Portraits By Ryan Hulvat
Officer Mike Dobson
You bet there’s such a thing as “crab larceny.” And Officer Mike Dobson will be the first to tell you that it’s a misdemeanor worthy of a $2,500 fine and/or up to twelve months in jail. And, mister, that’s not a threat; that’s a promise.
Based out of Gloucester, Virginia, Marine Patrol Officer Dobson rides the waters of the York River and Mobjack Bay aboard a 23-foot Seahawk, protecting and conserving the state’s natural resources. Dobson, like his fellow marine patrol officers, is also a deputized federal agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. “When I started twenty-four years ago, it was just like being a fisheries inspector with very limited police powers-no weapons or anything,” he says. “But in the late ‘80s they decided to arm us, making us marine policemen. We’re like state troopers on the water. I like the diversity of it-I’m not sitting behind a desk doing the same thing that I did yesterday.”
Dobson is one of sixty-five marine patrol officers responsible for covering 5,000 miles of shoreline encompassing the regions of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, the James, York, and Rapahannock rivers, Virginia’s portion of the Potomac, and the state’s tidal waters, which include the Eastern Shore’s sea side and Bay side.
There are his typical tasks: checking for fishing licenses, proper-sized catch, and boat registrations’ notifying watermen of the Virginia Marine Resource Commission’s monthly changes in fisheries regulations. And then there’s the less predictable side of his job: search and rescue, plainclothes undercover work, investigating boating accidents, poacher-patrolling contaminated creeks for the National Shellfish Sanitation Program. Says Dobson: “In general, people are much more law abiding than they were twenty-four years ago in both commercial and recreational areas, especially the recreational.”
The foundation of all of Dobson’s duties is the mental library he must keep on the characteristics of and regulatory laws on the thirty-one species of fish and shellfish he inspects in both commercial and recreational fishermen’s catches. “You’re trying to conserve and protect the state’s natural resources for everybody and everybody’s children. To me, that’s an inspiring thing. I have a great respect for the Bay. If you’ve ever been caught in really rough seas it can be your best friend or your worst enemy.”
img src="http://www.chesapeakelifemag.com/images/features/out_2.jpg" width="200" height="268" border="0" align="right" alt="Tommy Crouch">
Tommy Crouch
Tightrope walker, traffic cop, gardener, tactician-it’s all in a day’s work for Tommy Crouch. Crouch, maintenance crew leader at the Chesapeake Bay bridge, and his four-man team oversee the bridge’s eastbound span, repairing potholes and overhead lane signals, replacing navigational lights atop the suspension bridge towers and below the roadbed, and checking the taughtness of the countless bolts and rivets that secure the bridge’s piers, as well as tending to the landscaping on the Eastern Shore side of the bridge. With his powers to close and open lanes, he’s also the guy responsible for those interminable summer days in traffic you’ve had the non-pleasure of spending en route to the beach. “Most people that ride by don’t see all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes,” says Crouch. “All they see is a traffic cone out there, and they want to yell at someone for putting it there. If it’s out there, it’s there for a reason.”
No acrophobia here. The impressive acrobatics involved with walking the 16-inch diameter cables leading to the navigational lights some 385 feet above the water classify Crouch as half cat. “The preferred way by most maintenance people is to walk the cables, which are outside, or climb inside the tower that’s inside the steel structure where it’s narrow and not well ventilated,” says the former waterman nonchalantly. “Your first time up is a little scary for most. It’s a real nice view when you get up there. On a clear day you want to bring your camera-you can see all of Baltimore. But the way traffic is nowadays I’d rather be on the catwalk than on roadbed.”
Crouch says that his job is not for the faint of heart-or heights. At least once a year, each new kid on the bridge must pass the “agility test” on the catwalk, the narrow walkway of 12-inch beams that stretches three-quarters of the way across the bridge’s underbelly. Says Crouch, “Some get out there and freeze up and that’s it. The hard part is getting them down. It’s not for everybody. But it’s always something different.”
