“You care more about this house than you do about me,” I yelled before aiming the second clog at him. I banged out the screen door and headed down to the water.
He’s acting like a moody husband with a mistress, I thought. Too bad I had to spend all week in the city earning money to help support this project. Could he be taking advantage of that? Again I considered the possibility that work and stress were driving us into separate, lonely worlds. What a perfect irony if we shore up this nice old house and in the process damage our relationship beyond repair.
Often these days, I found myself walking down to the water’s edge, for a few minutes or an hour. It always helped to clarify my objectives, the consoling sight of this geological marvel that surrounds our finger of land on three sides. From the dock where I like to stand, you can see the water turn almost any shade of blue, silver, white, gray, orange, mauve, pink, or black. Depending on the weather and time of day, it changes quickly, slowly, always unpredictably. On the most ordinary of afternoons it will surprise with a showing of luminous pale green, reflecting early spring light off the maples, oaks, and willows leafing out along the shoreline.
The largest estuary in North America, two hundred miles long, four thousand miles square, the Chesapeake Bay spans an astonishing 11,600 miles of coastline. Formed by glacial melt at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, the bay is the drowned valley of the mighty Susquehanna River. Long before rising seas flooded the river valley, a meteorite carved out the mouth about 35 million years ago, to the south where the estuary opens to the Atlantic Ocean.
Much of the bay is shallow, less than thirty feet deep, and in places you can wade far out before the depth increases much over five feet. The shallowness of these warm, partly salt and partly fresh waters nurtures a magnificent ecosystem of fish, fowl, and plant life. There are hundreds of species of finfish and shellfish, thirty kinds of waterfowl alone. There are diving ducks, such as the canvasbacks and redheads, with their legs far back under their bodies to help them dive deep for food, and dabbling ducks, with their legs more centrally located for walking, such as mallards and black ducks. There are gorgeously plumed wood ducks, mergansers, Canada and snow geese, mute and tundra swans. Among the most beautiful of water birds, the great blue heron and the snowy egret inhabit the region for part or all of the year in the company of little blue herons, laughing gulls, oystercatchers, swallows, pelicans, cormorants, sandpipers, plovers, bald eagles, and ospreys.
That splendid raptor, the osprey, also known as the seahawk or fish eagle, was once in decline. Intensive study revealed that the pesticide DDT caused the shells of osprey eggs to become fragile and easily broken, resulting in “egg failure.” Since the banning of DDT, ospreys have resurged and are more abundant now on the Chesapeake Bay than anywhere else in the world. Osprey pairs, which mate for life, return to the bay every March from the Caribbean and South America to occupy the same nest and hatch their cinnamon-brown eggs. Even with an improved environment, they have a much harder life and obstacles than we humans typically do.
Contemplating all this, I think, should be enough to catapult anyone into a permanent state of gratitude, not to say renewed loyalty to one’s mate.
Whenever I take time to consider it, the bay’s huge beauty and riches fill me with awe and hope. With its distinctive, extravagant flora and fauna, the bay once defined an entire culture centered on shipping, agriculture, fishing, and later crabbing and oystering, that spanned centuries. By 1900 a second culture appeared, one of recreation, and these two cultures now coexist side by side and compete with each other for diminishing resources. There are bay work boats and bay pleasure boats, bay industries and agriculture, bay tourism and development.
Following construction in the 1950s of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, conveniently linking the Eastern Shore to the mainland, massive development got underway. Even still, stretches of bay and shoreline appear as untouched and picturesque as a century or more ago, if you know where to look.
Along with the new, traditions also survive, especially in the architecture of towns dating to the seventeenth century and in bay foods and bay cooking. At almost every dockside restaurant and crab house, a distinctive seasoning imparts zing to the famous steamed blue crabs and also to potatoes, corn, bread, eggs, popcorn, crackers, and anything else people want to put it on. A blend of spices, it usually includes coarse salt, mustard seed, paprika, black and red peppers, bay laurel, ginger, allspice, mace, and clove.
