Volume 41, Number 13 · July 14, 1994
On the Waterfront
By Jonathan Raban
Alongshore
by John Stilgoe
Yale University Press, 443 pp., $35.00
The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840
by Alain Corbin, translated by Jocelyn Phelps
University of California Press, 380 pp., $35.00
Waterfronts: Cities Reclaim Their Edge
by Ann Breen, by Dick Rigby. maps by Diane Charyk Norris and Charles Norris
McGraw-Hill, 333 pp., $49.95
On the beach, where the sea wets the land, boundary disputes and ambiguities naturally pile up with bladderwrack and plastic bottles. The seaman looks anxiously to his depth sounder as he closes with the shore, for land is always dangerous to ships, while the landsman fears the water—the tide fanning out at speed over the level sands, the undertow, the deep. The law of the land gets into trouble when it reaches the ocean, often being hard put to it to say where the land is, or if the land is. Here on the Pacific Northwest coast, for instance, whose mixed diurnal and semidiurnal tides work in a lolloping daily rhythm of high-high-water, low-low-water, low-high-water, and high-low-water, the state of Washington holds title to the inshore seabed 'up to and including the line of ordinary high tide,' which would be a tidy definition, except that no such thing as an ordinary high tide has ever been witnessed in these parts.
Review, 5003 words
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