pass into iridescent bubbles. Last night I read about a new theory linking bubbles with the origin of life. It says that the simple chemicals present on early Earth—hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon—gave birth to such big complicated molecules as RNA, DNA, and proteins with the help of bubbles on the surface of primordial seas. The theory is the boldest kind of guesswork but is rooted in some solid facts. Bubbles are just whiffs of gas enclosed in a skin of water, born of the action of wind and waves, the splash of raindrops and snowflakes, the belch of undersea volcanoes. At any given moment, they cover 3 or 4 percent of the ocean surface, an area roughly the size of North America. As a bubble travels through the atmosphere and ocean, it scavenges organic materials, minerals, metals, and clay particles, then concentrates them within its skin. Here they grow in size and complexity in response to changing temperatures and pressures. When the bubble pops, a rich little brew of chemicals is spit into the air and carried aloft by winds. The theory goes that sometime during Earth’s first 700 million years, atmospheric chemistry triggered by lightning and ultraviolet light from the sun worked its alchemy on these chemical dollops, and the molecules grew even more complex, fell to sea as rain or snow, and were once again sucked into a bubble. The cycle was repeated again and again in the early seas, until some lucky collection of concentrated chemicals vaulted into being as a nucleic acid, parent of us all.

SAND HAS BEEN moving during the night, riding currents from the south to feed the cape. My progress around the hook is slow. There’s new ground here. It’s low tide. And every few feet I stoop to scrutinize the wrack line, the beards of seaweed and smashed clam shells. I’m moving slowly these days, anyway, feeling heavier and more than a little morning sick. Pregnancy has made me first and foremost my physical self, a warm thumping habitat of bone and blood. I should be at home packing, not dawdling over sea grass and bubbles. But it’s good to be out: schools of little whitecaps, cries of the sanderling and the osprey, light sea wind like a child’s breath.