As I sat at the edge of the tide, I thought about collecting and letting go.
The Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) is located on the Virginia portion of the Assateague barrier island. There’s a trail that ends at the Atlantic seashore in northern Virginia. It is accessible by foot or bike but not by car. It is littered with seashells. I didn’t come here to beach comb but as I walked along a few shells caught my eye. I pick up black, amber, and deep amethyst colored bits. I sit at the wave’s break line and let the seawater rinse the sand off the shells. The waves push and pull the sand around my legs. I know if I loosen my grip just a little my small collection will tumble from my hand and disappear.
Decorated Driftwood on Chincoteague NWR
It’s within my first week as a Wilderness Fellow that I sit on the beach debating whether to take a souvenir. What has already become the defining characteristic of the Assateague barrier island is dynamism. The island has existed for thousands of years but has only survived by constantly changing form. It boils down to the sun, moon, and our irregularly shaped planet. The tides and littoral drift push and pull sand so that the island migrates –usually south and inland. Sometimes the island's migration is accelerated by storms and sea level rise or interrupted with seawalls and jetties. The islands, like anything really, are always responsive. A seawall or jetty deprives a different part of the island or a separate island of a sediment source. Starved, the island may contort more rapidly or ultimately thin and wash away.
People put seawalls and jetties on the shore in an effort to stabilize what is there. It seems that they want to hold onto what they’ve grown accustomed to. They’ve become invested in the landscape as it is, invested maybe through commerce, real estate, or memories. One of the biggest management issues the Chincoteague NWR faces is trying to maintain its current location for beach-access parking. The parking lot in place is continually overwashed with sand. The solution would appear to be moving the parking lot back or rebuilding it. The refuge has done so multiple times at considerable cost. Now, because the island is thinning, the parking lot is being squeezed out.
My first reaction is to abandon the parking lot and let the beach do what it wants. My favorite thing about the beach is that it’s never the same. You can’t come to the same beach twice. The waves crash in a slightly different pattern and therefore tug the sand into new contours. The weather can cause the ocean to be steely and powerful or glittering and playful. The sea foam can be so fluffy that it rolls in the wind or instantly dissolve with a hiss into the sand. As a local pointed out to me, the only thing constant about a beach is change. How can we ever capture it? The beach will consume the parking lots or tear down the houses at the edge or become something completely different from what you saw in your childhood.
Parts of the refuge are intended for recreation and thus the battle of the parking lot. But the northern part of the refuge is proposed wilderness where the intention is to let natural forces reign. Wildernesses usually have the inaccurate reputation of being pristine. To me, pristine is closely associated with unchanged. Yet the proposed wilderness for the Chincoteague NWR will embrace change. The only permanence about the wildernesses is ensuring that natural forces are allowed to occur without restraint. I feel that sense of release knowing that the wind and waves may push the sand where it likes in the northern Chinctoeague NWR. Whenever I may visit, I will know it for that one day but even then I’m letting it go and when I return it will be new again.
Taryn Sudol
Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge
Wilderness Fellow 2012
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