Marsh Partaken

Each of my three brothers and three sisters can recall a trip to Nantasket Beach in Hull during stormy weather. Piled into a 1960 two-toned Buick station wagon, we screeched when we first came upon the waves breaching the seawall. As my mother pulled the old wagon next to the seawall, waves as high as telephone poles began swamping the roof of the car. Family lore states that the youngest among us began to cry uncontrollably and beg to be taken home. As the sixth child and youngest of the four brothers, I deny this vehemently, remembering only the fun of it and ascribing any tears and wailing to my baby sister. Whether or not any of us knew we were in the midst of a hurricane at the time is not quite clear.

My mother is an excellent swimmer, known as a young teenager to have dived 50 feet into the waters of Quincy's quarries. Long before news stations started to send out the obligatory intrepid reporter at the first hint of snowflake or raindrop on studio windowpanes, our mother braved the torrent of a real hurricane to show her children something she loved. Perhaps a remnant of teenage bravery spurred her that day--more likely, the thrill of the surging surf called her.

Walking Wollaston Beach daily in Quincy, where I live, is a milder way for me to catch some ocean air, get some exercise, and contemplate. Walking its shores makes it a welcome respite, an awaited antidote to busy city life. I've been a fairly regular beach-walker my entire adult life. It's not an exciting beach. It's rather pedestrian, literally and figuratively. When I tell someone, "I walked the beach today," I usually mean that I walked up and down the 2.2-mile sidewalk adjoining the beach. Sometimes I will walk on the sand or go down to the shore but mostly I walk along the sidewalk to take in the air and to be outside. It's neither as picturesque as the long stretch of white sand at Duxbury Beach nor does it possess the high cliffs of some of Plymouth's beaches, two beaches further down the South Shore, yet I would guess more activity occurs daily on this beach.

Wollaston can be busy. It bustles with regular traffic, upwards of 10,000 commuter cars a day at each rush hour, zipping by on Quincy Shore Drive. This traffic assures that it will never be a tranquil spot during that time but I know a few places adjacent to the beach where one can imagine remoteness. At either end of the beach there are salt marshes whose presence alone quells the traffic.

Just north of the beach lies Moswettuset Hummock, onetime home to Chicatabut and his tribe, the Massachusett. Moswettuset means powerful place or area. This approximately two-acre piece of land is preserved largely as the Native Americans knew it and is a nice place to walk despite the ubiquitous presence of a Dunkin' Donuts and CVS off to either side across the road. A small marsh area hugs the northern end of the beach, veers right with the road, meets the southern side of the hummock and then a larger, more expansive marsh spreads beyond the northern section, bracketing the causeway leading into the Squantum peninsula. This area, considered sacred by the Chicatabut, is on the same road as an abandoned airport, used in the early days of aviation.

One remaining hangar was transformed into a skating rink, then a flea market, eventually torn down, and now this section of Squantum houses nightclubs, restaurants, luxury condominiums, marinas, and office buildings. Luxury living, assisted living, condo living, the building signs extol. Box living would be a more appropriate sign. The area is now about as sacred as a wrinkled dollar bill. The most recent loss of land was Lot 23, home to migrating songbirds and next to salt marshes and a few, still-abandoned runways. The lot was bulldozed after much litigation between a local environmental group and the developer. It now contains a seven-story, 200-plus apartment dwelling, shocking in its ungainliness beside sedate marshes and ugly as any ill-designed, inner-city tenement. After the shell went up, the structure was encased in yellow sheathing. For a few months, until the sheathing was covered, the monolithic brick-and-concrete skyline of Squantum's nouveau-blunt buildings was further abased by this neon-ugly yellow monstrosity. This most ungodly stretch of buildings was once near the Native American planting ground called the Massachusetts Fields.

Across the road from the beach, on the southern end, lies a marsh called Black's Creek, approximately 150 to 200 acres offering more roaming space and devoid of any commercial activity close by. This is the marsh I walk in the newness of January, the budding of May, and the haze of August. In early fall, the calm of the marsh can be seen in the stateliness of the trees on the two hummocks, uplands higher on the marsh, or by the herons standing sentinel along inlets, surveying fish popping to the surface snagging tiny insects. Two dominant marsh grasses, spartina alterniflora and spartina patens, drape their full lushness across the marsh in early fall like a tightly knit, gold-green afghan. These grasses along with the seawater comprise the life-blood of the marsh contributing their nutrients to the ecosystem. If you walk a hundred yards into the marsh, the traffic on the busy roadway abutting the marsh becomes a whispering afterthought. Stillness pervades but the life that is the marsh beats as close as the next winged creature. Chipmunks and squirrels gather acorns for the coming winter.

I walk the marsh or run the beach not for exercise nor for any perceived beauty. It's just something I do. Gone for more than a few days, by day three I'm jiggy to get back to it, legs restless. Spending the better part of my working life at a computer terminal in various office buildings replete with life-draining fluorescence, my skin craves contact with the air, sky, and ocean. The smell of the sea salt refreshes and restores like no other scent can. Even the sulfur smell from the brack of the receding tide-flats conjures memories of days spent at the shore.