These days, of course, the defining force that was the bay is doing far less defining. It has been eaten up, like our house, from inside and out. Though saving a house, I remind myself, is nothing compared to saving a bay.
You would never guess from the developers’ advertisements about the good life here or from the restaurants offering all the crabs you can eat that the bay is deathly ill. The trouble started long before a campaign to “Save the Bay” was launched in the 1970s. Every step of development from the steamships and railways in the nineteenth century to the cars, highways, and housing of the twentieth has contributed. By the 1970s the situation was critical and billions of dollars later the crisis is worse. No matter what the agencies working on the problems or responsible for them may say in their “cautiously optimistic” reports, the situation remains desperate.
The oysters are all but gone and the legendary blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, too. The name, given by a Smithsonian Institution scientist, comes from the Latin sapidus, meaning savory or tasty, and the Greek for beautiful swimmer. More than beautiful swimmers, they’re beautiful, tasty swimmers and, like the taste of the oyster, the taste of crab only creates a desire for more—which helps matters not at all.
At the same time that the shellfish are disappearing, along with the submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, that is so important to the ecosystem, other forms of life have rebounded, notably the shad and striped bass. But even this is not a win-win . . .
A summer or so back, a neighbor close by on Edge Creek sighted a bullnose shark cruising off the end of his dock. What was a large shark doing up this shallow creek? “Very aggressive, the bullnose,” the Department of Natural Resources advised when the sighting was reported. “Probably hungry, probably chasing striped bass.”
And what are striped bass doing up this shallow creek? “They’re hungry, too. Probably came up the creek to eat baby crabs,” said the Department of Natural Resources.
In the 1980s, striped bass were in short supply from over-harvesting so fishing for striped bass, called rockfish locally, was banned. The fish rebounded in large numbers. A success story for the bass, but not for young blue crabs that hide in underwater grasses in the shallow, warm creeks.
Between the bass feasting on little crabs and the human passion for big crabs, a passion that depletes 75 percent of the bay’s adult crab stock every year, one of the great glories of the bay is in dangerously short supply. To help meet summertime demand, crab is now shipped in from the Gulf of Mexico and South Asia.
Trying to help, the state offered to buy back crabbing licenses in 2009 from Maryland watermen. After consulting economists, who proposed a technique from game theory, the state asked each waterman to privately name his price. One crabber asked $425 million; others refused to bid altogether, saying the license was their link to the past, family and traditions. Said one, “I would feel like part of me was gone. . . This is what I am.”
The native oysters are in even worse shape than the crabs. Overharvested since the late nineteenth century, and diseased more recently as a result of poor water quality, 98 percent of the oysters are gone. Go out on the water with Captain Wade Murphy on his skipjack, the traditional shallow-draft sailing boat used to harvest bay oysters, and he’ll dredge for oysters, pulling up perhaps a dozen. Ten of the twelve will be dead. Other days he pulls up only empty shells.
Projects are underway to save the shellfish, such as building reefs for oyster beds and seeding with disease-resistant and nonnative species of oysters. Thi
s is a controversial issue, as no one can predict for certain what will happen once nonnative species are introduced. In another effort, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deposited a million oysters in the bay in the summer of2004, hoping to increase the population. Within weeks, to the engineers’ embarrassment, a raiding party of cownose rays, relatives of the stingray, came along and gobbled up about 750,000 of the young oysters, a feast that cost $45,000.
Beyond their exquisite flavor, the oysters are important for a much larger reason. They filter water for nutrients, such as algae, and in so doing help to clean the bay. Because an oyster can filter as much as five liters of water an hour, scientists believe that the once-vast oyster population filtered the entire volume of the bay’s waters every three to four days. Oysters were so plentiful at one time that they formed shoals large enough to endanger ships. Overharvesting began after the Civil War with the advent of train service that rushed the oysters to market. Production peaked in the 1880s, when 20 million bushels of oysters a year were taken. Ever since, the harvest has declined.
