Richard Russo

The first time I visited Cape Cod, a city boy unaccustomed to the ways of the natural world, I encountered what seemed to me one of the primal mysteries, the secret from which so much else in life sprang. Although I have witnessed this phenomenon again and again over the past twenty or so years, it mystifies me still. During that first trip, my wife and I made an initial foray to the beach on Cape Cod Bay and looked out across the magnificent body of water held in the cup of land stretching from Bourne to Provincetown and marked by a length of watery horizon that could not be encompassed by peripheral vision alone. We waded out into that gentle ripple of surf and could see, at our feet, patches of waving sea grass, the scurrying shadows of hermit crabs hustling out of our paths, and an occasional darker-hued stripe indicating a gully in the sand and subtle deepening of the water. When we returned the next day at a different, later hour, expecting more of the same, we found the water gone, as if the whole bay had been sucked down a great central drain. What had happened? What could we do except stare, bewildered by the vast, striated plain of sand before us containing only a few attenuated channels and residual pools of water? The uncovered sand was striped with gray, green, orange, and pink, and at the horizon was a thread of blue, a shimmering dream nearly a mile away, an indication of the distance to which the water had retreated.

Those of you worldlier than I was will have recognized by now the ancient rhythm of the tides, a drama which plays out every six hours, day after day, and has done so for as close to “forever” as you’re likely to come. Now that I’ve returned from my annual jaunt to the beaches of Cape Cod and tried to return to the unnatural rhythms of the workaday life, my mind keeps going back to that great tidal clock, which continues without my having to do anything about it, without even the slightest necessity for willfulness or action on my part. I suppose it even happens when I’m not there to see it.

What, you might well ask, does any of this have to do with a blog whose main focus, so far, has been books and reading?  read more »