“Didn’t want to go cross the pond,” Jake remarked, referring to other side of the Bay, when he saw the concern on her face. “All them buildings and roads make me nervous,” he explained. It was a typical ’shore man’s excuse for staying on the rural eastern side.
Jake’s gift to her was a concept to build a floating platform on which Bay plants, barnacles, and sea grasses could grow and be anchored in the shallow waters where natural marshes had disappeared. The platform would provide a perfect habitat for fish and crabs as well as acting as a natural filter for the waters around them.
She had taken that idea to her boss, Jim Shepherd, and, alter endless presentations to officials from every agency dealing with the Bay and a mind-numbing round of political fundraisers, lunches, and dinners, had finally secured enough funding for a few experimental platforms; a feasibility study, they called it. Unfortunately the funding didn’t go far enough to do anything meaningful. Only ten of the prototype platforms had been built by one of the Baltimore area aerospace firms. That was one of the political compromises they’d had to make. The key vote had been held by a politician whose constituents were impacted by cutbacks in the defense industry. This was a way of getting some credit for steering work their way. Mary was shocked at how quickly the funds disappeared.
Still, even with only ten platforms they could do some interesting things. They’d anchored one in each of the major feeder rivers; the Susquehenna, Patapsaco, Elk, Chester, and Choptank rivers. The rest were scattered in areas where pollution was suspected due to fish declines, habitat disappearance, or the like.
Each of the major rivers carried its individual load of pollutants into the Bay’s ecosystem along with the fresh water that maintained the Bay’s unique brackish mix. The Susquehenna drained a watershed that extended clear into the rich and overfertilized farmlands of Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. The Elk drew waters from the Atlantic, thanks to the Chesapeake and Delaware canal which provided a route for foreign life to enter the Bay, not to mention an ungodly mess of ships’ detritus and jetsam. The Patapsaco drained industrial Baltimore and contributed a rich assortment of chemicals and heavy metals, as well as the often ineffectively treated effluent of a major city. The Chester and Choptank were estuaries of the Bay rather than flowing rivers. Nevertheless the farms surrounding them washed a good deal of fertilizer and crop control chemicals into the water.
At the end of the season the institute would conduct a detailed examination of the flora and fauna that populated the platforms. Each oyster and barnacle, every root and leaf would tell the tale of what it had picked up from the waters and give a good indication of the degree of damage the Bay was suffering. These biological filters would reveal subtle things that their spot samples would miss and provide a good, long-term view of what was taking place over the course of a year.
Mary’s original idea had not been to use the platforms as floating collection sites for the environmental studies but as change agents for the Bay. If they used huge numbers of them the sheer mass of aquatic life would actually filter the water and help cleanse the Bay. A flotilla of platforms would help replace much of the ecosystem that had been lost through development and industrialization. But the funds they’d secured could only go so far and this year’s allocation was gone. She’d have to wait for the next round of budget talks in Annapolis to get any more.
“Listen Jake, I’m running down to Eston to check on the platform we put there. Maybe you’d like to come along.”
“I might go that way when the weather cools a bit,” he mused. “Been a while since I had the Gull out. Be a nice fall cruise.” Gull was Jake’s ten foot wesort-rigged sailboat; a flat-bottomed rowboat with more sail than sense. With him and the dog in it there was barely enough room to shift around when moving to a new tack. Fortunately Chessie had long ago learned how to avoid being dumped when the boat came about, and scurried forward whenever she saw Jake let go of the jib sheet and start to shift his weight. Jake, on the other hand, had learned that an eighty-pound dog moving about in a small boat must be taken into consideration. The two of them had learned much about swimming and righting a dunked wesort in the process of reaching their accommodation. “Yup, might be a nice little trip down there.”
The tide was running north at this hour of the morning, making two-foot waves in the Bay. A front was coming through later in the day and the stiff breezes that usuatly preceded a storm were already kicking up from the southeast. The Whaler she had borrowed from the DNR handled the water well, planing over the tops of the waves with only moderate bounce. She noted the number of sea gulls floating on the surface, another sign of bad weather.
It took less than an hour to make the run out of Eston’s tiny harbor down to where they had anchored the platform, and all but the last fifteen minutes was in the open waters of the Bay. She spotted it as soon as she rounded the sandy point that marked the entrance to Candle Creek.
The point was typical of the sand ecology in this part of the Bay. Beneath the dirty-looking sand was a web of roots and plant life; dune bean runners would weave under the deep dunes, Russian thistle and cockleburr would inhabit the inward reaches. Probably some marram, sand-reed, and psamma were also around, although she couldn’t see it from this distance. Altogether they were one of the most interesting environments in the Bay, and one that was routinely destroyed by weekend boaters who didn’t appreciate its wonders.
Candle Creek originated far to the east, meandered through numerous fields and woods before it came to Eston, where it wandered through the town like some drunken snake before heading in a straight line to escape into the Bay.
The institute’s crew had anchored the platform out of the creek’s main channel, quite close to an eroding bank that was gradually being undercut by the water’s flow. The creek was calm and still as she cut the motor back and coasted to the side of the platform, holding out her hands to prevent the bow from striking the fiberglass flotation tube.
This high-tech version of the platform looked quite unlike Jake’s original. Instead of logs the main flotation was provided by three twenty-four-foot pontoons made of layers of fiberglass. Instead of found lumber as cross members this version sported titanium struts epoxied into the pontoons. A mesh of polyethylene formed the base for the layers of humus and sand instead of Jake’s rough net and straw arrangement. The platform would last forever, plus one day. That’s one of the benefits from being built by a company used to dealing with MILSPECs, she mused. Now if only the damn thing didn’t cost so much!
She moved the boat along the side, searching for the anchor bolts they’d used to tow the platform here. She found one near the registration decals: Since the platform was man-made and capable of movement through the water it had to be registered as a vessel and all the taxes paid, including the exorbitant yachting fee the feds had levied. They were sort of lucky in that; one foot longer and the fee would have been another $120 more per platform! She quickly drew a line through the tow anchor bolt and threw two half hitches to secure the boat.
A quick examination of the overburden indicated that several birds had chosen to build sloppy nests among the grasses. They were either cormorants or coots, she theorized. The grasses seemed to be doing well, although the sonnet looked slightly yellow. She looked out along the creek’s bank and saw that only the cattails and pampas were present. None of the smaller grasses filled the spaces between. Carefully she pulled up a specimen of the sonnet, roots and all, and placed it in one of her plastic specimen bags for later examination at the lab. In another bag she put the usual samples of cattail root and leaves.