The Marsh at the End of the World
Photograph: Elizabeth Rush. A gnarled old pine marks the entrance to the Sprague River Marsh. It is high summer, a short season of riotous green in Maine. But the tree hasn’t taken any cues from the tilting of the planet, the long hours of sunlight, or the sudden warm spike. Its branches extend, empty and bare. This pine must be at least a hundred years old, but as with so many others I saw lining the banks of tidal marshes up and down the coast, too much salt water had too regularly soaked into the ground around the tree’s root system, killing it. On the surface, a single tree might seem inconsequential. But its death is a sign of a much larger transformation—the disintegration of tidal marshes all along the coast.
Because tidal marshes sit exactly at sea level, they are one of the first landscapes to show the effects of accelerated sea-level rise. Sometime during the past half-century or so, this tree’s taproot started to occasionally suck down salt water instead of fresh. It was stunned and stunted at first. Then it stopped growing. The sea kept kneading into the aquifer, storms got stronger and dumped more standing water onto the marsh, and it and so many other elegant old trees all along the coast—from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to the Gulf of Mexico—started to die.
Twenty-five years ago, hardwoods and pines often thrived alongside our marshy shore. Now not. It is still hard for me to believe that a departure this big began in my lifetime. I’ve encountered so many of these bare and lifeless forms that I have come to think of them as a series of memorials, a supersized Christo installation that spans the entire country from the Louisiana bayou all the way up here to this remote corner of the Gulf of Maine. Together they commemorate the tipping point: the moment the salt water began to move in. And now that sea levels are rising more quickly than they have in the past twenty-eight centuries, an even bigger change is happening: the ground itself has begun to rot.
I walk through a patch of poison ivy and over a weathered outcrop of granite into the marsh. The moment I step onto the upper portion of the Sprague, I know that it is in trouble. There I am met by the musky, almost strawberry scent of decomposition. Most marshes smell a little bit, but here the scent is overwhelming. A healthy marsh is firm underfoot. Here the earth quakes like Jell-O. With every step, bubbles burble from the accrued depths, releasing what captive sulfur lies beneath.
For the researchers I visit at Sprague, the smell of the rotten marsh is halfway normal. For me it conjures up images of my neglected compost bin.
In my mind, rot is something vegetables do. A still life will rot, which is why some artists prefer to paint plastic fruit. Limbs rot when gangrenous. I do not think, until this moment, that it is possible for the ground itself to rot. Or that when it does, it might just help heat up this precious pebble even faster.
*
“Welcome to our rotten marsh,” says Beverly Johnson, a professor of geology at Bates, a small liberal arts college about thirty miles inland where I, too, teach.
Beverly speaks a kind of hybrid language—half scientific fact, half block-party-accessible. Her wardrobe is a similar mix of business and pleasure. She wears knee-high wading boots, long black shorts, and a maroon T-shirt with a hiker and mountain peak airbrushed across the front. She carries in her periwinkle Osprey pack a change of socks, three water bottles, and a yellow hardcover all-weather geological field notebook, the words “Gulf of Maine” scribbled down the spine in black Sharpie.
Dana Cohen-Kaplan and Cailene Gunn, two of Beverly’s students who have been studying the relationship between marsh degradation and the release of greenhouse gases for their senior thesis
