What do you think?
Rate this book
Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains
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 of―perhaps because of―having been broken or lost for a while in backward drift. Picking up egg cases, stones, shells, I kept turning them over―in my hands and in my mind."
Each chapter starts with close attention to an object―a shell fragment of a pelican egg, or perhaps a jellyfish―but 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.
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 of―perhaps because of―having been broken or lost for a while in backward drift. Picking up egg cases, stones, shells, I kept turning them over―in my hands and in my mind."
Each chapter starts with close attention to an object―a shell fragment of a pelican egg, or perhaps a jellyfish―but 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.
136 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 31, 2020
The book compares the living and non living things washed up along the wrack line, with the human condition and experience. It was not as good as Stirring the Mud, Hurd's book about swamps. The creatures of the swamp were simply more interesting than the creatures of the sea. But it does have its moments. The chapters on the spider crab and the jellyfish were quite interesting. Hurd's journey to Orford Ness where she examines the merman myth, the US government's secret radar project and walks across the shingle beaches tingled my imagination a little bit.
March 22, 2019
An extraordinary piece of writing! Thought provoking and reflective, worthy of an immediate second read.
February 24, 2010
I found this book accidentally during a library catalog search on the subject of "walking." It was a serendipitous find--Hurd's essays, about using nature's discarded debris along the shore as metaphors for different aspects of our lives, are both poetic and intensely thoughtful. Through Hurd's eyes and words, such oddities as a broken oar, discarded shells, an empty and cracked pelican egg, driftwood, stones, sea glass, microscopic sand creatures, sea stars, and decaying jellyfish, acquire a form resembling brilliance. It is a book only someone middle-aged could write, I think, given its tone of quiet pensiveness tinted with a shade of regret. Anyone younger, as the author notes, would have "skirted or stepped over [the wrack line:] thousands of times in younger-me rush to get to the water." Only when you are older, perhaps, have acquired a bit of weathering and drifting yourself, can you appreciate what is broken, worn, discarded. I love that she has been able to create such beauty from debris...it gives me such hope. If you like lyrical non-fiction, it's worth reading. You can definitely see shades of Annie Dillard and Loren Eiseley here, who are Barbara Hurd's self-confessed heroes.
May 17, 2013
"Even driftwood twisted into wooden ghosts, overgrown worms, gnarled and craggy, appeals. The final arbitrator of its form has been friction with the world. It becomes what it is through long travel."
Beautifully written musings focusing on the metaphors found along the wrack line, illustrations to teach us about ourselves and our fellow beings on this mysterious planet.
December 9, 2018
It took me awhile to figure out this book, because it was definitely not what I was expecting. I ordered it from my library based on the title, and assumed it would be a book concerning the biology and, perhaps, natural history of the seashore. As a result, I was surprised to find that the bits of flotsam she picked up just served as jumping off places for essays having nothing to do with the sea, meditations on relationships, habits, and a sense of loss that comes with the realization that eventually everything falls apart.
Only after I glanced at the Dewey Decimal call number on the book’s spine did I realize what was going on. It was definitely not a natural history book. A quick internet search showed me it was 814 – American Essays in English. So, the book is what it is; if there were unmet expectations they were on me, not the author.
Having made that discovery I finished the book. Hurd has an evocative writing style, and an elegiac mood fills the essays. For someone confronting the struggles of life, and the inevitable diminishment that leads ultimately to dissolution, the writing provides some consolations. Everyone must make that journey, and we must all face what the future holds, embracing the joys and enduring the sorrows. With that in mind, her metaphor of using the broken bits that wash up on shore to find beauty and meaning in life works elegantly.
Only after I glanced at the Dewey Decimal call number on the book’s spine did I realize what was going on. It was definitely not a natural history book. A quick internet search showed me it was 814 – American Essays in English. So, the book is what it is; if there were unmet expectations they were on me, not the author.
