In the hilly farm country near Ephrata, Pennsylvania, God lives close to the red-tinted
earth. You can see it in the hand-written signs quoting scripture in front of
tidy brick homes—one phrase per side, so you get a little religion coming
and going. You can see it on the storefronts, posted with the note “Closed
for Ascension Day.” It’s in the bowed heads of Amish women who kneel
in riotously blooming flower beds, and in the stoic shoulders of men as they guide
teams of mules at the plow. From here, the watermen and oysters and long, flat
horizons of the Chesapeake Bay seem a world away, as distant as the moon. And
that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
 |
| This story is an excerpt from Window on the Chesapeake by Wendy Mitman
Clarke. To order this book, visit the Mariner's Museum. |
Matt Ehrhart steers his pickup along narrow roads flanked with daisies and
honeysuckle, slowing down every time he crosses a stream. He’s meandering
along Indian Run, a creek like hundreds of others in this neck of southern Pennsylvania—that
is to say shallow, narrow, fairly slow, and profoundly important to the Bay
some thirty miles distant. “This is where it starts to go downhill, right
here,” he says, as he pulls over across from a barn perched atop a low
hill. There is no grass on the hillside, just an acre or so of pocked brown
ooze—courtesy of the cows that walk from the barnyard down to the skinny
creek at the bottom, where they drink, swat flies, defecate, chew cud and generally
hang out. Across the street, more cows are doing the same in a narrow stretch
of pasture along the stream. “See, almost that whole area should be a
buffer,” Matt says, shaking his head. “We are still working on this
guy.”
Several miles away, he pulls over again and points to a grassy swath embracing
both sides of the same creek. The grass is thick and lush, and saplings and
low shrubs stretch skyward. The cows here are still doing their bovine thing,
but well away from the creek. “When we first sampled this stream we were
just sampling manure, half-digested silage,” Matt says. “Just a
year later there was a real bottom and actually critters crawling around in
it. To watch [the buffer] come in and start looking like a forest is pretty
satisfying, really.”
As assistant director and watershed restoration manager for the Chesapeake
Bay Foundation’s Pennsylvania office in Harrisburg, thirty-three-year-old
Matt finds in untarnished streams the kind of glory and gratification an opera
buff might find in a Puccini aria. He has been seduced by them since he was
a boy growing up in nearby New Holland. He has flailed away at them with a fly
rod, he has watched his young son find the same wondrous world within their
riffles and pools. He has made his home on one here near Ephrata, a sun-dappled,
silver ribbon called Segloch Run, one of a handful of streams in southern Pennsylvania
healthy enough to support a population of wild trout. He wants to make every
creek and brook within this place of red earth, green hills and devout people
look, sound and feel like this one.
|
