Chapter 4: Summer’s End
It’s September, and the sanderlings are back at Ship’s Shoal in North Carolina, along with eels, shad, shrimp, and mullet.
Named characters include Pandion, the fish hawk (an osprey), and White Tip, a bald eagle.
The fish, too, are being called to migrate.
“On a day when the full harvest moon sailed like a white balloon in the sky, the tides, which had grown in strength as the moon swelled to roundness, began to wash out a gully across the inlet beach.” (p. 47) Carson casts a romantic scene. Did she sit alone with her typewriter on a dune at night, observing the power of the moon to move the tides and feeling moved by it herself?
The ospreys’ nest is six feet across, built at the top of a loblolly pine, woven through with beach wrack: haul seine, cork floats, cockle and oyster shells, an eagle’s skeleton, a broken oar, a fisherman’s boot. (p. 49-50). It comes from years of work by the pair, “who had been faithful to each other throughout life.” (p. 49) What a stable life they seem to have, and on a lovely beach, too.