Times of Sand
Richard Bready
In science one tries to say something that no one knew before
in a way that everyone can understand. Whereas in poetry . . .
- Dirac (1)
I
The foam along the beach stands up like hills
Seen from aloft. On foot, nine birds patrol
The intertidal zone, their tweezer bills
Ready to pluck small life from every hole
It digs when stranded. This arrangement fills
A fractioned second’s record on a roll
Of photographic film: sand, bubbles, ocean,
And sanderlings, all frozen in mid-motion.
As regular as clockwork toys, the birds
That flee then follow each collapsing wave
Have wound down, count by count, until two thirds
Of once-reported numbers fail (2). To save
Some quotient of those running, time and words
Both fly. The key resource the waters gave
Has new consumers now; supplies of sand
For living on or living off the land
Are limited. The hills, time-lapsed, like foam
Slide flat, flowing in streams back to the sea,
Where many a tiny being makes its home,
Armor and armature, out of the free
Stone molecules dissolved there. Breakers comb
Shell fragments with eroded quartz debris
Of antique landscapes. As these grains combine,
Exceeding slowly and exceeding fine,
A longshore current wipes them sideways. Beaches
Ribbon the coast. In summer, gentle, warm,
Soft-crested rollers fall upslope, and each is
Depositor of sediment to form
Wide flats that winter waves from wind-whipped reaches
Narrow and steepen. Heaped and scraped by storm,
Or levelled by the leavings of fair weather,
The shoreline ebbs and grows. Taken together,
All factors average out so that the coast,
Decade to decade, does not show a lot
Of difference, although in fact almost
The whole has shifted from some previous spot
And will abandon soon its present post.
Dynamic equilibrium is not
A property desirable to buyers
Of property. The migratory fliers
Go elsewhere in lean years for body fat
To fuel them to their tundra nests and fill
Their eggs with calories (3), or, lacking that,
Don’t reproduce (their populations spill
And soar in curves that match their habitat),
But owners, fixed like barnacles, hold still,
A constancy against which every loss
They suffer from the local pitch and toss
Is measured for resentment, as a waste
Of time, of money, spent here to secure
A territory. Watching it defaced,
The beachfront houses by the sea unsure,
The nesteggs threatened, paradise misplaced
Perhaps for years, they think themselves landpoor,
Demand that conservation keep more change
From harming them, and to this end arrange
Groins, jetties, bulkheads, breakwaters, seawalls,
A coastal incrustation hoped to hide
The land that’s shrinking from the wash. Yet all’s
For naught. What order given to the tide
Will stop or slow its motion? In it crawls
And out casts castles pride had fortified
Regardless of the cost. Wave guides, sand traps
Hasten erosion (4). Beaches found on maps
Are lost at sea now, littorally vanished.
For birds, there is no other shore to go
To on the other side; or, they are banished
From remnant feeding grounds by flocks that grow
Whatever happens: busy, noisy, tannish,
These eat, these swim, these bask, run to and fro
For their own reasons, dig, call, squabble, read,
Drive Jet Skis® and dune buggies at high speed,
And make the scene intolerable, except
For such as gulls, who share a human nature
And profit from increase of garbage. Kept
From food or rest, a less aggressive creature,
Thinner for each horizon overleapt
To beat retreat from beasts of greater stature (5),
Flies on, dies on the way perhaps, ends there
Its piece of time with water, earth, and air.
II
For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present,
and future signifies only an illusion, if a stubborn one.
- Einstein (6)
Two million years or so ago (7), when ice
Platemailed the planet, sanderlings were trotting
Seasidelong back and forth at their precise
Escapement distance from the wavefronts plotting
A line on continental shelves where twice
The modern inshore verge rose dry (8): allotting
Less runoff to each river as they grew,
The glaciers made sea level drop. All through
Those twenty thousand centuries of freeze-
Thaw seesaw tides, a pendulum has swung,
Now with slow fastnesses of crystal seas
Towering above parched prairies, now among
The headlong meltdown torrents that with ease
Have carried megatons to fill the young
Wide-open river mouths with sand and silt,
Which risen oceans gradually rebuilt
As barrier island, beach, bar, shoal, or spit,
While flattened barrens shed their load of frost,
And pioneering lichens bit by bit
Cracked rock to soil. Grown fertile, sedged and mossed,
Swarmed in sextillions, warmed through long sunlit
High-latitude spring evenings, land forelost
To life, recovered by that layer bloomed
And buzzed until the glacial spread resumed.
The yearly birds flew north as they do now
To country so congenial for breeding,
Its densities of prey sometimes allow
A pair to double-clutch (9), each parent leading
The brood it hatched. Birthrate increase is how
They best exploit their ice edge niche, succeeding
By an excess that balances, all told,
Eggs eaten, fledglings dead of sudden cold,
And juveniles not most of which survive
The first great journey southward. Shorter days
Trigger the hormones governing their drive
To longer flight. They travel unknown ways
Hinted by instinct’s “Warmer” and arrive
At a new sight, of splashing water—bays,
Coves, estuaries, gulfs—and a new urge:
To eat along the outswash by the surge.
