Water on Our Mind

Winter’s thaw is releasing more than melted ice

It’s no wonder that water, in a variety of forms, flows through three of our stories this week. Vast volumes of water from the great snow melt are flowing downstream throughout the great 64,000 square miles of the Chesapeake Bay drainage basin. The Bay is linked to the land in six states, plus the District of Columbia, by more than 150 rivers, creeks and streams — all fed by water flowing off the roofs of our houses, skyscrapers and sheds; our cars and trucks; our driveways, parking lots, roads and highways.

Water is moving. A lot of water. And it is not very clean. But that’s another story.

This week’s stories are about very clean water. At least two of them are.

Aspiring young writer Katie Dodd tells you about her quest to taste perfect water. You’ll also learn about how Chesapeake Country water — pumped from aquifers impervious to all this flow — stacks up to the entries Katie judged in The Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting Competition.

Another young writer, Ariel Martinez Brumbaugh, is anything but new to Bay Weekly’s pages. Ariel has been writing for us since she was six or seven as a junior reporter. Ariel — who is bartending while perfecting her poetry at John Hopkins — tells us about how to pour the perfect Guinness. The famous Irish brew is another form of water — the Irish might say the perfect form — that will be flowing abundantly on St. Patrick’s Day this week.

Our third water writer, Marilyn Recknor, is a retired teacher who begins a second career as a reporter with Bay Weekly. Her story is written from her ride-along with an Anne Arundel County Public Works crew out repairing the potholes caused by the expansion and compression of freezing water under our roadways.

Why so much water in the last issue of winter? I might have called it accidental, were it not that our hearts are moving, too, thawed and flowing toward the water.

This cold winter has kept most of us off the Chesapeake except in our dreams. Now, Chesapeake Country’s hundreds of boatyards are working again. On land, boats are uncovered and tons of shrink removed. (Note, boaters, that it’s all recyclable, and now welcome in Anne Arundel County’s recycling.) Bottoms are being scraped, sanded and painted; hulls washed, buffed and polished; engines tuned and oil changed.

The water is pulling everybody who has a boat to go on out it, commercial watermen and fishermen toward the April 17 opening of trophy rockfish season. Sailors want to catch April’s winds, if not March’s, and the rest of us just want to feel the water under us.

Water tells many of the stories of Chesapeake Bay, and this week we bring you a few.

from the Editor

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