Moving Day

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Mercury Rising

Nothing of the day or the place spoke danger to the two fishermen when they launched their canoe into the upper reaches of the Chester River watershed. A soft September sun shone through the afternoon haze and a fitful breeze riffled the surface, making sparkles. Birds sang. The men flicked spinning rods, casting bait to the shallows, and the strikes came quickly.

There are photos of them there that day, smiling, unshaven, holding their catches a little toward the camera, like fishermen do, to make them look larger. The men were plainly proud, as fishermen are, of a catch like that -- largemouth bass, fat, green, shimmering in the light -- hard-fighting and pretty good eating, buttered and battered and fried just right. They didn't know, then, what they know now.

What they held in their hands could wreck their brains. A poison.

Some already had suspicions, though, or Jim Thompson of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources and Dave Sutherland of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would not have been out on Urieville Lake this day and on Jones Pond the next. The Chester Riverkeeper had asked them to bag and return all the fish they could catch, to be sent to a laboratory at the University of North Carolina.

It turned out that every fish they caught in the so-called freshwater catchments of the Chester River contained mercury. Three out of 10 fish had mercury in their flesh exceeding the level set by government as safe for human consumption.

Mercury, of the same chemical family as lead, stunts brain development in fetuses and children, cripples coordination in everyone overexposed to it, causing involuntary muscle action, attention deficit disorders, heart irregularities and problems with blood pressure. It impairs vision and hearing, and reproductive systems, too. It's a worldwide worry.

But in the Chester? In a river that is arguably the least developed of the upper Eastern Shore? There is no industry in sight for the 60 miles this tidal estuary flows, nothing to warn boaters or those dangling hooks from the bridge at Chestertown of the danger below.

Where's it coming from? Downriver and upwind. Just across the Chesapeake Bay from the mouth of the Chester rise the stacks of Brandon Shores, a coal-fired power plant. "It is one of the 50 top mercury polluters in the nation," reports the Chester Riverkeeper. According to a study in 2005 by the National Wildlife Federation, Brandon Shores spits 709 pounds of mercury in the air annually. Also nearby are Phoenix Services, spewing 198 pounds of mercury in a year; Waste Energy Partners, 162 pounds; and C.P. Crane Generating Station, 91 pounds. Total mercury air emissions statewide, according to Maryland's Department of Environment, and all of it from plants that are up prevailing wind from the Chester: 3,295 pounds of mercury that wind up falling from the sky.

Meantime, studies cited by the Waterkeeper Alliance find that 1/70th of a teaspoon of pure mercury is enough to contaminate a 25-acres lake.

The Chester isn't the only sick river. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported that more than a fourth of American rivers now are under mercury fish advisories. Two years ago the EPA administrator admitted, "Mercury is everywhere. The more waters we monitor, the more we find mercury."

Trouble is, ever since George W. Bush became President, EPA hasn't wanted to do all that much monitoring. And the Chester is not one of the rivers where the EPA bothered to look. The findings here came because of an initiative by some 130 Waterkeepers nationwide, who sent fish to the lab in North Carolina. Reports Dr. Rick Maas at UNC, "We are finding mercury levels above the EPA consumption guide in roughly half the samples sent."

A number to remember: 630,000. That, according to research cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is how many infants were born in the U.S. last year with unsafe levels of mercury in their tissues. This year 630,000 more will be contaminated, and 630,000 will be every year until the pollution is plugged. The number of American children impacted by mercury poisoning is four times higher than those affected by all other birth defects combined.

It's no mystery how it happens. The puzzle is why.

Technology exists that can prevent 90 percent of mercury air pollution from power plants. The National Wildlife Federation told the Maryland General Assembly in testimony in 2005 that filtering processes to cut the polluting would cost the average Maryland household between 63 cents and $1.88 per month in passed-along billing. "That," said the NWF representative, "is about the price of one cup of coffee each month.

To date, bills requiring 90 percent reductions of coal-plant mercury pollution by 2010 have failed in the General Assembly. Environmentalists are always outnumbered and outspent by lobbyists for the industry, who tell lawmakers the cost is too high. These mouthpieces for the smokestacks cite a finding by the EPA that less that one percent of global mercury that taints fish comes from the U.S.

That may be true -- worldwide. But U.S. industry remains the cause, as the EPA also concedes, of 60 percent of that pollution within this country. Furthermore, EPA estimates that 14 percent of the mercury emitted is deposited within 30 miles of each site. The Chester is within that range from four of Maryland's top 10 mercury polluters.

