~/jeffreymoro/posts/2025-10-13-intracoastal

The low sweep of the Georgia coast looks at first as though a long war between land and sea has come to an uneasy truce. Each front has gained on the other until distinctions no longer hold, leaving exclaves and enclaves like a Balkan border: brackish pools and miniature lakes shape the negative space of a latticework of grass; above, crows and herons and turkey vultures prowl for their catch of the day. Roads risk the coast and bridges hold where they can. The sea, underneath all, secrets itself behind mangrove and palm, but you can still smell it. The salt-rot is in the dirt.

The intracoastal waterway runs along the east coast of the United States from Massachusetts to Miami, an aqueous Appalachia. An understated collaboration between nature and government, the intracoastal comprises a patchwork of rivers, sounds, creeks (rhymes with “tricks”), and strategically dredged canals maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers, all together offering ships safe passage up and down the coast, a protected bike lane against the traffic of the Atlantic. The intracoastal is as old as its country, at least in idea: in the first days of the nascent nation, so fragile in its independence and eager to prove its worth to the world, Congress sought both to establish control over its unruly territory and to encourage the literal flow of commerce. The Sea Islands that embroider the Carolina and Georgia coasts were home to a thriving, violent plantation economy: rice and indigo flourished, tended by slaves whose descendants, the Gullah and the Geechee, weave the coast today. Crops traveled from the islands to Savannah and Charleston for sale; the cash traveled back down into the pockets of rich whites. As flows the Moon River, so flows capital.

There is fragile beauty, still, in the marshes. Estuarine grasses—sporobolus alterniflorus, seed-thrower other-flower—dominate the waterways, pale woody stalks rising from the rivers to mop-top profusions of green. The grass builds the marsh: sediment collects at its roots, out of which grows more grass, a refuge too for the mussels and the trout and the sea bass and the snails that make their homes here. The latter work up and down the grass, eating the fungi and the insects and the rot feeding on it, keeping the grass neat and clean. The grass loves salt and the intracoastal is more than happy to provide. In turn, the grass feeds the water: when dying, dead, decaying, the grass melts into nutrients for other plants and animals alike where the soil, otherwise starved of oxygen by the salt, cannot. Clouds hang heavy in this part of the world.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Savannah, spanish moss drapes grey-gold on the oak and the elm. The moss takes nothing from the trees but a place to rest. Science calls this relationship epiphytic, “upon-the-plant”: the moss does not interfere with the trees but simply uses them as scaffolds, hanging high above the ground, safe from any creature that might feast upon it. It shares this propensity with fellow members of the genus Tillandsia, air plants, which feed from the sky and not the soil. Most are epiphytic, like the moss; they are also therefore natural sensors of air pollution. You will not be shocked to learn that the moss has been retreating in recent years.

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My biweekly newsletter seems to have turned bimonthly. No surprise there: the beginning of the semester makes time hard to come by and what words we can find are precious and routed to other projects first. Some of those other projects are soon to bear fruit: with my colleagues and friends Tamara Kneese and Briana Vecchione, I have an edited cluster on algorithms and the occult with the journal ASAP/J forthcoming in a week or two; along similar lines, I was invited to the new podcast Love + Machines, hosted by Julia Park of the University of Toronto, to discuss my work on astrology and computation, which drops soon as well. Links forthcoming!

In the meantime, two states over: