The white-coated man behind the seafood case in the grocery store sees me eyeing the round, plastic containers of crab meat set in ice. Traditional one-pound containers.

“Can I help you?”

I squint my eyes a little, making sure I’m reading the prices correctly, my mind running through numbers like an old-fashioned cash register. Jumbo lump crab meat, $63.  Regular lump crab meat, $43.

“The crab meat,” I say.  “Those prices look high.”

His answer comes quickly.  “Not as high as Annapolis. A pound of jumbo lump over there is running about $75.”

There’s no claw meat as there has been sometimes in the past. No special either.

“That lump meat is now what they call special.”

I thank the man for the information, tilt my hat back, scratch my head a little.  Not sure how that helps the thinking process but maybe it does.  Then I turn, walk away, and head for the cashier to pay for the four-gallon plastic trash bags I’ll put in the plastic paint bucket I bought at the hardware store to put beside my sink for food waste.  Keeps it out of the sink and the disposal and the septic system and the waters where the crabs grow.  They have enough to eat without me adding more nutrients to the system.

Looking at the crab meat prices was more of a fact-finding mission than a dinner decision.

Inflation and high prices are on everyone’s mind. Soft crabs have been scarce lately. I saw some in another seafood case the other day – they were good-sized soft crabs, alive  – $7.75 each. More sticker shock.

“Market’s terrible,” a local buyer tells me. “”Used to be crabs were something people ate as a regular part of their diet. Not anymore.  Look at the prices.  Now they’re a delicacy, a luxury item. Soft crabs are scarce because peelers are scarce.  A Delaware Bay crabber said there hasn’t been hardly any peeler run so far this year. But there’s lots of little crabs out there.”

Another chimes in. “This is never usually a strong time for the market.”

And another: “Ocean City was strong over Memorial Day weekend but not what it’s been in the past.”

Prices.  Not just for crabs, for all kinds of food items.

Conversation shifts.  “Did you smell the smoke in the air this morning and see the haze? It’s the wild fires up in Canada, Nova Scotia.  They say half the island’s on fire.”

I did smell the smoke Thursday morning and noticed the haze that softened the edges of the clouds and the trees in the distance. Smelling smoke in the morning strikes me as unusual.

National Weather Service says the smoky smell and haze are a result of the Canadian fires up north, fires scorching parts of New Jersey’s Pione Barrens and fires out west. They expect those conditions, coming at us from sources thousands of miles away, to persist for a while.

More head scratching, wondering, my mind scrolling and scanning, trying to make sense of it all, trying to connect all of the dots. Plastic containers, plastic bags, plastic paint pails. Plastics all made from fossil fuels.  The burning of fossil fuels, we’re told, part of the equation leading to a warming of the climate, changes in weather patterns, “smoke on the water and fire in the sky.” Everything contributes.

Back to crabs.  Watermen are getting $150 per bushel at the moment, fairly typical for this time of the year.  The winter dredge survey, results announced recently, showed significantly higher numbers of crabs in the Chesapeake compared to 2022.

“Lots of little crabs out there now.  Lots of them.”

Prices should moderate as the season progresses into the summer.  Demand will be higher but so too will be supply.  And as the sheds continue with each full moon, crabs are getting bigger too.

“By late summer and fall, there will be plenty of crabs.”

Anecdotal reporting, that’s what I do.  Listening and observing, bits and snatches of information coming from all different directions – just as irregular and numerous as jigsaw puzzle pieces – helping form our ever-changing world view, completing a puzzle that’s really never completed..

If you made it with me this far, thanks for reading.

The estimated harvest of 620,000 bushels of oysters from natural bars in the Maryland portion of Chesapeake Bay during the 2022-2023 season is the highest since the 976,000 bushel harvest recorded in the 1986-’87 season.

Information provided by the Shellfish Division of the state’s Department of Natural Resources indicates that while the oyster population is trending in a positive direction, it’s still a long way from the boom years of more than a century ago when annual harvests counted in the several millions of bushels.

The dockside value of this year’s harvest, based on an average bushel price of $30 over the course of the October through March season, comes in at $18,600,000. That’s a $2,310,00 increase – 14 percent – over the value of the 543,000 bushels harvested during the 2021-’22 season. Excellent working conditions weatherwise and strong sets of baby oysters over the last few years led to daily-limit harvests for the tongers, dredgers and divers who work the Chesapeake and its tributaries.

Dockside chatter indicates that the East Coast market remained relatively strong through the season.  So strong in fact that Virginia extended its season by a month leading to some watermen in Maryland’s portion of the Bay seeking a similar extension here. However, according to Maryland Shellfish Division Director Chris Judy, that wasn’t given serious consideration among Maryland’s resource managers.

“Maryland did not consider extending the oyster season, as did Virginia. We have kept the same harvest rules, such as the daily bushel limit and season length and others, as a conservative approach to managing the population and fishery,” said Judy.

In response to questions about the steady improvement in harvests over the past few years, Judy reiterated that strong spat sets, low prevalence of disease, low mortality rate and a healthy balance between fresh and salty water are the primary reasons for the upward trends.  But he was careful to sound a cautionary note as well: “Spat sets have been good recently, the biomass index – size and numbers of oysters – is trending upwards, and certain areas show an abundance of oysters. However, other areas are not getting good spat sets or showing large numbers of oysters, due to low salinity which impacts the population. Again, even though there are positive trends with oysters they are not yet recovered or restored.”

Recent surveys have found virtually no sets of little oysters in the upper part of Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake. Low salinity in that section of the Bay has long been a perennial problem.

The healthiest spat sets and harvests in recent years have come in the waters in and around Tangier Sound. One area of hope has come in the waters of Eastern Bay and the Miles and Wye Rivers where declining spat set trends have started to turn around.

Another reason why harvests have increased over the past few years is more watermen targeting oysters, which is natural considering stronger markets and growing oyster populations. For example, for the 2021-’22 wild oyster season, 1,228 individuals paid the oyster surcharge for their commercial licenses.  For the 2022-’23 season, that number increased to 1,316 surcharges.

During October and November each fall, state scientists take to the Bay’s waters to dredge approximately 345 samples from 271 bars throughout Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake to monitor the health of the oyster population.  The results of that survey are compiled in an annual report.

Here are some statements made in the conclusion of the most recent full report, compiled in 2021:

“ . . .  the positive trends in population indicators that began 12 years ago and have substantially improved over the past three years offer encouragement that a corner has been turned. Three years is a relatively short period of time for predicting trends, and it remains to be seen whether the oyster population continues to grow. Nevertheless, the past dozen years has seen a net gain for oysters in Maryland, especially when compared with the devastated post-epizootics [disease-ridden] populations of the previous decade. … Whether these trends will continue remains to be seen. But barring the resurgence of disease or some yet unknown threat, there is every reason to believe that oysters can continue to flourish in Maryland. They are a resilient species.”

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

Data 

The best way to sample the depth of knowledge and spiritual height of Rebecca Hoffberger is to walk the hallways, climb the soaring spiral stairs, and immerse yourself in the exhibit areas of Baltimore’s quirky, unique, inspiring and nationally acclaimed American Visionary Art Museum. There you will find creative vision and revelations in countless works by mostly unknown, self-taught artists.

The best way to sample the depth of knowledge and spiritual height of Rebecca Hoffberger is to walk the hallways, climb the soaring spiral stairs, and immerse yourself in the exhibit areas of Baltimore’s quirky, unique, inspiring and nationally acclaimed American Visionary Art Museum. There you will find creative vision and revelations in countless works by mostly unknown, self-taught artists.

Hoffberger and her late husband LeRoy Hoffberger championed such artistry, along with their many believers, contributors, and dedicated staff, from the day they opened the museum and education center in 1995. Straight out of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the American Visionary Arts Museum is ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.’

Should you think this all sounds just a little too lofty, don’t forget to spend time in the museum’s restrooms where all kinds of humor – including the perennial favorite bathroom variety – festoons the walls. ‘Hooker Named Lay Person of the Year,’ reads one of the many framed headlines in one of the restrooms.

Bladders relieved and minds refreshed, visitors find themselves drying their hands a long time as they read the walls before laughing their way back to more of the engaging exhibits.

Hoffberger believes firmly in a quotation by Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or else they’ll kill you.” Truth has always been central to Hoffberger’s mantra: focusing on the power of new and fresh thinking from the intuition and imagination of people.

“I’m an addict of fresh thought,” she said in a recent interview.  That addiction has been on display for 27 years in the form of the museum’s permanent exhibits, and 41 different themed exhibits she has envisioned and curated through all those years.  The unique works of the cavalcade of self-taught artists she has gathered for each exhibit have always been the primary medium carrying the various themes.

The title of Hoffberger’s last and most recent themed exhibit – The Art of Healing, Compassion, and the Lack Thereof – provides a sense of the truths explored by her exhibits through the decades.

But let’s move on, because that is exactly what Rebecca Hoffberger is doing. Words, also, can no more adequately describe the American Visionary Art Museum experience than holding a grain of sand can describe a beach.  Just go. Its red brick buildings at the intersection of Key Highway and Covington – now Rebecca Hoffberger Way thanks to Baltimore City Council – are an exhibit unto themselves. The complex is tucked between the foot of historic Federal Hill and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

But don’t expect to find Hoffberger in those hallways where she has spent the greatest majority of her waking hours since 1995. In April this year she announced her pending retirement and has since turned over the museum’s reins to new president and director Jenenne Whitfield.

Hoffberger, however, has no plans to cut her ties to the museum or to her native city.  “After 27 years of rolling strikes, my only failure has been not yet raising the modest – I think – $27 million needed for a sustaining endowment.  We’re debt free, but the endowment is needed to really secure our future. I’m working on that. I’m hardwired to try and I know how to succeed.  That’s why we’re one of the few museums in the region with increasing annual attendance.”

The museum’s approximate  $3.2 million annual budget confirms this enlightened enterprise is no small notion.

Although transitioning, no moss is growing beneath Hoffberger’s feet. As she begins her seventh decade, she wants to finish a play she is writing about the interconnected lives of Mark Twain and inventor Nikola Tesla.  “I want the play to reveal how we’ve come to where we are now.”

She also envisions a West Coast version of the visionary art museum including the world’s largest straw-bale building.

But they will have to wait until Hoffberger finishes what she says may be her last love song for Baltimore.

Government funding, to the tune of $150 million, is on its way for major work at the Baltimore Convention Center. Another $67.5 million for major projects is headed to the Inner Harbor area. “It’s only a five-minute walk from the convention center to the Inner Harbor,” she said. “A safe and beautiful walking path has to be part of that vision. I’m in the process of getting that together right now.  It grieves me that so much money is being spent on things that don’t last.  I want to use the same intuitive thought and imagination on display in the museum to inject fresh thought and inspiration into Baltimore.  I understand what it takes to make things successful.”

Hoffberger points to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark and the city of Medellin in Colombia, South America, as two success stories that can help Baltimore leave behind its poster child image of a city gone wrong.

“Tivoli Gardens are Denmark’s number one tourist attraction. They’re fun, beautiful, family friendly, elegant, whimsical and safe, and they have endured for 130 years.

“Medellin was once the murder capital of Colombia, she says. “Because of the efforts of three enlightened mayors in a row, Medellin has turned around with extensive park and transportation systems and high tech education that benefit all of the people.  It is now one of the most studied and peaceful cities there is. I’ve gone to Medellin and met with the principals there to learn how they have accomplished what they have.”

She also points to the closer Columbia, just 25 minutes away from downtown Baltimore, brought to life several decades ago by social visionary and architect James Rouse. Rouse was also the architect of the Inner Harbor’s Harborplace transformation.

“A recent survey found Columbia to be the safest city and  the second happiest city in America,” said Hoffberger.  “Look at its beautiful Centennial Park.  Rouse said: ‘Cities were meant to be gardens in which to grow beautiful people.’  He also said that cities that aren’t great places for everyone can’t be great cities.

‘I have a vision for what it would take to transform Baltimore.  It’s fleshed out, just as detailed as the vision I had for the visionary art museum when I started working on it in 1984.  I’m presently working with a major public relations firm to make this vision palpable so we can bring Baltimore back in a permanent way.”

The firm, said Hoffberger, is not charging her or the city for the work nor is she charging the city for her plans.

This whirling dervish, feeding on the kind of extra-dimensional intuition and imagination she has experienced and has cultivated in the visionary art museum, fully expects to see her plans realized.  She’s hopeful too that her family history of longevity will give her all the time she needs.

“My father lived to 101,” she said.  “Ramrod straight and in perfect health until he died.  And that despite a heartbeat that sounded like Gene Krupa on acid!”

Hoffberger well remembers the comment from Sister Charlotte Kerr, an acupuncturist well-versed in ancient Chinese wisdom, when she heard about Rebecca’s father’s remarkable heart. The comment resonated within Hoffberger’s innate optimism and wellspring of purposeful energy that drives her continuing quest for truth and fresh, intuitive thought.

“She told me that a heart that dances is stronger than a heart that marches.”

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

 

Hoffberger and her late husband LeRoy Hoffberger championed such artistry, along with their many believers, contributors, and dedicated staff, from the day they opened the museum and education center in 1995. Straight out of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the American Visionary Arts Museum is ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.’

Should you think this all sounds just a little too lofty, don’t forget to spend time in the museum’s restrooms where all kinds of humor – including the perennial favorite bathroom variety – festoons the walls. ‘Hooker Named Lay Person of the Year,’ reads one of the many framed headlines in one of the restrooms.

Bladders relieved and minds refreshed, visitors find themselves drying their hands a long time as they read the walls before laughing their way back to more of the engaging exhibits.

Hoffberger believes firmly in a quotation by Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or else they’ll kill you.” Truth has always been central to Hoffberger’s mantra: focusing on the power of new and fresh thinking from the intuition and imagination of people.

“I’m an addict of fresh thought,” she said in a recent interview.  That addiction has been on display for 27 years in the form of the museum’s permanent exhibits, and 41 different themed exhibits she has envisioned and curated through all those years.  The unique works of the cavalcade of self-taught artists she has gathered for each exhibit have always been the primary medium carrying the various themes.

The title of Hoffberger’s last and most recent themed exhibit – The Art of Healing, Compassion, and the Lack Thereof – provides a sense of the truths explored by her exhibits through the decades.

But let’s move on, because that is exactly what Rebecca Hoffberger is doing. Words, also, can no more adequately describe the American Visionary Art Museum experience than holding a grain of sand can describe a beach.  Just go. Its red brick buildings at the intersection of Key Highway and Covington – now Rebecca Hoffberger Way thanks to Baltimore City Council – are an exhibit unto themselves. The complex is tucked between the foot of historic Federal Hill and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

But don’t expect to find Hoffberger in those hallways where she has spent the greatest majority of her waking hours since 1995. In April this year she announced her pending retirement and has since turned over the museum’s reins to new president and director Jenenne Whitfield.

Hoffberger, however, has no plans to cut her ties to the museum or to her native city.  “After 27 years of rolling strikes, my only failure has been not yet raising the modest – I think – $27 million needed for a sustaining endowment.  We’re debt free, but the endowment is needed to really secure our future. I’m working on that. I’m hardwired to try and I know how to succeed.  That’s why we’re one of the few museums in the region with increasing annual attendance.”

The museum’s approximate  $3.2 million annual budget confirms this enlightened enterprise is no small notion.

Although transitioning, no moss is growing beneath Hoffberger’s feet. As she begins her seventh decade, she wants to finish a play she is writing about the interconnected lives of Mark Twain and inventor Nikola Tesla.  “I want the play to reveal how we’ve come to where we are now.”

She also envisions a West Coast version of the visionary art museum including the world’s largest straw-bale building.

But they will have to wait until Hoffberger finishes what she says may be her last love song for Baltimore.

Government funding, to the tune of $150 million, is on its way for major work at the Baltimore Convention Center. Another $67.5 million for major projects is headed to the Inner Harbor area. “It’s only a five-minute walk from the convention center to the Inner Harbor,” she said. “A safe and beautiful walking path has to be part of that vision. I’m in the process of getting that together right now.  It grieves me that so much money is being spent on things that don’t last.  I want to use the same intuitive thought and imagination on display in the museum to inject fresh thought and inspiration into Baltimore.  I understand what it takes to make things successful.”

Hoffberger points to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark and the city of Medellin in Colombia, South America, as two success stories that can help Baltimore leave behind its poster child image of a city gone wrong.

“Tivoli Gardens are Denmark’s number one tourist attraction. They’re fun, beautiful, family friendly, elegant, whimsical and safe, and they have endured for 130 years.

“Medellin was once the murder capital of Colombia, she says. “Because of the efforts of three enlightened mayors in a row, Medellin has turned around with extensive park and transportation systems and high tech education that benefit all of the people.  It is now one of the most studied and peaceful cities there is. I’ve gone to Medellin and met with the principals there to learn how they have accomplished what they have.”

She also points to the closer Columbia, just 25 minutes away from downtown Baltimore, brought to life several decades ago by social visionary and architect James Rouse. Rouse was also the architect of the Inner Harbor’s Harborplace transformation.

“A recent survey found Columbia to be the safest city and  the second happiest city in America,” said Hoffberger.  “Look at its beautiful Centennial Park.  Rouse said: ‘Cities were meant to be gardens in which to grow beautiful people.’  He also said that cities that aren’t great places for everyone can’t be great cities.

‘I have a vision for what it would take to transform Baltimore.  It’s fleshed out, just as detailed as the vision I had for the visionary art museum when I started working on it in 1984.  I’m presently working with a major public relations firm to make this vision palpable so we can bring Baltimore back in a permanent way.”

The firm, said Hoffberger, is not charging her or the city for the work nor is she charging the city for her plans.

This whirling dervish, feeding on the kind of extra-dimensional intuition and imagination she has experienced and has cultivated in the visionary art museum, fully expects to see her plans realized.  She’s hopeful too that her family history of longevity will give her all the time she needs.

“My father lived to 101,” she said.  “Ramrod straight and in perfect health until he died.  And that despite a heartbeat that sounded like Gene Krupa on acid!”

Hoffberger well remembers the comment from Sister Charlotte Kerr, an acupuncturist well-versed in ancient Chinese wisdom, when she heard about Rebecca’s father’s remarkable heart. The comment resonated within Hoffberger’s innate optimism and wellspring of purposeful energy that drives her continuing quest for truth and fresh, intuitive thought.

“She told me that a heart that dances is stronger than a heart that marches.”

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

 

The Talbot County visible from public highways and roads includes vast acreage of fertile farm fields and woods punctuated with numerous villages, towns and crossroads communities.

According to the 2021 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, the county’s 269 square miles includes a land area of 171,000 acres.  Of those, 109,000 acres are farmland.

By boat though, Talbot County looks to be a different place altogether. That different place – reflected in real estate prices – contributes significantly to Talbot County’s wealth and the perspective driving much of the county’s governance.

Joye Nagel, former Talbot County finance director, articulated that distinction in her introductory letter to the 2021 report:

“The County’s 600 miles of shoreline and many historic sites make it a significant tourist destination, drawing visitors from all over the region. Additionally, its abundant waterfront provides many desirable home sites. Development is purposely controlled to protect the County’s beauty and the fragile environment of its shoreline and waters. More intense development is limited to the incorporated municipalities where water and wastewater treatment services are available.”

My quest to determine exactly how many waterfront properties there are in Talbot led, courtesy of current Talbot Finance Director Martha Sparks, to the notes section at the end of the 2021 report.  Though the number of waterfront properties wasn’t included, many other statistics were.

The report notes that the estimated market value of all Talbot County real estate, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, totaled just over $8.63 billion.

As is the nature of the rising and falling economy that affects real estate values, the report notes that in 2012, that number stood at $9.7 billion.

Queen Anne’s County, just north of Talbot, reported its 2021 estimated value of real estate at just under $8.6 billion. There, the shoreline clocks in at 414 miles.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shoreline definition includes the mileage along “offshore islands, sounds, bays, rivers, and creeks to the head of tidewater or to a point where tidal waters narrow to a width of 100 feet.”

NOAA estimates the total shoreline of the US at 95,471 miles.

Most know that California, geographically, is a whole lot larger than Maryland, yet that state’s total shoreline of 3,427 miles is only a couple hundred more than Maryland’s 3,190 miles.

Dorchester County to the south of Talbot, with all of its meandering rivers and bays and creeks and extensive marsh systems, give it 1,700 miles of shoreline, according to NOAA.

Shoreline and coastline are two different things as California and Maryland bear out.  California’s ocean coast stretches 840 miles from north to south while Maryland has just 31 miles of ocean coast.

But back to Talbot’s numbers.

Driven largely by the value of waterfront property, Talbot’s property taxes brought $45.7 million to county coffers in the 2021 fiscal year.  That’s the county’s single largest source of revenues and 41.2 percent of total tax revenues which in 2021 amounted to $120,424,546. That’s against $101,715,752 in expenses.

The report places RDC Inn at Perry Cabin LLC as the holder of the most valuable single piece of real estate in Talbot, valued by the county for tax purposes at $25,497,233.

Talbot’s income tax rate of 2.4 percent is also a significant contributor to county revenues, just under $32 million for the 2021 year.  That’s on the basis of $1.37 billion of taxable income earned by the county’s 14,917 tax filers.  The county’s total population for that year is listed as 37,673.

A chart in the report shows how that tax burden is distributed. Just about 30 percent of income taxes – $9,369,106 – are paid by the 332 filers who reported incomes for that year of $500,000 and up. The highest number of filers, 4,307, reported annual incomes between $25,000.and $49,900. Their taxes totaled $2,451,626, or about 7.7 percent of Talbot’s total income tax revenues.

