On the Bay

Thick clouds are brooding on an early October day at Assateague Island on Maryland’s Atlantic coast, but no one in the crew of Maryland Conservation Corps members is paying much attention to the sky; their focus, instead, is on what has fallen out of it.

Maryland Sea Grant (MDSG) has welcomed three new science fellows this year who have embedded in state agencies and organizations to better address climate change throughout Maryland.

When I was asked if I was interested in being a notetaker for the Coastal Farming Challenges workshops hosted by Maryland Sea Grant, I immediately said yes without fully knowing what my duties entailed. And I am glad that I did.

“Ah, man. I lost him.” Carter Ruby, a junior at Westminster High School, sighs and reaches into the 10-gallon aquarium tank again, a petri dish gripped carefully in his fingers. Beside him, junior Bella Diaz laughs and bends over her own petri dish, this one placed precisely on gridded paper.

Growing up on Cape Ann, north of Boston between Massachusetts and Ipswich Bays, Jim LaChance seemed to always have one foot on the land and the other in the water.