by Maggie Tarlo

The tide goes out and leaves behind a secret world.

At Pawleys Island the sand stretches wide enough to feel eternal, though of course it isn’t. At low tide the pools glitter in the late morning light, small glass bowls filled with scuttling life. Ghost crabs dart sideways like anxious punctuation marks. A horseshoe crab shell lies abandoned, its ridges catching the sun in copper flashes. A blue crab waves a claw in irritation as if I were the intruder. I am the intruder. The marsh grass hums with insects and fiddler crabs raise their one oversized arm in comic defiance, a chorus line of absurdity and persistence.

I had come to the beach expecting the surface view: the long horizon, the rolling surf, the gentle choreography of umbrellas and children and sunburnt fathers chasing footballs they’ll later regret. Instead the tide pulls me down, closer, into a different register. Pools alive with shrimp so translucent you catch them only by the flicker of movement, periwinkle snails tracing slow cartographies over wet rocks, the occasional sand dollar already bleached by the sun. Nothing majestic in the grand sense—no orcas, no sea lions—but a miniature universe that holds just as much weight, if you pause long enough to look.

And yet the pause is loaded. Because this is not Seattle, not the mythic Northwest of tidal spectacles and postcard wilderness. This is the South, where the heat folds itself over the water and never quite leaves, where hurricanes rewrite the shoreline every season, where luxury condos and plastic litter sit almost within the same line of sight. The beauty is undeniable, but so is its fragility.

I bend down to examine a small cluster of oysters attached to a broken piling. Their shells cut sharp and irregular, layered like an accidental cathedral. They filter the water with each pulse, tiny lungs working against impossible odds. Oysters are miracles, and also warnings. They survive by cleaning the very element they live in, but only until we’ve dirtied it too much. In the past century more than ninety percent of the world’s oyster reefs have been lost, dredged or poisoned out of existence. Here in South Carolina, restoration projects cling to whatever shoreline politics will allow. To touch their rough edges is to feel both history and precarity, abundance and loss in the same gesture.

The pelicans fly overhead in perfect V-formation, prehistoric silhouettes cutting the sky. They dive with sudden precision, beak first, into the shallows, rising with silver fish glinting in their pouches. It looks effortless. It isn’t. Rising ocean temperatures have shifted fish populations, starved colonies, disrupted breeding. The spectacle continues, for now, and we clap silently from the sand like theater-goers grateful the performance hasn’t ended.

There is a certain Southern romance to it, the way the marshlands bleed into the Atlantic, the way the air smells of salt and decay and sweetness all at once. Cypress knees twist upward like gnarled questions, egrets stand still enough to seem carved from ivory. But romance does not cancel the ache. Plastic bottles wash up with the tide, beer cans wedge into the dunes, tiny shards of Styrofoam masquerade as shells until you reach for them and feel the betrayal of texture. Each wave delivers both life and ruin, as if the ocean itself has grown ambivalent about what it wants to give us.

I remember reading once about the sheer abundance that used to define these waters. Shad so thick in the rivers that horses refused to cross, shrimp runs lighting up the creeks at night, loggerhead turtles nesting without interference from porch lights and seawalls. It is still possible to glimpse fragments of that world: a stingray’s ripple in the surf, a dolphin arc at dusk, the patterned crawl of a turtle track in the morning sand. But each glimpse is tempered by the knowledge of rarity, the math of diminishing returns. Wonder laced with grief is a difficult currency, but it is the only one available.

The Atlantic here is not cinematic blue. It is brown-green, restless, opaque. The kind of water that conceals as much as it reveals. I float in it and think of what moves unseen beneath me: jellyfish pulsing, sharks circling, schools of menhaden sliding as one. The opacity is unnerving, but also protective. To not see is sometimes to remain connected, rather than estranged. The mystery feels intact even as the reality frays.

Children collect shells along the shoreline, shouting with each new find. A perfect whelk, an intact sand dollar, a scallop shell still bearing faint pink. They run to show their parents, who nod absently while scrolling on phones. The children will later drop half the shells back in the sand, already bored. But for a moment they knew what it was to marvel. For a moment the tide pools offered them the same astonishment they once offered to us. I want to believe they will remember.

The South Carolina coast has a particular melancholy stitched into its landscape. Hurricanes carve new inlets overnight. Barrier islands shift, erode, disappear. What looks permanent from the highway is anything but. To live here is to know impermanence intimately, to watch whole stretches of marsh drown under rising seas, to accept that the map itself is provisional. Some locals call it resilience, a testament to the spirit of the coast. Others call it inevitability.

Standing barefoot in the tide, you cannot help but feel lucky. The sanderlings chase the receding foam with comic urgency. The spartina grass ripples in the wind, each blade catching light as if brushed with silver. A loggerhead turtle, against all odds, hauls itself ashore under cover of night, leaving tracks like runes in the sand. To witness even one of these things is to know that beauty remains, not as abstraction but as event, real and stubborn in its persistence.

The fragility does not cancel the wonder. If anything it intensifies it. To love the shoreline is to love something imperiled, something already half lost. The pelican dive is not less miraculous because fish populations dwindle; it is more so. The oyster’s filtration is not less astonishing because it may fail; it is more so. The tide pool shrimp, barely visible against the sand, is not trivial because it will not survive the next storm surge; it is sacred precisely because it flickers, for now, in the shallow water before me.

We are not kind to this coast. Development eats away at the dunes. Pollution seeps into every estuary. Hurricanes grow stronger in the warming climate we’ve engineered, reshaping the very places we claim to cherish. And still, the coast gives us spectacle, abundance, wonder. Still the marsh grass bends but does not break. Still the tide comes in, goes out, leaves behind its hidden worlds for anyone willing to kneel down and see.

I walk back across the sand at dusk. The horizon glows orange, then pink, then gray. The air is thick with humidity, the kind that clings even in twilight. Behind me the waves erase my footprints as if I had never been there. Ahead of me the dunes rise, fragile and stubborn, anchored by sea oats that bow in the wind. For a moment the melancholy lifts. For a moment there is only gratitude, sharp and almost painful.

Because here, even in loss, the coast still astonishes. Here, even in fragility, the world offers itself. And to stand on the South Carolina shore, watching the tide retreat, is to be reminded that wonder and mourning are not opposites. They are the same gesture, held together, breaking your heart and remaking it all at once.