That’s called a progressive tax system, where people pay progressively more taxes the more they earn. Sales taxes are a regressive tax where the tax collected is a higher percentage of a person’s income the less they earn.

The other brackets in the Talbot income tax chart show 679 filers earning between $250,000 and $499,000 per year; 2,990 filers between $100,000 and $249,000; 3,860 filers between $50,000 and $99,900; and 2,681 filers between $5,000 and $24,900. There were 678 filers in the under $5,000 per year bracket.

Getting back to the total number of waterfront properties in Talbot, I’m still working on that one.  Tougher to pin down. Stay tuned.

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

Watching the development and revitalization of Baltimore’s inner harbor over the past 50 years has been something to behold.

Talbot County native and visionary James Rouse sparked much of the transformation with his Harborplace complex in the heart of the city many decades ago. He understood the allure of public waterfront spaces where people could gather, enjoy being outside, take long walks, and watch the dynamic interaction between the humming maritime activity of the harbor and the culture of the multi-faceted city surrounding it.

Pursued with the assistance of many of Baltimore’s leaders, Rouse’s vision continues to unfold today with the promise of creating an even more powerful nucleus around which the city can rebuild and thrive. The mixed-use high-rises of the Inner Harbor East area just a few blocks from the original Harborplace buildings have brought a new vibrancy and round-the-clock economy to what was once a monolithic industrial complex. Tens of thousands of residents in the apartments and condominiums overlooking the streets and harbor mean more and more business for restaurants, grocery stores and other retail establishments at sidewalk level. The miles-long public promenade linking so much of the waterfront’s businesses, residences, offices and parks add to the attractiveness.

The magic and positive contagion of Rouse’s big, waterfront thinking continues to spread, although the future of the city’s nearby central business district remains another question mark for the city.

The latest cranes accenting the inner harbor skyline belong to the massive Harbor Point project on one of the city’s most prominent pieces of waterfront property.

Baltimore Chrome Works, a previous occupant, was once reputed to be the world’s largest industrial processor of chromium ore, mined in Maryland. Situated on 27 acres and surrounded on three sides by water, the noisy and smokey facility and its associated wharves employed thousands, produced chromium chemicals for a wide variety of industrial and military uses, and, unfortunately, polluted the waters of the city’s harbor.

Following hundreds of millions spent to clear, clean, and cap the site to prevent further pollution of the harbor’s Patapsco River, the leveled property is well on its way to becoming what its developers call a sustainable urban hub.

Across from the Domino sugar facility, Harbor Point is well on its way to becoming a mixed-use home to three-million square feet of offices, retail space, residences and hotel rooms.

The 21-story Exelon building, completed in 2016 with LEED (Leadership in Energy Efficient Design) certification, towers over the site. It came on the heels of the eight-story Thames Street Wharf offices building, completed in 2010 as the first Harbor Point structure.

The partnership of Armada Hoffler, construction contractors, and Beatty Development, assisted by City of Baltimore economic development funding, are continuing at an aggressive pace. The 1405 Point building, with 289 residences and 18,000 square feet of retail space, opened in 2018 followed by the 12-story Wills Wharf complex of hotel and office space and its accompanying park.

The third, final and grandest phase of Harbor Point is now under construction.  The global headquarters of financial firm T. Rowe Price will occupy two, seven-story buildings with 550,000 square feet of new office space.  The final phase also includes more than 500 residential units and 60,000 square feet of new retail space. Completion is slated for 2024.

Louis Haddad, president and CEO of Virginia Beach-based Armada Hoffler, calls Harbor Point “a shining example of the kind of long-term, transformative neighborhood developments our company pursues. It is emerging as a safe, high-quality destination for Baltimore residents, professionals and visitors to spend time in. Harbor Point is helping the city retain quality businesses as a newer, vibrant alternative to the central business district. The vision of our partnership with Beatty Development Group is to create a cohesive, well-rounded neighborhood the city and its residents can be proud of.”

With hundreds of years of history, and counting, Baltimore is more proof that nothing is as constant as change.

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

Why does a pile of boulders in a farmer’s front yard in Caroline County, on the road between Denton and Easton, bring an inquiring smile to my face?

Here’s one explanation, involving ice ages, glaciers, millions of years and geologic history.

When you’re heating rods of iron in a coal-fired forge, then hammering them on an anvil into useful and decorative shapes, you can’t be in a hurry.  I’m pretty sure that’s why my friend the blacksmith has often said that the key to happiness is slow.