Clint Evans
“Kennel-up,” Clint Evans mumbles to his yellow Labrador in the cold blackness of an unthinkably early hour when even the shadows have yet to waken. Into an even colder, mud-encrusted pickup the hunting dog and the hunting guide climb. Evans softly guns the engine, hurtling the truck though the weakening darkness toward his camouflaged “office” in a remote Eastern Shore cornfield. By dawn’s early light the two, with clients in tow, are settled into a duck blind battered by a biting November wind with jaws more determined than a hounddog’s in a steak house.
Owner of Chestertown-based Fair Winds Gun Club, Evans has been a hunting guide for twenty years. He guides with his good-ol’-boy sidekicks Michael McBride (a country songwriter for stars like Johnny Paycheck), who’s been hunting since he can remember, and Billy Quade, who’s been guiding for six years. “We’ve all been huntin’ all our lives,” says Evans. It’s definitely a job that you have to love, and we all do.”
Although his outfitter’s license is applicable Maryland-wide, Evans only guides in Kent County. His preferred territory extends 3,500 acres from Rock Hall to Galena on land leased from farmers whom he pays in various forms of currency-taxidermy, cash, his wife’s homemade fudge. Explains Evans, “We treat these farms like they’re our own-probably better than our own.”
Evans’s clients are primarily East Coast corporate types, who book the pleasure of his eagle-eye services from September 1 (the opening of dove season) through the middle of March (the end of snow goose season). “Our job is to give our hunters the opportunity to pull the trigger,” he says. “Eighty percent of our job is not in the blind with the party; it is out scouting. There’s so much prep work-blinds, decoys, trailers. That’s the majority of what we do. The easiest part of our job is walking into the blind with the party and saying, ‘We’re hunting now.’”
Of the total number of licensed commercial hunting guides in Maryland, Evans estimates that 80 percent are no longer working. “We’ve been fortunate,” says Evans. “When the moratorium on Canada geese started six years ago, our corporate clientele stayed with us because we were getting into snow geese and duck hunting. We had to diversify in terms of our business because we were strictly Canada goose hunters. Most everybody else went out of business. There’s only a few of us left.”
Evans understands and greatly respects the symbiotic relationship between conservation of the species he hunts and the viability of his profession. “We will not be successful unless we manage the birds,” he stresses. “In the spring we drain the ponds, let them dry out, plant them, and reflood them in the fall even though they’re someone else’s property. We will harvest a small percentage of the birds we are providing for. We send so many more birds back North in good breeding condition, well fed.” Adds his guide McBride, “Gotta be a giver. Can’t be a taker all the time. And there’s a difference between a hunter and a killer.”
Stephen Griffin
Artist Stephen Griffin takes his cue from the sun, following the light’s path to the precise hours when all is revealed in its truest and most distinct color.
Although he makes his living as a portrait painter, Griffin’s interest in painting boats began as an escape from the confines of his studio and quickly metamorphosed into another facet of his artistic career. Skipjacks, schooners, crab boats, and buy boats have become his outdoor portraits. “The Chesa-peake is a distinct place-the color, the light, the work boats, the people who work them. These elements I try to capture in my paintings.”
A Philadelphia native, Griffin moved to Maryland to study with renowned portrait artists Cedric and Joanette Egeli. “The first time I met them, Joanette said to me, ‘You need to learn how to draw, and you need to learn how to paint.’ With that, he dropped out of the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia to apprentice with the Egelis. “To have somebody come along and say that really opened my eyes,” he laughs. “They introduced me to impressionism which, to me, was a revelation of color and light. I started seeing things as they really are, not the way we think they should be. The sky ceased to be blue, the leaves ceased to be green. You’re literally seeing on a different level. Your eyes are opened to the true visual reality that God has created.”
