The magical allure of mangrove forests
Quintessentially in-between
There's something fascinating about the places where land and sea come together. Words like lagoons and estuaries, deltas and tidal basins, shoals and marshes have always felt otherworldly and compelling to me. Places of shifting conditions, constantly adapting, in which every little drop and nook hides a whole world. Places that are deeply connected to the tides, and thus to the moon.
Some words, like mangrove forest, sound especially magical. The stuff of fantastical stories and remarkable creatures. Like the Jabberwocky in the “borogroves,” which of course are made up, but "mangroves" is not so different a word, is it? As a child, I'd read Edward Lear's nonsensical and so enjoyable poems like The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo and imagine that the Coast of Coromandel "where the early pumpkins blow" (a place which at the time I had no idea actually existed, in New Zealand) was a mangrove forest. Wild and mysterious and pulsing with life.
Last week I had the opportunity to float through the mangrove forest in La Boquilla, on the northern edge of Cartagena, in Colombia. My family and I spent a few hours on a simple wooden boat meandering through the tunnels formed by the intertwined branches of the red, white, and black mangroves, finding sweet relief from the relentless sun. We observing so many birds—herons, ibises, wild ducks, cormorants, osprey, their song and chatter filling the air. We delighted at the tiny mangrove tree crabs, spied a raccoon, and even tried our hand at casting handwoven traditional fishing nets. (It was a good thing we were not relying on our fishing prowess for lunch; the 13-year-old in our midst was the only one of us to net a fish, and it was smaller than their palm.)
It was, for me, a highlight of the trip. The water is too shallow for any motorized boats, so the sounds are all natural. Bird calls, the occasional plouf of a fish or plop of an iguana or turtle slipping into the water, the splash of the pole used to propel the boat forward, and maybe some sounds of voices or music drifting in on a breeze. It felt like an in-between place, and entrance but also an exit, a place of confluence, of ebb and flow. Of possibility.
Mangroves exist in tropical areas. I remember as a child hearing my father, who is from Calcutta, talk about the Sundarbans, a massive mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Always when he mentioned it his eyes would go wide, like just saying the name might make a crocodile or python rear its head at us. He used to talk about the Sundarbans tigers—and here he'd hold up his hands like claws—and I imagined golden eyes watching from amid the knobby knees of the trees. (For a lush and incredible read set in the Sundarbans, check out Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide. And speaking of hunger, I have a vivid image in my mind of the carnivorous island in Yann Martel's The Life of Pi as being made up of a mangrove forest, an image I have from the book itself, not the movie which I chose not to see so as to keep my own interpretation of the story in my head. And in Abraham Verghese’s latest book, The Covenant of Water, the waters of Kerala swallow one person per generation.)
Mangroves are tough and resilient. They get flooded twice a day. They are the first to be hit by storms and hurricanes. They survive in very salty water, with mechanisms to filter this salt and excrete it through their leaves, storing the freshwater. Their knobby roots that protrude out of the water a lower tides help keep them firmly planted in the sandy soil, and allow them to access oxygen. When their seed pods fall vertically into exposed mud or silt, they take root and spread, in effect extending the land mass. They are so very intriguing. Wherever I go, if there's a mangrove forest, I want to travel into it. I've been fortunate to be able to do so in the backwaters of Kerala, South India, as well as in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, and the swamps of Slidell, Louisiana. Each has its own smells and sights and sounds, all of which have stayed with me.
On a completely different note, I will be speaking not about mangroves but about the writing life and starting a publishing company with my business partner Henriette Lazaridis this coming Tuesday, March 5th, at 7:30 pm ET, online with The Writers' Room of Boston. It's free! Register here, pour yourself whatever you like to drink at that hour and come join us for the conversation.
Happy weekend to all. I meant to send this not on a Friday night but on Thursday, but this week hasn’t turned out quite as planned. So here we are.
Beautiful piece!