The World of the Salt Marsh: Appreciating and Protecting the Tidal Marshes of the Southeastern Atlantic Coast

By Charles Seabrook

The World of the Salt Marsh is a wide-ranging exploration of the southeastern coast—its natural history, its people and their way of life, and the historic and ongoing threats to its ecological survival.

Focusing on areas from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, Charles Seabrook examines the ecological importance of the salt marsh, calling it “a biological factory without equal.” Twice-daily tides carry in a supply of nutrients that nourish vast meadows of spartina (Spartina alterniflora)—a crucial habitat for creatures ranging from tiny marine invertebrates to wading birds. The meadows provide vital nurseries for 80 percent of the seafood species, including oysters, crabs, shrimp, and a variety of finfish, and they are invaluable for storm protection, erosion prevention, and pollution filtration.

Seabrook is also concerned with the plight of the people who make their living from the coast’s bounty and who carry on its unique culture. Among them are Charlie Phillips, a fishmonger whose livelihood is threatened by development in McIntosh County, Georgia, and Vera Manigault of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, a basket maker of Gullah-Geechee descent, who says that the sweetgrass needed to make her culturally significant wares is becoming scarcer.

For all of the biodiversity and cultural history of the salt marshes, many still view them as vast wastelands to be drained, diked, or “improved” for development into highways and subdivisions. If people can better understand and appreciate these ecosystems, Seabrook contends, they are more likely to join the growing chorus of scientists, conservationists, fishermen, and coastal visitors and residents calling for protection of these truly amazing places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780820343846

Charles Seabrook

CHARLES SEABROOK, a native of John’s Island, South Carolina, is a columnist and environmental writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is the author of Cumberland Island: Strong Women, Wild Horses and, with Marcy Louza, Red Clay, Pink Cadillacs and White Gold: The Kaolin Chalk Wars.

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THE WORLD OF THE SALT MARSH

THE WORLD OF THE SALT MARSH

Appreciating and Protecting the Tidal Marshes of the Southeastern Atlantic Coast

CHARLES SEABROOK

© 2012 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602 www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig

Set in Arno Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia

Manufactured by Sheridan Books

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

12  13  14  15  16  C  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seabrook, Charles.

The world of the salt marsh : appreciating and protecting the tidal marshes

of the southeastern Atlantic coast / Charles Seabrook.

p. cm. — (A Wormsloe foundation nature book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-2706-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-2706-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Salt marshes—Atlantic Coast (U.S.) 2. Salt marshes—Southern States.

3. Salt marsh conservation—Atlantic Coast (U.S.) 4. Salt marsh conservation—

Southern States. 5. Salt marsh ecology—Atlantic Coast (U.S.)

6. Salt marsh ecology—Southern States. 7. Salt marsh restoration—Atlantic Coast (U.S.)

8. Salt marsh restoration—Southern States. I. Title.

QH76.5.A85S43 2012

577.60975—dc23

2011038256

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4384-6

To my brothers, Jim, Carl, and Wilson

In respectful memory of

Eugene Odum

Edgar Sonny Timmons Sr.

Peter Verity

Richard Wiegert

Sam Hamilton

Ogden Doremus

Charles Wharton

Vernon Jim Henry

Jimmy Chandler

Nick Williams

Reid Harris

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE. The Poetry of the Marsh

TWO. A Walk across the Marsh

THREE. Tide Watching

FOUR. Too Big for Its Britches

FIVE. Farms in the River

SIX. Gone with the Flow

SEVEN. A Tale of Two Rivers

EIGHT. An Endangered Culture

NINE. The Institute

TEN. Protecting the Marsh?