Not as tantalizingly fun as Nantasket further down the South Shore with its surfable waves, huge roller coaster, gaudy arcades, and nice sands, Wollaston was away from the city, a short jaunt by car from my hometown of Dorchester. You could see off into the distance here, not like the city beaches which were enclosed by Boston Harbor. Wollaston Beach was a little more exotic than Boston's city beaches: Carson, Malibu, and Tenean, all notable in the '60s and '70s for their filth and their closeness to the Southeast Expressway. There were signs of Wollaston's proximity to Boston Harbor in its own murky waters, but it had clam shacks and shops and a long seawall to run on, and was much longer and straighter than the city beaches.

Sweaty and sticky in the city heat, I begged until some family member would relent and haul me, my siblings, and cousins off to Wolly. We'd cavort, splash, fight, swim, hold our breath under water and enjoy being out of the city. Wollaston is part of Quincy Bay, another natural harbor, but from the shore you can see more harbor islands in the distance and Boston Light, its lighthouse beacon guiding sea-going tankers and pleasure boats. Two harbor islands frame an opening where container ships pass through on their way to other continents. That distance spoke of distant lands and pirates when I was young.

My mother fed that curiosity with tales from Edward Rowe Snow, the prolific chronicler and historian of both Boston Harbor and coastal New England. When I couldn't get enough of those tales, she fed me his books. I devoured them. His books, perfect for a young boy, tell tales of lighthouses, pirates, ghosts, the Revolutionary War, fishing fleets, Indian battles, and canoeing among the islands, adroitly detailing the myriad activities occurring in the harbor. Every winter I await the complete twin icing of the harbors that occurred early in the twentieth century, an event detailed in one of Snow's books. The most icing I've seen is less than halfway across Quincy Bay, probably 100 yards at the coldest about five years ago. From Castle Island into the Mystic River Bridge, I recall little thick icing compared to what Snow detailed, when you could walk on ice all the way from Quincy through the mouth of the harbor at Castle Island and on to East Boston. Mr. Snow ranks high on my list of personal heroes, sharing equal influence with my mother on my shore-walking habit.

I remain curious about smaller events on the harbor. Standing on the Greenberg Bridge over the dam where Quincy Bay rushes into the lagoon of the marsh, I spy merganser ducks in the distance. They bob on the surface, cartoon-like with their wavy S-necks, just past the rush of the partial dam, poised to dive for fish below. They dive from the water singly, one after the other, never in unison. They surface the same way. I give them perfect 10s most of the time. A straggler gets a lower score when it makes a half-hearted plunge, too busy sorting feathers for a full dive. They usually dive in teams of four or five. I wonder how their brains are hard-wired by millennia of evolution to dive and surface, apart, but in concert every time. I scan the horizon to see where they'll surface, always some distance, usually ten to 15 yards away from where they dive but sometimes as much as 50.

This duck dive I witness happened long before the Massachusetts Fields were planted; it continues unhampered. I laugh at our affected, modern notion of teamwork. Show me a mother teaching her young how to feed, how to fly, how to survive.

I love birds for a simple reason. Birds fly. I want to fly. Not in a glider, a plane, sailplane, parachute, hand glider, or from a bungee cord. I don't want to be a bird. In my dreams I fly, like Superman in the episode where the man of steel takes Lois on a tour of the world, hovering and skimming over the globe. This is the flight I desire. Not a flapping of wings or strapped to an engine but a body in flight, aloft. In my dreams I fly. Meantime, I watch the flight of birds.

This summer I could see white herons preening, teaching their young. Their alabaster brilliance marks them against the background of trees in the hummock of the conservation area across the marsh inlet. Twenty years ago I saw herons feeding here but never saw any young. Now, herons appear to be using the marsh as a breeding ground. One spring, about 12 years ago, I tracked a tri-colored heron. For about three weeks, I'd come to the marsh or go to Sailor's Pond, a short walk away, to see this magnificent bird, which had found its way to my neighborhood. Looking prehistoric with it huge wingspan and long neck, this was the bird that prompted me to borrow my uncle's field guide in hope of identifying it. I would later purchase my own guide. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, I'd watch it. Inevitably, it would sense my presence and fly to the opposite side of the marsh or pond, its low, flapping, enormous wings nearly scraping the water's surface, only to glide into a smooth, prolonged flight of ease.

After a decade-long, much-publicized harbor cleanup, the beach and marsh waters are noticeably cleaner. I swam at the beach this summer. At high tide, I swam out 20 yards and stopped. I tried to reach bottom, but it was over my head. I looked down and could see my toes. Twenty years ago, only a few years after swimming regularly there, the water became dirtier and you couldn't see your toes standing ankle-deep in the muck. This sparkling clarity is a true marvel in a body of water once scorned nationwide for its filthy shore litter, hypodermic needles, used tampons and condoms, human waste--few of these were absently discarded, rather they were pushed into the harbor by an archaic waste disposal system of storm drains and antiquated pumping stations.

I noticed more people using the beach this past summer. On the hottest days every parking space was full. A few swimmers braved the newly clean waters, but there were still days when most were daunted by the red no swimming flags posted when bacteria counts exceeded swimmable levels. Even though the parking spaces were full, sun-bathers were still surrounded by yards of sand.

