A Place Between the Tides: A Naturalist's Reflections on the Salt Marsh - Softcover

Thurston, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1553650352 ISBN 13: 9781553650355

Publisher: Greystone Books, 2004

Synopsis

For every nature writer there seems to be one special place that tutors him or her in the ways of nature and the relationships of humans to the natural world, including the spiritual dimension. For Thoreau, it was a pond; for Henry Beaton, a barrier beach; for Annie Dillard, a creek. For Harry Thurston, it is the salt marsh, that part of the planet where land meets sea.

Based upon childhood memory and his naturalist’s journals, "A Place Between the Tides" is the story of Thurston’s return to the beloved environment of his boyhood when he moves to the Old Marsh, a 1.5-hectare marsh on the banks of the Tidnish River in Nova Scotia. Elegantly moving back and forth in time, from the present year through the past decade and all the way back to childhood, the book describes the seasons in the life of the marsh as filtered through two decades of Thurston’s living there. Blending acute analysis and a poet’s lyricism, Thurston explores and examines one of the most productive and biologically diverse habitats on Earth, a habitat that has been degraded relentlessly since European settlement, making the few standing marshes precious because they are so vulnerable and vital.

About this title

Reviews

An author of Canadian nature books, Thurston lives in a house that adjoins a tidal river in Nova Scotia. His perspective on nature's molting aspects over the course of a year frames this work, whose January-to-December chapters also offer Thurston's memories of his 1950s boyhood. While this mixture produces a somewhat episodic narrative, its recurring observations about prey-predator behavior unify events and maintain the reader's interest in how, for example, blue herons fare in the competition. Thurston views animals acutely, but never cutely, his upbringing on a farm militating against sentimentalism about their lives and deaths. Thus clear-eyed, he writes vividly about birds' and mammals' endowment of alertness as they hunt or flee, and he amply populates the text with memorable descriptions of the outcomes of the dynamic, as of an impression in the snow made by an owl that caught a field mouse. Digressions into natural facts about particular animals and the estuarine ecosystem of his locale (the isthmus connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) fill out a well-considered work. Gilbert Taylor
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Edition details

• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1553650352
• ISBN 13: 9781553650355
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240