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Updated: May 13, 2025
Below, by day, heavy wherries swung moored to the ooze-clad spiles or, when the tide was out, sprawled upon stinking mud-flats with a gesture of pathetic helplessness peculiar to stranded watercraft. Seldom was one observed in use: to all seeming they existed for purposes of atmosphere alone.
It was a fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky that belonged to this district.
It was fortunate to find at Chenik the North Star, a small stern-wheeler river boat, with whose captain a number of us quickly made satisfactory arrangements for immediate transportation to White Mountain, the half-way point to Council City. She soon, duck-like, flopped over to the side of the Elmore; our freight was rustled into her with all despatch; and, at eight o'clock in the evening, pretty well laden with passengers and their effects, this gem of the ocean, under the peculiar care of a crazy old Swede and his motley crew of three, was puffing and breathing hard and pushing her clumsy way across the bay toward the hidden delta of the Fish River. It was a matter of lying about the primitive machinery, by the boilers and wood fuel, to keep warm, and listening to a not too delightful crowd of alleged miners swapping lies about the country. Sleep, of course, was out of the question; a place to stretch out was not available except in the adjacent bunks of the crew, and on inspection of these I decided that I would rather not. It would not have seemed at all natural, or homelike, had we not proceeded, about midnight, to run into fog and upon the mud-flats. Only two and a half feet of water were requisite to allow the vessel to navigate, but in order to get that depth it was necessary to keep strictly in a zig-zag "channel," regarding whose location our navigator was not precisely expert. While we lingered upon the mucky bottom, a section of the crew, provided with a pole and a boat, under the orders of the captain (expressed forcibly and picturesquely, not to say profanely,
To-day, feeling the need of saltier fare, she led him in the opposite direction, down through a cleft in the cliffs, and out across the great, red, glistening mud-flats left bare by the ebb of the terrific Fundy tides.
During the gold excitement of '49, when hundreds of ships dropped anchor in the bay, many sailors deserted to go to the mines, and some of the old vessels were hauled in on these mud-flats and made into storehouses.
On the mud-flats and sandbars, and among the green rushes of the bays and inlets, were stately water-fowl; crimson flamingoes and rosy spoonbills, dark- colored ibis and white storks with black wings. Darters, with snakelike necks and pointed bills, perched in the trees on the brink of the river. Snowy egrets flapped across the marshes.
Dixon writes, "vast flights of dunlins often appear upon the mud-flats towards the end of August, and remain for the winter.... The movements of these birds are most interesting, as a vast flock wheels and spreads out or closes up with as much precision as drilled troops. Scattered among them are many odd stints and sanderlings and ringed-plovers."
We do produce some intellectual athletes, and we knock a few hardy minds more or less into shape; but meanwhile a great river of opportunities, curiosity, intelligence, taste, interest, pleasure, goes idly weltering, through mud-flats and lean promontories and bare islands to the sea. It is the loss, the waste, the folly, of it that I deplore.
The gardeners to-day had rooted up the geraniums and dug over the empty flower beds, just below, preparatory to planting them with bulbs for spring blossoming. The keen, pungent scent of the newly-turned earth hung in the humid air, as, mingling with it a less agreeable incense did the reek of the mud-flats. On the right the twin ilex trees formed a mass of soft imponderable gloom.
The effect was languorous, would have been enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia had not the posturing cormorants introduced a note of absurdity and the tainted breath of the mud-flats a wholesome reminder of original sin.
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