THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607110001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Patrick Lackey
LENGTH: 77 lines
You've probably played the game in which you pretend you are living the last day of your life.
The idea is to make every second special, until the plainest wildflower is bathed in beauty and a gray bird's brief song lifts you to rarefied heights of ecstasy.
As you know, the game is a complete waste of time, since you can never con yourself into truly believing a certain day is your last, though of course it could be, given the way many people drive.
Here's a game that works better. Remind yourself that tens of thousands of tourists pay daunting sums to come here to play. Then you think, ``Hey, I'm here to play for free, unless you count the house payment.'' Next ask yourself, ``As a tourist, what do I want to see?'' Viewed through a tourist's wide eyes, the area's choices suddenly seem less mundane, even exotic. Then you get off your duff and enrich your life playing tourist.
Although I heartily recommend the ``I'm-a-Tourist'' game, I'm limited as a local tourist because my wife can't swim and so has little desire to pass leisure hours on the water. Worse, I seldom venture 200 yards from shore without getting seasick. Once, to do a story, I rode in a boat beside a young man swimming from the Eastern Shore to Virginia Beach. For many hours he swam on one side of the boat while I fed the fishes on the other. I don't even like docks.
Yet this area is most spectacular when viewed from the water. We have the Chesapeake Bay and its wide tributaries, any one of which would make me sick. Then there's the Atlantic Ocean, which I'm told is really big.
On land, by sorry comparison, we have the Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway and Virginia Beach and Battlefield boulevards. We have strip malls.
I overstate the case. We have a lifetime's worth of attractions on land, like Portsmouth's fantastic Children's Museum of Virginia. Still, except for queasy people like me, the water is better than the land. It is what makes Hampton Roads special in the whole world. It is what draws the tourists.
Although as a boy I once got car sick watching a drive-in movie, I can read books about the water - even books with pictures - without becoming ill.
For people like me who love the water from ashore, or for local folks who want to know more about this area in order to experience anew the thrills tourists feel, a good book to buy and read is Preserving the Chesapeake Bay, by former Virginia governor Gerald L. Baliles.
It's in many local book stores or can be ordered by calling 1-800-728-5229. Profits benefit the Virginia Museum of Natural History and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, two worthy nonprofit organizations.
Every other page is taken up by a painting or picture of Bay life: birds, boats, watermen, etc. These are gorgeous scenes that tourists might drive hundreds of miles to see but that we have right here, because Hampton Roads is special.
Baliles' words are mainly about the Bay's bounty, the Bay's decline, and efforts, including his, to save this splendid estuary whose 64,000-square-mile watershed stretches as far north as the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and as far south as Hampton Roads. We're the Bay's exit to the sea.
Baliles writes that oysters once filtered the entire Bay's water every few days. Now, with only one percent as many oysters as before, filtration takes a year. He describes what's special about the estuary: ``The Bay's shallow depth allows flora and fauna dependent upon light to flourish in most of its waters. The Bay's complex currents, generated by its mix of fresh and salt water, amplify natural recycling processes, allowing the Bay to get the most out of available nutrients. The Bay's Atlantic access draws back sea life from the ocean for spawning.''
The Bay is a treasure. Ninety percent of the nation's soft-shell-crab catch comes from it. The annual Bay seafood harvest totals 100-million pounds.
The book offers qualified hope. Different states are cooperating to save the Bay, for no state alone can do enough. Far more needs doing if the Bay is to recover its health or, for that matter, not to worsen, as ever-more people settle near its shore.
The book makes clear that a tourist area such as Hampton Roads would be crazy not to do all in its power to save the Bay. And, of course, on many days we local folks are tourists, too. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Photo of book cover by CNB