ELEVEN. Saving the Oyster

TWELVE. Saving the Marsh

THIRTEEN. Rice Fields and Causeways

FOURTEEN. Bridging the Marsh

FIFTEEN. The Ultimate Price

SIXTEEN. Living on the Edge

SEVENTEEN. The Last Season

EIGHTEEN. The Beloved Land

Epilogue

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EVERY PERSON WHOSE NAME appears on these pages deserves my considerable thanks for their guidance and kind advice during the research for this book. To name everyone who graciously helped me, though, would require the equivalent of another chapter. I am grateful to them all. I must, however, express my special gratitude to some very helpful individuals: Ron Kneib, Merryl Alber, and Lawrence Pomeroy at the University of Georgia; Fred Holland at the Hollings Marine Laboratory in Charleston; Charlie Phillips, fishmonger and airboat pilot supreme; library director John Cruickshank and public information director Mike Sullivan at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography; James Holland of the Altamaha Riverkeeper; Larry and Tina Toomer, co-owners of the Bluffton Oyster Company; and my fellow board members of the Center for a Sustainable Coast—Dave Kyler, Charlie Belin, Steve Willis, Peter Krull, Mindy Egan, Les Davenport, and Ellen Schoolar.

Many thanks to Christa Frangiamore, Judy Purdy, and Laura Sutton, who as editors at the University of Georgia Press encouraged me to pursue the book when it seemed a daunting task. Thanks to Mindy Conner for her skilled editing. And thanks to the entire UGA Press staff for their talent and professional ability.

Finally, thanks to my wife, Laura. Without her, I would be an aimless wanderer.

THE WORLD OF THE SALT MARSH

The South Atlantic Bight is an indentation in the coastline stretching roughly from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and encompassing the continental shelf offshore.

Map by Anna Boyette at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography.

INTRODUCTION

I SPENT HALF MY childhood trying to get off an island. I have spent half my adulthood trying to get back.

The island is John’s Island, one of the sleepy, semitropical sea islands nuzzling the South Carolina coast that are surrounded by vast salt marshes, broad sounds, and winding tidal rivers. It was home to my ancestors for two hundred years, a haven where everyone knew my name. My daddy once warned me how it would be when I left: When you leave this island, nobody will give a damn whether your name is Seabrook, he said.

But I could not wait to leave. There were soaring mountains with snowcapped peaks and tropical rainforests with wild, howling monkeys to see. I wanted to ride a camel across the Sahara and descend into deep caverns to gaze upon stupendous geological wonders. I wanted to see Paris, London, New York, Rio, Rome, Istanbul, and the thousands of other places I read about in National Geographic.

So, three days after graduating from high school in 1962, I left my island. Since then I have seen many of those places. As a science reporter for thirty-three years with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution I wrote stories from such far-flung places as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and the rainforests of Guatemala. I walked on the Great Wall of China, paddled a dugout canoe down an Amazon tributary in Brazil, and rode through the Panama Canal in an outboard skiff. I saw Paris, Rome, London, Rio, Berlin, Beijing, Hong Kong, Prague, Budapest, and other marvels.

But I know now that the most wondrous, magical place of all was the place I left as soon as I got the chance—my island. I remember the moment when I finally realized that. I had been living for many years in Atlanta, and I was crossing the bridge to the island on a glorious autumn afternoon to see my mother. It was high tide, and the golden marsh with the tidal creeks twisting through it glowed softly in the afternoon sun. The beauty took my breath away.

An unnamed salt marsh creek in late summer on John’s Island, South Carolina.

The creeks, of course, have always wound through the marsh; the sun has always set over it. I just hadn’t appreciated the splendor of the view before. I was too busy plotting to get away. Now, after years of being away, I long for what I once took for granted.

In my boyhood, John’s Island—a twenty-minute drive from downtown Charleston—was a place of magnificent spreading live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that formed cathedral-like canopies over the sandy roads and pathways; of stately palmettos that rustled when nudged by the soft air; of the broad Stono River, now placid blue, now roiling green in mood with the sky. Dolphins frolicked in the water and rolled up on mud banks and then back into the water again. You could spend all day sailing the river or searching its high bluffs for arrowheads, rusting Civil War cannonballs, and long-lost pirate booty.

