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Blackwater, Fragile Beauty
By Dick Cooper
Cambridge, Md. — A thousand snow geese explode out of the marsh in swirl of white. Their black-tipped wings blur against the brown and green backdrop of the forest as they bank and turn in unison. As they fly toward us, their honking intensifies and we can feel the roiling currents of air rush over us.
My wife, Pat, caught much of the sight through the lens of her camera. As she lowers the Nikon, her face lights up with a broad smile, half joy, half wonder.
“I just love this,” she says.
We are in Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in the Great Marsh of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Blackwater Lake, a 12-square-mile tidal pool, stretches out in front of us. Thousands of Canada geese waddle on the mud flats. A bald eagle stands sentry on the lone trunk of a long-dead loblolly pine. A squadron of ducks leaps out of the water and flies overhead on whistling wings. A heron stares through the surface of the water, looking for lunch.
Blackwater is truly a refuge for wild life.
The 27,000-acre refuge makes you fell as if you have traveled to a remote, raw frontier of nature, but we are is just 15 minutes from the busy six-lane highway, lined with hotels, fast-food franchises and big-box stores, and that cuts through the city of Cambridge, 140 miles southwest of Philadelphia.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that maintains the refuge, claims that 60 percent of Americans live within a day’s drive of the marsh. It draws more than 165,000 visitors a year.
The refuge is the winter home to 35,000 Canada geese, 15,000 snow geese and tundra swans, as well as thousands of ducks, loons and even white pelicans. Tens of thousands of migrating birds stop make it a stop. It is the year-round home more than 130 bald eagles, the largest East Coast population of the national birds north of Florida, according to the FWS.
The service maintains a series ponds and more than 450 acres of farm fields to provide food for the migratory birds on the Eastern Fly Way.
In the recently remodeled Visitors Center, staffed by volunteers from the Friends of Blackwater, near the entrance to the refuge, a monitor displays the life feed from a camera over an eagles’ nest where the female has just laid two eggs to start her new family.
“They lay their eggs in the winter,” a volunteer explains, pointing to the screen. “They incubate them for 32 to 36 days before they hatch.” Males and females take turns sitting the eggs to make sure they stay warm and unmolested. A second-floor observatory affords a sweeping view of the lake and the marsh.
Just down the road from the Visitors’ Center is the entrance to Wildlife Drive that winds its way along waterways, woods and marsh. Several short trails branch off the drive to get you closer to the wildlife.
Around a corner in the drive, the horizon opens up and you realize why Blackwater has become know as the “Everglades of the North.” Open expanses of water are framed by hummocks covered with pines and tall grass. Most of the migrating geese and swans winter there, congregating in flocks of hundreds to thousands.
The air is full of the sounds of birds. The honking of an unseen flock somewhere off to the west carries across the water like a distant war chant.
As we drive though a forested section, Blackwater’s version of a traffic jam brings us to a halt. Four cars are stopped on the shoulder. A half dozen people are standing in the roadway aiming cameras with telephoto lens and binoculars into the pines.
We get out and join them. One of the men lowers his camera as we approach. He points into the trees and says in a reverent church whisper, “Back there, about 20 feet up, two bald eagles.”
The pair of national birds is looking right back at us with bored gazes, slowing turning their heads to get a better view. A cyclist stops to join us, followed by a young couple with a baby in a stroller. We all quietly watch. No one talks. No motorists blow their horns in impatience. A chevron of geese passes overhead. We are the visitors.
Most visitors tour the five miles of Wildlife Drive by car, but the refuge also has hiking trails and three marked water “trails” for paddlers who want to explore deeper into the marsh. The FWS recommends that paddlers take guided tours to help navigate the maze of rivers and streams.
The beauty of Blackwater, however, hides the fragility of the marsh. The land is sinking under the water at a rate of about 100 acres a year. The “lake” is really the drowned Blackwater River; its serpentine bed once lined with tall grass, has slipped under the surface over the last 75 years.
For more than two centuries, Blackwater has been the victim of upstream mistakes. A canal dug by slaves in 1820 turned the freshwater river and marsh brackish killing trees and wildlife. Nearby canneries that shipped seafood and vegetables around the world for the first half of the Twentieth Century, used so much water that the land is slipping away. Rainwater runoff from new housing developments sends pollutes into the marsh.
Dixie Birch, the supervisory wildlife biologist at Blackwater, says that if the cycle is not reversed, the marsh will continue to disappear.
“Sea level is rising even faster than we thought,” she says. “We continue to loose the marsh at an alarming rate. More and more is going underwater. It could be gone in 2025 or even 2020.”
Birch says the marshes are crucial to the environment.
