Editor’s Note: What follows is an essay titled At the Turn of the Tide, taken from Salt Marsh Diary, a book by Mark Seth Lender, a writer and producer for the National Public Radio program Living on Earth. Mr. Lender will speak tonight upstairs at the Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven at 7:30 p.m. At the Turn of the Tide is copyrighted by the author and appears here with permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. In an e-mail to the Gazette this week, the author explained the Vineyard story behind Turn of the Tide:

“I’ve been a tern aficionado ever since my first summer on the Vineyard. At the Turn of the Tide is a story which came to me while watching a small flock of terns hovering and diving at the inlet to Menemsha Pond. They were flying into the wind, lined up so that each was in a different and sequential pose, a stop-frame animation of their plunge into the tidal bore. It was late, and whether tuned by satiety or the failing of the light they vanished all at once. Reminiscing, I hear them now and see them in the true mind’s eye.”

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In the grainy dusk terns gather and cry. Their voices ring, raspy as the rip of the tide that calls them here. So small they are, their wings almost blue in the turbulent reflections from beneath, the humid light of the sky. In close formation they follow each other. The orange beacon of feet and beak almost gray as day recedes. Only the black cape, draped across the head from nape to eyes, stands out. Proof against glare, it is useless now as the sun tumbles into the sea. The terns will peel off one by one to follow the sun except they will not fall, they storm.

Four grouped together work a ruffled patch of water. Like Magic Lantern slides, each in a different frame they hover— wings out, wings forward, wings curled like a wave, wings back, and around. Tails spread and wavering they drop their heads, each beak a pointer aiming through a turbulence thick as lava, nor can you penetrate the darkness of their eyes as all absorbs there, a sponge for light. Below, confined by the collision of inrushing waters the bait fish feed flashing their silvery sides, not knowing every flick of a fin, every fleck of a tail is seen, and the terns dive!

In the way of men leaping the rail of a listing liner, wings raised high and together above their heads, they plunge, feet first. A volcano of white rises where they strike, and vanish, swallowed by the deep. A long moment, and another. Doubt closes like a gorget when, skipping and dancing and running each atop his own bubbling wake as if it is the easiest thing, the terns one by one come resurrected into air.

As suddenly as they appeared they are gone. Even their voices have left us. The rusting channel markers bob in the slack. Only quiet rules where all this life and death was rhyming only a clock tick past. Some of the terns have eaten their fill. Others having filled their crops leave with two and three plump bait held sideways in their mouths in trust for other mouths whose hunger must be fed, if this fragile existence is to carry on. This time it was the fish who paid, a Roman retribution, Decimation, the taking of every tenth man. But the dawn will come when a tern does not dive but pinwheels into the sea and his essences return to become once more, the little fishes. How proud the fisherbird in the catch and cull. How certain in his Fate.