So why not set up the grill on the lawn and eat more chicken until the shellfish rebound? Because chickens and lawns are part of the problem. The area’s chicken farms—along with agriculture and lawns all up and down the watershed, including dairy farms in Pennsylvania—represent the single biggest cause of environmental damage to the bay because they produce runoffs of nitrogen from fertilizers and phosphorous from manure. The runoff into the bay and its creeks leads to algae overgrowth, or “blooms,” which block light needed by other plant life. When the algae die and decompose, consuming oxygen in the process, further species are threatened.
A chicken tax is proposed by environmentalists to help clean up and truck away the manure. But housing development all along the shoreline, bringing more lawns and more fertilizer use, contributes excessive nutrients to the runoff as well. More paved roads, more auto emissions, more shopping centers, more sewage, and more stormwater from all around the 64,000-square-mile watershed of the Chesapeake contribute chemical contaminants, too.
The largest river that drains into the bay, the Susquehanna once brought a rush of clean water. In time, the river was dammed, the flow of cleansing water diminished, and the river itself began contributing pollution; by 2005 the Susquehanna was listed as the country’s most endangered river. By 2006 the Chesapeake Bay Foundation ranked the bay’s health at 29 on a scale of 100. Although this represents a 2-point improvement over previous years, underwater grasses scored 18, shad got a 10, and the native oyster scored 4. The cleanup is far behind schedule. By 2010 the bay was supposed to be clean enough to be taken off the federal list of “dirty waters.” No one expects that goal to be met. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is considering moving the deadline to 2020, by which time many say the bay and its tributaries may be beyond saving and leading the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation to file suit against the agency for failing to enforce the Clean Water Act.
And that’s what happened to the Chesapeake Bay, or the Chesepiooc as the Algonquians called it, which some say means Great Shellfish Bay.
Much of the world chooses to live where land and water meet. In the United States the majority of the population lives within fifty miles of an ocean, bay, or the shores of the Great Lakes. As naturalist Tom Horton points out, people are drawn to this edge “because it’s beautiful and just plain more interesting than anywhere else.”
With human habitation taking a heavy toll and continued population growth of about 170,000 people a year along the Chesapeake watershed, it isn’t hard to see the bay’s very beauty and interest as its ultimate tragic flaw.
Captain Murphy and his family have fished the bay waters for three generations. Over the years he has developed perspective on adversity. When his skipjack sank in a squall, he got it pulled up, declared a National Historic Landmark, and with the help of preservation funds he restored it. Now he puts it to new use with excursions and environmental lectures to tourists.
“It isn’t complicated,” he sums up as we come ashore following an afternoon with him on the Rebecca T. Ruark.“If everyone would just stop making three stupid mistakes—stop damming the rivers, stop overfishing, and stop putting things in the bay that don’t belong there—the bay might recover and the shellfish might come back.”
CHAPTER
7
Family, Family
WHEN RICK ARRIVED AGAIN ON ONE OF HIS MANY visits, he looked around and sighed. “The area is so WT.”
Huh? Hugo said.
“You know, WT. White trash.”
“If you like it, fine,” my sister said when we thought the place was really starting to spruce up in the second year of work. “But I could never live here.”
A third relative was even less subtle. We were eating in a café in St. Michaels when he announced, “This town looks like shit.”
Back at the house, Hugo needed a few glasses of wine while we discussed this comment. Not long after, the New York Times described St. Michaels as “picture perfect . . . a place of waterfront sunsets and white sails,” and the area was listed in a sleek travel magazine as one of the ten most romantic places in the country for a weekend getaway, not to mention the entire town’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. I thought of the trees, fields, woods, creeks, coves, marshes, and painterly stretches of open bay. Something didn’t add up.
