The Peripatetic Reviewer

AS I look back it seems to me that all my life I have been in close touch with marshes — and always have I taken them for granted. As a child I could see from my nursery window the miles of marsh that separated my hometown from Jersey City: on an autumn evening the tall, dry cattails would catch fire from the sparks of the Pennsylvania locomotives and start a blaze that would sweep on for miles. Summers during my boyhood I lived on the Barnegat, which is to say, I lived half in the marsh and half in the sea. I cruised through the marshes from Bay Head to Cape May; I remember the snipe and the ducks which used to throng them in September just before I went back to school; I remember the odor of the marshland under the hot August sun, and when I catch a whiff of it today, a current of nostalgia flashes through me. In New England and especially since my fortieth year, when I became an angler, the marshes of Plum Island, of the Rowley and Ipswich rivers, the Essex marsh and the Nauset marsh on Cape Cod, sacred to the memory of Wyman Richardson, have held a special meaning. But my love for them has been unconcerned; not till five years ago did I realize that our salt marshes were in jeopardy and that we should have to fight to keep them alive — them and all the marine life that depends on them.

We Americans are the most spontaneous people on earth, spontaneous in our giving and equally spontaneous in our destruction. Unless we can slow down our highway engineers and persuade our rural developers to listen to reason, we shall turn this glorious coast of ours into a desert of string towns and through ways faster than the Egyptians turned Egypt into sand. It is a pity that the instinct to preserve comes so late to the political biped. But it does come, and there lies our hope. The Cape Cod Seashore National Park is an example of what can be done with persuasion and persistence, and, as in all such undertakings, the first step is to educate. The public must understand what we are trying to preserve, and why — and what it will mean to them and their children.

“A tidal marsh,” as Dr. George C. Matthiessen well says, “means different things to different people. To some it is an evil smelling eyesore; to hunters and naturalists a haven for wildlife; and to still others a piece of real estate of great potential value.” But to the marine biologist the tidal marsh is a prehistoric heritage. The rain and tides that flow through the marsh grass and over the soft soil, and the algae of the marsh creeks, compose a food supply, as we have learned only within the past decade, which is indispensable to the existence of our clam and oyster beds, and equally so to the great schools of fish feeding off the Atlantic shelf.

Suddenly, then, the coastal states have been confronted with the questions, how fast and how much of their vital marshlands can they preserve. We see Virginia battling to protect the Capes, Maryland keeping a wary eye on the marshes of the Eastern Shore, Massachusetts scrambling to catch up, New Jersey setting an example which makes everyone envious. Back in the 1930s New Jersey began to appropriate a sizable part of the money paid for hunting and fishing licenses for the purchase of the marshes bordering the Inland Waterway and reaching inland around the inlets and great bays so numerous along its coastline. Some of the marshes were bought at $5.00 an acre — and a high price it was thought in the Depression — some cost twenty times that. But the acquisition continued under the steady pressure of Lester G. MacNamara of the Department of Conservation and Economic Development, with the result that New Jersey has today 82,000 acres of salt marsh in a state of preservation and beyond the threat of dredge, fill, and pollution.

In Massachusetts the salt marsh inventory, authorized by the Legislature in 1962, took two years to complete; it showed that of the state’s remaining 60,000 acres of coastal wetland, 45,000 acres should be preserved in their present untrammeled state, and for these reasons: 71 percent are presently productive of shellfish; 69 percent were considered of unusual importance as a nursery for flounder; 87 percent were of moderate or high value to striped bass, and, almost needless to add, every acre preserved would provide food and lodging for migratory waterfowl. At the eleventh hour it is realized that these salt marshes, so little changed since the glaciers, with their water, soil, plants, and animals forming “a huge, selfrenewable, food-producing system,” must be either saved or lost — and if lost, the fish are lost too.

It is too late in the day to seek protection through outright acquisition — there isn’t that much money available in the state treasury, much less for the operation and maintenance. The most feasible solution is to ask each owner of marshland to be a partner in preservation. He might be asked to execute a formal agreement, guaranteeing his marsh against alteration yet reserving to himself and his heirs the right to all other uses — hunting, fishing, boating — and the privacy of his own property. In exchange for such cooperation he and his heirs might be granted a reduction in taxation. Only by making common cause can we hope to preserve the salt marsh with its life-giving process and its wisdom. On a container for wastepaper in a park in Edinburgh is a sign reading “The amenity of our city is recommended to your care.” Suppose we enlarge this to read “The amenity of our scacoast is recommended to your care.”

Having judged more than a score of them, I should say that a prize contest succeeds when it throws up into prominence, however temporarily, the work of a young writer which would otherwise not have been so widely read. The Harper Novel Contest is the only one which has been consistently maintained for four decades, and its prizewinner for 1965, P. S. WILKINSON by C. D. B. BRYAN (Harper & Row, $5.95), merits the award and is pleasurable to read. The career of the hero, “P.S.,” as he is known to his friends, parallels that of the author, at least to the extent of eighteen months of army service in Korea and a recall as a reserve officer during the Berlin crisis of 1961. Most first novels have in them elements of autobiography, but it should be clear that Mr. Bryan’s capacity for characterization and invention is invigorating and true to the young generation he is writing about.