To arguments that filtering mercury would be too expensive, Dr. Lorne Garrettson of the American Academy of Pediatrics is scornful: "The case against is flawed to the degree that if you did it on a high school economics test you'd flunk. Nobody puts in the cost on health, and that's enormous. Nobody figures in lost earning capacity that is the direct result of intelligence lost caused by mercury pollution, and it's vast. Cost benefits far, far outweigh cleanup cost."

And yet, the last time the General Assembly voted, it bought the power industry's logic. Even though every single member lives in the wind-shadow of a mercury-vomiting smokestack. Their votes seemed to defy self-interest -- although state legislatures being what they are, no citizen can always be sure that argument is all that lobbyists are feeding lawmakers. Absent clear evidence of bribery, however, you can only suppose that rejecting any affordable plan to rid mercury from what we eat was an involuntary muscle action, the result of impaired vision and hearing, mass attention deficit disorder, raging insanity, or the thinking of people with the IQs of largemouth bass.

Must be something in the water.

Remains of the Bay

The last American fishing fleet with sails is scudding westward across the Chesapeake Bay, one more time. It's dark yet, autumn winds are blowing, the water is roughening. The crewmen huddled below in cramped cabins and and the captains topside at their helms realize this could be the final season they will go dredging for oysters -- "drudgin' arsters," in the waterman's vernacular.

Running under motor, not sail, this scattered fleet of four skipjacks no longer uses the wind to oyster. Sailing is too slow and doesn't pay when so few shellfish remain on the bottom of the bay -- for something is killing the oysters.

A century ago skipjacks numbered perhaps 1,000 but by 1985, when they were listed on the National Register of Historic Places, only 35 working boats had survived. Just a dozen are commercially licensed today. Most captains don't bother to leave their docks.

In the fall of 2003 Lawrence Murphy hadn't given up. His "Thomas Clyde" was one of the biggest and oldest skipjacks still afloat. Launched in 1911, 73 feet from bowsprit to far stern davits, 20 feet across her beam, weathered rough by any measure, she smelled of diesel fumes and of men who work hard.

This day that year it's 6:40 a.m. when the boat reaches the underwater ledge known as Seven Foot Knoll, and the sun swells like a fat pumpkin growing from Maryland's Eastern Shore. Murphy pushes a throttle, engines rumble, and crewmen swing big dredge baskets over each side. After a few minutes of shuddering across the bottom, they are hauled up and hundreds of pounds of muck and shell are dumped on deck. "Arsters aren't very thick on the bottom," Murphy observes.

At day's end he's looking over four high heaps, reckoning his final haul at 130 bushels. Not bad, but short of the 150-bushel limit, and the season's early days are the best. Murphy shakes his head and says, "If there was a good job somewhere, I'd take it."

Skipjacks are awash in irony. The purpose for which they were designed has all but disappeared, and the laws governing their use have been contorted to the point of contradiction. This is a vessel that evolved after one of the earliest conservation laws banned dredging except by sail -- to conserve oysters at a time when there were billions of them -- yet today, when oysters are scarce, laws allow motor dredging, which rakes more of the bay bottom, and faster. And yet again, the prospect of no waterman dredging for oysters and no skipjack left to "lick" the bars saddens anyone who's ever seen the craft on the Chesapeake.

Up close, the old one may be big around the belly and broad across the butt, white paint flecked, decks jumbled and dirty. At any distance, though, especially when the sails are up, she's a pretty sight. With her long why bowsprit, decks flush to low hull, tall raked-back mast, big jib and vast leg-o"-mutton mainsail, she seems to skim the waters like a fish on the flats.

This is why efforts are being made to save the vessels that are historic symbols of a time and place. The age of the boats and the punky bottoms and brittle masts that come from deferred maintenance during years of waning harvests make preservation urgent. Few owners can afford to keep their craft in good repair. In November 2000 the 50-year-old "City of Crisfield" went down at her dock in Cambridge, Md., rotten from the keel up. A year before that the 113-year-old "Rebecca T. Ruark, oldest skipjack of all, foundered in a storm near the mouth of the Choptank River.

With funds from the state and preservation groups, one by one the skipjacks have been hauled ashore, practically dissembled, then plut back afloat with sound timbers. Sums spent, a cap of $50,000 per boat, would astound those who built the boats generations ago. Skipjacks once were many because their design was simple and cheap. Their box construction requires fewer supports or ribs and is called for in round-hulled vessels. Supposedly a competent house carpenter could put one together for a few hundred dollars. But that was the 1890s, when hand labor hardly cost and huge trees could still be found here. Plentiful oysters repaid the expense in a few seasons.

