Risk

Fig 1.

An adult photographer measures children against the fatality of the tides. Photograph by Mildred E. Collins, © Alfred C. Redfield, "The Tides of the Waters of New England and New York," 1980.

Two boys stand beside a massive wharf in Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, at low tide (fig. 1). The photographer, Mildred E. Collins, might have decided that they provided a sense of scale. The darkened edge of the wharf, towering over the boys, measures the tide like a colossal version of a doorframe charting a child's growth. Only, no one would ever withstand this tide; to remain there would be fatal, and long before high tide. Against this yardstick measuring an inhuman scale, the distinction between the smaller boy's shorts and the taller boy's trousers makes a poignant, if pathetically fragile, assertion of the slightest of generational differences against the sublime promise of the high tide that will erase the landscape where they stand.

The wharf measures tidal change in the Minas Basin; these tides are part of one of the most variable tidal systems in the world, that of the Bay of Fundy, where the difference between low and high tide is a matter of roughly fifty feet. This catastrophically powerful system lies in the background of 36.5. Sarah Cameron Sunde describes the moment that inspired her series of performances: "I was sitting on the rocks by a tidal bay in Maine, thinking about New York City's current relationship to water and the contemporary relationship of art to suffering and sacrifice. The tide was rising and I marveled at how quickly the environment changed. Rocks were being swallowed whole. Oh, the strength of the moon!"¹ The speed of the transformation of the environment—that ravenous ocean devouring rocks—was not only a reminder of the moon's gravitational pull but also an effect of the massive tidal system to the north. The influence of the Bay of Fundy's tides reaches south to Bass Harbor, Maine, where Sunde performed the first iteration of her traveling piece.² The difference between high and low tide there is not as extreme as in Minas Basin, but it is nevertheless unusually large (worldwide, the typical difference is about two feet). Sunde's 36.5 began inside the orbit of that system's daily remaking of seascapes and landscapes and lives.³

Fig 2.

NOAA tide predictions for Bar Harbor, Maine, August 15, 2013. Daily oscillations of this elegant graph are useful to everyone and yet predict nothing about a particular spot on the ocean floor. Times for Bass Harbor would have varied slightly.

A graph published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration represents the tides in nearby Bar Harbor, Maine, for August 15, 2013—the day of Sunde's first performance—as an elegant curve (fig. 2). Sunde began at about the point of the dip midway through the chart when the height of the low tide is noted as .83 feet and continued almost to the chart's final point, ending her performance at 11:52 at night, near the next low tide. At many places in Bass Harbor, 36.5 would have been, as the chart suggests, impossible to perform; the high tide in the cycle, at the highest point of the second curve, reached eleven and a half feet. A photograph on the website for 36.5 shows Sunde "testing the depth of the water with a pole," evidence of the everyday know-how required to understand what NOAA's chart means for practice; it doesn't tell you what the depth of the water at high tide will be at any particular spot, especially when the topography is as variable as that of a tidal bay on the jagged Down East coast of Maine. Indeed, all credible sources stress that tidal predictions remain predictions. Note, for instance, NOAA's disclaimer and how it throws some doubt on the mathematical elegance of its curve: "These data are based upon the latest information available as of the...