“They are a major spawning area for shellfish and finfish and an important habitat for bald eagles and migratory birds and the endangered Delmarva fox squirrel,” she says. “If the wetlands are lost they will have nowhere to go.”
“Some one has said that wetlands are like the kidneys in a person,” Birch says. “They filter out wastes and help clean up the Bay.”
Federal and state agencies are working on long-range plans to restore the marsh to the size it was when the federal government bought the former fur farm in 1933. Birch says a major success has been the eradication of the nutria from the refuge. The beaver-like rodent, native to South America was brought to the fur farm in the 1940s to supplement the native muskrat. With no natural predators, the nutria population expanded rapidly. The nutria’s favorite meal happens to be the roots of marsh grasses. They were eating the marsh to death.
The other great hope for the restoration is to use soil dredge from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay shipping channel as fill to replace the subsided land. The dredged soil is being used now to rebuild Poplar Island in the Bay. Birch and scientists from the University of Maryland say that the use of the soil is one of the major pieces in the intricate plan to save Blackwater.
The preservation of Blackwater has drawn national attention. When a developer wanted to build a resort, golf course and thousands of new homes at the headwaters of the Little Blackwater River, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation got 35,000 people to sign a petition against the project. Maryland lawmakers have since negotiated reduction in the size of the project and bought 750 of the 1,080-acre tract for the developer to become parkland.
The Dorchester County marshes have always been sparsely populated. Most of the villages now have more gravestones than occupants. Those who farm, hunt and fish the area for a living have to contend with oppressive summer heat and of some of the meanest mosquitoes on the Delmarva Peninsula.
Until the Civil War, slaves worked much of the land. Harriet Tubman, the famed Underground Railway conductor, was born on the Brodess Plantation a few miles from Blackwater. A museum dedicated to her life is in Cambridge.
Today, the road from Cambridge to Blackwater runs through incredibly flat farmland and tall stands of pine. South and west from the refuge, a network of narrow, two-lane roads take you into the heart of the marsh. At high tide, the road often goes underwater. For miles, there are no manmade structures in sight. Frequently, the horizon disappears as the water meets the sky.
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Yosemite, Remotely Familiar
By Dick Cooper
As we neared our destination, a place my wife, Pat, and I had never even been close to before, we began to recognize familiar sites.
And then El Capitan came into view, its shear gray-white face rising 3,300 feet in front of us in the autumn sun. We had arrived in the Yosemite Valley.
Superlatives flow like the lacy waters wafting down the 620-foot face of Bridalveil Falls. Just up the road, next to the mouth of the Wawona Tunnel, the overlook offers one of California’s favorite photo ops. The landmark rock faces, waterfalls and river valley spreads out for miles as tourists crowd along the stone wall to take photographs that will only give a fraction of a hint of an inkling of the panorama before them.
One can only envy the lives of the band of Miwok Indians who called this Shangri La home for eons. It is equally chilling to know that within a decade of being “discovered” by group of white militiamen in 1851, the Miwoks and their centuries-old lifestyle had all but disappeared.
Yosemite National Park is part of our national subconscious and can evoke a sense of magnitude and wonder just by saying its name.
Blame it on Ansel Adams.
The master’s photographs-as-art have burned black-and-white images of El Capitan, Half Dome and Yosemite Valley into our collective memories. And while his are some of the best photographs ever taken, they are out done by the real thing.
On this glorious October day, we joined the tens of millions of visitors who have been awed, inspired and humbled by the beauty of Yosemite.
We were just starting our annual trip to visit daughter Jessica, a pastry chef, who moved to California several years ago to practice her profession. Each year, we try to mix in something new and the Golden State never fails to please and amaze.
One of the best finds of this trip was our new favorite California airport, Sacramento International (SMF). We came upon it more through fluke and frugality than design. Pat was watching the airfares to San Francisco, our former favorite California airport, when she spotted round trips from Philadelphia to Sacramento at half the price.
I jumped on the Internet, calculated the distances to our destinations - Yosemite, San Francisco and the wine country of St. Helena where Jessica now lives - and found that Sacramento was a central location for our trip. It was a little closer to Yosemite and the same distance from St. Helena as SFO, without the headache of driving through Oakland and San Francisco traffic. And, with 150 flights a day, compared to about 40 an hour at SFO, the airport is more user-friendly.
There are no non-stops from Philadelphia to SMF but we put aside our aversion to connecting flights to take advantage of the price break. Several carriers connect Philadelphia to Sacramento with one stop. Our United flight through Chicago’s O’Hare was just over an hour longer than a non-stop to San Francisco. We left Philadelphia at 6 a.m. and arrived at 10:30 a.m., Sacramento time. Within 30 minutes of landing, we were in our rental car.
