num_pages: 136
description: Barbara Hurd continues to give nature writing a human dimension in this final volume of her trilogy that began with Stirring the Mud and Entering the Stone . With prose both eloquent and wise she examines what washes ashore from the angel wing shells to broken oars. Even a merman appears in this brilliant collection that throws light on the mysterious and the overlooked.Writing from beaches as far-flung as Morocco St. Croix or Alaska and as familiar as California and Cape Cod she helps us see beauty in the gruesome feeding process of the moon snail. She holds up an encrusted still-sealed message bottle to make tangible the emotional divide between mother and daughter. She considers a chunk of sea glass and the possibilities of transformation.The book began on a beach Hurd says with the realization that a lot of what I care about survives in spite ofperhaps because ofhaving been broken or lost for a while in backward drift. Picking up egg cases stones shells I kept turning them overin my hands and in my mind.Each chapter starts with close attention to an objecta shell fragment of a pelican egg or perhaps a jellyfishbut then widens into larger the persistence of habits desire disappointments the lie of the perfectly preserved the pleasures of aversions transformations and a phenomenon from physics known as the strange attractor.
language: English
title: Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains
publisher: University of Georgia Press