Food is their fate now, find it or become it,
With migrant raptors waiting to attack
Flocks fear assembles; though each day kills some, it
Spares others, safe in numbers. Any lack
Of intake is as lethal. Rule of thumb: it
Requires one week’s weight gain to win back
Strength spent while flying several dozen hours,
Two miles up, at the limit of their powers,
As they must, several times (10). Such wingwork done,
The autumn equinox sees them beside
Six continents, three where the tropic sun
Will follow, three where residents abide
Gale, chill, and dark. Metabolisms run
So fast in them, they take these in their stride,
For nearer birds find, when they next set forth,
Prime sites available throughout the north.
The latest species in its genus (11), fleet
And strong, evolved for margin profits, goes,
Like dawn-age horses as they found their feet,
Tiptoe for speed and so needs no hind toes (12).
Well suited to life’s cycles by a suite
Of adaptations, its long history shows
(Say twice (13) the mean survival of the myriad
With which it shared the Quaternary Period
And twenty times (14) the talking hominid’s),
It faces now a geologic chasm:
A mass extinction, when the planet rids
Itself of life-forms in a rapid spasm
Of death and taxa. What has greased the skids?
Intelligence, that popular phantasm,
Modern mutation, prototype, quick fix,
Like feathers on an archaeopteryx,
Plus sociability, an old improvement
Updated to let many use some’s clever
Ideas in ways the few might disapprove, meant
As thought seems for a higher flight. However:
The birds, the years, the periodic movement,
Waving goodbye, off to the big fornever—
These cannot cease to be. As physicists
Know well, time past, past reaching, still exists.
III
The notion of analogy is deeper than the notion of formulae.
- Oppenheimer (15)
The moment that the motor shot the shutter
Across its aperture made light of time,
Set permanent as particles waves’ flutter
In dye-grain diagram, their fall and climb
A message to the future, written water
Formed firm here, framed here, orderly eye rhyme.
Cross-section of an instant and location,
Now reproducible from information
Locked in its dots, on any page or screen
By ink or current, image can outlast
Occasion, lives, and place. The pictured scene,
Once out of site and into mind, broadcast
Through spacetime, will in changeless silence mean
The singular event—aloud, amassed—
When and wherever probability
Distributes copies. Versatility
Makes sand a subject, means, and measure. Melt
Quartz crystals, then cool quickly; they will change
From solids, patterned molecules all dealt
In face and edge and angle, to a strange
Irregular stilled liquid that is felt
To be a crystal though its parts arrange
Themselves amorphously, which is why glass
Slows light so bends light but lets most light pass,
Lens-gathered to a focus (some reflects,
And windows kill a billion birds a year (16),
Brains bloodied by false azure). What detects
Incoming photons and gets camera gear
Adjusted, bright or dark, as it directs,
Is sand again. Cooked, oxygen will clear
Out of its silica. The siliconic
Atomic lattices for electronic
Controls and sensors slice time even thinner
Than wristwatch quartz vibrating at a snappy
Two-to-the-fifteenth cycles. But the winner
On small scales is the theoretician, happy
To calculate a metric for the inner
Dimensions of the quanta - as a frappé:
Instead of worldline sequences, fluxed foam
Of separate points, past, present, and to come,
And here a place and there a place, yet such
That none leads to another, though they share
Contingent borders, layered nothing much
Between the megagoogolths really there (17).
So water’s surface tension keeps in touch,
Its clingfilm tight around the pressure air
Stirs into it, the contour of a bubble
Upheld by balanced forces in their double
Act. Crossing from one compound to the next,
Repeatedly, refractedly, bounced back
And froth-diverted, light rays, veering, flexed
Along a zigzag and redundant track,
Writhe off in all directions. Sight, thus vexed,
Perceives an opaque white, a shadow black
As if from density, the same way clouds,
Mere pressure gradients collecting crowds
Of droplets, can seem stiff as any stone
That clouds erode with rain and snow while falling
To gravity, the leveller. Downthrown,
Sandpile and surf combine, one smoothed, one sprawling,
To shape a fleeting looking glass: birds shown
Inverted, rippled, blue background recalling
The air, where particles that scatter light
Favor this color’s energy. From flight
The birds drop to a triple point, of sky,
Land, sea, the basic phases matter shifts
As ever since that eon when the dry
Young planet outgassed water at such rifts
As now spread underwater. Floating high
On flowing rock, each continent that drifts
Has closed and opened oceans, heaved up coasts
In mountains, ground those cloud-compelling hosts
To rubble nubbins, and then sand. The age
Of any grain on any hand may be
More than two thousand million years (18), by stage
In magma, granite, river, delta, sea,
Stone, uplift, ice, beach, dune, and desert. Gauge
Of deep time, it implies activity:
To crystallize what little bit one knows,
In chance and change, an angle of repose.