Anyone who flung a cast net into the tidal creeks pulled out bountiful shrimp, blue crabs, and mullet. Oysters crowded the creek banks and were there for the taking. At oyster roasts, we tossed the mollusks onto a redhot sheet of tin, threw wet croaker sacks soaked in salt water over them, let them steam several minutes, then shucked them open to get at the succulent meat.

On certain Sunday afternoons in summer, church members gathered at the river’s edge to witness as the preacher in hip boots dipped the white-robed baptismal candidates into the ebb tide, the best tide for washing away sins.

At church suppers, tables sagged with platters of juicy tomatoes and corn on the cob and steaming bowls of beans, peppers, peas, and collards. The island’s fertile black loam yielded a cornucopia of vegetables for anyone with the energy to drop a few seeds into the ground and do a little weeding.

There was something else, too: John’s Island was a stronghold of cunjuh, a brand of voodoo practiced on the sea islands. I believed in it as a child, and to this day I don’t challenge it. I lay in bed many a night and heard the cunjuh drums thumping on Whaley Hill, just across the salt marsh from my home. Nighttime was when the hags and the boodaddies and the plat-eye and the cunjuh world’s other sinister denizens came out.

Boodaddies were the spirits of dead people who had returned to Earth to take somebody back with them. If you saw a boodaddy, you were supposed to stand stock-still and say, I ain’t ready to go yet. The plat-eye, the all-seeing spirit, could appear as a pig, a calf, a yellow cat, or some other form, but all were distinguished by one formidable trait—a big, ugly eye hanging out the center of the face. Hags were invisible and could ride you and sap the strength from your body. They could come through a keyhole and sit on your chest and stop your breathing. Nearly every sound of the night was a hag omen. The soft creaking of a porch swing nudged by a light breeze was really a hag scratching around, trying to get in. A barking dog was being harassed by a hag. Even daytime sounds were signs that hags would be up and about that night.

Hag gon’ come ’round tonight, warned one of our neighbors, Sis’ Mamie, when a rooster crowed or an Air Force jet broke the sound barrier. Sis’ Mamie spoke in Gullah, the lilting patois that is unique to the sea islands and incomprehensible to outsiders.

As much as I long for my island, I can never return to the place I knew as a child. Its verdant maritime forests have given way to subdivisions and shopping centers and horse farms. Because of pollution, oysters no longer can be taken from many of the creeks. The beautiful Gullah dialect is dying out, victim of television’s pervasiveness and pompous educators who believe everybody should talk the same way.

Gone is John Isabull, who nearly every day—except Sunday—drove his wobbly, mule-drawn wagon down the road to a little field, where he unhitched the weary animal from the cart and hooked him up to a plow to cultivate sweet watermelons and other produce. John’s gees and haws at the stubborn old mule could be heard a mile away across the salt marsh.

Gone, too, is Mr. John Limehouse’s store, a wondrous place redolent of tobacco, smoked sausage, herring, and bananas. On sultry summer days it was pure pleasure to stick your hand in the drink box and feel around in the icy water for a Nehi grape soda or Coca-Cola. The old store was torn down to make way for a fancy convenience mart with self-serve gas pumps.

Long gone are the gypsies who came in the summer, three or four families in dilapidated cars pulling rickety wooden trailers. They set up a carnival and a tent in Mr. Limehouse’s pasture on the edge of the salt marsh and showed movies Monday through Friday nights. On Saturdays they staged a rodeo with a half-starved bull and some broken-down horses that were candidates for the glue factory. To a child who had never wandered far from the island, it was a glorious spectacle.

Our parents told us not to go to the camp by ourselves because the gypsies stole children. I believed that back then, just as I believed in the hags and the boodaddies. And now I long for my island. In my heart, I never really left it.

THE BEAUTY OF my island was undeniable even to a child. But I didn’t realize back then that the tidal marsh surrounding the island and backing up to our backyard is one of the most remarkable natural systems on Earth. The salt marsh has been described as a biological factory without equal—far more fertile than the fields in which we raised our tomatoes and soybeans, more productive than the great fields of wheat and corn in the Midwest called America’s breadbasket.

