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.