Pictures of the beach's heyday as a spa in the early twentieth century show a similar yet different scene. Model As and Ts line the roadway. Men, women, and children in body-length bathing suits crowd the beach, with little sand between one group of beach-goers and the next. The beach is covered with people. There were probably more people per car back then than today's usual one car, one driver ratio. This was the jump generation, one foot in an agricultural past, the other dipping into the industrial future, inheritors of a sacred land and precursors of a materially rich society. One can only speculate as to how the same scene would have looked in Chicatabut's time.

To gather clams and mussels freely with no permit or bacterial clearance needed, to fish un-cancer-ridden flounder, to harvest nonpesticidal crops, to capture plump birds fed on berries and smelt and not the offal of civilization, to swim non-motorized waters, to eat grain and game harvested and hunted nearby, to walk unfettered by moving agglomerations of steel and rubber, to decorate their surroundings with totems from the land, to dwell on the land. To dwell. On. In. Of. Around. Surrounded by. The land. This was the land of the free Chicatabut at the precipice of his brave, coming demise. Lives hewn as close to the bone of the land as possible left a legacy of pristine, uncharted, interminable space. Today's lives, lived box to box, house to car to office, are hewn a conversely opposite distance, far from the nut of the land with a legacy of thousands of buildings and cars dotting the land.

I had imagined the marsh much the same as when Native Americans fished it. After some research, I find that this marsh has had its share of human intervention with some controversial dredging of the lagoon done in the 1970s. Even before then, more than 200 years earlier, in the creek and marsh that bear his name, Mr. Black constructed mills. They were some of the first mills in America. It's not a great leap to imagine that these mills presaged the Industrial Revolution. There are a couple of culverts and dikes in parts of the marsh but it retains much the same ecological character of hundreds of years ago, if on a lesser scale. Just as the beach is still visited by high and low tide everyday, the marsh is still cleansed by those same tides and is still home to striper and kingfish, quahog, and common mud snail. Despite the massive human influx into the original Massachusetts Fields, goldfinches and monarch butterflies still dart about, and tall marsh grasses with their puffy heads sway in the breeze.

The section of the marsh from the last parking lot in Lt. William Caddy Park, opposite the beach, to the bridge spanning the inlet into the lagoon is an unquestionable favorite place. At the beginning of this section there's a large swath of low marsh grass denoted by the throng of low, bunched grasses looking like a series of cowlicks racing this way and that. I gaze at this section often, picturing it pristine and unspotted by human touch. Stared at long enough, it appears as one of those popular, eye-puzzle pictures. On this horizon, oaks and maples sweep up from the low grasses; the sky big over the stand of trees.

At the bridge, vistas of sky, tide, and bird-life predominate. As I walk back from bridge to swale, water envelops me on both sides, lagoon on the left, ocean to the right, road and sidewalk in between, an almost 360 degree expanse of open, unobstructed sky. This is why I walk here: to partake of the marsh and its openness. To witness heaven, earth, and ocean, constantly created. Few allegedly newsworthy events today match the glorious ordinariness and survival abilities of daily lives, lived in tune with the land, hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Here, at the bridge, in early winter I stop to take in the scene on the lagoon, always a solace with breezes and the rush of tide beneath the bridge. Yet, I am stunned by a new sight--swans. There are three, mother, father, and smaller by one-third, a presumed offspring. They cruise 20 yards right of the bridge, near the shore of the grassy marsh that emanates from the hummock. They look like the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. Or is it vice versa? Brilliant, starkly white like the herons but with a black cowl spilling down their orangey beaks, their color and the length and line of their necks betoken classic beauty. They dive too, like the ducks, but differently in that they only dive with their necks. They troll, looking for vegetation and then slowly plunge their necks beneath the surface, keeping their bulk horizontally above water with necks totally invisible. Or sometimes they plunge half of their bodies straight down, white mound of torso and tail feathers pointing skyward, looking for all the world like stray underclothes hung out to dry. A different form of adaptation impels them to dive using only their long necks. I track them each day for 5 to 15 minutes, taking in the languorous yet ardent reach of their dives.

Black's Creek Marsh did not survive in its current state accidentally. The official name of the area is the Reuben and Lizzie Grossman Conservation Area. In 1971, their children bequeathed this land and its resources to the city of Quincy, preserving the area as a natural resource in perpetuity. Had a present-day philanthropist emulated their efforts, similar land might have been preserved during the recent heady real estate rush that left Quincy with less than 100 available acres left for either development or acquisition as open space. A large, ten-foot wide, four-feet high granite marker at the corner of Fenno Street and Shore Drive silently proclaims this story of generational love; the Grossman children conclude the stone proclamation as testament to their parents' "Humanity, Humility, Godliness, and Kindness." Thank you, Grossman family.

In the dizzying life-spirit that is June in the marsh, on the ice-enshrouded banks in February, engulfed by the liquid vise of a horizontal April northeaster, braced by the glorious briskness of October air, I walk the beach and absorb the marsh, casting my gaze, watching events unfold.

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Mon, Nov 3, 2003.