Chesapeake (155 page)

‘Does he ever hunt with that big gun?’

‘What?’

‘Where’s he keep it, Rafe?’

‘Keep what?’ the boy asked, a kind of stupid glaze over his face.

‘You tell your father—’

‘My father’s in Baltimore.’

‘I mean your grandfather,’ Pflaum snapped.

‘Tell him what?’ the boy asked.

‘That I was here.’

‘Who are you?’

‘You know damned well who I am. I’m Hugo Pflaum, your uncle more or less. You tell him I was here.’

‘I’ll tell him. Hugo Pflaum.’

With disgust, the game warden kicked at the sod, gingerly retraced his steps through the garden sculpture and drove back to town.

When he was gone, and well gone, with the pickup far around the bend, Rafe Turlock slumped against the trailer and would have fallen except that he caught hold of a coping. Keeping himself more or less erect, he began to vomit, not once or twice but seven times, until his stomach was empty and his body racked.

Midge found him there, still retching, and thought he might have whooping cough, for the boy would give no explanation for his spasms. She insisted that he go to bed, and he lay there with wet packs on his forehead, waiting for his grandfather’s return.

Amos was absent for a long time distributing geese, but when he reached the kitchen and heard the rambling report of his grandson’s seizure, he could guess what had caused it. Slipping into the sickroom, he asked, ‘Hugo Pflaum here?’

‘Yep. He was standin’ right on the gun, askin’ his questions.’

‘About last night?’

‘And the gun.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘Nothin’, but when he kicked at one of the rings I almost vomited.’

‘Midge says you did. All over the place.’

‘That was after.’

Amos did not pat his grandson on the head, or congratulate him in any way. The boy had done only what was required, but he did want to let Rafe know that he was pleased, so he whistled for the Chesapeake,
and to the dog’s surprise, the door was opened and he was invited into the trailer. Quickly he sought out his young master, and realizing that the boy was ill, stayed by his bed, licking his limp fingers.

Amos, closing the door on the room, offered no explanation to Midge. He walked out onto the lawn to survey his twenty-one sets of sculpture: the deer were lined up behind Santa, the purple flamingo spread its concrete wings toward Sunset Acres, and the seven dwarfs trailed along behind their mistress in seven distinct styles of cuteness. Looking to where the three stood in line, Amos could visualize the great gun nesting at their feet.

‘Safe for another fifty years,’ he said.

One crisp November morning Owen Steed awoke to the sound of birds squabbling at the feeder outside his window, and he was so enchanted by their vitality that without dressing he went onto the lawn, where he could see the creeks from which the osprey had migrated. Standing reverently amidst a beauty he had discovered nowhere else on earth, he reflected that no one had successfully described the quiet splendor of the Eastern Shore. He was sixty-six that morning and aware that he could enjoy these estuaries for only a limited number of years, but he was grateful that misadventures in Oklahoma had forced him to come back to the drowsy glories of his youth.

When he returned to his bedroom he heard Ethel washing, and called, ‘They refer to this as the land of pleasant living, but that’s mere hedonism.’

‘What are you talking about, Owen?’

‘The lasting values of this place. Bright mornings like this. Cool nights.’

‘They were cool last winter.’

‘I’m trying to be serious. About a land worth preserving.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you joining me at the meeting?’

‘What meeting?’ And before he could reply, she cried enthusiastically, ‘That chap from Annapolis. Going to advise us as to how we can end the plague of beer cans.’ Indeed she was attending.

But as they entered the meeting hall Chris Pflaum dampened their enthusiasm. ‘You’re not going to like what he says. He’s quite gloomy.’ He certainly was, a tall angular man in his late fifties, worn down by bureaucratic haggling:

Comments on this doleful litany were spirited. ‘Can’t we pass laws requiring deposits on cans and bottles?’ Adamson replied that such plans had been rejected sharply by most voters on the grounds that they were an imposition on their freedom. ‘Can’t we appoint county officials with trucks to pick up the awful garbage?’ Adamson pointed out eleven instances in which communities had rejected such proposals as unwarranted expense, the argument being that it penalized those who did not drink beer. ‘Can we simply outlaw the damned things as socially destructive? We’d outlaw a plague of locusts quick enough.’ Adamson did not have to go far afield for his answer to this; he referred to the commission’s decision that since Norman Turlock had invested so much money in his canning plant, it would be unfair to him to change the rules now.

‘What can we do?’ Ethel Steed asked in some desperation.

‘Nothing,’ Adamson replied. ‘I’m head of the agency that’s supposed to prevent the plundering of Maryland’s natural beauty, and there’s not a damned thing I can do.’ He paused to let this fact sink in, then added, ‘There is, however, one thing you might try.’ Everyone leaned forward, for the desire to end this nuisance was vigorous. ‘Buy yourself a basket, and three days a week go out like me and pick the damned things up.’

The meeting ended on such a hopeless note that the Steeds did not want to go home, and they were relieved when Chris Pflaum suggested that they wait in the lobby and join Dr. Adamson for lunch. They found him in a reflective mood, wanting to talk about the problems of the Chesapeake. ‘I was raised in Chestertown. Went to Washington College there. Didn’t learn much calculus but I sure learned how to man a schooner. I lived on the bay in the good years, 1936 to the beginning of 1942. No bridge crossing the bay. No oil deposits on your hull. Crabs everywhere. The best oysters in America. And what I remember most fondly, you could jump overboard at any spot in the bay and swim. No jellyfish. It was then that my intense love for the bay was born.’

