Chesapeake Gold by Brait Susan;

Author:Brait, Susan; [Brait, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5Metamorphosis

Down in Virginia, along the northern bank of the York, a research facility connected with the college of William and Mary, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, is located on a triangular spit of land in the town of Gloucester Point. I traveled down the Tidewater Trail to the institute one day because I wanted to meet two marine biologists working there. Recently hired for a new project, they were trying to reseed some of the Bay with cultured oysters.

Around Gloucester Point, the Trail’s four lanes are hedged with small brick shopping centers. I turned from the highway between a fast food restaurant and a gas station and drove past some cul-de-sacs built for commuters from Newport News. I took a rutted dirt road to the river. The hatchery was down that road near the point of a crescent-shaped basin.

The building was boxy and white, with a bank of windows around its second story. I walked around a bit before I went in. There was a pile of oyster shells near the entrance and, beyond that, an experimental plot of marsh grass with a please-don’t-walk sign on it. Near the water’s edge some turtles dozed in tubs. Past them, out on the river, a white hut floated on a raft. A jumble of pipes ran from that building across the marsh to the hatchery.

I went inside to see the hatchery and meet the scientists. The building was divided into one large double-storied room off to the right and several small offices and storage rooms, some on the first floor, some on the second, off to the left. In the large room, vats and tubs were lined up in orderly rows like assembly tables in a factory. To one side were the vats: round containers of gray plastic about five feet high and five feet across. To the other were the tubs: green rectangular troughs about six feet long and three feet wide. Pipes with spigots and heavy electrical cord hung from the ceiling down over each container.

The floor of this main room was awash, an inch or two deep, with York River water. Ken Kurkowski was wading through it, shoving it from him with the outer edges of his boots. He had the slight stoop of a distance runner; beneath jeans and polo shirt, his body was long and lean and stiff. His hair was clipped short above his ears and neck as if it had been dealt with severely by a militaristic barber.

A green hose lay on the cement floor. It had been cut apart and then spliced back together with a metal clamp. He hunkered down to it, clenched his jaw, and loosened the clamp. Then he righted a filtering mechanism: a clear plastic box about the size and shape of a large briefcase containing two meshed white cylinders, each about a foot long.

One storage room jutted into the two-story main room of the hatchery, like a small box set down inside a large carton. The room had a ceiling but no second story counterpart; one could stand on its roof while inside the building.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.