The Lure of the Shoreline

The seashore marks a liminal space and appeals to us in part due to the sheer tenacity of life to survive there despite its harsh envi­ronment. Marine zoologist Rachel Carson characterized the sea­shore as a harsh but vibrant biome. Known primarily for her book

Silent Spring, Carson’s area of expertise and real passion was the ocean. She published three best-selling books on the topic, but The Edge of the Sea specifically focused on the rigor necessary for spe­cies to survive in the hostile terrain of the shoreline.17 Describing the seashore as “the place of our dim ancestral beginnings,” Car­son writes:

Only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mu­table, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals. In this difficult world of the shore, life displays its enormous toughness and vitality by occupying almost every conceivable niche. Visibly, it carpets the intertidal rocks; or half hidden, it descends into fissures and crevices, or hides under boulders, or lurks in the wet gloom of sea caves. Invisibly, where the casual observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and pas­sageways. It tunnels into solid rock and bores into peat and clay. It encrusts weeds or drifting spars or the hard, chitinous shell of a lob­ster. It exists minutely, as the film of bacteria that spreads over a rock surface or a wharf piling; as spheres of protozoa small as pinpricks, sparkling at the surface of the sea; and as Lilliputian beings swimming through dark pools that lie between the grains of sand.18

Celebrated anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley, in his essay “The Star Thrower,” similarly contemplated the formidable environment of the shoreline in Sanibel, Florida, which he de­scribes as “littered with the debris of life”: “Shells are cast up in windrows; a hermit crab, fumbling for a new home in the depths, is tossed naked ashore, where the waiting gulls cut him to pieces. Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. Even the torn fragments of a green sponge yield bits of scrambling life striving to return to the great mother that has nourished and protected them.”19

Eiseley recounts walking along the beach and encountering a man picking up starfish washed ashore by the rugged waves. Eise – ley pauses and together the men notice a starfish that “thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.” The man picks up the star and tosses it beyond the breakers back into the sea. At some point, Eiseley joins in the effort to save at least a few of the beached starfish. He describes lifting up one star, “whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers while. . . it cried soundlessly for life.”20 In such prose Eiseley offers a snap­shot of life’s tenacity to survive in a threshold landscape. Evolved approximately 500 million years ago, starfish are ancestors to more complex organisms, including us. In that momentary em­brace between Eiseley’s fingers and the tube feet of the starfish, life primordial touches the present as two beings communicate a sim­ple and mutually understood message, each wishing only to cling to life. Such vivid depictions of species surviving by a bare foot­hold, or tubed foothold, inspire us to imagine the distant shores on Titan, with its carved river channels and methane lakes, and won­der what microbes or variants of terrestrial mollusks might subsist on its frozen shorelines. While Bonestell painted his spacescapes at the dawn of the Space Age, we have since sent our spacecraft bil­lions of miles from home, and in time we’ll seek out the answers to what must have been Bonestell’s questions regarding life-forms that might cling to the rocks and crevasses on Saturn’s icy moons.