THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509210607
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
NOTES FROM THE SHORE
JENNIFER ACKERMAN
Viking. 187 pp. $21.
Nature writing may be the trickiest of crafts. How, after all, does one separate earthly details of note from all that organic banality?
Our best writers on the natural world (Thoreau then, Annie Dillard now) instinctively seem to know what fascinates and what bores. So does former National Geographic staffer Jennifer Ackerman.
In nine sparkling, perfectly crafted essays, Ackerman explores the beaches, marshes and bays surrounding Delaware's Cape Henlopen. Like Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Ackerman's eye falls upon what most of us would overlook - worms that live in tubes, horseshoe crabs that couple during orgiastic beach parties and the success strategies of A. sollicitans, the blood-sucking salt marsh mosquito. All things most of us couldn't care less about until Ackerman explains their significance and elegance in her direct style.
Unlike Dillard, Ackerman isn't obliged to detail her process of dirt gathering. Notes from the Shore, for that reason, is a breezy walk on untrodden sands.
The author's knowledge of her subjects is deep and often yields surprises. After watching ospreys mate on a platform off the cape, she notes, ``Scientists are uncovering evidence of philandering in species after species, withering the notion of lovingly coupled birds . . . With DNA fingerprinting, they've compiled dossiers on the adulterers.''
During her travels up and down the coast, she records the strange and the beautiful: a group of wild parrots that have taken up residence in Rehoboth; the asymmetrical pigmentation of a finback whale viewed from a Boston whaler; and the constant breeding of life out of the compost and murk of The Great Marsh.
Ackerman provides a rich human history as well. Lewes, the Cape's main town of 25,000, has remained small, she reports, because of the mosquito-replete marsh to the west and two former fish fertilizer plants to the east. She tells, entertainingly and only with the most necessary details, of the long futile attempt to keep the channel to Lewes clear for shipping.
By the 1830s ships were routinely meeting shoals - at least 200 were lost. After 12 presidents and more than $2 million - a ransom in those times - the breakwater was finished. Thirteen years later, after the harbor had begun to fill in, Lewes Harbor was already too shallow for vessels of the largest class. By 1910, it was only 13 feet deep and useless to anything but small craft. So much for messing with Mother Nature.
There's nothing admonitory, pedantic or, on the other hand, pyrotechnic about Ackerman's writing. She knows all the details and she lets them tell the story. For example: ``As the sea travels over the ribbed bottom of the flats, fish move in from the deep, dissolving in and out of sight around my feet. Though they seem mute, they are not. They fill the waters with belches and cries, calls of courtship, alarm, aggression and fright.''
Though it's not exactly light, this should be the one book that gets read at the beach each summer.
- MEMO: Michael Anft is a writer who lives in Baltimore. by CNB