Dunne: Bayshore Summer

It’s as presumptuous as I hope it is premature for a reviewer to say that a writer as young and as prolific as Pete Dunne has attained his “mature style”: but I suspect that most readers will agree with me that Bayshore Summer, the second volume in the author’s planned seasonal quartet, is the best so far of the estimable and growing corpus of Dunne’s natural history writing.

Any book about a season brings with it its own chronological structure–Dunne begins at a Memorial Day gas station and ends with a Labor Day fishing trip–but there is a much deeper, much more significant series of symmetries here, too. Leaving aside a couple of the clever set pieces for which the author is justly famous (and by which he is, in too many readers’ minds, unjustly defined), Summer is neatly bookended by symmetrically placed chapters that inform and question each other; the book’s careful architecture invites the reader to think hard about the issues raised in it.

And they are important issues. This is not–notwithstanding constant references to the Delaware Bayshore’s rich birdlife–a bird book, but a book about the history and natural history of a landscape, a marshscape, that has been inhabited by humans for nearly as long as it has by Ospreys and Laughing Gulls. When I lived in central New Jersey in the 1980s, we thought of Cumberland County as an exotic wilderness, far off the beaten parkway path. But the bayshore is also home to people, many of them still pursuing traditional resource-based professions that are as endangered (and for many of the same reasons) as a wintering Loggerhead Shrike or a migrant Red Knot. Dunne treats the baymen with sympathy and respect, acknowledging their expertise borne of hundreds of years on the water and out in the spartina marshes, and pointing out again and again that no landscape can be saved without taking culture as much into account as nature.

Most telling of all is a pair of chapters at the center of the book focusing on young people’s connections to nature. In Chapter 6, “Party,” Dunne relates his encounter with a teenage boy and his father fishing from a party boat on Delaware Bay; grudgingly, the young man rates his experience a 4 out of 10, far lower on the scale than a day spent playing computer games. Compare this with the young angler’s 15-year-old counterpart in Chapter 4, putting up salt hay with his father (and a visiting natural history writer), his plans for the future consisting in “doin’ this…with my father.” There’s sentimentality in the contrast between the salt of the earth with his feet on the ground and the city kid with his head in the clouds, but there’s also an important message about our increasing remoteness from a natural world that increasingly needs our help.

Dunne concludes with a set of recommendations for providing that help, from development restrictions to ecotourism promotion, and, with equal eloquence, he identifies “the biological element that makes the region so colorfully unique”:

The people. Who have, for eight and ten and twelve generations, worked their changes upon and been themselves changed by the environment in which they live. Not as observers but as participants. Not as exploiters but as players in a wonderful, real-life drama, involving people and nature. All set on an extraordinary stage that might be approaching its final curtain call.

Overstated? Not in the least, as south Jersey comes to look more and more like north Jersey a generation or two ago; but the recognition that nature and culture, wildness and humans, must be thought of together can go a long ways towards helping us save both. Pete Dunne’s Bayshore Summer inspires us to do just that.