Thursday, June 10, 2004
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: The Bay begins in Bill's backyard
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Catawba Creek meanders along the backside of our property in Roanoke County, hardly more than a couple leaps wide in dry weather. When we have visitors from Tidewater Virginia, I like to take them to the creek and say, “Here’s the beginning of your mighty Chesapeake Bay.”
If I am lucky, a Black Angus will bleat in a nearby meadow, sounding like a foghorn, and the wind in the sycamores will mimic sea breezes.
We are a long way from the aroma of saltwater or rosy sunsets over a horizon of blue or creatures with colorful names like red drum, gray trout and blue crabs. But it is not stretching the truth to say it all begins here, with modest Catawba Creek gurgling and sparkling across our bottomland in the Catawba Valley.
The creek flows through a green, rural setting, often within shadow of the mountain peaks that carried the Appalachian Trail. It reaches the James River just downstream from Eagle Rock, and like the mustering of troops for some great campaign it adds to the volume of the river as it marches toward the Bay. There’s hardly a stroke of a paddle on this couple hundred mile journey that you don’t mingle with history or natural beauty.
Of course there are scores of other vein-like tributaries that pump lifeblood into the multistate Chesapeake Bay, an estuary whose size and importance is massive.
I love the Bay, and often send our boat across its choppy water. Even more, I love the mountains where I was born and live.
I have come to realize how closely the two are entwined. Our sense of community and commitment does not end at the tide line. The water, fresh and salt, belongs to everyone. How we treat it during the brief period it crosses our lives plays a role in the quality of life a couple hundred miles down the way.
This is a lesson that we’ve been slow to master. On the inland side of the Bay we have pumped sewage, sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus into the water, without regard to the Bay and its creatures and people. In the Bay area we have witnessed ever-expanding development in the watershed. In the Bay itself, we have allowed a fleet of purse-seine commercial fishing ships to remove, without study of the impact, tons of menhaden, a species that provides food for game fish and a filtering mechanism for the water.
You could come to the conclusion that the well being of the Bay is so complex that all hope for reversing trends that harm it are futile. That would be the wrong conclusion. Some scientists believe that cleanup efforts already are making an impact, and just last week the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission agreed to begin addressing the problem of decreasing menhaden stocks.
Maybe the very best way for us to preserve the Bay, or any other part of our environment, is to first deal with problems right were we live, in our backyard or back 40. Some of my neighbors are beginning to do that through the Carvins Cove Watershed Task Force, formed about a year ago under the umbrella of the Western Virginia Land Trust (westernvirginialandtrust.org).
The idea is to get landowners, big and small, to think about ways they can protect water and preserve open space. No one is shoving anything down anyone’s throat; in fact, there are cost-share funds available for property owners to carry out conservation practices. We should not expect landowners to bear the burden of conservation efforts apart from some personal benefits.
Fencing cattle out of Catawba Creek is one of the emphases of the task force. It is a quick means of sending cleaner water downstream. The fenced in corridors rapidly grow into habitat that benefits a variety of wildlife.
Water and wildlife aren’t the only winners. More productive, easier to operate farms can be a result.
We are beginning to do our part up here in the mountains. I hope the Bay people appreciate that and are doing the same.
