Swimming to the Top of the Tide: Finding Life Where Land and Water Meet

While the writing is lyrical and the author sympathetic, this book was somewhat disappointing as I expected to learn more about the habitats traversed by the sustained swimming of this couple while they explored the quarries and tidal estuaries of the Cape Ann region. Melding stories of their swims with family recollections during the recorded year of 2008, a fondness for the environment and for one another are the focus of the first part of the book.

The second part evokes concern for the environmental changes taking place due to human encroachment, with buildings invading natural surroundings and commercial concerns diverting flowing water, along with deforestation and dams changing the paths of rivers. The focus is directed toward the importance of coastal marshes, with their resident plant biomass serving as an essential element for storing carbon, thereby controlling the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a factor in the threatening climate change.

This is the feature that is so important to stress, but the story told here reflects a journal’s recording of a year’s activities while swimming with a growing awareness of the changes taking place that are leading to environmental consequences.