But he did not want to stress the old days at the expense of the present. ‘This is still the world’s most enchanting inland water. Chap in my office who loves to sail calculated that if a man owned a boat which drew less than four feet, he could cruise the Chesapeake for a thousand successive days, and drop anchor each night in a different cove.’

‘Sounds improbable,’ Steed said.

‘Let’s take the Tred Avon,’ Adamson suggested, and from memory he rattled off eighteen contributory creeks. ‘Now, let’s take just one of them, Plaindealing, and recall only the coves we can name. Twelve of them. You could spend six months on the Tred Avon and each night anchor in some cove of heavenly beauty. And remember, we have forty rivers as good as the Tred Avon. My friend was conservative. There must be eight thousand coves along this bay—all of them in peril.’

He spoke of the dreadful burden humanity was throwing upon this inland sea: effluvia from the sewer systems, poisons from the plants, industrial waste from the entire Susquehanna Valley, the garbage of the small-boat fleet, the awful pressure of human beings, each year more insistent, less disciplined, more wasteful, less attentive.

‘Ecologists in Germany and Japan and Russia are working on the theory that it is man himself who is the contaminant. Not his manufacturing plants, nor his chemicals, nor his oil spills. They’re the conspicuous disasters, but the permanent one is the accumulation of men and women in great quantities and large clusters. Even if they do no single thing disastrous, it is they who create the great disaster. By their numbers alone shall ye know them.’

He dilated on this for nearly half an hour, developing the theme first enunciated by German scholars analyzing India. ‘They found that numbers
alone are determinant. Around the world, wherever six thousand people congregate they justify a city. Six thousand people merit having a shoemaker, and a barber, and a man who specializes in baking pastries, and a sewage engineer, however primitive. The outside specialist has no right to ask, “What is the justification for this city?” It is its own justification.

‘Well, the same kind of limit probably operates negatively. If you have clustering on the shores of any body of water a large enough population, that water will be destroyed. You watch the Mediterranean two hundred years from now.’

A woman at the lunch made the obvious remark that she wasn’t going to be on the Chesapeake two hundred years from now, and she doubted very much that any of the others would be there, either, to which Adamson replied, with no impatience, ‘The individual witness disappears, yes, but the collective intelligence persists. Two hundred years from now, in 2177, someone like me, with every one of my apprehensions, will be lunching in Patamoke and weighing the future of the Chesapeake. We have to ensure that the bay still exists for him to worry about.’

‘We were pessimistic over the possibility of controlling empty beer cans,’ Steed said. ‘How about the bay itself?’

‘The numbers terrify me, Mr. Steed. All of central Pennsylvania contaminates our bay. Baltimore, Washington, Roanoke. Millions upon millions of people, all throwing their problems into the bay. How can it possibly survive?’

‘We said that about the goose, forty years ago. Now look at the population.’

‘Yes!’ Adamson cried, his eyes brightening with that enthusiasm he had acquired as a boy. ‘The hopeful factor is what we’ve discovered in various countries. Any body of water with a strong flow, no matter how contaminated, can flush itself out—renew itself completely—in three years. If it’s protected. If it’s allowed to regenerate in its own slow, sweet way.’

‘Even Lake Erie?’ a woman asked.

‘Of course! Three years of total policing … no new contamination coming in from Huron … average rainfall. Even Lake Erie could cleanse itself. Now there would be some stubborn deposits on the bottom, but in time even they would be degraded and washed away. The Chesapeake Bay is like a beautiful woman. There’s no humiliation from which she cannot recover.’

The room in which the ecologists were having their lunch overlooked the Choptank, and from this vantage point no one could have deduced that the river had altered much in the past three hundred and seventy years of the white man’s occupancy: the width was the same; the color was still a chocolate-brown; the tides ebbed and flowed without creating
much disturbance; and the geese were back. Land which had begun to perish under the weight of tomatoes was prospering when planted with corn—thousands upon thousands of acres—and out beyond Devon Island, what was left of it, the bay rested in the wintry sunlight.

‘It’s in dreadful shape now,’ Adamson said. ‘I suppose you know we had to close down three more creeks. Oysters all contaminated. Hepatitis factories, our doctors call them. You eat a plate of six, you’re in bed for half a year. The bay’s become a cesspool—a dumping ground for Baltimore … and the others. But it could be restored.’

He rose and walked nervously about the room, looking now at the Choptank, now at the forests of loblolly on the far shore. ‘Our gamble has to be this. That at some point in the next two hundred years there will be a group of people like us able to convince society to give the bay three years of rest. It will revive. Oysters will be edible again. Fish will return. Grass will grow in the creeks and the ducks will be back, too. Millions of them.’

He was so excited by the endless possibilities of rejuvenation that his mind raced on. ‘Of course, when the ducks return, the geese may leave. Then we’ll change again and they’ll come back. The entire bay can be revived, every one of its eight thousand coves …’ He hesitated. His face grew somber. ‘Unless, of course, we have so contaminated the oceans that they can no longer send fresh tides and fish into the bay.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Mankind was destined to live on the edge of perpetual disaster. We are mankind because we survive. We do it in a half-assed way, but we do it. I suppose before the year ends we’ll even see some blue heron wading back. Their struggle has lasted for eleven thousand years. Ours is just beginning.’