Voice of the Bay

https://www.dailypress.com/1991/09/24/voice-of-the-bay/

Mick Blackistone got his first taste of the Chesapeake Bay by jumping off the end of his family’s River Springs Farm pier when he 8 or 9 years old.

He would surface with handful after handful of meaty oysters taken from a bed his St. Mary’s County ancestors had tended for more than 10 generations. Then he’d throw out a fishing line for double strikes of wriggling perch – or pull in crabs so thick and plentiful that they’d cling to his bait in pairs.

Catching doublers was a frequent occurrence at River Springs farm during the 1950s. But as he grew into manhood, the water gradually turned murky and the bountiful harvest declined.

The slide continued through Blackistone’s college years and his job as a Senate aide in Washington, D.C. It deepened when he returned home to set up his own public relations firm in Annapolis in 1978.

Then he saw the threat to something his family had revered since the first Blackistones stepped off the decks of the Ark and the Dove in 1634.

“The fish weren’t there the way they used to be. The oysters were completely gone. The grasses where the soft crabs used to hide thinned away into almost nothing,” he says.

“Regardless of the way our lives had changed, everyone in my family was raised with the idea that we were responsible for this place. The river and the bay were part of our family home.”

Now 44, Blackistone began attacking the problem from a number of different fronts. As executive director of the Marine Trades Association of Maryland, he started bringing together commercial fishing, recreational boating and environmental interests that had been divided by a long history of conflicts. The compromises to which they finally agreed helped promote an important series of new protective laws, including legislation banning lead-based paint and requiring environmental buffer zones.

But he may be better known for his books on the Chesapeake Bay, including two children’s stories, a volume of poetry and a descriptive look at the region’s watermen. Scores of his fans, including several watermen, turned out to ask for his autograph during a recent stop at the Watermen’s Museum for the Yorktown Tercentennial celebration.

“I’ve always been a writer,” he says. “But I began writing these books as another way to reach out to more people about the bay.

“You’ve got to touch people before anything is going to happen.”

Blackistone began gathering material for a book on the watermen after years of working and arguing with them about the bay. His subjects were skeptical at first, he says, “because they’d seen a lot of coffee-table books that didn’t really represent them or their life.” His close relationship with the recreational boating industry caused additional problems.

Blackistone won their trust, however, with a year-and-a-half stint during which he worked regularly alongside members of the Maryland Watermen’s Association. He began by shipping out with the state’s historic skipjack fleet and dredging for oysters. Then he labored from the deck of a deadrise using patent tongs.

He worked during the eeling and crabbing seasons, too, often rising at 2 a.m. for the long drive from Annapolis to Tilghman Island. He frequently didn’t return home until 9 p.m. or later, he says.

The result, “Sunup to Sundown: The Watermen of the Chesapeake,” was an honest, unsentimental book that incorporated many of the watermen’s own observations. Unlike other volumes on the subject, it avoided romantic descriptions in favor of a straightforward look at the hardships and rewards of their life.

“They cut through all the bull written about them real quick,” Blackistone says.

The book also strived to correct the impression that watermen are modern-day misfits who take to their boats because they’re unable to lead a structured lifestyle.

“Most have responsibilities for a boat, a crew and a family. That’s a lot to take care of,” Blackistone says.

“They’re more like the Indians of the past than the rough, unshaven cowboys some people compare them with,” he adds. “They’re the ones that are having their livelihood taken away.”

“Sunup” was adopted for use in both sociology and anthropology courses at the University of South Carolina. Blackistone’s second volume, a children’s book called “The Day They Left the Bay,” was even more successful. The story won an Environmental Education Achievement Award from the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 1989. Maryland teachers now use it as part of the standard fourth grade curriculum.

It also led to a growing series of talks in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia schools that has brought the writer in touch with more than 30,000 children over the past two years. Young people respond quickly to the imagined tale of the animals leaving the Chesapeake Bay because of pollution, he says. Their ability to imagine that bleak future may be the bay’s best hope.

“I’ve had elementary school students come up with the concept of a buffer zone around the bay completely on their own. I’ve had kids come up with a ban on Styrofoam because of what it does to the bay,” he explains.

“Every time I do a school talk, I see kids coming up with things that we adults have debated for years. But where we can’t nail these things down, they can do it right away because, for them, it’s simple. They don’t want to see the crabs and the fish and the oysters die.”