If that’s the case, then geologists must be among the happiest of people.  Geological time, after all, is real slow, and that’s the world in which they delve.

One geological source, for example, tells us that the Appalachian mountains millions of years ago butted right up against the mid-Atlantic coast.  That made for a rocky shoreline as exists today in New England and northward.  But their studies show that the Appalachians, in tectonic fashion, have been migrating westward annually at about the same pace as the growth of our fingernails.

That kind of slow breeds a happiness that can’t help but morph into contentment.

If you, like millions of others, are content to sit on one of the Delmarva Peninsula’s miles and miles of sandy beaches, watching the waves pushing sand back and forth between sea and dunes, you can thank the Appalachians.  Their slow migration made way for development of the fertile coastal plain, in general, and the Delmarva Peninsula specifically.

Over millions of years, and one ice age after another, eroding mountains sent sand seaward down rivers and streams until the gravitational flow eased.  Sand settled out and piled up as it met the incessant power of the ocean.  Together, sand and sediment rolling out of the great and ancient Susquehanna and Delaware rivers eventually formed this long spit of land that we now call the Delmarva Peninsula, and its beaches, between the flooded Chesapeake and Delaware bay estuaries.

Flat and fertile, the peninsula has proven commodious for human habitation since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. ‘The land of pleasant living,’ as Delmarva is often called.

But boulders, like those along the road in Caroline County, were not part of the general equation that formed Delmarva. Farmers here don’t typically work around rocks and boulders in their fields. So what gives?

University of Delaware geologist Kelvin Ramsey provided the answer to that mystery a few decades back when I was reporting on the finding of a boulder about the size of a Volkswagen beetle.  A farmer disking a field in late spring, outside Milton and near Delaware Bay, struck the boulder and gave me a call.

Such boulders, Ramsey said, amount to geological debris left behind by receding glaciers melting away at the end of the last ice age.  Encapsulated in ice as glaciers formed, boulders moved forward with the ice.

Or, he said, they could have been tangled in tree roots and were rushed over the peninsula when melting glaciers spawned powerful floods in the big rivers. When those floods subsided, the trees, and boulders they pushed along, eventually fell out. The trees rotted away. The boulders endured.

“They’re probably quartz or sandstone,” said Ramsey of the Caroline County boulders. “In the hilly country of Pennsylvania and New York you’ll find boulders, like those, at the tops of ridges.  Durable and hard, they last.  Transported by ice or flooding rivers, they would hold up.”

Receding glaciers and associated flooding also probably explain the gravel in the sand pit where the boulders were discovered.

Bruce Miller owns the farm where the boulders now live, not far from the sand pit.  He has used them over the years for an informal fence along the road and to border his wife’s rose garden. He’s grown fond of them. Geological happiness abides.

When he makes a planned move to Delaware, the boulders will go with him.  “They’re a connection to my dad.  He brought them to me.”

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.

Those feisty blue crabs that snap their claws and defiantly spit streams of water when we reach for them with tongs turn out to be a whole lot more instinctively smart than many of us realize. That’s why managing them as a highly sought-after coastal resource can be tricky, complicated and – most of all – filled with uncertainty.

A dredge survey this year of thousands of sites throughout the Chesapeake where blue crabs hibernate through the winter found the lowest number of crabs since the annual survey began 30 years ago. That has led to lower than usual harvests through the first half of the 2022 season.

Resource managers in Maryland and Virginia responded by shortening the 2022 season by a couple of weeks, placing bushel limits on the commercial harvest of male crabs where there had been no limits before, reducing the bushel limits on commercial harvesting of female crabs for the months of July through October, and reducing the bushel limits for recreational crabbers.

But they and the scientists who guide them in their work are still scratching their heads. Why did the Chesapeake’s overall crab population decline significantly this year? Asked if there were any predominant reasons being bandied about, Gregg Bortz in the communications office for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources said this: “No consensus as of yet. There may be more discussion on that among the scientists and managers later in the year. The immediate focus has been on management adjustments that can be made this season.”

Watermen are now reporting increasing numbers of smaller and larger crabs in their pots and on their trotlines as July races toward August. That bodes well for stronger late-season crabbing, after a couple more sheds and the consequent increase in size.

But, is there any way of predicting how many baby crabs will be born during 2022 and eventually become part of next winter’s dredge survey? Female crabs in the Chesapeake, in total, produce hundreds of millions of eggs each year. How many of those eggs will hatch and survive over the course of the 18 months or so that it takes for them to go through several life stages to reach juvenile crab size and eventual market size?

