Leeds Point: The Bounty of the Salt Marsh
- wordwomanvt4
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
Leeds Point, the site of my eco-political gothic horror novel in sonnet verse, is a spit of land on the mainland of Galloway, New Jersey, near the beautiful Forsythe National Wildlife Refugue, surrounded by salt marsh and looking across the bay at Atlantic City, New Jersey, where I was born. Salt marshes are ecological Edens, and provide enormous protection to our shorelines from storms and flood--critical in the rising tides and increasing storm ferocity of our era of climate change.
When she is first abandoned in the salt marshes off Leeds Point in 1702, Esther Waters nearly starves to death. She's a savvy, competent, and well-read young English woman, but she was not prepared for the fact that so much of the natural environment would be unfamiliar to her in the New World. (At one point she makes the classic mistake of using poison ivy a toilet paper, as poison ivy did not grow in England at that time. She wound up horribly ill with a systemic reaction to the poison. Even in the US today, people routinely make this mistake.)
Once she becomes accustomed to her surroundings and stops trying to grow English gardens in the sandy shoals (a packet of lettuce seed she finds tucked as a bookmark in one of her precious volumes brings hope, but swiftly comes to naught), Esther finds the salt marsh holds an abundant bounty. Fish, shellfish, turtles, small game, cattail tubers, fiddlehead ferns, pine needle tea, and the multitude of eggs from which Egg Harbor gets its name, provide a feast once you've learned to live with the land instead of trying to shape it to a different vision.
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