On the Bay

Most kids spend their time at the beach swimming and playing in the ocean. Not Brittany Wolfe. Growing up surrounded by water on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, she was more interested in poking around the intertidal zone, finding shells and wondering about the animals that lived in them.

Some 20 miles upstream from Baltimore on the Patapsco River, a four-inch-long American eel is making a monumental climb. Wriggling up a steep 30-foot-long metal gutter lined with a climbing substrate, the eel finally gains the summit, then slides down the other side into a mesh bag in a holding tank. 

Ordinarily at this time of year, Kit Waskom Pollard is cooking oysters. Grilled in the backyard, sprinkled with rosemary and sea salt, their aroma signals one celebration after another: Easter, Mother’s Day, her father’s birthday, maybe an engagement or a graduation.

Thousands of American eels captured at the Conowingo Dam eel ramp are swimming en masse in a huge holding tank, waiting to be trucked upstream where they will be released to restock part of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced schools worldwide to close and shift their classes to online learning—a prodigious undertaking for teachers and students that has thrown traditional education for a violent loop. But some educators, among them J.