Skin-diving monk shows Hilton Head how to experience the beach | Opinion

So they have come to Hilton Head Island to complain about marsh wrack on the beach.

They ask whose job is it to sweep up these ugly piles of dead Spartina grass that the tide washes ashore.

I guess in the off-season, they go to Egypt and whine about the tall stacks of old bricks.

This recent online “conversation” about marsh wrack thankfully included pushback from a number of people who saw the absurdity in it and know the value of wrack.

It offers crucial habitat and a food source for wildlife and nutrients for dune-protecting plants, experts say.

The question makes you wonder: What would they do if they stumbled into a Devil’s Purse? Or a bullbat?

Worse, it makes you wonder what has happened to our sense of wonder.

The beach is many things to many, many people these days. My trips in the early mornings show them doing yoga, flying drones, looking for sea turtle tracks, pitching tents, drinking coffee, exercising dogs, jogging, biking, walking, sitting, fishing, staring at cell phones, picking up litter, plugging in ear buds, taking pictures, wading in the surf, and stopping in awe as the big orange ball glides silently over the ocean horizon.

For Betty N. Cook, the beach was a place of wonder.

She wondered in her “Island Discoveries” column in The Island Packet of the early 1970s about black, leathery pouches found tangled in seaweed.

She wondered enough to thumb through a booklet published in 1970 about the strange world to be discovered at the shoreline. It’s still full of wonders as it waits to be discovered like an oyster’s pearl on our public library shelves.

“Beachcombing on Hilton Head Island” by Bertrand H. Dunegan informed Betty that the odd black things with projections called horns at each corner are called a Devil’s Purse. They are egg cases for sharks and skates. Little embryos are inside.

They are such a sign of wonder worldwide that they’re also called “Mermaids Purses,” “Witches Purses” and “Devil’s Pocketbooks.” And in England, a Shark Trust website shows how citizen scientists can document these wonders.

Betty Cook knew that the beach is not a place for whiners.

Writing about a bird called a bullbat (common nighthawk), she said, “I always have to cover my head on nightly beach strolls as the island swarms with bullbats. Their repeated dives in my direction, with one brushing across my face so closely that I felt its warm, whiskery feathers, makes me wonder if they could possibly mistake a human for a goat.”

Bertrand Dunegan was himself a wonder.

He was a skin-diving monk.

He was a magna cum laude college graduate with a master’s degree in theology and another in biology from Ohio State University. He did graduate work at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

He was a monk of St. Vincent Archabbey in the Order of St. Benedict in his native Pennsylvania.

And he was a teacher. Fr. Bertrand is still remembered as a demanding biology teacher from 1967 to 1992 at Benedictine Military School in Savannah.

That’s when he came to love our beach, and when he inspired 100 boys to dive deeper into oceanography and marine biology in his Benedictine Institute of Oceanography.

He died in 1996, but through his book, Fr. Bertrand can still be heard like the voice in a conch shell beckoning us to come closer to the “scent of the salt spray and the cry of the gull.”

He urges us to go to the beach at low tide after an offshore wind to dig and poke and wonder until the flood tide pushes us away from “the riot of color, complexity of life and luxury of design we were privileged to witness from the treasury of the sea.”

Fr. Bertrand said much of the sea remains a mystery, even after 4,000 years of people probing these shores every day.

He helps quench our sense of wonder – not with a giant broom or vacuum cleaner to wipe away marsh wrack, but with more than 150 illustrations of things we’re most likely to wonder about, like Devil’s Purses.

Fr. Bertrand reflects on how many times the tide has come and gone in the very same spot, yet no two scenes have ever been the same.

And he says, “Like a precious diamond sparkling in the sun, the beach reveals some new facet of truth and beauty with each passing tide. We find our souls enriched with a deeper insight into the wonders of creation.”