Today the ship's share of a year's harvest might barely buy the mast. One day at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, where the skipjacks are being restored, Russell Dize, whose 101-year-old skipjack "Kathryn" was in line for a new 12-foot-long stern plank, shook his head at the cost. Dize's grandfather built the boat in 1903 for $500. Today, he figures, it would cost $200,000. "Kathryn" will stay moored that season. "It's the first year I'm not dredging," Dize says. "We have no oysters in our area. You have to go to the head of the bay to find any, and they can't last very long."

What happens on the deck of a skipjack that does venture out is nothing a yachtsman would enjoy. On "Thomas Clyde" there is no hauling of sheets or reefing of sails because the canvas stays furled, but much to do with shovels and throttles. Powered or not it's hard-muscle work. Up comes a big steel-toothed basket on each side of the boat. The baskets are about four feet long and weigh about a hundred pounds, and most scoops bring up a couple hundred pounds more of bottom glop. Two crewmen grab either end of the basket, dump it on the steel-plated deck, heave it back overboard, drop to their knees to pick through the load for oysters, then get to their feet and shovel what's left over the side -- and up again comes the basket.

This happens every few minutes for nine hours, with just one 20-minute break below for yellow cheese sandwiches. It's as monotonous as any assembly line but far more strenuous than factory work today. But all day long the men are trading jokes and laughing.

On the starboard basket is Russell Swift, 31, with a wife and children at home down in Crisfield. He spends nights aboard the skipjack while the boat works the northern bay. He'll get maybe $500 for two days' work. "It's not a lot for what we do to earn it," admits Swift. "I probably won't clear more than $6,000 for the season. It's hard, it's cold. I miss my family -- and I love it. It's what I want to do. You're your own man."

Once, you had to be your own sheriff, too. Two hundred miles long by 30 miles at its widest, the bay was as lawless a region as the nation has known. Battles on the bay began as early as 1812 when New England schooners, having scraped their beds clean, began showing up in the Chesapeake. Local watermen armed their boats and tried to drive ou the damn Yankees; they were outgunned. In response, Maryland banned all dredging but could not enforce the law.

Long after the West was considered tamed, the escalating violence became the so-called Oyster Wars. Fighting over the bounty became three-way among the locals: "hand-tongers" in small bateaux, skipjacks dredging under sail, and Maryland's new force of marine police -- nicknamed the Oyster Navy, which tried to limit the harvests. Watermen from Virginia traded shots with Marylanders, each claiming rights to the oyster beds. In 1888 the dredger crews of the notorious oyster pirate Gus Price fired volleys into what looked like a police steamer in the fog on the Chester River but turned out to be a steamboat filled with women and children. When Price returned to the Chester later that year, the Oyster Navy retaliated with howitzers. Two boats sank, drowning shanghaied crewmen Price had locked in the forepeaks.

The deliberate drowning of deck hands to avoid paying them was practiced into the 1900s. Captains were known for "paying off with the boom," letting it sweep crewmen over the side. A study then in the Geographical Review stated, "Dredging in Maryland is simply a general scramble, carried on in 700 boats, manned by 5,600 daring and unscrupulous men, who regard neither the laws of God or man. . .These men taken as a class form perhaps one of the most depraved bodies of workmen to be found in the country. They are gathered from jails, penitentiaries, workhouse and the lowest vilest dens of the city. Many are foreigners. . .unable to speak more than a few words of English."

Shootouts between low-county Marylanders and their counterparts from Virginia continued all the way into the 1950s. In the final incident, three Virginians slipped out from Colonial Beach to dredge beds inside the mouth of the Potomac. Lying in wait, Maryland oyster police killed one waterman and wounded another.

Killing a man over oysters was too much for the public to tolerate in 1959. A shakeup of Maryland's marine force was followed by negotiations between the two states over harvest rights. Three years later President John F. Kennedy signed a law establishing a bistate fisheries commission to conserve marine resources of the region.

The Oyster Wars were over and nobody won. The big loser was the oyster.

The Chesapeake was once the perfect habitat for one of the most fertile animals on the planet, a sex-changing bivalve that, as a male, spews millions of sperm, and when a female expels millions of eggs. The 2,500 square miles of the bay provided the ideal mix of fresh and salt water for oyster reproduction. Scientists calculate that the filter feeders once numbered so many that they cycled and cleaned the bay's more than 18,000 billion gallons of water every few days. Now so few survive that it takes them a year to do the job.

