Bay Country

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Johns Hopkins Paperbacks Edition [stated]. Third printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. Charles R. Hazard. xvi, 223, [7] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Index. Cover has some wear and soiling. Signed and dated by the author on the half-title page. Winner of the John Burroughs Medal! This is one of the Maryland Paperback Bookshelf series. Born on Maryland's Eastern Shore and growing up close to the Chesapeake Bay, Horton's life and work has been defined by his love for this country's most impressive estuary. The Bay is his home, and as a writer, his passion. Horton is the nation's leading environmentalist journalist on the Chesapeake Bay. Working for The Baltimore Sun from the early 1970s until 2006, Horton carved out space to be a voice on environmental issues, no easy undertaking in a journalism setting. Horton was sure, however, of the work he was doing for the Bay and continued to make room for the stories he covered. When Hurricane Agnes struck the Chesapeake Bay in June of 1972, Horton's reporting on the devastation would dominate the front pages of The Sun. Later on in his career, Horton's work took him beyond the structure of a newspaper, to researching and writing several books and producing documentaries on the Bay. In one of his books, An Island Out of Time, Horton details the three years he and his family spent living on Smith Island, a cluster of islands located in the middle of the Chesapeake estuary. Horton writes about the people who have long lived isolated on Smith Island and in close relationship to the Bay. Horton has written about the environment for the past fifteen years in the Baltimore Sun. He is a writer who can mention herring and Proust in the same breath and charm readers with no previous affection for either. His stories of oysters and sea nettle, elms and rivers, barrier islands and blue crabs, farmers and watermen, always reach beyond the local to the most universal of subjects. This is a collection of personal essays, the distillation of what has seemed truest and best through a decade of reporting on the Maryland environment. The choice of subjects includes toward the Chesapeake Bay, as does most of the state's land and water. Only in the western third of Garrett County, where the eastern continental divide shrugs the Casselman and the Youghiogheny rivers off one shoulder toward the Gulf of Mexico, does the state by appreciable tribute to a watershed other than the bay. "Must reading in a city that reinvented itself by seeking its harbor roots". --Baltimore Magazine. "Mr. Horton -- a Baltimore journalist who has developed a devoted but hitherto local following -- ventures into a small, distinguished circle of nature writers. Fans of Aldo Leopold, John McPhee and Sigurd Olson won't be disappointed. This is not merely a book for those who already know the Chesapeake, although they will be enchanted by Tom Horton's vast knowledge, narrative skills and eye for detail. Like the true bay native he is, Mr. Horton uses the Chesapeake as a limitless resource from which to harvest a great bounty of observations about politics, nature, and human beings". -- New York Times Book Review. "Sailing down the Chesapeake in this book is bracing, for Horton is knowledgeable, thoughtful, full of wonder about the natural world and outspoken . . . As Smith Islanders might say, it's a 'right smart' book". -- Washington Post. Maryland Paperback Bookshelf. The structure of journalism, Horton describes, only allowed him to go so far in exploring his environmental interests. More than reporting on the news of environmental issues, Horton wanted to explore, "the motivations of the people who fight for the wetlands." He wanted to find a way to explore that deeper drive for action, and maybe even bring it out in his audiences. Even though he was well into a journalism career, Horton found he had more to say and would need an entirely different space to do so.