The House at Royal Oak (10 page)

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. This 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.”

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 clearly 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.

Coughing and wiping plaster dust from his face with a bandanna, Hugo Junior walked beside him. I trailed close enough to listen but far enough back to stay out of any “discussion.” When his dad turned abruptly and headed back down the porch steps for the waiting car, Hugo stopped coughing enough to say, “Come on, Dad, I'll show you around inside.”

“No, thanks. Got to get back to Washington.”

“But you just got here. Don't you want something to drink or eat?”

“No, thanks.” He reached for the car door.

“Did I ever tell you . . .” His father stood there, seemingly lost in thought.

“Dad? Maybe you should come inside and rest before you leave.”

“No, we're leaving in a minute. As I was saying, did I tell you about the time I got a call from the State Department? They wanted me to go to the Mideast, maybe to operate on someone. When we landed, I found out we were in Baghdad and that the president of the country had disappeared. This other guy was in charge, Saddam Hussein. Some thuggish bodyguards drove me across the city to an impressive building and took me to an upper floor. I came into a room and the first thing I saw was a circle of eighteen gilt chairs. I recognized physicians from all the major countries sitting there. Then I noticed at the head of the room, up on a platform in a big bed, was Hussein. He was having back problems. They wanted a diagnosis from each doctor.