THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9507040514
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
SOME BOOKS seize us by the lapels from the opening paragraph, demanding immediate and total attention, like sudden pitchmen for exotic opportunities.
Remember the beginning of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff? ``Within five minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there.'' And away we go, straight off, to find out what.
Other books pull us into the tent more slowly, like fortunetellers playing first one card, then the next, and, at length, still another, until, without any appearance of haste, the reluctant onlooker becomes a rapt patron.
Paradise: Stories of a Changing Chesapeake (Rappahannock Press, 126 pp., $9.95) by J.H. Hall works the slow way. ``Bird Hunting as It Used to Be and Still Is,'' the first in this savvy but tender collection of related tales, starts thus: ``Lester Harmon was a bird hunter.'' Then it discusses an overweight Eastern Shore squirrel who bugs Lester's bird dog, Sarge. Then it examines the fact that the squirrel feeds where the quail once did, because houses have sprung up where farms had been, and now decorative azaleas abound instead of protective sedge and scrub pine.
Ecological curtains; there goes the neighborhood.
By the time Lester plugs the intrusive squirrel on page 7, he has effectively bagged the reader as well. The 10 stories gather impact by accretion, and by the time we have read the last yarn, ``Arrowheads,'' we have come to understand Lester, his pals, his relations, his retreating waterman's world and his adversaries, official and unofficial.
``At one time,'' Lester reflects, ``ducks had been so plentiful they had been harvested like a crop, trapped or shot, packed into barrels like potatoes and shipped north, redheads for fifty cents a pair, canvasbacks for seventy-five. Even after the market hunting ended and seasons and limits were established, sport hunting held up for many years. Then more and more people up North started draining marshes where the ducks bred, and plowing and planting the reclaimed land.''
And building on it and living in it and unleashing legions of tiresome, interfering game wardens upon it, looking and finding. They pinched Paradise. Now Lester's friend C.E., in ``Mates for Life,'' has come to regard poaching as a civic duty.
``Without the likes of you and me,'' C.E. informs Lester, ``they wouldn't need wardens. We're creating jobs by being out here, and the money we pay in fines - though I can't say you've paid your share - goes for schools and highways and who knows what all. Of course, they've got to catch us first.''
Still, in the course of things, Lester's enduring example supplies us with hope, if not overwhelming optimism:
``He didn't elaborate, but sometimes the bay was cruel and rough and cold. If you romanticized the bay, she'd kill you. She killed Otha, threw him overboard and drowned him.
``So don't tell Lester how lucky he was to work so close to nature. Tell Otha. You couldn't get any closer to nature than Otha was.
``He was part of it.''
Hill understands this ground. The Danville, Va., native has lived variously on both eastern and western shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Currently he is a Duke University-trained medical consultant in Wayne, Maine, whose outdoor writing has appeared in such publications as Flyrod & Reel, Gray's Sporting Journal and The In-Fisherman.
Paradise is illustrated with crisp black-and-white line drawings by Maryland artist Bill Martz, whose work has been described as ``a love affair with Virginia and the Northern Neck.'' It is also a business. Martz's company distributes notepaper, prints and sportswear emblazoned with marshy imagery celebrating the Chesapeake Bay.
In graceful tandem, with appreciative deliberation, author and illustrator provide a culminating sense of the region as weathered but not withered, regulated but by no means gone. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
P.H. Hall, author or ``Paradise''
by CNB