Stinking Sands

Further on the comments to yesterday's post, now that Blogger has coughed up the original comment.

Once upon a time, when I was taking a computer programming course, our instructor, Dr. GM, loved to distract his students with Buddhist wisdom (he was one) and with local lore (he was also local).

The stinking sands to which M-A refers to are, I think, the ones cited in this link. The article is a little thinly researched. If the reporter had dug a little further, she would have discovered Dr. GM's pertinent bit of local knowledge, and learnt that cutting a tidal passage through the Nahant Causeway isn't "far-fetched," but the only rational solution. That's because the construction of the causeway caused the problem in the first place.

These beaches face a bay with a rare nautical phenomenon known as rotary current. Well-behaved ocean currents start at point A and go to point B. Rotary currents go around, along with anything that they happen to pick up. New England residents should think of rotary currents as traffic rotaries without enough exits.

Into the early 20th century, locals and summer people got to the two islands that form the town of Nahant one of two ways: by boat, or over the then very low tidal sandbank that linked Nahant to the mainland. Tides ran freely over the middle of the bank, but this was not a problem for horse-drawn conveyances. The buggies sat well above the water and the salt water was good for the horses' legs.

Then came the 20th century and internal combustion engines. It didn't take long for intrepid, affluent motorists to discover that immersing their machines in salt water was a really, really, dumb idea. Money talked as usual and the sand bank began to sport a raised gravel roadbed, which over the course of the next 30 or so years morphed into today's masonry-walled, briskly-traveled causeway. Thus the rotary current lost its principal exit.

According to Dr. GM, wherever in the world this sort of thing has happened, it creates the perfect habitat for, not the algae, but some venturesome microorganisms that live on the algae.

And they die on the algae. When people say the beaches smell like something crawled onto them and died, evidently that's exactly what has happened. Gazillions of microorganisms, having lived out their happy little spans whirling around the bay, die and are washed up on the beach along with their algae homes. The various towns can shovel out all the algae they want; they can shovel it out until hell freezes over and they still won't have solved the problem of this micro-organic suburb humans have made. The little beasties will still be there, and they'll be there in uncountable numbers until the rotary gets back its entrance-exit, which sloshes just enough critter-free water in and out to contain the population.

Again, think of any major rotary in Massachusetts. Suppose someone shut off the ramps when the rotary was full of tourists. The tourists would never leave, never be guided to safety by friendly natives using horns and hand gestures. They too would be washed up on the edges and die.

Why hasn't this solution been attempted? Well, there it is: it's far-fetched.

Faced with half a century of obstinate public sector refusal to try a fairly simple solution to this problem, the only question left is why the rest of us haven't turned Buddhist as the only way to cope with our frustration, and with the state's smelliest sands.

(Disclaimer: Dr. GM is only responsible for the abstract, not for my unscientific explanation. I'm not a microbiologist, even on TV.)