THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 12, 1995 TAG: 9502090637
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
EASTERN SHORE conservationist George Reiger is a practical person. ``If it dies,'' he maintains, ``it also fries.''
What he shoots, he and his wife, Barbara, eat.
That means quail, duck, geese, blackbirds, starlings, name it.
Shredded tweet.
It's part of the economy of a life conducted outdoors.
More than two decades ago, the Reigers purchased the core of what became their 260-acre coastal farm in Locustville. Before that they lived in Washington and New York City. The intrepid couple much preferred salt marsh to asphalt.
Heron Hill Chronicle (Lyons & Burford, 189 pp., $19.95) is the story of their staunch self-sufficiency and stewardship.
Those who might regard them as cut off from urban activity might be surprised at the quantity and quality of rural diversions here.
The book teems with close encounters of the bird kind.
Oscar Wilde said people in the country get up early because there's so much to do and go to bed early because there's nothing to talk about. Wilde might have changed his mind about bedtime in the garrulous company of Reiger, who has plenty to say on a lot of subjects, not all of them alfresco. He's tough as teak.
For wildfowl watcher though he may be, and annual crop cultivator and even duck-pond digger, George Reiger is no ecological sentimentalist. Quite the contrary. And as a longtime Field and Stream columnist, a Purple Heart veteran and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, he is not at all shy about putting those with a ``Disneyesque sense of nature'' in their place:
Preservationists have converted conservation into a precious attitude rather than a positive action. They discourage the participation of pragmatists who know that real conservation is about planting filter strips along erodable stream margins and riprapping the banks to prevent swollen currents from undercutting them. It's not about save-the-whale rallies.
Real conservation is about constructing and maintaining waterfowl nesting boxes.
Not those pointy Ducks Unlimited plastic ones, either. When the sun struck them, the heat cooked the eggs and broiled the birds. The memory gets Reiger grumpy.
He hunts, too.
Fishes.
Cooks road kill.
Shoots pests, unrepentantly.
``I'm tired of hearing environmentally correct rubbish about foxes preying exclusively on rodents and insects,'' Reiger complains to one nosy state official.
Don't get him started.
A number of years ago, Christine Stevens - founder of the Animal Welfare Institute - told me she hated the word ``management'' because it only meant killing things. That's not all it means, of course, but why do so many people find it so hard to accept death as a more humane option than the pretense of ``removal''?
So, undeniably, there is death in Reiger's Eden. And mosquitoes that bite like vampire bats. But there are also soft moonrises and pale osprey and, yes, open wonder.
Reiger says he determined early in life to live someplace where he could be ``master of his own labor and land.'' He would seem to have come as close as anyone can. But the outdoors has a way of reminding us that a sense of mastery can be illusory.
As Reiger himself acknowledges, ``no tidal blind lasts for long.''
Nor does anything else. That knowledge bids us to seize the moment, to appreciate that well which we must lose ere long. Reiger's new book is a realist's hymn to the sunset, a bittersweet songbird alertly attended to before dark.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
DARRELL SMITH
In ``Heron Hill Chronicle,'' George Reiger depicts his life on a
farm in Locustville.
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