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National Geographic : 1993 Jun
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No ONE in the Chesapeake water shed, it is said, lives more than a few minutes from some stream. The bay branches and branches again and again, rooting the estuary like a mighty tree in the lives of us all. Recently I decided to go back for the first time in more than 30 years, to where the bay began for me. To a ravine behind my family's old home and a rubbishy little rivulet that was as much a drain for waste oil from a local trucking firm as it was a waterway. It meandered only a half mile or so before enter ing Marshyhope Creek, and eventually the "LAST GUY, last house, last everything," jokes I. T. Todd about his return to Holland Island, where he was one of the last children born. Islanders were leaving by 1917, when his father dismantled the family home and rebuilt it in mainland Crisfield. The last house on Holland (left) is owned by hunters, and the island, like the community of 300 that once lived there, is dissolving into remembrance. Nanticoke, the Chesapeake, and beyond. Never mind its biological shortcomings, that little stream was flowing water, lending personality and attraction to an otherwise ordinary depression in the land. My playmates and I dammed it, channeled it, splashed in it, raced wood chips in it, swung across it on ropes. Such a humble thread in the grand web of the bay's drainage, yet what perceptions, memories, and emotions it still evokes for me. Sliding down a steep bank into the cool, sun dappled, and still trashy creek bottom, I heard voices-three youths of the town, armed with one rusty toy gun among them, out for a Sun day morning expedition. Their leader, Steve Faulkner, Jr., 12, described himself as the general of this group. He took me in tow and introduced his buddies Michael and Joey Keene. They offered me a turn on the slender rope they used to swing across the water. I declined. (When you weigh 220 pounds, some things are best left unrevisited.) "It's a neat place, huh?" the general asked. "Oh yes," I replied, and thought, just wait until you see what it's connected to. In fact, I was impressed and pleased to learn, they knew something of the little stream's links to the bay. And they knew that cleaning up the bay was, in Steve's view, "one of the most important things we've got to do." They had discussed it in school. I wondered if they had ever caught a shad downstream in the river or dipped a herring in April or May. "Nope," said Steve. It seemed they were wiser than I at their age, yet poorer. This brought to mind something a friend from one of the bay's tributary communities had told me recently. "The difference between the bay I knew and the bay my daughter knows is this," he said. "She's 19 and never caught a rockfish, and I just think that is outrageous." 0 Chesapeake Bay
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