While the rest of us have no trouble finding fault with the dog breath-like air that characterizes Maryland summers, Griffin finds a friend in the region’s famous humidity. “I like the light around here because there is so much humidity. It puts a haze over everything. The light has to go through the haze, and it sets up beautiful screens of atmosphere. That explains such a beautiful principle: space receding in color.”
During the “R” months, you’ll most likely find Griffin painting in Tilghman, Galesville, or Deale. “I remember painting down by the docks with a couple of friends,” he recalls. “Our paintings were drying, lined up in a row. I heard a deep, raspy voice like that of a modern-day captain Ahab. ‘Who painted this painting?’ the waterman said. He was pointing at my painting. He said, ‘I’ve been around here for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of people try to paint these boats, but nobody gets the lines right. This is my boat, and you got her right.’ That was probably one of my happier days. That means I’m doing something right. Watermen know their boats-they understand the spirit of the place. There’s a lot of painters out there who paint boats and put in all the details and make them very exact and precise, but they miss something. They miss the spirit.”
Jake Haynie
Roondooney. Mammywhacker. Buntbuster. Nicknames for your grandmother’s girdle? Perhaps for some, but among spotter pilots like Jake Haynie these unusual, comical terms are slang names for large schools of menhaden. “This job is funny at times, and it’s serious at times, too. Watermen-they’re kind of a serious bunch.”
A fish spotter for twenty-three years, Haynie is the chief pilot for Reedville, Virginia-based Omega Protein, the largest menhaden reduction plant on the Atlantic Coast and a commercial resident of the Northern Neck for one hundred years. Spotter pilots like Haynie have been used by the Reedville plant since the 1950s. The plant currently employs eight pilots who are stationed throughout the southern Bay region.
On Sunday, the day before the menhaden boats head out of Reedville, Haynie sends his pilots out on patrol-one pilot is sent as far north as New York, one as far south as the South Carolina line, two directly over Virginia’s Bay waters where the bulk of the fish are caught. At the end of the day, Haynie calls in a report to the boat captains, telling them the amount of fish seen and where, as well as the weather conditions and forecast in those areas.
Conditions permitting, daylight Monday morning the plant’s ten refrigerated steel purse seine boats, averaging 170 feet long and capable of carrying 450 tons of menhaden, leave for the predetermined fishing holes. They won’t return until their goal weight has been caught. The catch is then processed into fish meal and oil and sold to poultry houses as a high-protein supplement or shipped overseas for cooking oil. Throughout the week, Haynie and his team continue spotting, spending up to five hours at a time in the air locating schools of menhaden. “It’s exciting and it’s boring all at the same time,” says Haynie. “It’s not like a nine-to-five job. When you take off in the mornings, you don’t really ever know where you ‘re going to end up. You might leave here in the morning and spend the night in New York.”
Like the blue crab and oyster, the menhaden faces its own challenges. “We’ve lost a lot of fishing ground in the last ten years. We used to be able to fish up to the shoreline in states like New Jersey, Delaware-not Maryland, we’ve never been allowed to fish in Maryland-but now we have to be a mile and two-tenths off the beach on the whole coast in New Jersey, and they’re pushing to extend that line to 3 miles and we’ve been legislated out of Delaware. It’s a full-time job for our managers to keep the fishing grounds open.”
Nevertheless, the face of the Bay has become an old friend to Haynie. “All spotter pilots know every nook and cranny on the Bay,” he says. “We know every river, where all the shallow water is, where we can set a net and can’ t set a net. When you look at the Bay every day for twenty years, it’s gotta sink in.”
Dr. Cindy Driscoll
There’s an undeniably deep-seeded connection between the people of the Bay region and the wildlife that team in its skies and watershed. Few are as concerned with fostering this relationship as Dr. Cindy Driscoll.
Dr. Driscoll is the founder and project leader of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) Fish and Wildlife Health Program which provides research, mortality response, monitoring, and educational outreach focused on the state’s wildlife and living aquatic resources. On this particular day, Dr. Driscoll has come to Tuckahoe State Park to examine several rehabilitated hawks and owls that have retired to the park and now star in Maryland’s Scales and Tales wildlife education program. Although these birds are veterans at being handled, they screech like panicked toddlers in a pediatrician’s office. Dr. Driscoll talks to them softly, encouraging their patience as she takes each bird through a five-minute ornithological physical, checking overall body condition, wings, and heart as well as taking base-line blood samples. The results of these tests enable Dr. Driscoll to help the Scales and Tails program develop health regimes for the captive birds, and also serve as useful research tools in dealing with disease outbreaks in free-ranging fish and wildlife disease outbreaks like West Nile Virus found in birds and Hemorrhagic Disease found in dear that have the potential to effect large populations of the state’s natural resources.
Dr. Driscoll is also the founder of the Maryland DNR Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Stranding Response Program, administered jointly by the DNR at the Cooperative Oxford Laboratory and in cooperation with the National Aquarium in Baltimore. She and her team of five biologists are contacted when a whale or harp seal carcass beaches on Assateague island and requires a necropsy (animal autopsy), or when a stranded-loggerhead turtle appears in Ocean City requiring examination. “Some of the strandings are from natural causes like disease and old age,” she says. “However, human interactions are one of the primary causes of death. By conducting complete examinations and collecting and analyzing samples we obtain information leading us to the cause of death.”
Dr. Driscoll explains that the marine mammal stranding program has yielded some exciting discoveries in the Bay. Before the stranding network began, sea turtles were not well documented in Maryland waters. Thanks to the research efforts by Dr. Driscoll and her team, there are now records of sea turtles including Loggerhead, Kemp’s Ridley (the world’s most endangered sea turtle), and Leatherbacks as far north as the Chester River.
Dr. Driscoll has found the ideal outlet for her training in veterinary medicine. “I couldn’t have dreamed up a better job than what I have now-everyone at DNR has been very supportive and sees the value of what we’re doing,” she says. “This is where I grew up, and I want to contribute to the Bay.”
Dr. Susan Langley
“Archeology by braille.” That’s how Dr. Susan Langley describes her job as Maryland’s state underwater archaeologist. “We haven’t had one big, sexy wreck like the Queen Anne’s Revenge or the La Belle,” she laments. “They keep telling me, ‘Well, go find one!’ But have you ever seen the visibility out here?”
Surprisingly, there are only eighteen states that have formal underwater archeology programs, which Maryland has had for more than a decade. “We have one of the most active programs-we’re really well respected,” says Langley. “And I’m the only woman in the country in my position. It does make for interesting meetings-me and the boys.”
Relying on the “eyes” of remote sensing equipment, Langley and her staff of two use technology like side-scan sonar, magnetometers, and subbottom profiling to locate Maryland’s submerged history. And while the state’s Bay waters aren’t a veritable hotbed for shipwrecks, Langley has uncovered her fair share of exciting finds. “For an archaeologist, we live in terror of finding gold or jewelry or anything because it’s such a miasma of problems. Around here the neat things we found were the War of 1812 sites and the Pemberton Wharf down in Salisbury. It turns out it’s the earliest bulkhead-style wharf in the country and probably the second earliest wharf that I could find dates for-1747. That made the board of the Pemberton Hall Foundation very happy.”
Judging by the amount of attention she and her staff give to educational outreach through organizations such as the Maritime Archeological Historical Society, the message is clear that not many know the laws that protect Maryland’s underwater artifacts. “Anything below mean high tide is state property, and you can pick up to five items that are exposed-once,” she stresses. “You can’t go back tomorrow and do it again.” “Even if they’re exposed, you’re supposed to tell us where they are were, what you’ve found. It’s like anything else, you need to get a hunting license to hunt, a driver’s license to drive, and an archaeological permit to [dig on a site]. We have two weeks to give you an answer on it and say, ‘No it’s not important, have fun,’ or ‘Holy cow, you’ve found the Ark of the Covenant.’”
Yet misguided souvenir hunters remain Langley’s number-one concern: “I’m also a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer on the side, and I can get people while they’re still learning and say, ‘If I catch you stealing stuff off sites, you will get busted,’ and educate them early before it occurs to them to go out and pillage sites. I’ve got a herd of treasure hunters-they love to rat each other out. They figure if they tell me what everybody else is doing, I’ll leave them alone. Then I just go talk to their buddy, and their buddy tells me what they’re doing. If they’re doing something that’s not really, really horrible, I kind of leave them alone, I try find projects and other ways to involve the public whether they’re divers or not, because if I know where they are, I know where they’re not.”
Currently the state’s big underwater archaeology push is two fold: the War of 1812 Initiative, a statewide project joining the Office of Tourism Development, the Navy, and the National Parks Service through the American Battlefields Protection Program, and on going maintenance on the state’s first underwater preserve, the German submarine U-1105, sunk during Cold War testing. Efforts are also being made to make Charles County’s Mallows Bay the state’s second preserve. “We’re trying to survey and inventory the whole state-all the state waters. We’ve done not even 5 percent in ten years because of budgetary concerns.”
Canadian by birth, Langley had been teaching underwater archeology in Thailand prior to accepting the Maryland post. “It’s very, very rare these days to find a job in exactly what you’re trained in. I mean, what an opportunity.”
A model attitude coming from a woman who is forced to wear a bathing suit all year ‘round.
Greg and Laura Lohse
He majored in oceanography, she in earth science, with a meteorology emphasis. Together they mesh into a combination of earth, sky, and water-personalities given to transient motion like the nature of the elements they’ve studied. Yet recently Greg and Laura Lohse have found themselves settling into an uncharacteristically domestic routine as charter boat captains, operating tours out of their adopted hometown of Cape Charles, Virginia.
Although this is only the Lohses’ sixth summer in the charter business, neither is a stranger to a career on the water. The two met while working on a tall ship sail-training and research vessels, which they continued to do until deciding to go into business for themselves. They recently traded in their first charter boat, a 45-foot schooner, for a 63-foot, thirty-four passenger schooner, Serenity. They’re pretty much a self-sufficient team: he handles all the mechanics, rigging, welding, and carpentry. She does all the painting and helps with the rigging. Says Greg, “We like schooners because we both worked on them. It’s an easy rig for two people to handle and we like the look of it-it’s traditional and an attraction vessel.”
The Lohses explain that their ideal existence would be to do overnight ecotours in the summer and then head south for the winter. Says Greg, “We like to make those we take out aware of what’s going on with the Bay-let them know about the environment and the ecosystem. We tell them about the animals you can see, let them know the names of the birds that are common and rare, and the special problems they face. We also tell them about the endangered species around here-like the waterman. We want to convey the fragile nature of the Bay’s environment and the need to protect it. The more people we make aware, the more likely it will happen.”
In addition to her captain’s duties, Laura is the local harbor mistress, tending the transient boats, serving as a mini tourist information center, keeping track of the local fishermen’s catches, and collecting dockage. He’s also the local carpenter/builder in an Eastern Shore town currently enjoying an economic and architectural reawakening. But it’s the sailing that owns their hearts. “Laura and I are definitely voyagers, and so far the charters we’ve done have been really fun. It’s a good way to make a living.”
Gary Smith
If the feeble oyster population ever had a behind-the-scenes hero, it would be Gary Smith. Smith, a principal investigator with the mapping and analysis project at the DNR’s Cooperative Oxford Laboratory developing and working with high-tech equipment like Acoustic Seafloor Classification Systems (ASCS) to map the Bay floor in search of existing oyster bottom with good restoration potential.
Says Smith, “We’re working to develop these techniques for a lot of applications, but the current application is the condition of oyster habitat in the Bay. That’s the relevant issue that we chose because of the critical nature of what’s happening. Our goals right now are first, direct where oyster rehabilitation should go, and then assess the success of those restoration techniques. We want to get the science and the technology up to speed for the rehabilitation of the oyster.”
Traditionally, Maryland’s annual oyster restoration procedure has been to dredge shell from a site up near Pooles Island in the northern Bay and place it on the bottom as clean substrate to which young oysters can attach. But because this supply is now very limited, new rehabilitation methods must be designed.
According to Smith’s research team, oyster shell plantings typically last about three to five years before the natural processes of being covered with mud or sand occurs, rendering young oysters unable to find anything to settle on-these are the sites that are the best candidates for restoration. “We want to clean what’s down there-no one has done this before at all. One of the reasons why it hasn’t been done yet is without this type of information that we’re working on, you don’t know where to go to even begin. You have to have a map [of the bottom types] to make those choices of where to clean the bottom. These bottoms are so distinctly different. That level of distinction is what needs to be known before you can even begin to go to planning how to restore these bottoms.”
Enter “Bird"-the eyes with which Smith’s team is finding potential restoration sites on the Bay’s floor. “Bird” is an underwater sled custom-designed by Smith for the Bay’s turbid waters. It’s rigged with two variable-intensity lights and four lenses that film the bottom-the exact same lenses as those used to explore the Titanic. “Bird” is linked to a satellite navigation system and is dragged along the bottom by a research boat at a speed just fast enough to keep it ahead of its dirt cloud.
Field work is also a large part of Smith’s job: diving with his research crew, running surveys, and testing the acoustic test gear. He explains that worldwide, there are only fifteen organizations that are using subbottom acoustic technologies like ASCS. “I’m much more interested in improving and developing the technology for a wide range of habitat applications,” says Smith. “But right now this is the baby that needs it.”
Although Smith has spent most of his life working in estuarine science in British Columbia, he has developed very close ties to Bay. “I think of the Bay as a living thing, not as a piece of geography. It has its own particular type of beauty. I’m underwater a lot, in diving gear on the bottom. I like to get my hands down there and my nose in the mud-I see the Bay in a different light that way. I always get my eyeballs down on the bottom somehow.”
Barry Truitt
He’s the bird man of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. No wings, no cape even, just binoculars, patience as thick as his salt-and-pepper beard, and a mastered knack for tallying flocks of fast-flying birds. “Some people practice counting birds with M&M’s-they throw them on the ground, look at them really quick, make a guess, then actually count them. They say it improves the accuracy of the count. But I’ve never done it.”
Barry Truitt is chief biologist at The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Virginia Coast Reserve on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. He’s responsible for the maintenance, protection, and conservation of the biological diversity of Virginia’s barrier islands, with colonial birds and nesting shorebirds being his main management focus. “We’ve got about 75,000 pairs of colonial waterbirds that nest out on the barrier islands and in the marshes. Three-quarters of the colonial birds in the coastal plain of Virginia, including the Bay and the rivers, nest on the seaside.”
Truitt has helped TNC compile one of the longest-term databases on nesting birds on the Atlantic coast, twenty-six years worth of research that began in 1974. “It’s a really dynamic system, and even the birds are dynamic. Over half of the species that nest on the barrier islands and marshes have moved into this area in the last seventy-five years: pelicans moved in the mid ‘80s; cormorants are moving in now; Louisiana herons came up in the ‘30s; glossy ibis and cattle egrets came up from the south in the ‘50s. In partnership with the University of Virginia’s Long Term Ecological Research project and the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William & Mary, we received a Mellon Ecosystem grant to analyze how the islands have changed and how the bird colonies have changed in response. Last year, we observed the best productivity and the most young birds that we have seen in many years. Hopefully, the trends will continue to improve.”