Twice a day, the tides ferry in a perpetual supply of nutrients, which the plants and microorganisms of the marsh break down and use with amazing quickness. The unfailing cycle nourishes the vast meadows of salt-tolerant Spartina alterniflora, or smooth cordgrass, by far the most important plant of the salt marsh. It is the canelike spartina that makes the marsh a great productive sanctuary, nourishing and protecting the young of blue crabs, shrimp, flounder, menhaden, mullet, oysters, and dozens of other species of ecological and gastronomic importance.

You can see this great fecundity with the naked eye. I do not exaggerate when I say that I have had shrimp and mullet in a tidal creek literally leap out of the water and land in my boat, as if begging to be caught.

During spring and summer, especially at night on a rising tide, enormous populations of juvenile shrimp graze on microscopic algae and on organic detritus, the end product of the huge swaths of spartina. These teeming multitudes can make swimming in a tidal creek slightly unpleasant. Scores of shrimp constantly run into you, their sharp tails and spines pricking your skin like so many little stickpins. If you swim at night, their little red eyes surround you, thousands of tiny points of light darting about like tiny little spooks. Many times, creek shrimp got inside my swimsuit—if I was wearing one—and their flipping and jabbing required quick action to protect certain parts of my anatomy.

LEGIONS OF SCIENTISTS and their students have come to the tidal marshes, the sea islands, the creeks, and the rivers to understand this remarkable fertility and to quantify it. One of the most venerated of those scientists was Eugene Odum, the father of modern ecology, whose patient scrutiny of natural marsh processes helped him formulate some of his bedrock tenets of ecology.

What the scientists learned is this: A single acre of marsh produces ten tons or more of dry organic matter, while the most fertile farm acre produces less than half as much. Their enormous fertility aside, the marshes also help filter and purify water. They dissipate the fury of howling storms blowing in from the sea. They shelter enormous numbers of creatures from predators. A healthy marsh is a prime example of the silent economy of nature, a truly wondrous thing.

Another great man came to the marsh seeking revelation of another kind: the poet Sidney Lanier. In the 1870s, sitting under a spreading live oak at the edge of a great salt marsh in Georgia’s Glynn County, he pondered how we all yearn for the beauty of the woods, the sea, and the marshes amidst the grit and grind of modern life. Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free; / ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea, he wrote in his famous poem The Marshes of Glynn.

But despite the magnificent fertility that amazed the scientist, despite the serenity that inspired the poet, there are those who destroy the marsh. They use it as a place to dump the caustic wastes of their industry; they drain it, dike it, dry it out, and turn it into factory sites and suburbs surrounded by asphalt and concrete. They mine the marsh for its minerals, leaving behind a landscape stripped of its ability to produce.

In many places the ecologist, the poet, the conservationist, the politician, and the lawyer have risen up together to save and protect the marsh from destruction. To them now belong our grateful thanks that vast stretches of this vital natural resource remain intact. But the battles continue; we must be vigilant.

SALT MARSHES, brackish marshes, and freshwater marshes, all influenced by the rise and fall of the tides, hug the coastlines of the United States—the Gulf Coast, the Pacific Coast, and the Atlantic Seaboard. The marshes of all these regions are in many ways similar, but they are also different in so many ways that each region deserves separate treatment in a book.

This book is devoted to the tidal marshes of the southeast Atlantic Coast, a broad, flat coastal plain bordered by lush barrier islands and sandy beaches interspersed with scenic tidal inlets and broad rivers. Its magnificent salt and brackish marshes stretch like vast, manicured lawns—sometimes nearly eight miles wide—between the mainland and the barrier islands from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This book is also about the places vitally connected to the southeastern marshes—the estuaries, the sea islands, the broad rivers, the maritime forests, the tidal creeks, all of which hum and interact like the pulsating organs of a great benevolent being. They are all unceasingly shaped and altered by tidal currents, winds, and storms that spin, blow, and throb where the sea meets the land.

