The Clamshell Boat

One day in early spring, I found myself knee-deep in the Potomac River near Washington, D.C., fishing for shad. The fish weren’t biting, so my attention wandered. Suddenly, my eye caught something on the water not far from me: a small clamshell, like one of thousands I’d seen along the shores of the river, but different in one important respect—it was floating. I have no idea how it got that way, whether a gust of wind had tipped a dry shell onto the water or, less likely, a small child upstream had carefully placed it on the surface film: would it, could it … yes! Whatever the reason, there it was, riding concave side-down, like a little round boat.

The water pressed right up to the shell’s edge, but not over, and it seemed that the smallest thing—another gust of wind or a drop of water—would send it to the bottom, but, for as long as I stood transfixed, nothing upset that delicate balance, and the little clamshell boat sailed off, spinning a few times in the eddy behind my feet, and then away down river towards the open sea.

To the casual observer, the tidal Potomac may seem an unlikely place for miracles. It’s a bit dog-eared, not so much loved to death as ignored—ignored in the sense that most of the millions who live within the wide watershed that drains through that gorge just west of Washington haven’t the faintest idea what’s there, nor do they seem to care, as evidenced by the flotsam and jetsam along the river’s shores: tennis balls, bottles, cans; even toilet seats and shopping carts; and hundreds upon hundreds of plastic bags, caught in the tree tops during frequent floods and now fluttering in the breeze like so many profane copies of Tibetan prayer flags.

And yet, plastic bags aside, there is something miraculous, something almost divine, about that great green corridor that cuts through the heart of the Nation’s Capitol. Certainly, there was a hymn in the air that morning: the soft glow of morning sun on the cliffs. The mutter of cormorants. An osprey launching itself into the wind from its perch high above the river.

There was something miraculous, too, in my fishing for shad. For millennia, millions of shad—American and Hickory—pushed their way from the open ocean and into the Chesapeake Bay each Spring, then up the rivers and streams, where they first hatched, to spawn the next generation of shad. These days those great runs of shad, which sustained Native Americans and spawned local festivals among the American Colonists each Spring, are sadly diminished. Many streams that once saw hundreds of thousands of shad now see few, if any.

Fortunately, in response to sustained restoration efforts involving the States of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the shad have started to return, signalling again, as they have for millenia, the return of Spring.

It's all rather miraculous, isn't it--the light light on the water, the return of the shad, and the clamshell boat, sailing off on its improbable voyage with only me to watch it.

As the French theologian Blaise Pascal once observed, “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." They frighten me too, even as they fill me with awe and wonder.

Our knowledge of the universe continues to expand, and astronomers identify new planets all the time—raising the hope that somewhere, way out there beyond time and memory, there may be other worlds like this one. Even so, the mind-boggling distances and probabilities only confirm the miracle of this particular planet: this green earth—our home—spinning its way, like a little clamshell boat, down a river of stars.

(Photo courtesy of waferkitty on Flickr; available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/waferkitty/2052220258/.)