acco, grain and flour down Piedmont rivers was a long, narrow wooden boat called a batteau.
Perched on the eastern rim of the Chesapeake’s watershed, closer to Atlantic beaches than to the Bay, Delaware’s Trap Pond State Park offers the standard recreational amenities, from ballfields and nature walks, to tenting, cabins and picnic tables shaded by tall pines.
But it’s Taxiodium distichum, the lordly bald cypress, that defines this nearly 4,000-acre park that guards the headwaters of the Delmarva Peninsula’s Nanticoke River. It is the nation’s northernmost natural occurrence of a species whose range extends south to Florida and west into Texas.
One hundred years ago, when Harper’s Magazine writer J.W. Church wanted to visit Tangier Island, he presented a letter asking for transport to a Crisfield oysterman.
The oysterman agreed to have one of his captains ferry the writer and his photographer to Capt. Peter Crockett’s island store, but counseled caution. Tangiermen, the Crisfielder said, “sure are a strange lot.”
In the center of an enclosure filled with tall oaks, a bobcat strolls nonchalantly toward what looks like a large rock, wagging his characteristic shortened tail in full view of visitors 20 feet away on an elevated boardwalk. On this sunny late autumn day, the cat opts for a bed of leaves in dappled sunlight nearby.
“That ‘rock’ is actually made of concrete and has a heating element, which makes for a nice dozing spot in the winter,” said George Mathews, Jr., curatorial director at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News, VA.
Events and Activitys around the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, Smith Island stands defiant. Its community remains strong and proud while all the other island towns in Maryland have faded away, their populations fleeing for the mainland.
Smith Island clings to a way of life that is centuries old: hard work on the water all week and then a day of rest to worship the Lord on Sunday. Many of its residents refuse to evacuate, even in the strongest of storms, even when county emergency officials beg them to go.
Visit once, and it won’t be enough.
Spruce Knob stands at the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. But a visitor standing atop the windswept peak would be excused for thinking they were at the edge of a northern wilderness.
Even in midsummer, the top of this West Virginia mountain is a refreshingly cool escape from the heat and humidity common in a mid-Atlantic summer.
At 4,863 feet, Spruce Knob is the highest point in West Virginia.
Mark Mendelsohn has fond memories of visiting his grandparents on the West River in Annapolis. The family would pile in a skiff and run out to the banks of Poplar Island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. There, his grandmother would catch so many bluefish that her arms would be sore.
But the past half-century was not kind to Poplar and the cluster of islands that surround it about three miles north of Tilghman Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Erosion and sea level rise had whittled away the islands. In 1847, Poplar Island covered more than 1,100 acres. By the early 1990s, when Mendelsohn and his Army Corps of Engineers colleague Justin Callahan went to survey the island, it was fewer than five acres.
I was one of five people trekking through the woods at Robinson Neck Preserve, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was a sunny, shoulder-season day that put all of us in a good mood — bright enough for sunglasses and cool enough for fleece.
About halfway into the hike, the forest around our narrow trail suddenly gave way on both sides to reveal long, lush views of the Slaughter Creek marsh. While each member of our group spends a fair amount of time in lovely outdoor places, we still gave a collective gasp at the sight.
Wind was tugging at a red, white and blue flag hitched to a dock in Somerset County, on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore. Mike Hinman, whose wisps of gray hair were also dancing in the wind, caught the flag and pulled it taut.
“Want to see who we are?” said Hinman. “I’ll show you.”
Dragonflies, like most 