As it always has, the smell arrives first. For some it’s a marshy, salty aroma, the smell of the Mayport Ferry port at low tide minus the diesel. It has those unmistakable sharp and spiky flavor notes when fresh and alive then quickly devolves into a deep musk-like sulfur when the sun bakes the beach mat. It’s a pungent rotten-egg abstraction that will irritate the throat and eyes of some caught downwind from the source. It’s the gas released by decaying sargassum and many, almost universally, find it offensive. But others, however, recognize the phenomenon for what it is and live alongside this brine-bristled thatch with stoic perspectives on its importance in the life of a healthy beach.
The annual March-through-October sea crop tangled along the tide lines of Ponte Vedra Beach is more manageable than on the beachheads much farther south and down and around and up towards Tampa and beyond where the deep-water pipelines come ashore from Houston. It’s “beach wrack,” a natural fertilizer that feeds shorebirds, crabs and other sea life in floating habitats, sheltering sand dollar-sized sea turtles safe within its mass.
But for us, its most important attribute might be its contribution to beach wrack that helps bind the sand with the essentials for the long-term countering of beach erosion. We don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Preferences have always been deeply personal in the perfume industry and pure hydrogen sulfide is a highly polarizing off note “not for fragrance use.” But trace amounts of this niche oceanic sulfur when combined with the fresh sea breeze unchanged since antiquity are indeed powerful indicators of wealth. A Kentucky thoroughbred barn with its nearby piles of stall cleanings carries the same distinction. To live and enjoy the luxury of the oceanfront means that at times the edges of the Sargassum Sea will reach the shore.
Admittedly, it’s not the polite perfume of picture-perfect postcards or the sea-bright promises made to tourists. It’s something deeper, more honest. It’s where the Gulf Stream sea-mats meet the sand; the equivalent of where the rubber hits the road.
The scent attaches to everything, and it will work its way into olfactory memory as far inland as the breeze can carry it. Only the Hastings cabbage fields tillage in August will attract as much attention from passersby. Old Santiago in Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” knew the aroma. His great fish had been reduced by the sharks to little more than a carcass. The rare fragrance of experience will always linger in this sea-musk as the trophy of a battle honestly fought. It reminds some of the smell of a paper pulp mill, or the exotic bloom of Amorphophallus titanum housed at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., where visitors line up to smell its notorious inflorescence.
But when living with nature, what decays is not wasted. Cumberland Island teaches us this. Decay nourishes and shelters as it falls away. A poet naturalist might say the beach is exhibiting all this without mourning, without regret.
Walk the beach at dusk and you will see this wisdom working itself out plainly. The material and annual cycles of this natural matting, seaweed and wrack, bits of shell and whatever the tide chooses to lay down mingles with the sand to make a remedial living carpet. It catches more sediment, slows erosion, and creates the conditions for rebuilding the dunes and shoreline that everyone has come to admire in its immediacy for well over a century.
But our human nature can’t help but be tempted to turn up our noses at the “mess.” Well-meaning crews arrive with rakes and equipment and begin clearing, disturbing and disrupting the very processes that help protect and preserve the one thing they love the most, all in hopes their intercession will encourage prosperity.
Meddling with the order of things and mistaking neatness for conservancy means the beach bears the brunt, as Santiago bore the sharks; the small, contingent costs begin to add up over time.
Beaches are accumulations of shell, sand and organic leavings that form the living “Florida bedrock.” Tiny stirrings of shored marine life, bound together by calcium carbonate dissolved in rainwater and carried through the deposits that, in time, create a stone that is both porous and resilient. The mineral foundations, enriched by the very wrack we sometimes hurry to remove, hold up beaches from below St. Augustine up through Ponte Vedra to Mayport and farther north. It is the slow, cumulative engineering of the land itself, enduring and uncomplaining in its mechanics.
Ponte Vedra Beach has never been simply about scenery. It’s a place that remains in the works, and it’s shaped by time. This has always guided the builders within its boundary and, if the call is to consider how to live in better harmony with the environment, then it’s the beach that carries the memory of older lessons. It’s what is beneath the sand that matters the most, and it always has since the very beginning.
Flagler’s influence lingers in the practical solutions that are sometimes exposed by storms for our examination and edification. Under the topsoil behind the bulkheads are large pilings the size of telegraph poles driven vertically, helping hold the shoring behind the sea wall. Modern construction has replaced this wood with concrete but in 1964, Hurricane Dora exposed this lumbering infrastructure for what it was, beach wrack.
It’s always been said that coquina quarried for walls breathes. Farther up the coast, tabby walls exist as coastal concrete. Materials and methods squeezed in-between draw from what the sea and land already offer. Buildings and structures belong to “place” and a one-size-fits-all homogenized design, engineering and construction philosophy is a recipe for disaster. The wrack line belongs to the tide.
After all major storms, there is always a collective examination of conscience at what went wrong and it is prudence that assures us of the value of foresight, preparation and ordered action in the face of uncertainty. Prudence is the “charioteer of the virtues,” Auriga virtutum.
It’s so easy to push away the raw gifts of hindsight in natural affairs and in the things we build. We sometimes all prefer the clean postcard view without the wrack; the triumph without the scars, the memory free of the rough edge. Yet the sea grass, the marlin’s remains, and the beach sometimes tell another story.
Endurance has a fragrance all its own. We can’t escape from decay, but we can meet it, understand it and live alongside it. Tomorrow, the tide will bring more and the day after that even more. It always brings more in this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach.