Having made that discovery I finished the book. Hurd has an evocative writing style, and an elegiac mood fills the essays. For someone confronting the struggles of life, and the inevitable diminishment that leads ultimately to dissolution, the writing provides some consolations. Everyone must make that journey, and we must all face what the future holds, embracing the joys and enduring the sorrows. With that in mind, her metaphor of using the broken bits that wash up on shore to find beauty and meaning in life works elegantly.
October 12, 2023
#1 fan of Barbara Hurd
June 7, 2022
Walking the Wrackline is a book of prose by Barbra Hurd, who wrote Stirring the Mud, that squishy dreamy book I loved so much last year.
Each short chapter tells a story of the magic found along the ocean shore. She writes about the microbes in ponds, intertidal zones and the spaces between grains of sand. She muses about the massive gentleness of the tide. Its a poetic description of an indescribable vibe.
She zooms in with her empathy, and shares details of what goes on inside seashells, and imagines witnessing the tide from a star fish's point of view. This book is as much about being a creative person as it is about being a sea creature. It swings back and forth between questioning the difference between making and seeking and exploring the lives of Moon Snails, jellyfish and messages in bottles.
Each short chapter tells a story of the magic found along the ocean shore. She writes about the microbes in ponds, intertidal zones and the spaces between grains of sand. She muses about the massive gentleness of the tide. Its a poetic description of an indescribable vibe.
She zooms in with her empathy, and shares details of what goes on inside seashells, and imagines witnessing the tide from a star fish's point of view. This book is as much about being a creative person as it is about being a sea creature. It swings back and forth between questioning the difference between making and seeking and exploring the lives of Moon Snails, jellyfish and messages in bottles.
September 27, 2012
Barbara Hurd has done something wonderful here, something elegant and penetrating and absolutely riveting. Using the wrack line as her guide, its inhabitants as her muses, Hurd writes out a sometimes melancholy, always graceful interlocking series of essays certainly worth your while.
It's exactly this note that rings true across these essays.
Wherever the sea---like others' wants---begins to encroach, there's evidence of scrimmage. Here, crab claws and feathers, fraying rope and shredded kelp, an unended dory and a man I avoid because he wants to talk again about shamanic journeys. I'm less interested at the moment in where things are going, more in what happens if they come apart. ("Wordwrack: Openings", 9)
It's exactly this note that rings true across these essays.
September 11, 2011
who hasn't walked a beach and right where the tide stops investigated the objects washed ashore in all their varied strewn configurations. a haphazard assemblage of the living and the used and the dead and the treasured. surely we think about our lives upon picking up a shell and turning it over in the palm of our hands or finding someone's sunglasses scraped by the constant motion of wave and sand. what does the wrack line tell us about ourselves, what we value, how we chose to live? i especially like the vignettes on sea nettles and sea glass. what the sea takes and brings back to us.......
June 17, 2008
Really lovely. I probably read it too quickly to really absorb everything. The book is comprised of observations at the sea's edge and the author's meditations on her own life.
A better review is available from NPR's website, as well as an excerpt from the book.
A better review is available from NPR's website, as well as an excerpt from the book.
September 14, 2008
This is a lovely little book from a very underrated nature writer (kudos to my alma mater for having the good sense to publish her work). It's a collection of essays about her musings and memories as she walks the shore, and each one seems to absorb the gentle cadence and rhythm of waves and tides. Profound but not pedantic or preachy, and a swift but very memorable read.
Read
April 8, 2017I read this beautifully written collection of contemplative essays slowly, savoring each one. I borrowed it from the public library, but it deserves a permanent place in my library to read again and again.
October 20, 2014
A slim volume of reflections reminiscent of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's A Gift from the Sea. Lovely.
Want to read
December 4, 2008Written by my dad's wife. Just started it but am enjoying the attention to the details of nature she includes.
July 26, 2008
Bailed out about 6 essays in. Sincere, simple but for me it rang hollow and I couldn't keep at it.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews