Where the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Begins

On November 6, 2010, Jill Bieri of Chesapeake Experience led a Walk and Talk at New Quarter Park. I took this picture of her standing beside a drawing of the Chesapeake Bay watershed that was made by some of her campers. She laid it out on the basketball court in order to explain the definition of a watershed and just how large the 64,000 square mile Chesapeake Bay watershed is. It includes all or parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia and West Virginia. Its Susquehanna River headwater begins at Otsego Lake, in Cooperstown, New York.

As the Walk and Talk group moved from the spot where Jill began the program to Queen's Creek, where she talked more about the Bay's ecology, I overheard one of the participants saying that he remembered reading about the Susquehanna's headwaters in The Pioneers, the first of the so-called Leatherstocking Tales by the first great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper. I interrupted to tell him about my Driving Around the Chesapeake Bay Watershed project, and he was kind enough to find, copy, and send the reference for me.

In the Introduction to The Pioneers, Cooper says that he delineates the the central New York area with details he remembers from his youth. He published the book in 1824, so the area probably wasn't too much changed from the time he describes in his history of Otsego and the Susquehanna at the time that "it is connected with civilized man." Here are two paragraphs from the Introduction:

"Otsego, in common with most of the interior of the province of New York, was included in the county of Albany previously to the war of the separation. It then became, in a subsequent division of territory, a part of Montgomery; and finally, having obtained a sufficient population of its own, it was set apart as a county by itself shortly after the peace of 1783. It lies among those low spurs of the Alleghanies which cover the midland counties of New York, and it is a little east of a meridional line drawn through the centre of the State. As the waters of New York flow either southerly into the Atlantic or northerly into Ontario and its outlet, Otsego Lake, being the source of the Susquehanna, is of necessity among its highest lands. The face of the country, the climate as it was found by the whites, and the manners of the settlers, are described with a minuteness for which the author has no other apology than the force of his own recollections."

"In 1779 an expedition was sent against the hostile Indians, who dwelt about a hundred miles west of Otsego, on the banks of the Cayuga. The whole country was then a wilderness, and it was necessary to transport the baggage of the troops by means of the rivers--a devious but practicable route. One brigade ascended the Mohawk until it reached the point nearest to the sources of the Susquehanna, whence it cut a lane through the forest to the head of the Otsego. The boats and baggage were carried over this "portage," and the troops proceeded to the other extremity of the lake, where they disembarked and encamped. The Susquehanna, a narrow though rapid stream at its source, was much filled with "flood wood," or fallen trees; and the troops adopted a novel expedient to facilitate their passage. The Otsego is about nine miles in length, varying in breadth from half a mile to a mile and a half. The water is of great depth, limpid, and supplied from a thousand springs. At its foot the banks are rather less than thirty feet high the remainder of its margin being in mountains, intervals, and points. The outlet, or the Susquehanna, flows through a gorge in the low banks just mentioned, which may have a width of two hundred feet. This gorge was dammed and the waters of the lake collected: the Susquehanna was converted into a rill. When all was ready the troops embarked, the damn was knocked away, the Otsego poured out its torrent, and the boats went merrily down with the current."

Shelving the Book Format for Now

When I started this blog, my intent was to write a book, blog post by blog post. But more than six months have passed. In the meantime, I haven't cleaned up Chapter 4 and other thoughts and materials are going unposted. I've been driving around lots of neat places in the watershed that I want to post about!

Therefore, I've decided to go about writing on this topic in a manner befitting a blog. Instead of posting this one finished chapter by one finished chapter at a time, I'm going to use this blog as a means to randomly capture and record thoughts and information about Driving Around in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. A blog is about journaling. So let the journaling begin.

Perhaps someday I will look at this blog as my notes and come back to it to piece the posts together as a traditional book. Maybe. Someday. I'm not sure that that medium fits today's reader. Also, as an author of 5 books, I know what a struggle it is to publish and sell books. I could make as much money if everyone who visits my blog would just click on a Google ad or two, or buy one of my suggested books -- hint, hint.

And so, I'll blog this again, as I did in Chapter 1:

"I’ve wanted to do something to Save the Bay, something more than sending my annual check to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Beyond supporting them financially, I Clean the Bay. I took their VoiCeS (Volunteer Chesapeake Steward) course. I raise oysters for the Chesapeake habitat restoration program. I have changed my over-consumptive ways. I am a vegetarian. I buy Energy Star appliances. I lead kayaking tours on a Chesapeake Bay tributary.

And I am writing this blog. It’s not much, but I’ve heard those scientists say that if we could just get people to understand that the condition of the Chesapeake Bay comes from upstream, that it might help. So I decided that I’d write about the streams and the land in the tributary portions of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s the part of the Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, that we drive around in every day. It is lots of little streams and the stream and the land beside it that we love and call home. Let’s Save the Bay one stream-scape at a time. You save yours and I’ll save mine because ... don’t we really all want the same thing? Health, happy kids, and peace on earth.

This blog is intended to get readers who live and travel all across the great big Chesapeake Bay watershed to see, really see the bit of the Bay that they can see. Perhaps then, they ... you ... will have a watershed moment when seeing, thinking, and caring. Ah, ha! The Chesapeake Bay’s health is inextricably tied to our health. Our health, and the well-being of us all."

In case you're interested in this blog as potential book, here's more information about the chapters that I have roughed out with the intent to develop.

Chapter 4: Around Cape Henry and into Hampton Roads - About the Lynnhaven River, Hampton Roads, and the Norfolk area.

Chapter 5: Let the Punishment Fit the Ducking Place - Early use of the river environment to keep order.

Chapter 6: The James River below the Fall Line - First settlements then and now.

Chapter 7: Unfamiliar to English Eyes - The Chesapeake Bay developed as a scattering of plantations. It was hard to make towns and cities stick. Highways then and now.

Chapter 8: From Williamsburg to Harrisonburg - The history of the rivers I pass when taking my son to college at James Madison University.

Chapter 9: Virginia Peninsula Rivers on the Chesapeake Bay - Hampton, Poquoson, and such.

Chapter 10: The Mobjack Bay and the York River Watershed Below the Fall Line - The watershed of my youth. Gloucester and Mathews.

Chapter 11: Driving Up the Fall Line - Our route to Washington D.C. Taking my daughter to college at George Mason University.

So, if you're a literary agent, I'd be happy to formalize this in a book proposal for you. In the meantime, this blog is just my journal about driving around in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Chapter 3: How the Chesapeake Bay Got Its Name

From mankind’s earliest days, newcomers have heard natives speak about towns, hills, rivers, directions, and emotions and, in order to survive or get along, they spoke the new words and kneaded them into their dialect. As time passed, the spirit of the original meaning lived on like a word shadow.

This is true in modern Great Britain where ancient Celtic tribes mixed with Romans, Saxons, Normans, and more. The Welsh people have claimed to be the true and first human inhabitants of that kingdom. Their DNA reveals that the Welsh are indeed an old race of mankind. Their language, too, echoes ancient rhythms.

I mention this because I am descended from the Welsh, as are many Americans. The Welsh claim that an ancestor of ours was the first European to come to America in the 12th century. Madoc, a bastard son of King Owain of Gwyned, left Wales after his father’s death and ensuing fight among the King’s children over hereditary rule. After a while abroad, the Prince returned to tell of his adventures in a new world and persuaded some Welshmen to return to America with him. A group sailed away again in 1171. An epic poem points to their landing in the area of present day Mobile Bay, Alabama, from whence they moved into the central United States and were absorbed by native tribes. Proof of the Welsh presence in North America has been offered in the form of legends about towns with European-looking streets and stone houses similar to Welsh castles. The story goes that the stone houses were built by a tribe of white people. It is said, too, that the Mandan Indians, who were called white Indians, were quick to pick up the Welsh language. Of course, it is hard to verify this since the Madans were virtually wiped out by a nineteenth century smallpox epidemic.

Of course, today we know that great numbers of native peoples live in cities in the Americas before 1492. In the century between Christopher Columbus and John Smith, these advanced American cultures were attacked by armies of non-native bugs set lose by the coughs and sneezes of European explorers. The native American population plummeted and their cities decayed. The so-called Indians that survived in smaller tribes, like the Mandans of the Midwest and the Algonquians who lived around the rim of the Chesapeake Bay, were remnants of former well-developed native American civilizations.

All of this is to say that we have no idea how the Chesapeake Bay got its name. I have always heard that “Chesapeake” meant, roughly speaking, “great shellfish bay.” This is the definition I found on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s website, and I have never had any reason not to believe them.

Until recently. I read John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609 by Helen C. Rountree et al, and I stand corrected. I respect Helen’s thoroughgoing, lifelong research on early American topics and if she says it’s so, who am I to disagree? I am merely a born-again amateur historian, a college history major and short-time museum curator. I went to the dark side in the 1980s with everyone else who thought an M.B.A. degree was a golden ticket. It never suited me and so here I am scribbling. A few years ago, I shared the podium with Helen at a King’s Daughters’ authors’ event and I sensed that she fairly bristled at the occasion of sitting next to the likes of me. (Perhaps I'm oversensitive?) I talked about my local history book on Gloucester County and she talked about her book, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. I wanted to tell her how much I admired her well-researched and written book, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries, but the time never seemed right. A missed opportunity.

In any case, in the John Smith book she says this: “Most Algonquian place-names in the region cannot be translated today, even though a few of them (e.g. Pamunky, Piscataway) appear repeatedly up and down the Atlantic coast. The meaning of the name of the great bay itself is uncertain. Philip Barbour wrote that it meant ‘country of people on the great river’ which accords with the English of the Roanoke colony originally hearing the name in connection with the Chesapeake Indians, not with the bay at all. The Spanish called the great estuary Bahia de Santa Maria (St. Mary’s Bay), and their sometime guide Paquinquineo (Don Luis) called the region he knew Ajacán. But nobody recorded the native names (probably plural) for the bay.”

I feel especially good about repeating her words because the “great shellfish bay” translation is the meaning most familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in the Chesapeake Bay. I worry that the John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyages book may not be widely read. It was produced for the 400th Anniversary of the Jamestown landing, and the hoopla that the event inspired also inspired lots of competing merchandise and collectibles. I almost didn’t bother with it myself, but I’m glad that I did. I especially liked the chapters that described in detail the natural world that John Smith and his band gazed upon on their voyages. The vivid descriptions of nature, along with the painstaking remake of Smith’s voyages by following his log while paddling in a similar boat, explored by co-authors Wayne Clark and Kent Mountford, make the world of the Chesapeake Bay, if not the meaning of the word in particular, come to life.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation says that the Europeans heard the natives refer to the bay as "Tschiswapeki." However, on the map viewed by most as the most accurate of the sixteenth century (above, courtesy the U.S. Library of Congress), the proper noun is spelled “Chesepiooc.” The map, published in 1590 in a volume about new-found lands, includes several renderings based on drawings of the New World by John White. The map brings together White’s well-known work with additional images picked up from other sources. It is a well-done hodge-podge, but lends credence to the theory that the Chesapeake moniker had less to do with the body of water than it does with the native tribe known to use the name. Note on the De Bry map that Chesepiooc is written on the area of land. Chesepiooc sinus (sinus being Middle English from the Latin for cavity or hollow) appears on the waterway.

Soon after the Virginia Company settlement, John Rolfe developed a strain of sweet tobacco that was a hit in the Old World. Virginians had struck their gold. Wannabe landowners and planters arrived in droves and took up tracts all around the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary streams. The Bay geography was perfect for English ship captains and merchants, who moved around the bay and its streams from one farm to the next to fill their ships with hogshead barrels full of weed.

And so, in the words of Rountree, “By the end of the seventeenth century, the English had won the population contest.” Disease and force of arms had won the day. “There remain today only a few native speakers still fluent in one of the Algonquian languages of the Chesapeake region—the Oklahoma descendants of the Leni Lanape (Delaware). All the other Indian people in the region now speak English.”

We may never know exactly what Chesapeake means. Embedded in our language is this word and other “Algonquian-derived names: hickory, persimmon, and pecan.” These and many other native words have been absorbed and are used daily by those of us newcomers who love to tramp through the woods and wetlands and paddle or sail transfixed by the scent, hue, and breeze of our Chesapeake Bay home.

Chapter 2: A Brief History of the Chesapeake Bay

When a comet-like object hit the very spot where the town of Cape Charles would be built about 35 million years later, it plowed through the earth’s surface and drilled downward for over a mile. Immediately, all that remained of the bolide was cinders while in the same second a plume of rock and ash echoed back into the atmosphere. Some of the debris fell to earth again thousands of miles away. Most filled a crater 55 miles wide.

Although the bolide did not form the bay that we call Chesapeake, it set into motion the processes that would allow it to form. Millions of years passed and sea levels rose and fell in tune with the wobble of the earth. Water turned to ice and ice turned to water. On the edge of the continent where the bolide crashed, the havoc that it created squeezed down and settled tight beneath the liquid-solid tug-of-war. Sand, silt, and clay was pushed, pulled, dropped, and layered over it.

About two to three million years ago, melting glaciers carved a north-south channel through the surface sediment of new-formed continental coastal plain. The channel’s flow, encouraged by the slowly, slowly subsiding rubble, directed water toward the sink as it spilled out to the ocean. From the southwest, gravity pulled another ancient stream toward the crater before it too merged into the sea.

By fifteen thousand years ago, the soft and fertile earth all around filled with hardwood trees. The warming climate promoted the formation of other rivers, like one named Pamunkey by descendants of the basin’s first human population. The land around the bay sprouted and was carved by many other streams.

Four thousand years ago, the Bay dubbed Tschiswapeki by the first people assumed the shape we know today. The Spanish named it Bahia de Santa Maria in the 1500s. Other European explorers recorded the bay’s name as Chesepiooc. The main stem of the estuary drained from the river John Smith noted on his 1612 map as the Sasquesahanough. The current rippled southward for 190 miles. Salt water met fresh waters that flowed from stream channels. The main body of the bay spread to a maximum width of 35 miles, pooled at an average depth of 22 feet, and swirled above land lowered by the ancient bolide.

Wetlands and marshes all around teamed with fish and shellfish that coaxed the first people to hunt and fish. One thousand years ago, Woodland Indians settled around the great shellfish bay and planted fields of corn, beans, and squash. When Europeans began to explore the locale about 500 years ago, the native population that watched and listened from as many as 200 villages was estimated to be 26,000 to 34,000 strong.

Soon enough, the English settlers deemed the land surrounding the great shellfish bay to be excellent for their plantations and farms. They renamed the watery highways that led to their homes after their monarchs, the rivers they recalled from their youth, their religious orientation, and themselves. Their first colonial capital cities were sited near rivers they named James, York, St. Mary’s, and Severn.
All around the bay, Europeans settlers grew tobacco. English import records evince the rapid expansion of agriculture. Ships filled their holes with harvests. Imports grew from near 500,000 pounds in the 1630s to 15 million pounds by the end of the 1660s to 28 million pounds by the end of the century. From 1650 to 1750, the European-settler population grew from an estimated 13,000 to 380,000 people.

By 1776, the population of colonists living around the shores of the Chesapeake reached 700,000. Before and after the American Revolution, settlers pushed west and named the multitude of finger streams that traced to the headwaters of the principle Chesapeake Bay Rivers. Waves of new settlers from the borderlands, forests, and fens of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland staked their claims using names that recalled their experience.

By 1800, the Chesapeake Bay region’s population reached one million. Steamboats replaced sailing ships on the Chesapeake’s Rivers beginning in the 1820s. Canals were built and named. They eased the way for commerce.

By the turn of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the Chesapeake Bay region’s population neared 3 million. Motorized transport replaced most river traffic.

One hundred years later, with its watershed population passing 16 million, the Chesapeake Bay is plied by giant tankers, remnant watermen, sport fishermen, weekend sailors, riffle-riding kayakers, and bird-watching canoeists.

Since the time of the first English settlers, it is estimated that the Chesapeake Bay has lost half of its forested shorelines and more than half of its wetlands. Excess nitrogen and sediment pollution that runs off of the land threatens the health of wildlife, fish, and shellfish. Fertilizer, animal manure, sewage treatment plant effluent, toxic substances, and particulates from polluted air end up in the water. The water is dirty and unhealthy.

We the people, who enjoy water views and pleasant Mid-Atlantic climate, might do well to stop to wonder about this. When we look around us, we see that the Bay is everywhere. We realize that we are not the first to love this place. We are not the first, but we have arrived at a point in time where we need to pay greater attention. If we do not, we may hasten the end of thousands of years of our species habitation here.

Where's the Bay?

The thousands of streams that feed the Chesapeake Bay are laced beneath mostly straight and level modern highways. Traveling as fast as we do, we have to look fast and we have to know where to look. To look is to see and to see is to think and to think is to care.

I look, see, think, and care about the Chesapeake Bay a lot as I drive around the five states and 64,000 square miles of its troubled watershed. I am not your average person, though. I bought my first kayak about ten years ago and that changed the way that I see things. After several retreats to a creek near my home, an environmental epiphany washed over me. Since then I’ve been obsessed about the Bay.

On my first kayaking trip, I noticed something unusual about College Creek, a tributary of the James River, which is, in turn, a major Chesapeake Bay tributary. College Creek didn’t look right. It didn’t sound right.

My environmental epiphany rose up from my knowledge of history. In 1607, John Smith and adventuring members of the Virginia Company paddled on this very creek. It was one of several streams they passed on their way to plant Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the New World.

Gentleman adventurer George Percy, recorded that on the twelfth day of May “we … discovered a point of Land, called Archers Hope.” The explorers had given this name to the place because adventurer Gabriel Archer had hoped that the Virginia Company’s settlement might be located on my neighborhood creek. Hope, however, didn’t have to do with Archer’s proclivity for the location. “Hope” meant “small embayment” to the Englishmen. Such a feature is formed behind a spit of land at the mouth of Archer’s Creek. (The creek was renamed more than a century later for the College of William and Mary, founded in 1693 and built five miles away in the creek’s swampy headwaters.)

Percy observed a much different place 400 years ago:

“The soile was good and fruitfull, with excellent good Timber. There are also great store of Vines in bignesse of a mans thigh, running up to the tops of the Trees in great abundance. We also did see many Squirels, Conies [rabbits], Black Birds with crimson wings, and divers other Fowles and Birds of divers and sundrie collours of crimson, Watchet, Yellow, Greene, Murry, and of divers other hewes naturally without any art using … We found store of Turkey nests and many Eggs, if it had not been disliked, because the ship could not ride near the shore, we had settled there to all the Colony's contentment.”

Familiar with this passage, I had imagined a fulsome place: active and noisy, jungle-like. But Percy’s description didn’t jive with what I saw and felt when kayaking. I heard nothing. Nada. I stopped and listened: soft slaps of brackish water on the hull of my boat, a car far in the distance, an airplane somewhere. Relative to other suburban waterways, it is a very quiet place, preserved (in a manner of speaking) by upscale homes on green and heavily-treed shores.

Most homebuilders had kept their distance, save for about a dozen perched perilously and disrespectfully on the steam bank. I secretly wish their homeowners ill. They impinge on my communion with nature.

Nature, or the lack thereof, sent me to learn about the Chesapeake Bay that is imperiled by human-caused activity across the watershed, reaching north into upstate New York and west to the Appalachians. Runoff from farms and lawns and nutrients from sewage treatment plants have caused abundant blooms of algae in major tributaries and the main stem of the Bay. The blooms die and drift to the bottom. The thick layer of organic matter decomposes and in the process robs the water of oxygen needed by benthic creatures, oysters, crabs, and fish.

In 1607, the population of the Jamestown area was made up of 104 English men and boys and natives that Smith thought to number around 5,000. Modern historians believe human inhabitation of the entire watershed at that time was at least 25 to 30 thousand, an amount that was down from the many thousands more that were here before invasive European microbes were introduced in 1492 and ran rampant across the hemisphere. Today, humans in the Bay watershed number more than 16 million, many more than even in the heyday of the first human occupation. Today, descendants of colonial Europeans and Africans construct subdivisions and shopping centers aplenty. Rooftops and parking lots are washed by rain and hosed down with drinking water by the cleanliness-crazy. Leaves, soil, chemicals, oil, paper, plastic, and more settle into the Chesapeake Bay estuary, which is said to have an average depth of just 20 feet. Tidal action sloshes the mortally wounded and dirty water back and forth. Oysters and a variety of filter feeders as well as underwater vegetation that once nourished each other and cleaned the Bay’s waters are long gone, or at least greatly reduced in number.

Recently, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency for not throwing enough money and regulation in the direction of the Chesapeake Bay. EPA actions would have saved the bay, they say. At least, I think, it would have helped. But—and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation knows this—there is plenty more blame to spread around among organizations and individuals. One piece of it that occurs to me is this: as I drive around the Chesapeake Bay watershed, I don’t see it. Surely if I don’t see it, and I am one prone to look, do others? Who cares about what they do not see?

At the start of the New Year I resolved to see the Bay better and do what I could to be sure that more Chesapeake Bay residents saw it. I resolved to help others look for and see and, perhaps, care more about our interrelationship with a healthy watershed. From my perch as a marketing communications professional, history lover, and Chesapeake Bay Foundation volunteer, I resolved to chat up the watery parts of the Chesapeake Bay watershed to fellow travelers. I will look into the history, legends, and people and tell the stories. When traveling by car, I will concurrently research, record, and publish something about what I see from the highway.

Chapter 1: My Watershed Moment

We live in a Chesapeake Bay watershed moment. The future of the Bay as a home for sea creatures and a play pool for human recreation is at risk. The Chesapeake Bay environment is in sharp decline. We can fix it, perhaps. But we have to act fast.

Is the Chesapeake Bay’s watershed moment (in the British sense of the word) a thin line between health and unwholesomeness? Not really. The Chesapeake Bay's watershed moment, in the North American sense of the word, is a basin where many watershed moments are held. The Chesapeake Bay’s watershed moment occurred when a bolide fractured the Earth’s shell and the glaciers dripped down the ancient Susquehannah Valley. It occurred as the Age of Mammals dawned and around the time when early humans settled and planted crops. In 1607, when 104 English settlers arrived, sailed up its James River tributary, and settled at Jamestown, the Bay experienced another watershed moment. It was a watershed moment when tobacco was first planted by John Rolfe in Virginia and several years later when Godiah Spray and hundreds of others planted the weed in Maryland. We cross the watershed line at various points 100, 200, or 300 year later, when the Chesapeake became integral to the Triangle Trade, when the colonies rebelled, and when the internal combustion engine roared onto the scene. A true watershed moment occurred the day 400 years later, when the watershed’s population surpassed 16 million people.

For billions of years, the land and water have danced around on this place we call the Chesapeake Bay. Life forms have ebbed and flowed. For hundreds of years, from John Smith to me, this 64,000 square mile American-style watershed has gathered in lots of humans who love the land because of the water. We’re newcomers: history doesn’t start with man. Nevertheless, when we talk about the watershed and its moments in this blog, we are usually talking about the people and the moments on land, even though the Chesapeake Bay’s watershed moment is really all about the water that sustains both seamen and landlubbers. Abundant Chesapeake water highways brought ease of access and accessible food. Even in recent years, since motor replaced sail and Costco replaced fishing for dinner, we love nothing better than to putter and paddle around the Chesapeake Bay and its 11,684 miles of shoreline.

About the time of the 400 anniversary of Jamestown, words like “global warming” and “go green” entered everyday figurative language. People around the world had watershed moments: humans are part of nature and have to play nice in order to continue as a species. The big picture is global, but the Chesapeake Bay is our local example. Abundant pollution, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, have set in motion a chain reaction that leads to grassless and oxygen-starved waters. The Bay’s keystone species was once the big cog in the natural wheel of life that kept the protein factory clean and full of itself. Oysters can’t survive and thrive. Is it too late for them to be revived, even if the Bay could come back from the brink?

Too many were harvested to feed us. The biological relationships built around keystone species are changing because too many people need natural resources like oysters. The rapid and uneven withdrawal of resources like trees and water is causing the patient, our planet and our Bay, to gasp and tilt. Modern human life requires coal and gas and beef. Too much burning and farting alters the atmosphere and traps heat which melts ice and expands water to send worldwide sea level high and the subsiding Chesapeake’s shoreline farther inland.

A damaged ecosystem doesn’t have what it takes to fight back against the alien plants and animals that we track in on our shoes and ballast water. The aliens, finding none of their natural enemies here, multiply exponentially.

Is it too late to do anything? Is it too late to care? Have we crossed the watershed (in the British sense of the word) line? The experts say no. If we do the right thing IMMEDIATELY, if not sooner. Just you watch! In about three years, it will bubble its way right back to normal. With some limited experience, I see that this is true, but since I am not a scientist I have to take it on faith.

When I took up kayaking about 10 years ago, I had a watershed moment. I realized how much the Bay had changed since I was a kid. The water was really murky. I started reading and listening and understanding why the Bay had changed so much since I was a child in the 1960s.

I’ve wanted to do something to Save the Bay, something more than sending my annual check to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Beyond supporting them financially, I Clean the Bay. I took their VoiCeS (Volunteer Chesapeake Steward) course. I raise oysters for the Chesapeake habitat restoration program. I have changed my over-consumptive ways. I am a vegetarian. I buy Energy Star appliances. I lead kayaking tours.

And I am writing this blog. It’s not much, but I’ve heard those scientists say that if we could just get people to understand that the condition of the Chesapeake Bay comes from upstream, that it might help. So I decided that I’d write about the streams and the land in the tributary portion of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s the part of the Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which we drive around in every day. It is lots of little streams and the stream and the land beside it that we love and call home. Let’s Save the Bay one stream-scape at a time. You save yours and I’ll save mine because ... don’t we really all want the same thing? Health, happy kids, and peace on earth.

This blog is intended to get readers who live and travel all across the great big Chesapeake Bay watershed to see, really see the bit of the Bay that they can see. Perhaps then, they ... you ... will have a watershed moment when seeing, thinking, and caring. Ah, ha! The Chesapeake Bay’s health is inextricably tied to our health. Our health, and the health of us all.

Foreword: What is a Watershed?

wa•ter•shed \ˈwȯ-tər-ˌshed, ˈwä-\ noun. 1803. 1 a : divide b : a region or area bounded peripherally by a divide and draining ultimately to a particular watercourse or body of water.

Merriam-Webster

“What it means depends on where you’re standing,” says Michael Quinion. Originating as a purely scientific word around 1800, watershed meant “the imaginary line that separates two river systems.” The English word was borrowed from the German Wasserscheide. Shed or scheide is an old word meaning division, split, or separation. “In North America, the word watershed often means not the dividing line, but the river catchment areas on either side of the ridge, the whole land area that drains into a particular river. How the sense shifted isn’t clear.” Quinion speculates that, “The difference in sense explains why Americans don’t use the figurative sense of the word as much as the rest of us do.”

World Wide Words: Michael Quinion writes on international English from a British viewpoint.