A Walker in the Suburbs

Brackish waters belong to both the sea and the land, and Chincoteague is surrounded by them, by  estuaries and lagoons. In fact (I read on Wikipedia, just checking my terms), the Chesapeake Bay, which surrounds these tidal lowlands, is the largest estuary in the U.S. It’s “the drowned river valley of the Susquehanna” — something I never knew but will remember, due to its poetic turn of phrase.

But the word and concept of “brackish” sets the mind to spinning. How often do we run into situations that are a little of this and a little of that; that would be, if transferred into salinity equations, brackish?

Most of the time, I’d say. And that makes the brackish beautiful, which it most certainly is. So even though one is tempted to turn up one’s nose at brackish water, to think of it as sluggish and unhealthy, I warmed to it at Chincoteague: the mud flats, the marshy reeds, the waters shining in the late-day sun.

I was out early this morning for a bike ride around the refuge and a walk on the beach. The sun was rising, and though I missed its first rays on the strand I caught them on the marsh. It was more stunning, if that is possible.

I came to the beach for a few days to clear my head and punctuate what came before from what comes next. In that I was moderately successful. A lot has come before, after all.

But I came, most of all, for the place, for its beauty and rhythms and peacefulness. I’ve tried to capture it in words and photographs and mindset. And now, I’ll do my best to take it back.

My family has a long history of visiting Chincoteague. We brought Suzanne here before she was a year old, and the girls have visited at regular enough intervals that they have real memories of the place. One of them is a standing joke/question/riff: Are the famed ponies, popularized by Misty of Chincoteague, really wild? With today’s post I will answer this question once and for all.

They are wild, within boundaries.

OK, I know this is a cop-out — but it’s true. I walked five miles round trip yesterday to a section of the island where they roam free. “Once you cross that fence (there was a cattle guard), you’ll be in their territory,” the ranger told me.

Fenced wild ponies? An oxymoron, for sure. But I was close enough to feel their wildness, their utter disregard that I was there. I kept remembering the pamphlet warnings. “Wild ponies bite and kick.” So I didn’t approach or offer an outstretched hand for sniffing.

Instead, I observed. And soon after this mare walked past me she started to trot and then to canter. Her friends soon joined her, a posse of five. I held my breath as they galloped past, leaving a cloud of dust and flowing manes in their wake. They were alive and moving and free. They were as wild as any fenced creatures can be.

I’ve been thinking about the impulse to label and categorize. Take this shell, for example. I picked it up today after promising myself I would collect no more. The big bag of shells yesterday should  have been enough. And since today’s walk was a much chillier one — stiff breeze blowing, long-sleeved shirt and sweatshirt — my hands would have been warmer stuffed in my pockets. Except they were too busy picking up whelk shells.

But the urge to acquire is often accompanied by the urge to name and arrange, so I stopped in at the Tom’s Cove Visitor’s Center and picked up a little handout on shells. There are two types of whelks, I learned: the knobbed whelk, which has little points on each whorl, and the channeled whelk, which has grooves instead of points.

Learning its name is a way to honor the shell and its former inhabitant. It helps me appreciate it, which isn’t hard given its beauty.

But there is much I still don’t know: how a snail created this shell, how its hue came to resemble a thousand sunsets; how the ocean buffeted and burnished it and the waves tossed it up on the shore for me to find — all of those things I’ll never understand.