One cannot talk about the marshes of the Southeast, however, without talking about the people intimately linked to them. Therefore, this book is also about the scientists who study the marsh and the poets who celebrate it—and the ordinary people who make a living from it and are fed by it, entire cultures that turn on its daily rhythms. Most notable are the Gullah-Geechee people, whose lilting dialect and unique arts, crafts, and traditions are disappearing under the onslaught of unbridled development on the coast.

This book is for everyone, though, for all of us whose spirits are uplifted and whose weary minds are refreshed when we gaze upon a vast marsh stretching to the far horizon.

CHAPTER ONE

The Poetry of the Marsh

RIDDEN WITH tuberculosis, his strength ebbing away, the man who was to become Georgia’s most revered poet came to Brunswick on the Georgia coast in the 1870s, seeking respite from his affliction. The clean ocean breezes and the deep pine fragrance suffusing Brunswick’s air were thought to be excellent elixirs for those plagued by the then-incurable lung disease.¹

Sidney Lanier had contracted consumption during the Civil War at Camp Point Lookout, Maryland, a crowded Union Army prison where he was locked up in 1864 after being captured by Union forces. After the war, to support his young wife, Mary, and growing family, he became a lawyer in his native Macon. He was not cut out to be a lawyer, and the law practice broke down his health. He was, however, an accomplished musician, selftaught on the flute, piano, organ, violin, banjo, and guitar. He had made his first flute from a reed cut on the banks of Georgia’s Ocmulgee River and imitated the sounds of birds.

Eventually Lanier moved his family to Baltimore, where he became first flutist for the Peabody Symphony Orchestra and taught English literature at Johns Hopkins University.² His restless, creative mind yearned for more. His true passion, he came to realize, was poetry. He spent long hours writing verse and studying it while his malady continued its relentless assault on his body. Sometimes he was confined to his room for weeks on end. His doctors advised him to seek a place more suitable to his frail condition, where the air was gentler and the climate warmer, where his sickly lungs stood less chance of further damage.³

That advice brought him to Brunswick. His wife’s family owned land there, and his brother-in-law had a rambling home on the south side of town. Lanier was struck by the natural beauty surrounding Brunswick—especially the vast expanse of salt marsh with its sparkling creeks and rivers that seemed to twist and turn just for the pure joy of it. He reveled in the region’s splendor. It touched something deep inside him, and he longed to understand the mysterious forces at work in the marsh.⁴

Sitting beneath a shady live oak, he gazed on the world of marsh that borders a world of sea and was inspired to write some of his finest poems. The most cherished of these is The Marshes of Glynn, named for the county in which Brunswick is located. Generations of Georgia and South Carolina schoolchildren have committed passages of it to memory.

As Lanier’s biographer Edwin Mims explained, the poet represents himself in the poem as having spent the day in the forest and coming at sunset into full view of the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.⁵ The glooms of the live oaks and the emerald twilights of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, had been a refuge from the blazing noonday sun. Within the deep recesses of the forest he had felt the passionate pleasure of prayer. But at the same time, the forest had constrained him. When he looks out upon the marsh, his spirit soars to a lordly great compass within—a sense of limitless space, of freedom. According to Mims, Lanier is ready for what English poet William Wordsworth called a god-like hour:

But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,

And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,

And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem

Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream,—

Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak

And my heart is at ease from men,

and the wearisome sound of the stroke

Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,

And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,

And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,

That the length and the breadth

and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn

Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore

When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,

And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain

Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, —

Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face

The vast sweet visage of space.

To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,

Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,

For a mete and a mark

To the forest-dark: —

So:

Affable live-oak, leaning low, —

Thus—with your favor—soft, with a reverent hand

(Not lightly your person, Lord of the land!)

Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand

On the firm-packed sand,

Free

By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea. (lines 21–48)

Lanier penned several other grand poems of the salt marsh. In Sunset, composed on his deathbed, he professed deep reverence for the marsh, symbolic of his profound love of nature: Reverend Marsh, low-couched along the sea, Old chemist, rapt in alchemy, Distilling silence... Mims called him the poet of the marshes as surely as Bryant is of the forests, or Wordsworth of the mountains.⁶

Lanier could not know that his name would become revered throughout Georgia, with schools, bridges, a county, and a huge artificial lake north of Atlanta named after him. The tuberculosis wracking his body took its final toll in 1881; he died at age thirty-nine.

In the Marshes of Glynn

I am one of those schoolchildren whose teacher made sure that her pupils could recite from memory at least a few lines of The Marshes of Glynn. Miss Ruby Glover, an unabashed Lanier fan, opined that since we lived on an island surrounded by a salt marsh, it behooved us to become familiar with the most famous poem about the marsh.

On a sizzling day in June I am going one step further: I am becoming intimately familiar with Lanier’s marsh itself. Miss Ruby would be proud. I am tromping around in the marshes of Glynn, going boldly where few have gone before. I am desirous of seeing firsthand what so enraptured Lanier, wondering if I will have an epiphany of my own.

Georgia’s best-known poet, Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), author of The Marshes of Glynn. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

It’s dead low tide. To the east, green and brown spartina stretches like a suburban lawn for unbroken miles to the horizon. To the west, the mainland begins only a few hundred feet away. In plain view, aptly named, is the spanking new Sidney Lanier Bridge accommodating a roar of traffic over the Brunswick River. The live oak under which Lanier sat and marveled at the natural beauty spread before him is a mile away. The venerable old tree, wispy Spanish moss dangling from its boughs, now stands in the grassy median of U.S. Highway 17, once the main artery for northerners heading to and from Florida. A state historical marker tells passersby of the tree’s significance. Few can read it at highway speeds.

I am trying to keep up with Todd Schneider, an ornithologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. He has let me come along as he looks for bird nests as part of a breeding bird survey. He has spent many a day in the marsh and moves with amazing agility through the dense spartina and sucking mud. He says he understands why the marsh so inspired Lanier. The waving acres of grass, he says, can bring on a deep sense of isolation that is strangely satisfying to the soul.

We’re only a few hundred feet from shore where we can see several buildings and an asphalt parking lot, he says, nodding toward the mainland. But I feel content in this marsh; it seems as if we’re in a different world. It’s so peaceful.

He and I wonder, though, if Lanier himself actually ever strode through the marsh. Most people, Todd says, probably would not think of slogging laboriously through this place as we are doing. Striding would be out of the question.

They see the marsh only from their boat or car or from a bank or a dock, he notes. They never actually walk in the marsh itself. The idea of that would be foreign to them. Those people speeding over that bridge over there probably don’t have a clue as to what’s in this marsh.

The mud where the spartina grows thickly is firmer than I expected. But the pluff mud at a small drainage creek that we must cross is much, much softer—near the consistency of mayonnaise—and I am quickly bogged nearly to my hips. I struggle to extricate myself. The mud is gripping my legs, and my old sneakers are about to slip off my feet. For a fleeting instant I panic, fearful that I might sink deeper and become irretrievably stuck. But I have been in this predicament before. I bend over and lie on my stomach in the mud. This somehow gives me leverage enough to wiggle my legs free, and I belly-crawl in the mud to the edge of the creek, where the mud is firmer. Thank goodness it’s low tide and no water is in the creek.

I am not sure why the technique works. Maybe it’s because crawling on your stomach distributes your weight more evenly across the mud and you are less apt to sink into it. In any case, I am free but covered with thick black muck, which is already starting to dry in the hot sun and turn powdery gray. It leaves me smelling like the marsh. But that bothers me not a whit. The odor of a healthy salt marsh is sweet balm to my nostrils. Pat Conroy, the great novelist, called it the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater.⁷ In their book Life and Death of the Salt Marsh, John and Mildred Teal explained that the smell is that of spartina and the sea and salt water, of decayed life and traces of iodine and hydrogen sulfide from the mud. These are clean, fresh smells that are pleasing to one who lives by the sea but strange and not altogether pleasant to one who has always lived inland, they wrote.⁸

To me, it is the smell of home, a smell I have never forgotten. My big brother Jim, who lived near the salt marsh around John’s Island all his life, once told me how he loved the pungent aroma wafting from the marsh: When we had been gone from the island for a day or two, we would be headed back, and just before we got to the bridge you got a whiff of the marsh. It was a welcome smell. Mama would always say, ‘Smell that mud? We’re home.’ When I’ve been gone from the island for a long time, I’m so glad to be home I could scoop up that mud and throw it all over me. Just as sweet as magnolia blossoms in spring.

