Sippewissett: Or, Life on a Salt Marsh - Hardcover

Traver, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933392142 ISBN 13: 9781933392141

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Tim Traver's Sippewissett is heir to a rich history of nature writing. Akin to classics like Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the book forms an eloquent bridge between ecology and memory, science and art. Traver alternates between remembrances of the Cape Cod salt marsh where he spent his boyhood summers and the history of Sippewissett, a place that has been studied by many of America's great biologists, from Louis Agassiz to Rachel Carson.

There is poetry in his retelling of the past, a childhood of mud and tides and water; there is great love in the peace and satisfaction he finds later in life fishing and clamming and watching his own children discover the secrets of the marsh. Traver manages to weave these personal details into mesmerizing historical passages and meditations on the ecology of place that read like whodunits; one discovery leads to another, from the most beautiful dance of life to more somber considerations, such as the way the marsh can tell us so much about our environmental crises.
Sippewissett is an intimate exploration of place by a man of science and strong family bonds. Here is one of ecology's most studied places through the eyes of someone determined to make sense of its beauty and complexity--at once private and public--filled with poetry yet grounded in science, a place disappearing in the face of development and global climate change.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"Traver has written something truly lovely here; it combines the best sort of science writing, and aspects of Leopold, Dillard, and Carson are certainly echoed within its pages. But beyond that, it also calls to mind family memoirs like George Howe Colt's luminous Big House and makes readers yearn for a place on the shore, a place like Sippewissett. If nothing else, it certainly makes you realize the significance of these places to who we are and what we deem important. Traver writes with great eloquence about relationships with the land, old friendships, and family and the special significance of one small stretch of land in Massachusetts. Sippewissett is a lovely book, and reading it is truly a wonder." - Bookslut review, November 2006

"Rarely can so much be so happily learned. Tim Traver takes us deep into the microcosm of Sippewissett, but more so, explores with us the idea of home. Trevor leaps into his salt creek home and where it takes him is never dull." --Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land

"Tim Traver's Sippewissett is a brilliant accomplishment replete with insight, wisdom, understanding, and passion. The author marvelously combines natural history, science, culture, conservation, and enduring qualities of the human spirit. The reader is continually moved by Traver's eloquent blending of personal narrative and rational reflection; we find ourselves traveling with the author through his coming of age cum personal and professional odyssey. This is a book that is likely to endure, enrich, and inform for many years to come." --Stephen Kellert, Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

"Sippewissett is a salt marsh with history, and Tim Traver is an ideal guide who steers his readers through layers of birth natural and human, personal and expansive. The science of home is a noble pursuit, and Cape Cod has spawned some of our finest literary naturalists. With Sippewissett Traver joins the legacy of gifted seaside storytellers John Hay, Henry Beston, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Finch." --Ted Levin, author of Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades, winner of the 2004 Burroughs Medal

"This lovely book made me miss a bus. The sounds of the motor and the opening doors were lost in the ebb and flow of saltwater, migratory fish, and family, and in Traver's combination of humor and natural history with a deep meditation on the ecology of home." -John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home

From the Author:

When did the land actually stop being sacred to us? Did anyone record the moment or rather was it a dimming of awareness across years? Did we become modern producer-consumers by misattention, caught by time and opportunity while our meanings changed? Is that how we lost our way, moving nowhere but toward progress? Or is the land still sacred to us, and we just have to turn over more stones to know it?

—Sippewissett

About this edition

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1933392142
• ISBN 13: 9781933392141
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264
• Illustrator: Angell Bobbi