.....................................................................
I have commented before on the pleasures that this blog has brought in putting me in contact with people I otherwise would not have known. Here is a quintessential example. This evocative and provocative poem is published here courtesy of the writer, who describes himself as follows:
Richard Bready retired this year from a career mostly spent working on dictionaries and encyclopedias. He lives on the Seattle Fault. His email is richard.bready@gmail.com
The heading image is by MW and the references in the poem are:
- Quoted in Oppenheimer, J.R. Age of Science 1900-1950. Scientific American, September 1950. p. 20
- Myers, J.P. The Sanderling. Audubon Wildlife Report, 1988/1989. Howe, M.A., Geissler, P.H., and Harrington, B.A. Population Trends of North American Shorebirds Based on the International Shorebird Survey. Biological Conservation, 49 (1989). pp. 185-199
- Klaassen, M., et al. Arctic Waders Are Not Capital Breeders. Nature, 413, 25 Oct. 2001, p. 794, discuss the question whether nutrients in eggs of tundra-breeding sanderlings are gathered on migration or on the breeding site, arguing for the latter and citing support for the former.
- Kaufman, W., and Pilkey, O. The Beaches Are Moving. Duke Univ. Press, 1983. passim
- Highsmith, R.T. No Rest for the Weary? Conservation Sciences, Summer 1997. pp. 18-20
- Albert Einstein, Michele Besso, Correspondence 1903-1955, ed. P. Speziali, Hermann, 1972. p. 538 (to Besso’s daughter and son-in-law after Besso’s death)
- Emslie, S.D., and Morgan, G.S. A Catastrophic Death Assemblage and Paleoclimatic Implications of Pliocene Seabirds of Florida. Science, 264, 4/29/94. pp. 684-685
- Davis, R.A., Jr. The Evolving Coast, W.H. Freeman, 1993. pp. 32, 51
- Lenington, S. Evolution of Polyandry in Shorebirds. In Behaviour of Marine Animals, 5. Shorebirds: Breeding Behaviour and Populations, ed. J. Burger and B.L. Olla. Plenum Press, 1984. pp. 151-166. Gill, F.B. Ornithology. W.H. Freeman, 1990. pp. 302, 311
- Castro, G., and Myers, J.P. A Statistical Method to Estimate the Cost of Flight in Birds, Journal of Field Ornithology, 59(4). pp. 369-380. Ibid and Rickles, R.E. Ecology and Energetics of Sanderlings Migrating to Four Latitudes. Ecology. 73(3), 1992. pp. 833-844. Castro, G. Energy Costs and Avian Distributions: Limitations or Chance?—A Comment. Ecology. 70(4), 1989. pp. 1181-1182. Myers, J.P., Maron, J.L. and Sallaberry, Michel. Going to Extremes: Why Do Sanderlings Migrate to the Neotropics? Neotropical Ornithology. Ornithological Monographs No. 36
- Evolutionary hypothesis, taxonomic history, as until recently named Crocethia alba. Choate, E. Dictionary of American Bird Names. Gambit, 1973. p. 118. Matthiessen, P. The Wind Birds. Viking, 1973. p. 80
- Heinrich, Bernd. Why We Run. HarperCollins, 2002. pp. 159-160.
- May, R.M., Lawton, J.H., and Stork, N.E.: Assessing Extinction Rates; Ehrlich, P.R.: The scale of the Human Enterprise and Biodiversity Loss, both in Extinction Rates, ed. Lawton and May, Oxford, 1995. pp. 1-24 and 214-226, especially pp. 2, 3, and 220. Chapters in the same work by Coope and by Thomas and Morris indicate that prey species, in contrast, are coevals.
- Bickerton, D. Language and Evolution. U. Wash., 1995. pp. 68-70. Lieberman, P. Uniquely Human. Harvard, 1991. pp. 36-73
- Electron Theory: Description and Analogy. J. Franklin Carlson Lecture, Iowa State University, 1955
- Klem, D. Glass and Bird Kills: An Overview and Suggested Planning and Design Methods of Preventing a Fatal Hazard. Wildlife Conservation in Metropolitan Environments, National Institute for Urban Wildlife Symposium, Set 2
- Wheeler, J.A. and Patton, C.M. Is Physics Legislated by Cosmogony? in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, ed. R. Duncan and M. Smith. Pergamon, 1977. pp. 38-64 (originally in Quantum Gravity, ed. C.J. Isham, R. Penrose, D.W. Sciama, Clarendon, 1975). Hawking, S.N., Page, D.N., and Pope, C.N.: Quantum Gravitational Bubbles. Nuclear Physics B170, 1980, pp. 283-306
- Siever, Raymond. Sand. W.H. Freeman, 1988. p. 217