I catch up with Todd, who is plodding along more slowly now, scrutinizing the spartina for the nests of seaside sparrows, marsh wrens, and clapper rails—about the only birds that exclusively raise their babies in the marsh. Most of the marsh grass is a robust mint green. The rest is brown and decaying, which is also good. Dead or alive, spartina is crucial to the ecological health of the marsh.

Clad in a red baseball cap, yellow T-shirt, and blue jeans, Todd is keeping track of the nesting birds in this marsh to see if their populations are rising, falling, or holding steady. Just as Sidney Lanier found spiritual uplifting in the beauty and spaciousness of the marsh, Todd says he never fails to be awed by the marvels he finds here, like the bird nests.

A lot of the nests are so well camouflaged that you could walk right by them and never see them, he explains as he peers into the dense clumps of dead and living spartina.

He’s right. As familiar as I was with salt marshes as a boy, and as many times as I slogged through them, I remember seeing few bird nests. They were that well concealed. Todd points to something about fifty feet away; a little male seaside sparrow is clinging to a spartina stalk. In quick succession we see another male on another stalk, and then a juvenile and a female. After diligent search we find a few of their nests—simple, open cups constructed deep in the spartina but above the high-tide line. Some sport a canopy of living marsh grass pulled down from above. Todd says that seaside sparrows are so consistent in their choice of habitat that it would be useless to look for them anywhere else but a marsh. They spend much of their time on the marsh floor, scurrying mouselike through the spartina, searching for grasshoppers and other insects, snails, small crabs, marine worms, and seeds.

In chest-high spartina next to a tidal creek we find some marsh wren nests. The secretive little marsh wren forages for insects and spiders in the spartina canopy but tends to stay well hidden, even when defending its territory. They’ll come at you and fuss at you, but they won’t show themselves, Todd says as we listen to a scolding marsh wren somewhere nearby. He’s telling us to get the hell out of here. He weighs only ten grams, but he’s saying he’s going to kick our butts. All wrens have attitudes. A male marsh wren, Todd explains, takes several mates, each of which lays three to six eggs in an oblong nest made of reeds and grasses secured to the spartina. Most often the female completes an unfinished nest started by the male, fashioning a central cavity in it to hold her eggs. The male usually builds more than a dozen flimsy nests, most probably never meant for use. We find several of them the size of cantaloupes in the tall spartina. Todd says the dummy nests may be decoys to fool would-be predators, such as the red-winged blackbirds and boat-tailed grackles that we also see flitting about.

We have no luck finding a finished clapper rail nest, although we come across what appears to be the beginning of one. Todd says that as many times as he has been in the marsh looking for clapper rail nests, he has found only a few because they are even better hidden than those of the seaside sparrows.

Pairs of clapper rails build their platform-like nests of spartina and other material low in the marsh. They usually construct a dome over the nest from the surrounding vegetation. Because their nests often are only a foot or so above the mud, their biggest worry is high tide, although the eight or so eggs the female lays in the nest can withstand immersion in salt water, and the downy chicks are able to swim from the time of hatching.

Clapper rails—or marsh hens as we called them because they look, strut, and bob like skinny chickens—tread easily through the grass and soft mud on their wide-spreading toes, three on each foot. They are surprisingly good swimmers, even though their toes are not webbed like a duck’s.

