Bay Country: Reflections on the Chesapeake - by Tom Horton

The New York Times pull quote on the cover of this work states that "Fans of Aldo Leopold, John McPhee, and Sigur Olson won't be disappointed...Mr. Horton displays a stunning command of the language." I will admit to not having ever heard of Sigurd Olson; however, I have read two of McPhee's books (one for my Celebrating the States project some years ago), and more I recently blogged about Leopold's A Sand County Almanac . I agree that like McPhee and Leopold, Horton has a "stunning command of the language". Furthermore, as in Leopold's work, libraries in Horton's book are used metaphorically, as a way to understand (read) nature. 

The roots of corn we seldom notice, but ought to heed; for they speak as eloquently as the golden ears and luxuriant foliage topside, but a different message indeed. Pull up a stalk sometime and the first thing that will strike you is how easy it was to do, and how scanty are the underpinnings of so statuesque a plant. Pushing up its glossy green regimens across a thousand square miles of Maryland, this giant, wild grass, bred into the aristocrat of cultivated cereals, epitomizes the pride and problems of our agriculture - and of more than agriculture - I venture there is more profound social commentary in a cornfield than in some libraries, if one is willing to dig for it.

With a coring device [scientists] extract gray-brown cylinders from the bay's bottom, a distance down through the muck of several feet, but a journey back through time of a thousand years. Grain by grain, layer by layer, a few micrometers a year, the sediments washing off the 64,000-square-mile watershed that extends from New York to West Virginia have compiled a rich natural historical library, awaiting only a generations of readers skilled enough to translate it.

...public commitment to restoring the bay is running at an all-time high. Throughout the watershed, people and their elected leaders are gabbling excitedly about the prospects, as a flock of geese gets raucous just before lifting off for new feeding grounds. The challenge is infectious, the script outline looks promising; but just as yet the library at the bottom of the bay reads caution. 

Horton's soothing prose made this love letter to the Chesapeake Bay (and all of Maryland) a perfect read aloud for this Marylander and her husband. The book was originally published in 1987, the year we were married - in Maryland!