The record catch was 15 million bushels, in 1884. The annual average held at several million bushels for the next 90 years. The final good oyster year was 1986, with 1.6 million bushels. In recent years the catch has been below 40,000 bushels.

The bay is choking on sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus that are the by-products of human and animal wastes, fertilizers and auto emissions. Some 290 sewage treatment plants in the Chesapeake watershed make no effort to remove nitrogen from their waste streams -- contributing to a yearly load of 300 million gallons oozing into the bay.
The problems aren't confined to water quality. Half the forests that once stood here have vanished, along with vast underwater meadows of grass that served as habitat for marine life.

Conservation has made some little progress. Volunteers are planting bay grasses, increasing the acreage from 38,000 in 1984 to 69,000 in 2000. More than 1,400 miles of riparian forest buffers have been established.

Still, the oyster is in decline. Two of the big killers are little things, microbes -- Dermo and MSX -- for which no remedy is known. The parasites are harmless to humans but lethal to oysters. Many watermen push for transplanting disease-resistant Asian oysters to the bay. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wary of reintroducing an alien species, resists.

As the oyster harvest dwindles, some skipjacks have switched to "dredging" for tourists. It can be noble work if done right and the people taken aboard are made to see their own accountability for what has happened to the bay. Each of the 15 million people living in the broad watershed is in some part responsible for the plight of its waters, say environmentalists. The bay is a favored place of recreation for many of them. To net this market, several captains have converted their skipjacks for charters.

Andy McCown captains the skipjack "Elsworth," owned by the Echo Hill Outdoor School, north of Chestertown, Md. It accommodates half a dozen students who live and sleep aboard for five days and nights as she cruises the Chesapeake. McCown and his two crew members teach them how to analyze bay sediments and build aquariums on board that recreate the marine food chain.

McCown thinks this is how skipjacks fishing for a reason to keep afloat might find a purpose. How satisfying that may be for watermen is another matter. Most captains would rather have piles of silent oysters on their decks than a heap of noisy people. McCown reluctantly quit dredging in 1996. "That was the first time in 94 years the "Elsworth" didn't go oystering," he says sadly. "But I felt like I was chasing the last oyster."

Even so, McCown and other captains believe the bay suffers more from what people have done on land than from what's been done on the water. That's proved, they argue, by the fact oyster stocks stayed plentiful for most of a century even as the watermen took huge harvests. "The oysters could come back," McCown insists. "If we'd clean up the watershed, oysters could revive. Only I don't think it will be done," he adds, "in my life span."

Of Dogs and Men

As time goes by I keep missing my old dog Luke. And I killed him.

His fate was set the day my ex-girlfriend called and said we had to do something about him. At that point she and I couldn't get along anymore, but we did share, amicably, custody of Luke. I'd keep him awhile until I had to take a trip, then I'd pass him to her. She'd do the same. He seemed happy enough to be with either of us and ran eagerly into whichever house he was revisiting.

Now there were to be no more returns. He had pancreatic cancer, she reported, and an operation would cost thousands of dollars, and the vet wasn't encouraging about the outcome. Also, Luke's hip displasia had become so severe that he had difficulty getting up, and the condition had led to pelvic nerve damage, and he was losing bowel control.

Wasn't it time to put him down? Would I go with her to the vet's, for support?

(Read more)

Welcome to the Buzzards' Roost

The swallows that swarm to San Juan Capistrano are fabled, and that's not fair. What about another winged wonder of another charming place just about as rich in history and architecture and seasonal blessings. Honor is overdue to the birds that gather at the crossroads here as darkness closes, like sentinels of the night, so comforting to the people in their homes.

Yes, the buzzards of Chestertown. How come nobody celebrates them, I don't know.

(read more)

What the Light of the Firefly Shows

Summer nights on the Eastern Shore are orgies of sex and death. Everyone can see that just by stepping outside.

Consider, for a voyeuristic thrill, Mrs. Byrne's field. What goes on there on the far side of my barn would make anybody but a naturalist blush. In daytime all that's apparent are tall grasses and darting bluebirds, goldfinches, swallows and redwing blackbirds. Ah, but the nights. Then come the seductive, and the lethal, lights.

Fireflies.

(To read more)

Of Dogs and Men

As time goes by I keep missing my old dog Luke. And I killed him.

