Under Water Lens

Growing up, our family summer vacations were spent on Cape Cod in tiny, pine-paneled cottages near the water. We loved the tourist attractions, mini golf, and the neighborhood stores where we'd buy morning donuts, comic books and small white bags of penny candy. Long days were spent at the beach, and from a very young age we learned to navigate safely through the tides and undertow. We learned to overcome our squeamishness as we waded knee-deep through a thick soup of churning seaweed to swim in the clearer, deeper water beyond. We pried black-spiraled snail shells from jetty rocks. We dug for mole crabs and kept them in temporary homes in our plastic sand pails, and at day's end we'd return them to their home at the water's edge. We collected sun-bleached shells and salty stones to keep on windowsills back home, daily reminders of our summer lives.

Cape Cod is now my year round home, and over time I've explored this sandy peninsula by foot and by bike on trails that meander through varied terrain - past the vivid-green lushness of marshes, through cedar forests, across windswept fields, and around cranberry bogs, inlets, harbors and kettle ponds. I've explored the Cape's narrow, winding back roads which lead past art galleries, antique shops and dusty book stores; past small fish markets; past antique houses and the remnants of homesteads and family farms, and eventually, always, back to the water. I avoid, as much as possible, the inevitable shopping centers and trophy homes that have multiplied uncomfortably over time.

While I've explored the Cape on land, my knowledge of it's underwater habitat has not kept pace... until recently. Last week I picked up a copy of this book: Under Cape Cod Waters by Ethan Daniels. Daniels has a background in science and an artist's eye for color and composition. He is an award-winning photographer who has traveled the world capturing images of life below the waves. Like myself, he is locked in a lifelong love affair with Cape Cod, but his fascination lies below the surface of Cape waters, in a world that many never have the opportunity to see. In Under Cape Cod Waters, he has compiled a collection of images that show us some things familiar - a tangle of water lilies, swaying rockweed, blue crabs, starfish, painted turtles - but from new angles: up and through the water's depths. He also captures images of sea life that few of us will ever observe first hand: a rare yellow sea raven; beds of orange seas anemones; finger sponges reaching towards the light; great colonies of algae, bivalves and invertebrates that have, over time, established themselves on the broken forms of forgotten shipwrecks. He shows us color - not just the deep green-blue-black of the water, not just the dull browns of sun-dried seaweed on the sand, but rich, unexpected tones: fuchsia, lime, silver, red, cobalt, orange.

©Ethan Daniels

Daniels' words, both eloquent and informative, vividly describe this other world that is fertile, nutrient rich, and absolutely teeming with life. It's a world that pulsates, its life forms carrying on without awareness of new shopping centers, new roads, new trophy houses, increased traffic; rather they are engaged in a daily drama of life and death, survival of species, and adaptation to the environmental changes we subject them to.

As we come to understand how we impact the world around us, we bear the responsibility of stewardship for these underwater inhabitants, and the responsibility of minimizing the impact of our growth and development has on the Cape's delicate underwater environment. This is the underlying message in Ethan Daniel's book: a warning that our very existence and the choices we make have the potential to destroy, or the power to protect from devastating harm.

©Ethan Daniels

©Ethan Daniels

Anyone who's spent any amount of time in and around the water is aware that there's life in those beautiful shallows and ominous depths. Fisherman know what's running by the appearance of certain bait fish; they know water temps and currents and tides. Many Cape Cod natives know the best places to dig for steamers or rake scallops; some know the best spots to drop lobsters traps. The majority of us, however, give only a passing thought to the small pond fish that nibble at our ankles; the crabs that scuttle at the shoreline (and administer underwater warning nips to our toes), and the swaying plant life that we wade through to get to swimmable waters. We give slightly more consideration to the wriggling, slimly possibility of eels, of lumbering, prehistoric-seeming snapping turtles, and the occasional shark sighting that makes the local news. We remain alert to the unseen things that brush against our legs as we swim out through the waves, and we trust that whatever is below will continue about its business as we continue about ours. But once we view the world through Ethan Daniel's lens, we might better appreciate this unfamiliar world, it's seen and unseen inhabitants. With a new perspective might come greater understanding of the need to protect our ocean, marshes, bays and ponds and the life teeming within. I'll wager that if you spend some time absorbed in the stunning photos in Under Cape Cod Waters, you'll move through Cape waters, peer down through their depths with new awareness.

For those of us on the East Coast, there are two opportunities to hear Ethan Daniels speak this summer. If you find yourself on Cape Cod on July 28th, you might want to attend his lecture at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. I, for one, am planning on attending his talk and book signing in one of my favorite towns at the Woods Hole Library, on August 1st.