The story begins in Korea, where P. S. Wilkinson is serving his time in the long truce, on friendly footing with his fellow officers in the battalion and consistently in the doghouse with Major Sturgess, who resents his Ivy League manners. His showdown with the major comes when P. S. deliberately disobeys the order to shave the head of a whore who has crawled in through the wire at night, and the scene in which the lieutenant and his superior officer go to it is a dandy. In punishment for his point of honor, P.S.’s discharge is held up, intensifying his longing to resume his life at home. He gets back barely in time to serve as best man at Charlie Merritt’s wedding on Long Island. Nancy, the girl he had been engaged to at Yale and who had married someone else two weeks after he went to Korea, is a bridesmaid, and again they strike sparks, but nothing seems right.

In his renewed courtship with Nancy, in his efforts to get through to his diffident father, and in his halfhearted try for a job in the CIA, P.S. is harassed by misgivings conveyed to us in italics as a thought within a response. Tall, lean, bespectacled, attractive to women, mistrustful of himself, P.S. is a continual victim of circumstance, dissatisfied with what he can find to do and yet searching for a more honorable compensation. The gaps in the story are obvious: P.S. never mentions his mother, yet it is unlikely that he could have despised both parents. For an unathletic type he seems to have learned little at Yale save poise. Finally, his long lethargy while he drones away in a bank is hard to account for, though I know such spells do occur. But P.S. at the wedding, P.S. in those dreadful automobile rides with his father, his bloody reunion with the stripper, Polly Hippolyte, and, above all, P.S.’s awakening by the sharp-minded, lonely Nancy are scenes I believe in and enjoy.

DUDLEY CAMMETT LUNT spent his boyhood and early manhood in the forests and along the rocky coast of Maine not far from Falmouth Foreside, and although he now lives in a softer clime, the invisible tether which links us all to our homeland has pulled him back again and again to see how the place and the people have weathered. THE WOODS AND THE SEA (Knopf, $5.95) is a volume of reminiscences and adventures, taciturn at the outset, before the author warms to his subject, then coming alive with the sensuous detail and dry humor characteristic of most state-of-Mainers. Whether Mr. Lunt is writing about rivers as beautiful as the Allagash and the Penobscot or a lake as vast and changeful as Moosehead or a coast as perilous as that guarded by the Portland Head Light, he is determined that the reader shall share in the awe and mystery which he felt for these places in his early encounters.

He begins, close to home, describing the appetites of a small boy as he relishes the big events of the calendar — the cunner hunt on the Gape Shore with Uncle Jim, ending up with the little slabs of cunner, tom-cod, and pollock sizzling and spitting over the driftwood fire; or the Fourth of July fireworks on Pine Point and the burns and blisters he wakes up with the next day; and, most succulent of all, the clambake at Eagle’s Nest, where Uncle Ira’s “birds” — the lobsters — and Aunt Emily’s “sinkers” are washed down with coffee mixed with a couple of eggs.

Later come the long canoe trips with Baptiste Roncourt, his French-Canadian guide. Sometimes they follow Thoreau’s trail in the long crossing of Mooschead, or the even longer toil, with its many portages, up the West Branch and across the divide to the headwaters of the St. John, which was, as Baptiste put it, “de longes’ reever treep out o’ de town o’ Greenville.” On these trips Baptiste’s golden johnnycake served up with ham or trout kept them going, but what stand out are the unexpected glimpse of moose or hawk and the ordeal of poling a heavily laden canoe through fast water, paddling it safely to the lee shore when a squall shuts down, and toting the dead weight on the endless carries. Mr. Lunt, bless him, does not gloss over the hardships which are common to all who venture into the wilderness.

TED PATRICK, the late editor of Holiday, was a warmhearted man who appreciated dogs, and in THE THINKING DOG’S MAN (Random House, $4.95) he has written about his experience and his friendships in the Canine world with an eye that misses very little. Mr. Patrick was an airedale man specifically, but he admired and appreciated all good dogs, and his book is full of sensible observations based on a respectful, unsentimental assessment of their abilities. He has nothing but contempt for the kind of scientific experiment that claims to reveal a lack of memory or an inability to reason, and plain-spoken disgust for that intricate obedience training which shows the owner as being more clever than the dog.

Mr. Patrick’s book, including the amusing nonintroduction by John Steinbeck, is pointed up with good stories and interlarded with sensible advice, easy to read, and worth remembering. The trouble is that only readers who already know about dogs will appreciate what an accomplished trainer and interpreter Mr. Patrick was, while those most in need of his warning against cruel training and the unfortunate specimens of fashionable breeds will never bother to explore the relationship Ted had in mind.