Chapter 10: Seaways Now the hours of darkness were as many as the hours of daylight; the sun passed through the constellation of the scales; and September’s moon waned to a thin ghost of itself. What a storyteller. What a scene. This could introduce a gothic novel. So there came a night when the flood…
Author: Margaret Coombs
Poetry, curiosity, place.
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 10
Chapter 9: The Harbor If I wanted to read even more slowly, I could draw a map of life in the ocean, trace Scomber’s journey from North Carolina to New England, and list all the predators and prey Carson describes. Scomber again finds safe harbor in algae after an army of squid attacks the school…
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 9
Chapter 8: Hunters of the Plankton In the cruel, hungry undersea world, it is no surprise that Scomber was “caught in the entangling net of the tentacle hairs” (p. 78) of the inch-long body of a ctenophore (p. 77). But a sea-trout bites into the comb jelly and spits it out in disgust, and Scomber…
Under the Sea-Wind, Day 8
Chapter 7: Birth of a Mackeral His name is Scomber, and he lives through to the end of the chapter, though a newly spawned mackerel egg will face many dangers in the ocean. Reading this brought me a special happiness: Throughout the night, while the sea lay under a windless sky, the decimation of the…
Slow Reading: Under the Sea-Wind, Day 7
Book II: The Gull’s Way. Chapter 6: Migrants of the Spring Sea Carson describes the ocean floor, focusing on the “mackerel tribes.” Mackerels rest in winter, “in the blue haze of the continent’s edge.” (p. 63) Carson takes us on a journey to where “the sea rises out of the deep, dark bed of the…