What a difference a few decades can make.

While researching a short piece for Chesapeake Quarterly on the Bay’s once popular beaches, I came across some strange reminders of the past.

There were memories of summers decades ago when rock-and-roll bands played under the stars at Mayo Beach and at other hopping Bayside spots. Listening to aging beach-goers recall those summer nights I could feel the humid dark, see sunburned bodies sway, hear crickets trill beneath crying electric guitars.

When speaking to Daryl Lofgren, I sensed an even longer history. Lofgren is manager of what is now Anne Arundel County’s Mayo Beach Park, and his enthusiasm for the place and its past stirred thoughts of lost, long-ago landscapes of Colonial mills and farms — like the one belonging to Commodore Isaac Mayo, a naval hero of the War of 1812, for whom the Mayo peninsula is named.

I was also reminded of a darker past, one of exclusion and prejudice.

During the era of segregation, African Americans and Jews were not allowed on many Bay beaches and had to look for places of their own, places like Carrs Beach or, for Jewish families out of Washington, the Captain Salem Avery House, now a watermen’s museum.

One longtime Annapolis resident described how a high school friend was turned away from a popular Bay beach for being Jewish. In fact, she wasn’t Jewish, and said so. But that didn’t matter — evidently the ticket takers didn’t believe her. In the end she was turned away simply because she looked Jewish.

That was the harsh reality of the time. You could be turned away if you belonged to the wrong race, the wrong religion. Or even if you looked like you did.

We face many political and ecological challenges in the Bay region, including rising sea level and the washing away of so much beachfront. But with our losses have come gains, and some changes have been for the better. Though we still have a long way to go, we should be thankful for how far we’ve come.

For more, see A New Day on the Bay.

Why in the world is the Bay getting so cloudy?  That’s the question that’s puzzled so many of us.  Sure there is construction in the watershed and agriculture and stormwater runoff, and yet the cloudiness appears to be worse than one would expect, even with all that runoff. 

And especially strange, this haziness has been getting worse and worse every year, in a one-way slide.  This is disturbing, since even nutrients and dead zones are largely tied to changing conditions.  Wet years versus dry years.  More wind or less wind.  Hotter or cooler.  The Bay’s cloudiness, what scientists call turbidity, has been getting worse every year no matter what the weather.

That is downright weird.  And worrisome.

 When asked about what’s going on, most researchers would answer, “We just don’t know.”   Some even said, “It’s a mystery.”  Scientists don’t often use words like “mystery.”  This seemed out of the ordinary. 

Two scientists who have delved into this puzzle are Larry Sanford and Charles (Chuck) Gallegos.  Sanford (at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science) is an expert in sediment.  Gallegos (at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center) is an expert in algae.  They think the turbidity question has remained a mystery largely because it falls between the cracks of different disciplines.  Between those who study sediment and those who study algae.  Between the inorganic and the organic.

 What is occurring in the Bay, if these two researchers are right, cannot be explained in terms of sediment alone or algae alone.  Instead, there appears to be an interaction in the Bay’s waters that results from an overload of both nutrients and certain kinds of sediment.  The organic matter fueled by nutrients and the fine sediment that now floats in the Bay are apparently sticking together in ways that cause a cumulative build-up, a worsening cloudiness.

The resulting haze reaches its peak during the summer, much like the haze of those hot humid days in the city.  Smog in the air.  Turbidity in the water. 

For more on the story see “Shadow on the Chesapeake.”