His fate was set the day my ex-girlfriend called and said we had to do something about him. At that point she and I couldn't get along anymore, but we did share, amicably, custody of Luke. I'd keep him awhile until I had to take a trip, then I'd pass him to her. She'd do the same. He seemed happy enough to be with either of us and ran eagerly into whichever house he was revisiting.

Now there were to be no more returns. He had pancreatic cancer, she reported, and an operation would cost thousands of dollars, and the vet wasn't encouraging about the outcome. Also, Luke's hip displasia had become so severe that he had difficulty getting up, and the condition had led to pelvic nerve damage, and he was losing bowel control.

Wasn't it time to put him down? Would I go with her to the vet's, for support?

I did and it was worse than I'd expected. Luke sensed the difference of the visit. He was subdued, trembling. The needle didn't deliver death as quickly as I'd thought it would. He shuddered in my hands and took faltering breaths, struggling for life as every living thing does before he went still. I rushed from the room, leaving my old girlfriend to wrap up details -- arranging Luke's cremation, ordering his ashes delivered to me --while I cried in her car. So much for manly support.

Luke was 11, not so old for a border collie. I had foreordained his death on this day by another decision I'd made several years before when his hip condition began to get serious. Quit throwing balls and Frisbees to him, the vet advised then. Take him for walks on a leash and he'll get sufficient exercise, and he'll live longer.

I refused the advice. Luke was of a breed developed to run 50 miles in a day. When cooped up he made mischief or moped. Let him have a shorter and happier life, I decided. As long as he wanted to race around the park, I'd let him. Hard play was his nature.

Dog smarts, I believe, is something often misunderstood by dog's best friend. Often what we consider their intelligence is really instinctive behavior. This isn't to say Luke wasn't smart, too, because he was, but I came to see that much of his intensity was purely his nature. When the time came I could decide on his length of life, I couldn't deny his instincts any more than he could.

Here's what I think proves this: my new dog. When I moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore I decided mourning Luke for five years was long enough, and it was time to love a new dog. I chose a breed appropriate for hunting lands and one locally bred, a golden retriever. Tallulah, my little female, does some things better than Luke ever could. When I toss the ball for her, she "tracks," following with her head up, watching its flight, marking where it goes down, as retrievers are bred to do. Luke never could retrieve, not really. He'd go racing off before I could throw, and if I made the toss while he was running he could rarely find it. What he liked to do was run out in a hook-shaped pattern, then stop and stare back at me. Then I could make the toss and he'd get it. He'd bring it back but never to my knee as Tallulah does. He'd drop it a little short of me. I never could train him to bring it that last six or eight feet. He'd look at me and then stare intently at the ball, like he was making sure it didn't try to bounce away on its own.

Luke wasn't retrieving, he was herding. He was running that hook pattern as if circling to the far side of a clump of sheep. Anyone who's ever seen a border collie trial will catch on to why he always stopped a little short on the return. Luke was staying back and on the other side of it to make sure that little round bouncy sheep didn't bolt away from us. Bred to do it.

I'm not suggesting Tallulah or any golden is, or isn't, smarter than Luke or any border collie. But consider: when Tallulah's urge to relieve herself comes on her, she stops retrieving and hunkers there with her pink ball in her mouth. It's a comical sight but it's pretty good dog etiquette. When the same need came on Luke, he drop his toy, do a 180-degree turn and frequently make his deposit right on it. Then he'd look around, discover the accident and turn to me with a stare of deep perplexity as if to say, "Will you come look at this? Somebody just $#&+ on my Frisbee."

He wasn't about to grab it in his teeth, either, until I walked over and made matters right. To be fair to Luke, it's likely his displaysia was already damaging pelvic nerves and his need to relieve himself was catching him by surprise. Yeah, I still miss him and the tricks he played on himself.

My playing God with his lifespan got personal a little while back when I saw my doctor about my arythmia. He suggested I take coumadin, a blood thinner that can, maybe, stop heart attacks and strokes. I refused it. I use a wood-splitter, climb ladders, ride a bike, go kayaking, hunt when I'm invited -- activities a prudent person with chemically thinned blood would quit. The doctor said he wouldn't want to take the stuff either but, "Just don't blame us if. . ."

I won't. My frailties are hugely due to how I've lived, the 40 years I smoked, the nights of eerie ruckus. I don't claim my behaviors were instinctive, but all are definitely in my nature. As I accepted responsibility for shortening Luke's life, I have to take full blame for a lifetime of chasing after and herding home the fleece and not complain about that nasty surprise, someday when no one can make things right, I'll find upon my Frisbee.