Truitt explains that what makes the barrier islands so dynamic is not only the nesting bird populations, but also the constant changes they incur, from tides coming in and out to the rising sea level to 100-year storms that change whole landscapes. “I’m one of the few guys on the Atlantic coast that prays for a major hurricane, just for the ecological benefits of it. This is one of the first places an ecologist or scientist is going to be able to see the impacts of accelerated sea-level rise and global warming on coastal species, and a lot of it of it is going to be with these birds. We’ve had fifteen years now of real poor productivity of beach-nesting species, and they’re getting wiped out during the nesting season by full-moon high tides, not storms. It’s a huge natural experiment going on here. You can be an ecologist in the mountains and wait your lifetime to see some ecological change, and you can come out here and see change on a daily basis. It’s a neat natural laboratory. And that’s my management philosophy on islands: let nature take its course.”
In the last couple of years, Truitt has focused on globally important issues in the barrier island system like shorebird migration, shorebird and colonial bird productivity studies, landscape and ecosystem level changes, and wetland and upland restoration projects to create habitat for migratory birds and nesting colonial birds. He’s also been on the lookout for species declining in number all over the mid-Atlantic that has been historically recorded in the area but not spotted since 1920.
“I take a certain amount of pride in what I’ve been able to get done here in the past twenty-five years,” says Truitt. “We have the best handle on nesting birds anywhere on the mid-Atlantic. Conservation, in a lot of ways, I feel is the only battle worth fighting when you’re on earth. You’re trying to make it a better place for future generations. And I take a certain amount of pride in that, too.”
Marshall Cox
Marshall Cox was once told by a Virginia legislator that he’d make a great politician, if he weren’t so honest. Although Cox’s thoughts fall politely on the ear, Cox burns scant energy sugar-coating his opinions, preferring instead to live honestly-especially when it comes to his choice of career. “Very few people I’ve ever met in my life have told me that they love what they do,” he says. “I’ve always been blessed by that. You know when you’ve got a brand new job, and it’s the night before, and you can’t sleep, and you’ re all excited? Well, I’m that way every day of life. This is what I love to do. That’s what keeps me going. When I lose that is when I’ll stop. A lot of times I’ll complain, because the sun comes up a little bit too late for me or goes down a little bit too early.”
A fourth-generation waterman, Cox has been at it for thirty years. “When I was six or seven years old my dad started taking me. It never ended since then. I did my son the same way. When he was barely old enough to walk around he started going with me and he’s been doing it ever since. You have to understand that my son and myself-we have a unique working relationship. For thirteen years we’ve worked side by side and it’s just me and him. And when you leave the dock, days it’s just you two all the time until you get back. So many people never get that with their children. We work for 18 hours a day every day, me and him. On nasty days his life’s in my hands, and my life is in his hands. It’s pretty neat.”
Cox, head of the Lower Eastern Shore Waterman’s Association which he founded five years ago, works aboard the Mary Robin crab-potting in the spring, fish-potting and gill-netting in the summer, crab-dredging in the winter, and year-round he leases land from the state for clam and oyster aquaculture. “More in the last five years I’ve put more time into other industries on the water. Used to be 75 percent crabbin’ in a year’s time, and now that’s probably down to 40 percent. I’ve backed away from crabs a little bit because it’s just not there. I’d a never gotten into aquaculture if the crab industry had never changed. For years you’d just get up, put your boots on, and go to work. The harder you went at it, the better you did. Then it got to the point in crabbing that the harder you go, you could barely can make it. That’s why I turned to raising these oysters and clams.”
It’s the competitive spirit that drives a waterman to rise before dawn and get home after dark, Cox explains. The longer they work, chances are the more fruitful the rewards will be for their hard labor. “My best friend told me, ‘Marshall, you know what’s gonna happen to us? We’re gonna die going to work, comin’ from work, or workin’.’ And that’s exactly what he did. And that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. We don’t never stop. I’ve never met a waterman yet who just actually retired. They just keep goin’.”
Dr. Charles Wagner
His wife left the house to buy a car and came home with a hot air balloon. Recalls Dr. Charles Wagner, founder of “The First State’s Hot Air Balloon Team,” “The used car dealership was offering free rides so my wife came home telling me that we really had to do this. So she signed us both up for lessons-the rest is history.”