Along with small, simple houses and a few trailer homes, there are the old estates, private airstrips, the weekend houses of well-known public figures in business, sports, and politics that eventually included then—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Cheney and Rumsfeld houses sit practically next door to each other, less than a thirty-minute helicopter ride from Washington. “Outside the blast zone” was a popular surmise.
Was it because we, the family financial failures, wound up here that the rest of the family took more than a dim view of the project and even the whole setting? The town was guilty by association with us. We finished a bottle of wine and mulled the question into the night.
Subliminally I was inclined to like the place, having first seen the bay by boat and later by car, although I hardly knew where I was that day when I drove across the Bay Bridge to St. Michaels to meet James Michener as he was starting work on his epic novel Chesapeake. At the time I was an assistant book editor for the Washington Post and liked to get away from the desk now and again when I could come up with a good enough reason. Michener’s arrival on the Eastern Shore was news, though no one seemed to know exactly what he was up to. Arriving in St. Michaels early, I walked around and asked. “One doesn’t ask,” a shopkeeper said.
Michener was sixty-nine. We met at the house he was renting on the Miles River, talked, ate crab cakes and French fries at the Town Dock, and returned to his house to talk some more. He spoke freely about writing, research, how he approached projects, about success and fear of failing. He could have retired after his first book appeared, Tales of the South Pacific, which won a Pulitzer Prize, sold millions of copies, and became a popular film and Broadway musical, but he kept on researching and writing his massive volumes of fiction and nonfiction. It came back, he said, to a childhood spent in and out of foster homes with some bad luck companions.
“An essential fact about me,” he offered, “is that I’ve always known people can end on the ash heap.” Mostly he talked about the bay, which he first encountered fifty years before. Spurred by news of its despoliation, he returned.
The day before we met, he had explored with a guide stretches of the Choptank River that looked exactly as they would have 150 years before. He expressed Huck Finn—ish delight at that thought, saying he was enjoying himself “100 percent more than expected.”
On his desk I saw a copy of John Barth’s Sotweed Factor and an array of old maps. Michener told me that on the earliest maps the bay’s western shore was inscribed in lowercase letters while the Eastern Shore was always capitalized. His expression c
learly said, And with good reason.
This is a place that grows on you, gets into your psyche, I realized. Here was a man who could go anywhere in the world, and did. The Eastern Shore and the bay get to you, if you let them. It’s the reason they ship Old Bay Seasoning around the world to the nostalgic who have experienced the bay and left it.
• • •
A black car with tinted windows eased over the crushed oyster shells, dirt, and weeds that passed for our driveway and came to a stop. Slowly, an older man in massive black wraparound sunglasses, baseball cap, polo shirt, and gray flannel dress slacks got out.
When he took off the sunglasses I recognized my father-in-law, a short, frail man with pale blue eyes and a kind face. I set down my paintbrush and pulled off the green surgical mask he had given me.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “What the hell happened to him?” He was looking at Hugo, whose hair, skin, and clothing were all powdery white.
We didn’t keep the drywall finisher long, I explained, only long enough for Hugo to learn how to do it. I didn’t say that we were way over budget and that the drywall finisher made me uneasy. Everyone said he was the best in the business, just a harmless eccentric who worked by night, stripped naked. By day he slept in his car, which was decked out with pillows, clothes, food, water, stacks of yellowed newspapers, and a small TV. Sometimes you’d see him filling up at the gas station or catch sight of his car parked down some shady, out-of-the-way lane.
Hugo pointed out to his dad that the car engine was still running and the driver, a colleague, had not gotten out. “Doesn’t Dr. M. want to come inside with you and see the place?”
“No. I won’t be long.”
I remembered my sister’s first visit. Is this a family trait or what?
Hugo Senior walked the perimeter of the house, taking in the new construction and the remains of the old shed stacked by the garage. He climbed the front porch steps, took off his sunglasses and peered inside.
The House at Royal Oak Page 7
