For most of my childhood I lived within a stone's throw of the Great Sippewissett Marsh. I didn't realize how great it actually is, in terms of salt marshes, until I began reading Tim Traver's Sippewissett: Or Life on a Salt Marsh. Although I didn't have knowledge of the importance of the the place in the realm of marine biology, there is no question about its significance to my own natural history.
My pre-teen years were imprinted by the smells of that salt marsh, the slurping sound of bare feet mucking through its mud, the thrill of jumping into the 'black hole' carved out by the convergence of the two of the marsh's fingers, the taste of its brackish water sipped through straws fashioned from horsetails growing on the side of its feeder creeks.
Last week found me on the edge of another salt marsh. A place that I've visited a handful of times over the past decade, but not one that I've ever really explored. It is very different than Sippewissett in terms of climate and critters, but yet it is so familiar.
Sitting on the dock watching the green water yesterday I could have been nine years old. Listening to the quiet punctuated here and there by a jumping fish, the flapping wings of a nearby heron, was like hearing an echo. With the evidence of the tides and the renewal they bring every six hours all around, it's not a wonder that a visit to a salt marsh brings me back, if even for a moment.