Wagner and his wife, Patt, spend at least one day a week with their team of six taking their balloon, the 90 foot tall and 90 foot wide Dellabear, around the region attending festivals from Norfolk to Philadelphia promoting Delaware tourism and the Cape May and Lewes Ferry. For the past thirteen years, the Wagners have also organized Milton’s annual Delaware Balloon Festival, raising money for the local chapter of the American Diabetes Association’s camp for children with type-1 diabetes. Says Wagner, “I used to fly helicopters in Vietnam and later during medical school flew regular planes. But the difference between a hot air balloon and a plane is like the difference between a sailboat and a powerboat. This is three-dimensional sailing. We move at 5-7 miles per hour, an average speed of a sailboat. You have to have a much better knowledge of air movement and weather for this than you do for regular flying.”
While the Delaware Bay is too wide to cross, Wagner finds the Chesapeake an ideal ballooning venue. “It’s an unusual place to fly. The land and the water masses make it a challenging place to fly. We’ve flown over St. Michaels, Oxford, Kent Island, and Chincoteague using the rivers as avenues. Oxford was the best-it’s beautiful on the ground but over the water you see all those beautiful farms in the area and the beautiful landscape before you. You don’t know how beautiful the Bay is until you fly over it at sunrise.”
Kevin Colbeck
The field has become his second home. And it’s here that Kevin Colbeck has chosen to focus his energies-amid the wide-open spaces of the country, nourished by the satisfaction that comes from working the soil for the benefit of the land and the wildlife living within its quiet protection.
For the last seven years, Colbeck has been working in wildlife habitat and restoration, balancing his concentration between planting native grasses for both brood habitat and cover for wildlife and working in conjunction with the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s conservation reserve program (CRP) and conservation reserve enhancement program (CREP). Through these two programs, landowners are paid to remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and instead establish conservation plantings for wildlife in the form of warm-season grasses, trees, and riparian buffers.
Colbeck is one of a handful of independent planters in Maryland whom CRP- and CREP-participating landowners are currently employing to put in these plantings. He explains, “The majority of my clients are landowners who don’t have the equipment or time to fool with it, or farmers who need the wisdom of some of these programs, but who don’t want to stop their operations when they’re in the middle of planting corn or beans. It’s really a great program-great for low-productivity land. It’s kind of at the point where everyone who wants to do something good has jumped on it and now is trying to educate other farmers about the environmental and financial benefits of these programs-it’s a good way to go.”
Colbeck found the inspiration to begin his own wildlife habitat and restoration business while in his most natural habitat, hunting. “I was hunting on a farm that held some quail, and we wanted to improve the hunting, he says. If you don’t have brood habitat for them to breed in and to escape predators, you’re not going to get the birds. So the warm-season grasses are the answer to that. I talked to the landowner, who thought it was a good idea, so we did it-we had great success in creating stands of native warm-season grasses. The next thing I know the Department of Natural Resources guys are calling me up. It just grew, and people were calling me to do their jobs. And then it made sense to go into it full-blown.”
The habitat plantings Colbeck typically uses for cover crop are warm-season grasses like big blue stem, little blue stem, Indian grass, switch grass, and cool-season grasses like orchard grass, white clover, and Chewing’s fescue. He explains that these grasses are great habitat for quail, meadowlarks, grass sparrows, turkey, and deer as well as for intercepting nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment run off from fields before it can reach streams, rivers, or the Bay. Not only are these plantings environmentally functional, but they lend added beauty to acreage, as both warm-season and cool-season grasses typically include a wildflower mix that combines Black-eyed Susan, Lance-leaved Coreopsis, and Purple Coneflower.
The ultimate goal of Colbeck’s planting efforts is conservation. “I feel like I’m making a difference,” says Colbeck. “I know that I’m doing a good thing as far as the environment and the Bay. I know I’ve made my mark on a piece of property that’ll be there for at least ten or fifteen years. I’m creating a natural prairie like it was hundreds of years ago. Kind of cool.”