At Stockton, we left I-99 and headed east through mile after mile of exotic looking groves that we discovered were almond trees. We were getting hungry for lunch, having passed on the fast-food franchises clustered at the highway interchange, in the hopes of finding “real food.” We were passing through the farm town of Escalon when Pat spotted a half-dozen pickups parked outside a small eatery.
“Let’s try that place,” she said. “If the tradesmen are eating their lunch there, it has to be good.”
Groppetti’s Deli was chock full of local color, from the wall covered with photos of youth sports teams sponsored by the deli, to the waitresses shouting out the names of the customers when their orders came up. We had their special “barrel-roasted” chicken sandwiches - smoky chicken, choice of cheeses, lettuce, tomato and a secret sauce on a fresh long roll - that Pat dubbed “the best chicken sandwich I have ever had.”
From Escalon, the road rises through low, brown hills until you realize the “clouds” on the horizon are the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Over the crest of a hill the deep blue waters of a reservoir glistened. I pulled into an overlook and we jumped out with cameras to capture the views. We pulled off twice more in the next mile to get shots. In the next few hours, we would pull over at least two dozen times to take in sights that were each more spectacular than the last.
We arrived at the gate of Yosemite National Park about 3 p.m. As I was paying the $20 for the week-long vehicle pass, I asked the ranger if we were on the road to Tenaya Lodge where we had reserved a two-night stay.
“Yes, you are,” she assured. “It’s about two hours ahead.”
Pat sputtered a bit, trying to comprehend how we could be in the park and still be two-hours from our hotel on its southern entrance. Our East Coast minds translated two hours travel into the distances between major cities in several states. Just when you think you’re used to California’s vastness, it still surprises. Yosemite covers almost 1,200 square miles, roughly the same area as Philadelphia, Bucks and Montgomery counties combined.
Finally, after 50 miles of switchback roads at 25 miles an hour, we arrived at the Tenaya Lodge, the 244-room hotel just outside the south gate of the park, we suddenly felt a combination of the altitude and the three-hour time change, had a light dinner and turned in early to get ready for day two.
After a big breakfast at the lodge, we began with a visit to the Mariposa Grove, home to about 500 giant sequoias. Many of the 300-foot-tall trees are named, including the world famous Wawona Tunnel Tree, now fallen, that was photographed by generations of tourists who drove their cars through the arch cut in its base. Then there are the Grizzly Giant looking like a Franken-broccoli stalk on steroids, the Faithful Couple, whose trunks have grown together and the Clothespin, whose fire-ravaged trunk is split from the ground up.
We took the open-air, narrated tram ride, seeing most of the grove it in a little over an hour. While Yosemite has long been known for its adventurous hiking, rock climbing and rafting, we are Baby Boomers with bad knees. We enjoyed the park without leaving the roads or well-wore paths.
From the Mariposa Grove, we headed back to Yosemite Valley to spend more time in that sacred place.
When I was booking the trip in June, I tried to get a room at the Ahwahnee Lodge, the historic four-star hotel in the heart of the valley. At first we balked at the $949 price tag for the “Romance Package,” two-nights that included one night’s dinner for two. After deciding, “Let’s go for it,” I called. The booking agent came just short of laughing out loud when I told him I wanted a Thursday and Friday night in October. “Sir, those rooms have been booked for a year. Our guests often rebook before they leave.”
Lunch at the Ahwahnee’s grand dining room work out well on this trip. And a fine lunch it was, adding up to just $33 with tip.
After lunch, we walked along the pebbled beach of the Merced River. Pat saw most of it through the lens of her camera. A trout the size of your fore arm swam in a pool. Half Dome’s cloven face was wreathed in light smoke from a controlled burn. El Capitan’s reflection on the river’s surface gave the valley a felling of endless height and depth. Artists with easels stood in tall grasses trying to capture the beauty with oil on canvas. People moved along the valley looking up, down and around, speaking in church whispers.
We stopped at a small group who were staring up at El Capitan’s vertical face, pointing to a speck about three-quarters of the way to the top. An ant-sized figure moved ever so slightly, one of a score of climbers on the face at any given time.
“I hope he makes it before dark,” one of them said. Many don’t, choosing to spend nights shackled to El Cap’s face. “I would be afraid of walking in my sleep,” one replied. “You would only do that once,” another quipped.
We stopped one more time at the overlook outside the Wawona Tunnel to take a long last look back. Shadows moving across the valley at a quickening pace, changing the colors of the granite.
While three to four million people a year now visit Yosemite, the Miwoks would still recognize this glacier-cut as a hallowed haven.
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