Stories From Ashore: Cattails and Tires; Life on the Ottison's Marsh
Susan and Karl Ottison by The Creeks behind their home on Orange Street, August 2022. Photo courtesy of Olivia (Ollie) Davis.At Envision Resilience, we support the exploration of science-based, design-led adaptations and we seek to amplify the anecdotal accounts of climate change in our community. In this series, Stories from Ashore, we share stories of locals and their experience with climate change, introduce you to people in our community who are imagining a future with increased water on their properties and discuss pathways forward. What will be your response to climate change?
By Anna Popnikolova
Among the busy rush of Nantucket’s mid-island rotary, in the midst of the cars and buses, is a gravel driveway. In the mouth of Orange Street, with two wooden posts on either side, is the entrance to a winding path, leading to a large property with many small wooden buildings. In one of these, a sign reading SHOP hangs above a summer door. Inside, Susan Ottison can be found working away on her baskets. The shop is strewn with straw and woven baskets hanging from the ceilings and walls, carved ivory decorating their tops and handles. Her husband Karl Ottison is down the street, the sound of his saw ringing through the eight acres that make up their home at 170 Orange Street.
Karl’s family has been inhabiting this land for four generations. It has changed, with time and the tides. Quite literally, with the tides. “There’s eight acres here and three quarters of it is wet,” his wife laughs. The marsh has been home to marsh grasses, reeds, insects, birds, various wildflowers and brush for many years. In addition to the vegetation, cows. “In my grandfather’s time, he had milk cows, maybe four to six, and he was an old man when I remember him and the cows were gone,” Karl explained. He adds that, though he never knew the cows that once lived on 170 Orange, he’d heard from his mother that the cows never ran out of grass to eat in the summer because the ground was always wet, and the grass was always growing.
“This area never dries out,” he said. “If you dig a hole out there, anywhere past 10 inches deep, you’re in water.”
The marsh today is abundant with greenery—willows and cedars, apple trees, rhododendrons, blueberry bushes, daffodils and cattails. Flowers bloom, and Susan points out an exciting new blossom, a pop of bright red across the field, her cardinal flowers, among which she spotted a hummingbird just the day before.
During the marsh’s cattle days, the entire lot was made up of grass, without a single bush. Over time, shrubs and trees were brought in. Native and invasive plants began to take root all across the property, and after each large storm, when the marsh flooded, new plants began to pop up—from plants usually found in a different area of the island to species the Ottisons had never seen before.
“When I was a kid, there was one little patch of these cattails, they were different than the normal ones out in ponds at Miacomet, Hummock pond — the long, skinny fronds. These cattails were thinner and smaller, like a hot dog. These down here were a lot heavier, but shorter, and dark brown. My mother thought these cattails here were pretty… but after that No-Name Storm in the 80’s, clumps of the other cattails must have washed in and in the last 24 years, those long, skinny, brown cattails went from zero to covering at least two acres.”
Plants aren’t the only thing that the storm tides bring over to the Ottisons. “We notice the changes from storm to storm,” said Susan. “We get all Mother Nature cleans out, we get it on this end… Nor'easters, it comes right down the harbor and dumps it here: wood, papers, plastic, tires. I’ve got a tire down there that I’ve got to get rid of.”
When Nor’easters come through, the Ottisons get the worst of it based on their location at the end of the harbor. “That’s where our favorite weather always comes from, the northeast.. they’re blowing right down our throat, ” said Karl.
“They say the caps are melting, so it’s no surprise that the ocean is going to come up. All that ice is turning into water. I don’t know what else to think about that.”
The Ottison’s home at 170 Orange has always been hit harder than other properties by Nor’easters, as it is a natural basin for water from the harbor. And more recently, as the climate changes and the ocean rises, the storms have been growing in intensity.
“During the No-Name Storm, we had saltwater come right up to that tractor,” Karl explained as he gestured to a red tractor, in the grasses a couple of yards from the house. “My dad was alive then and he’d been here for 90 years, and he said he’d never seen it that bad. They say the caps are melting, so it’s no surprise that the ocean is going to come up. All that ice is turning into water. I don’t know what else to think about that.”
With the marsh as a natural space for the water to spill over and into, rising sea levels threaten to come up to the Ottison’s home, and often flood their small shack, which can be seen distantly from the house, in the middle of the marsh.
Having lived their entire lives on the island of Nantucket, the Ottisons have watched the island’s shores shift and change before their eyes. “When we used to ride out [to Great Point]as kids… I saw the remains of an old bulldozer that had belonged to the Coast Guard, a big hunk of iron,” said Karl. “And it got stuck and they left it there in the middle of the road to Great Point. That big old tractor sat there for years and years. In the storms, that tractor kept moving closer to the water.”
“The beach sand was picked up by the wind and the waves and transported to the west,” he recalled “The tractor remained stationary, and then after three or four winters, there’s the tractor out in the surf. And the whole width of what they call the galls, the sandspit, the sand had shifted entirely to the west side of the tractor and left it in the waves.”
As the climate changes, Susan and Karl watch the beaches of the island that they grew up on wear away, slowly, and move with the tides. The effects of sea level rise are, literally, in their own backyard. The most noticeable changes in the Ottison’s backyard have been the dramatic widening of the tributaries.
“The channels in the marshes, the little tributaries, were not many more than 12-14 feet wide,” Karl described. “And that has increased 400% in the last 60 years. There’s hardly any of them left that are 40 feet now, some are 60 feet, 70 feet wide now…I don’t imagine that they were any wider or narrower than that during the whaling days, that 12-foot width, by the 50’s, was gone, and there was no way to get it back. Because that material was gone.”
For this fourfold increase in width, Karl outlines a couple of potential contributors. The invasive green crabs—which have been damaging eelgrass populations and weakening the marsh–is one of them. The other is the use of motorboats through the marsh.
“There’s no speed limit or wake (to boats without motors)... any proliferation of motor boats causing a wake… could be just as detrimental to the natural way those channels were 60 or more years ago.”
The Ottisons have requested a speed limit to be placed on motorboats, especially while moving through the marsh, and hope for a positive outcome. Looking out at the marsh, Karl worries, “It’s got to be detrimental to the endgame, it’s going to leave us with no marsh if it continues at that rate for the next one hundred years, there won’t be any marsh anymore, it’ll just be a hole.”
Looking at current shore preservation efforts for Nantucket, the Ottisons express concerns that the seawall may not be strong enough, or that Nantucket homeowners may not take kindly to losing their oceanfront view. The island is changing and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to curb the tides of change, Susan explains. “We’ve watched one house go over in Sconset… we watched it just go into the water, still floating along… our little shack down there floods, it didn’t flood for 10 years and now it does.”
Not seeing any way to stop it or slow the erosion, Susan, smiling and shaking her head, said, “Mother Nature’s going to do what she wants.”
Karl’s input on Nantucket’s future isn’t much more optimistic than his wife’s. “I used to hang around [the] Maria Mitchell [Association],” he said. “Back when I was a teenager, they had estimated the lifespan of Nantucket to be something like five or six hundred years with no action by mankind to protect the shores. They had figured out in the 1600’s, when it was first inhabited and accurate maps were drawn by the people at the time, how much bigger the island was 300 years ago than it is today. You can extrapolate, it’s not going to be that long before there’s nothing left.”
Anna Popnikolova is a Nantucket native and junior at Nantucket High School. She is assistant Editor-In-Chief of Veritas, the NHS school newspaper, has been writing her entire life, and takes a great interest in the environment and conservation efforts on Nantucket. As a member of the Nantucket Youth Climate Committee, she hopes to continue her involvement with environmental awareness and resilience.
