On a recent coastal excursion, a birthday gift from my daughter (who l lives in Lewes, DE), I had the time to reflect on the changes I've witnessed to this section of Atlantic Coast where I grew up spending summers 'down the shore" with my mom and siblings. Mom rented a small bungalow on a bayside street in the ocean town of Dewey Beach where with a dozen other working class families who we lived next to, played and ate meals with, and fished alongside spent every summer.
For over fifteen years, the Delaware Coast was my summer home and I had extraordinary freedom to ride my bike, paddle our canoe, and walk just about everywhere. Out the back door were wild dunes and coastal forests. Out the front door was the sand-over-asphalt street lined with neighbors trucks and cars and boats. No one ate out. We fished for our meals with crab, flounder, and drum (thanks to our neighbor's abundant catch off the breakwaters), and may favorite - sea bass. I got to know this landscape intimately and loved it dearly. That was fifty years ago.
Now I hardly recognize the places we once walked, rode, and paddled. Traffic snarls on the main highway are commonplace with four-lane highways backing up against frequent accident scenes and crowded holiday weekends. For miles and miles pavement has replaced oak, pine, and holly forests where now hundreds of shopping plazas, outlets, fast food places, and housing developments sprawl almost to the waters edge. The walkability of these places is questionable if not dangerous. As I sit in the bow of the boat scanning the coves and inlets for pelcians and dolphins, I mention how rip-rap has replaced nearly all of the marsh-bound shore along the Delaware Bay side. No more half moon beaches or rickety piers to tie a few crab pots to. My sister, along for the ride, mentions that high tides daily flood her street when only three decades ago, this was not a common occurance.
Sea level rise threatens much of the U.S. Atlantic Coast and for some areas like coastal Virginia and North Carolina, the impact is severe. For those who live further back from the beach like my daughter, flooding from intense rainfall events turn neighborhoods into standing lakes drowning roads and sidewalks. High tides along the tidal creeks and rivers push farther and farther inshore killing swathes of what coastal forest remains. I think outloud "All in my lifetime." I look at my grandaughter riding the bow, laughing at getting soaked in salt spray as the fishing boat rolls and pitches on the ocean beyond Cape Henlopen. How can I ever explain that her world and mine at her age were entirely two different worlds?
I might have felt it in my blood, you know,
the terrible changes that would come to take my memories,
my anchorage, my belief in a single god.
For how could anyone, believing in such a god -
God of love and Creation-
have done such things to the places
where sea breezes made gnarled pines sigh
and wild dunes hum, crowned with grass
above the highwater salt scrub, full of Myrtle Warblers?
The knife turned under their ribs as
cash money promised to make gods of them all
where no longer a day's catch filled their bellies
but the bounty of another ocean shipped across the seas
heaped upon the new believers in
progress advances.
Gone are the crescent moon beaches where horseshoe crabs
over their millions of years once gathered and to feed
Red Knots on their way to the Arctic.
I guess we are all trying to find another way
to survive, but I'm not sure this is it.
I'm not sure I can tell the story
without mourning out loud
what others find it hard to imagine.
Notes:
NASA " Can't See Sea Level Rise?" May, 2020. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/cant-see-sea-level-rise-youre-looking-in-the-wrong-place/
Sea Level Rise and Delaware's Wetlands https://dnrec.delaware.gov/watershed-stewardship/wetlands/and-sea-level-rise/
NJ Spotlight News. May 2023. :Along the Delaware Bayshore, Hoping for a Future for Horsesshoe Crabs. https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2023/05/conservation-efforts-for-horseshoe-crabs-working-on-delaware-bayshore/
The world has certainly changed in my lifetime: the population of the U.S has doubled since my high school days, the forests are dying, the seas are rising, floods are more common and worse, summers are hotter. The changes are NOT for the better, I fear for our grandchildren.
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