Like the wrens and sparrows, the rails are super-secretive birds. But I very much would like to see one, or at least hear one. I regard them as old friends. Their wild, cackling call is the sound I most identify with my childhood—a yenk, yenk, yenk, yenk, yenk that sounds like hands clapping. It regularly emanated from the salt marsh next to my island home. Once you hear that harsh sound, you’re unlikely to forget it.

The marshes of Glynn County made famous by Sidney Lanier’s poem.

Sidney Lanier must have had a similarly hard time finding a clapper rail nest. In his Marshes of Glynn, he used the bird’s hidden nest as a simile for his faith in God and the mysteriousness of the sacred:

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,

Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies

In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies:

By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod

I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:

Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within

The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn. (lines 71–78)

Then, standing there in the marsh, I hear it—a clapper rail cackling in the distance, and I, too, am content.

Marshes and Superfund Sites

The next day I stop at the city of Brunswick’s Marshes of Glynn Overlook Park, just off U.S. 17. Across two lanes of the busy thoroughfare, in the median, is the Lanier Oak. The state historical marker says that Lanier frequently sat beneath this live oak and looked out over the marsh. Here he received the inspiration which resulted in some of his finest poems.

My eyes also are drawn almost instinctively toward the marsh. As the small park’s name suggests, I still can get a far-as-the-eye-can-see view of the gleaming green fields Lanier made famous. On the distant horizon I see the faint outlines of Saint Simons Island and Jekyll Island, both part of the low-lying barrier island chain known as Georgia’s Golden Isles. Beyond is the sea that generates the life-giving tides.

Nevertheless, if Lanier were looking out—and breathing—from here today, he would be mighty disappointed. Certainly he would not be enraptured. On the edge of the marsh, within plain view of the park and Lanier’s venerable old oak, is a McDonald’s golden arches sign. The most visible thing from here, however, is a big chemical plant. Its tall smokestack, etched starkly against the blue sky, belches out a thick, white plume that drifts out over the marsh. The emissions hardly ever cease. Sometimes they mingle with those from a giant paper mill on the edge of a marsh four miles across town. Seven public schools and a public hospital stand between them.⁹ Just a few years ago the stench from the plants was literally nauseating. A writer once likened the odor to what mustard gas must have smelled like as it billowed across the trenches of the Marne in World War I.¹⁰ Sometimes, Brunswick’s factories seemed to be competing for the title of smelliest. Even now, on certain days, industrial odors are still offensive in Brunswick. If visitors complain, local boosters laugh and say that the fumes smell like money.

Perched on a peninsula flanked by tidal rivers and the great salt marsh, Brunswick, population sixteen thousand, is Glynn County’s seat and industrial center. Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe, laid out its streets and squares in 1771. In 1789 George Washington proclaimed Brunswick one of the five original ports of entry for the colonies. The city boasts another original: it is the birthplace of a tangy stew. A plaque on an iron pot at the city’s visitors center states that the first Brunswick stew was cooked on July 2, 1898, on nearby Saint Simons Island. The pot supposedly held the first stew. At one time the city also billed itself as the Shrimp Capital of the World, for the many shrimp harvested in local waters. During World War II, at a sprawling shipyard on the edge of the marshes of Glynn, thousands of workers labored around the clock to build liberty ships that ferried troops and supplies to the war theater in Europe.¹¹

Today, Brunswick is one of the most productive ports on the Atlantic Coast. Besides handling wood pulp, paper products, wheat, soybeans, and heavy machinery, it is a primary U.S. port for numerous automobile manufacturers, including Jaguar, Land Rover, Porsche, Mitsubishi, Volvo, Ford, GM, and Mercedes. Another Brunswick landmark is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), a former Navy installation and World War II blimp base, which brings in thousands of students each month from various federal agencies that have law enforcement programs.¹² The bustling city proudly supports its industries, which employ many people, pay good wages, and contribute generously to local causes.

But if Sidney Lanier were alive today, Brunswick might be the last place doctors would send him to take the cure. Its polluting industries still make it one of the most contaminated places in the South. In addition to its stinky factories, the city is