Chapter 3: Anne, The Rising Tide
“Save the marshes! Protect the birds! Preserve our history!”
A small group of families protested cheerfully with homemade signs. They circled the stoic, stone town hall of Le Pouliguen, France, refreshed by the coastal breeze in the summer heat.
“Build the wall!” They chanted in unison.
Anne sat at her old wooden kitchen table, illuminated by a single bulb. She brushed away her silver hair with a wrinkled hand. Her skin was bronzed and cracked from a lifetime of working the salt marshes.
Across from her sat her wiry, middle-aged son, Henri. The family resemblance was strong, with sharp features and tanned skin. He wore a concerned look.
“I’m not sure what else we can do,” he confessed. “I harvest each evaporation pond as soon as the water level gets low. Once I’ve gathered the salt, I open the gates to refill it.”[1]
Anne nodded.
“But I just can’t keep up. By the time I’ve reset everything, the first pond is already dangerously low again. I’m worried that if something slows me down, they’ll go dry and be ruined.”
She shook her head. “Everything’s happening so much faster in this heat wave — I wish I could be out there helping you. You just need more hands. Let me call my friends at the cooperative.” She patted Henri’s arm and started to stand up.
“Mom, sit down, sit down.” Henri gently pressed her back into her chair. “You know just as well as I that all the paludiers[2] are having this problem too. Any workers that were available have long since been hired.”
At that moment, his daughter, Izzie, burst from her room, full of energy.
“Papa, I can help on the marshes!” she insisted.
“Oh no, no sweetie. You’re only twelve, you should be focusing on your studies, not working. We’ll figure out another way — Also, shouldn’t you be in bed?” Henri countered.
Izzie glared at him with a look that said, Some things are more important than bed time.
“But papa, my grades are fine. And school is so boooooring. I learn more with you and grand-mamie!”
“You know, I wish I’d had more time with my parents learning about the marshes before they passed. And if her grades slip, we can go back to the way it was. But I think it’s worth a try — I don’t see how else we’ll make it work,” Anne encouraged.
Henri relented, “Alright. We’ll start tomorrow. But if your grades drop, you’ll go back to classes during the day.”
Izzie jumped up and down in excitement.
The heat wave continued for the next week, and Henri and Izzie were exhausted from working non-stop.
The marsh was producing a record amount of salt in the hot, long summer days. The ponds’ individual salt piles didn’t even have time to drain between harvests, so they had to wheelbarrow the heavy, wet salt to their larger draining pile on the edge of the marsh. At least Izzie was there to help.
But now they had a new problem. The accelerated production was using up their water too fast. If their reservoir went dry before the next King Tide could refill it, their pond bottoms would crack and be unusable for the rest of the season.[3]
Anne, Henri and Izzie sat around the same kitchen table, sipping after-dinner coffees, deep in conversation.
“I don’t see any way around it, we’ll have to let them go dry this year. We have enough salt stockpiled for now, but we really need to think about next year. What can we do so that this doesn’t happen again?” Anne mused.
“If we need more water, couldn’t we carry it in? We have wheelbarrows!” Izzie said.
Anne laughed. “Oh my. Looks like someone’s been skipping on their math classes.”
“Hey, no I haven’t!” Izzie puffed up.
“Alright,” Anne said, “prove it to me. How many wheelbarrows of water would we need?”
“Uhhh.” She bit her lip.
“Well, how many wheelbarrows of salt do we produce?” Anne prompted her.
“Oh! Each pond makes one wheelbarrow per harvest!”
“And how much salt is in each wheelbarrow?”
“About… a hundred kilos?”
Anne nodded. “How many wheelbarrows of water would you need to get that much salt?”
Seeing Izzie’s overwhelmed look, Henri bent over and whispered, “Salt water has about thirty grams of salt per liter.”
Izzie counted intensely on her fingers. “Divide by three… Carry the zero…” Her eyes lit up. “Oh wow, that’s three thousand liters!”
“And if each wheelbarrow holds, say, two hundred liters?” Anne asked.
Izzie’s face scrunched as she counted again. “That’s a hundred fifty wheelbarrows, that’s a lot!”
“Very good. Maybe you can keep skipping math class after all.” Anne smiled and gave her a hug. “And remember, that’s per pond, per harvest.” She turned to Henri. “But we still need to do something about the marsh.”
“Could we have the cooperative raise the dam again?” Henri suggested.
“We already did that after that big glacier melted. They said that if it got any higher, some of the supporting walls inside the marsh would be too low.[4]” Anne shook her head.
“Couldn’t we raise those too?” Henri inquired.
“Nope. We did a survey when we raised the dam and built everything as high as it could go. Any higher and the dirt walls could collapse under the weight of the water.”
“What if… what if we build another dam?” Izzie suggested, reaching for an idea.
Anne and Henri looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if we can’t make the current dam bigger… what if we built a second damn in front of it? Like a water lock in a canal?”
“Huh.” Anne considered for a moment, stroking the top of her yellowed coffee mug thoughtfully. “That could work!”
“But wait, where did you learn about water locks?” Henri probed, surprised.
“They… they came up in my history textbook the other day. They were talking about how the Panama Canal revolutionized shipping.”
