Mud season is upon us. This year, with particularly wet warm conditions and little remaining snow, it can be difficult to find places to get outside where you don’t need a combination of muck boots and crampons. Going to the beach may not be the first thing you think of in March, but beaches are one of the few open places that you can explore when everything else is part muck, part ice. Unless you’re a winter surfer or a polar bear, swimming might not be involved. But, there is plenty to explore and notice.

Because winter can be a stormy time, beaches experience a lot of change over the winter. What might be a wide-open expanse of sand in the summer may turn into an odd mesa that drops off in a cliff to the waters bellows. This looks a bit like places in the West for good reason. The sandy formations in places like Wyoming and Montana were formed from an ancient ocean. Back in the Cretaceous period, some 66 million years ago, there was what was called the Western Interior Seaway. It reached from the Gulf of Mexico up through the middle of the United States and Canada all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. It was 2000 miles long, 600 miles wide and 2500 feet deep in places – an impressive giant inland sea which receded millions of years ago, leaving most of the area high and dry.

What we see today is essentially petrified sand that has gotten packed into layers over time, resulting in distinct striations of different colors in what we call sandstone. Their aquatic past can be found in fossils hidden amidst these rocks of little snails and other invertebrates. Seagulls can even strangely be seen flying overhead in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Winter isn’t going to turn Maine into a desert. But, it does significantly shape the beach. That’s an important thing given the oft-heavy traffic during the summer and the need to essentially recycle the sand and replenish the beach with nutrients for a variety of sand critters. In addition to large amounts of sand piling up on the shore, the heavy wave action of winter is quite powerful and can heave up large tree limbs and any number of other flotsam and jetsam.

What are flotsam and jetsam? By definition, flotsam includes items not intentionally tossed overboard – these could be pieces of an old ship that wrecked, or an old pier that broke apart. Jetsam is the stuff thrown into the sea on purpose. If a ship is sinking, for example, the crew might throw over excess cargo and this washes ashore as jetsam. The word flotsam comes from the French word floter for float. The term jetsam comes from the French word getaison, meaning “a throwing”. These terms date back to the early 1600s.

Today, however, we typically think of flotsam and jetsam as catchall terms for stuff that washes up on the beach. It might include natural materials that have washed off the shore. Large pieces of vegetation can even act as small vessels carrying creatures from one shore to the other. Insects and small invertebrates are the most likely passengers, but sometimes rodents hitch rides as well, finding new homes on a new shore. New plants may find their way ashore as well and maybe take hold it they are tossed high enough above the tideline.

There is a certainly a lot to see and treasures to find on Maine beaches in the spring. In addition, unlike the summer months where you have to battle for a parking place, you’re likely to have the beach all to yourself in the spring. It makes the coming of summer all the more sweet to remember how a favorite place weathered the stormy months and to then see it in its summer glory.

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