The House at Royal Oak by Carol Eron Rizzoli Page A

new, traditions also survive, especially in the architecture of towns dating to the seventeenth century and in bay foods and bay cooking. At almost every dockside restaurant and crab house, a distinctive seasoning imparts zing to the famous steamed blue crabs and also to potatoes, corn, bread, eggs, popcorn, crackers, and anything else people want to put it on. A blend of spices, it usually includes coarse salt, mustard seed, paprika, black and red peppers, bay laurel, ginger, allspice, mace, and clove.
    These days, of course, the defining force that was the bay is doing far less defining. It has been eaten up, like our house, from inside and out. Though saving a house, I remind myself, is nothing compared to saving a bay.
    You would never guess from the developers’ advertisements about the good life here or from the restaurantsoffering all the crabs you can eat that the bay is deathly ill. The trouble started long before a campaign to “Save the Bay” was launched in the 1970s. Every step of development from the steamships and railways in the nineteenth century to the cars, highways, and housing of the twentieth has contributed. By the 1970s the situation was critical and billions of dollars later the crisis is worse. No matter what the agencies working on the problems or responsible for them may say in their “cautiously optimistic” reports, the situation remains desperate.
    The oysters are all but gone and the legendary blue crab,
Callinectes sapidus,
too. The name, given by a Smithsonian Institution scientist, comes from the Latin
sapidus,
meaning savory or tasty, and the Greek for beautiful swimmer. More than beautiful swimmers, they’re beautiful, tasty swimmers and, like the taste of the oyster, the taste of crab only creates a desire for more—which helps matters not at all.
    At the same time that the shellfish are disappearing, along with the submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, that is so important to the ecosystem, other forms of life have rebounded, notably the shad and striped bass. But even this is not a win-win . . .
    A summer or so back, a neighbor close by on Edge Creek sighted a bullnose shark cruising off the end of his dock. What was a large shark doing up this shallow creek? “Very aggressive, the bullnose,” the Department of Natural Resources advised when the sighting was reported. “Probably hungry, probably chasing striped bass.”
    And what are striped bass doing up this shallow creek? “They’re hungry, too. Probably came up the creek to eat baby crabs,” said the Department of Natural Resources.
    In the 1980s, striped bass were in short supply from over-harvesting so fishing for striped bass, called rockfish locally, was banned. The fish rebounded in large numbers. A success story for the bass, but not for young blue crabs that hide in underwater grasses in the shallow, warm creeks.
    Between the bass feasting on little crabs and the human passion for big crabs, a passion that depletes 75 percent of the bay’s adult crab stock every year, one of the great glories of the bay is in dangerously short supply. To help meet summertime demand, crab is now shipped in from the Gulf of Mexico and South Asia.
    Trying to help, the state offered to buy back crabbing licenses in 2009 from Maryland watermen. After consulting economists, who proposed a technique from game theory, the state asked each waterman to privately name his price. One crabber asked $425 million; others refused to bid altogether, saying the license was their link to the past, family and traditions. Said one, “I would feel like part of me was gone. . . This is what I am.”
    The native oysters are in even worse shape than the crabs. Overharvested since the late nineteenth century, and diseased more recently as a result of poor water quality, 98 percent of the oysters are gone. Go out on the water with Captain Wade Murphy on his skipjack, the traditional shallow-draft sailing