Henri looked at her with that parental look, “See, I told you school was useful.”
Izzie glared back, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
Anne interrupted, “I think we might have a problem, though.”
They turned to her.
“A water lock would give all of the paludiers more water storage… Well, I’m not an ecologist, but it would disrupt the flow of the tides in the basin, which seems like it might harm the ecosystem?”
Henri and Izzie looked stricken. They both enjoyed the natural beauty of the marshes.
Henri begged, “But what can we do about that? Surely there’s some way we can save the birds and our marsh? It’s been in the family since the 1700's!”
“Honestly, I’ve been working the marshes for sixty years, but I’m not sure. I can tell you what the rhythms should be, but I don’t know how it’ll respond to changes. And we need to preserve the wildlife, because that’s part of how we saved this area when we formed the cooperative. Without the natural beauty, it’ll be hard to stop developers from filling in the rest of the marsh.”
“But you must know an ecologist, right?” Izzie pushed.
Anne thought for a moment.
“You know, it’s been a while. But there is someone I used to ask for help. I wonder if he’s still alive…”
Parker, awkwardly tall with unkempt grey hair, was perched on the edge of a small boat. Binoculars in hand, he was observing a small group of blue-footed boobies as they landed on the ocean in the pre-dawn light.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
The vibration caught him by surprise and he lost his footing, tossing him overboard.
The captain, who had guided Parker on many ecological expeditions, laughed uproariously before lending him a hand.
“Who could be calling me at this hour?” he huffed to the captain as he climbed back onboard.
By the time he’d pulled out his phone, the buzzing had stopped. “Weird, an unknown number? Must be spam.” He shrugged, wiped off his binoculars and looked around for his birds, but the commotion had caused them to flee.
Drat.
Anne put the phone down. “See, I told you he’d forget about me. Maybe he’s passed away and it’s someone else’s number now.” As much as Anne’s heart fluttered thinking about him, she was anxious about speaking with him after so long.
“You’re sure this is the right number?” Izzie questioned, looking at her phone.
“Absolutely. This was before smartphones, so I had to memorize important numbers.”
Henri raised an eyebrow. “You have his number memorized, but you’ve never mentioned him before?”
Anne blushed.
“Ok, well, let’s just try again, then! And maybe leave a message if he doesn’t pick up.” Izzie encouraged.
Parker put down his phone in disbelief. He was going to see Anne.
One week later, Parker sat on the TGV train. As he neared Le Pouliguen station, he saw glimpses of the marshes and was flooded with memories of that summer so long ago.
So much has changed since then. I have changed. What will Anne be like? Surely someone as incredible as her is married… Or maybe the spark has died? We haven’t talked in so long. What if she resents me for having never come back?
The passenger next to him, an elderly woman, spoke up. “Oh dear. Looks like you’re thinking of a girl, are you?”
Parker blushed. “How’d you know?”
“I could see it on your face, clear as day.” She winked. “Who is she?”
After all these years his heart still skipped a beat thinking about her tan skin and her unstoppable sense of adventure. “Anne Le Blanc.”
She leaned in closer. “Go on…”
“Well… I met her here, many years ago. My family used to summer here. We… really hit it off… I was supposed to go back to the States, get an MBA and take over the family business. But spending the summer with her, in these beautiful marshes, made me discover my love for nature. It’s one of my biggest regrets, never coming back to see her.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Parker sighed. “After I told my family I was dropping out of the MBA program and joining a nature conservancy, they cut me off. As an ornithology student, I couldn’t afford international travel. Sure, we talked on the phone, but it slowly faded and… well, by the time I could afford to come back out here, we hadn’t spoken in a while, and I was too… afraid?”
“But now you’re finally coming out to see her? So you did call her!”
Parker laughed. “Actually, she called me. She needed my help. Which is a little hard to believe, if I’m being honest. She was always so strong and independent. I remember her dad showing me a photo of her — ten years old, protesting against developers filling in the marshes. Her sign was bigger than her, but she looked so fierce.”
“She sounds like — “
“Next stop, Le Pouliguen.” The announcement cut her off.
“Ah, this is your stop. It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Petroff. And good luck with the girl!” She smiled and waved farewell. Parker nodded anxiously back.
He grabbed his suitcase, donned his white jacket and waited with bated breath as the doors opened.
Footnotes:
- Ponds are harvested at 1cm, and then refilled to 2cm in depth. Depending on the amount of sun light, air temperature, humidity and wind speed, ponds normally take 1–3 days to evaporate during the summer. Each marsh operates as a kind of slalom: The first pond is filled with sea water (33g/L of salt), and it gradually increases in salinity as it winds its way through multiple ponds, eventually ending up as salty as the dead sea (250g/L).
- Salt marsh worker. Specific to the Guerande salt marshes, they’ve been using the same hand-harvesting techniques since the time of the Romans.
- Ponds are carefully covered in a smooth, impermeable layer of clay each winter so that the water evaporates instead of draining into the soil.
- The marsh as a whole is divided by dirt walls into a maze of many individual marshes. The tops of the walls double as small roads for the paludiers to access their individual marshes.
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