Learning to love the sea around us

As a child growing up on Long Island in the 1970s and ’80s, I splashed in the surf on Fire Island and at Westhampton Beach. I tooled around the wetland canals surrounding Head of the Harbor in a rickety rowboat, catching crabs. I fished off the big pier at Cedar Beach in Mt. Sinai. I even waded through primordial muck on exploratory jaunts through the saltwater marshes at Baiting Hollow Scout Camp.

For a high school earth science class, I hiked 17 miles in the dead of winter along North Shore beaches to my teacher’s Wading River home, set on a cliff. His name was Herman Hermsdorf, and he was a Columbia graduate who kept a boa constrictor on a branch hung above students’ desks much of the time — and who had webbed hands (I kid you not).

Mr. Hermsdorf, who could nearly always be seen in a white lab coat to match his thinning white hair, wanted us to appreciate the beauty of the Long Island Sound — that is, the sea — when no one else was around.

He wanted us to breathe in the quiet, understand the solitude, to simply watch the surf as it lapped up on shore, bringing with it broken seashells, colored sea glass and tattered fishing nets. I loved the experience, particularly the enormous spaghetti-and-meatballs dinner that he had prepared for us in the end.

Like so many native Long Islanders, I was raised with the sea. Growing up, I thought I knew it, understood it. All these years later, I realize how little I knew — and how little I still know — about that watery world below the horizon.
In recent years I’ve spent a great deal of time studying our atmosphere, as I’ve tried to get a handle on global warming, which scientists tell us poses the greatest threat to humanity. But I spent little time trying to understand the sea. That was a mistake.

The sea plays as important a role as our atmosphere in supporting life on Earth. I learned this recently at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn. Through Sept. 12, the museum is hosting the exhibit “The Sea Around Us,” inspired by Rachel Carson’s landmark book of the same title, published in 1951 by Oxford University Press.