That’s where the tricky, complicated and uncertain parts come in.

Dr. Charles Epifanio of University of Delaware’s School of Marine Science and Policy in Lewes, along with several students and academic colleagues, has been studying blue crabs for several decades. In 2019, the Journal of Shellfish Research published a review paper by Epifanio that provided an overview of more than 100 years of science related to the early life history of the blue crab.

The review cited hundreds of papers written on the subject.

Research leading to the published studies – scientists building a body of knowledge through questioning, collaboration and sharing of results – revealed an amazing picture. Epifanio’s review shows how crabs travel hundreds of miles back and forth between ocean and bay. They have to do that to find the right conditions for the successful completion of their various life stages from fertilized egg to the mature crabs so prized for their delicate and flavorful meat.

That journey takes them from the fresher, middle and upper reaches of estuaries like the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, all the way out to the much higher salinity of surface waters along the Atlantic’s inner continental shelf. It’s in those higher salinity waters that the newly hatched larvae begin to grow and shed and grow and shed before riding tides and wind currents back into the estuaries.

Eating, drinking, swimming and growing, and responding to physical and chemical cues in all those activities, evolving crabs know where to position themselves in the water column to get where they want to go. For instance, constantly swimming upwards in the ocean water column keeps tiny crab larvae near the surface where wind currents carry them back into their ultimate estuaries where they can mature into adult crabs. They’re attracted to the surface waters by sensing the fresher, less salty and lighter water that floats to the surface as well as other cues like light and turbulence..

At the other end of their journey, mature female crabs – using more of the same cues that brought them this far – catch flood tides to make their way up to mating grounds in the middle and upper reaches of the bays. There, they gather all the sperm they can from a male crab during a once-in-a-lifetime, ten-hour mating session.

After carefully packaging the sperm to be used for fertilizing up to three or four broods of millions of eggs, and a sensitive-but-firm hit-the-road Jack discussion with their mate, the females catch ebbing tides to carry them back to the saltier water of the lower bays. In their tidal journeys, crabs sink to the bottom when the flow isn’t in the right direction. Currents are weaker there.

It’s in those saltier waters that the females use the stored sperm to fertilize their eggs before the next phase of their seaward migration takes them and their hatching eggs to the inner shelf waters where the larvae begin their development to start the whole process over again.

In the conclusion to his review, Epifanio wrote: “Perhaps the most important contribution of the past few decades has been the discovery that larval development in blue crabs occurs mainly in surface waters of the inner continental shelf – not in the estuary – and that larval transport on the shelf is is controlled by interactions between buoyant discharge from the estuary and wind patterns over the coastal ocean.”

Buoyant discharge relates to the fact that the freshwater of rainfall flowing out of estuaries like the Chesapeake is lighter than the saltwater of the ocean and tends to float near the surface.

Studying the wind currents and rainfall patterns in any given year that can influence the movement and numbers of developing larvae back into the estuary from the inner continental shelf might give a sense of how many crabs may eventually be on their way.

“The model is pretty good at predicting the magnitude of tiny, tiny juvenile crabs that might make it into the estuary,” said Epifanio in an interview this week. “Funding agencies are willing to give money to people like me because of the possibility of predicting the catch. But to get from the variations in the numbers of the tiny, tiny crabs to the variations in the catch of adults is not straightforward. We’ve tried that kind of predicting. It didn’t work that well. These studies explain a lot of how larvae make their way into the juvenile habitat where they can grow. And they show us how chemical cues in the water guide them into the sea grass and oyster reef bottoms where they find protection.”

But a lot can happen to them as they move up the bays, said Epifanio. Predators and availability of proper habitat from year to year make it hard to explain the great variations in the numbers that actually make it to the point of being counted in the winter dredge surveys.

For now at least, despite the great advances since the late 1800s in science’s insight into the mysteries of the complicated blue crab, Epifanio strikes a pragmatic tone:

“I wouldn’t bet heavy money on predicting catch based on wind and rainfall.”

But he agreed the gap between the magnitude of developing larvae that make their way into the bays’ nursery areas, and the adult crab population, offers rich ground for future scientific inquiry and potentially better models for predicting potential catch.

Dennis Forney has been a publisher, journalist and columnist on the Delmarva Peninsula since 1972.  He writes from his home on Grace Creek in Bozman.