Phillip reading Chesapeake

Phillip’s Book Rec: Chesapeake

Part 4 of our “Staff Picks” series for National Book Blitz Month

I was solving a jigsaw puzzle the other day—one with the Chicago skyline where the entire top was a bright blue sky. There was one piece of that sky that was eluding me. Annoying! But after a while of unsuccessfully looking for the missing piece, I decided to move on to a different section of the puzzle. While solving the other corner, I stumbled across the missing piece—it was right in front of me the whole time!

It’s a reality of life that is too often overlooked: Like the puzzle I was solving, everything is connected, especially humanity and nature. In the book Chesapeake, the author James A. Michener shows this the interconnectedness of mankind and nature in a variety of ways.

Set in Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay between the years 1583-1978, the book offers a multigenerational tale of the inhabitants who dwelled along its shores. Michener tells the story through the lives of several family groups, including a few short segments from the perspective of a goose within a flock of migratory Canada Geese.

While a myriad of interactions between humans and nature take place within the book, a core theme is how the inhabitants depend upon nature for their very survival in almost every way. The soil for crops, the trees for ships and buildings, the oysters and crab for food and export, the geese for hunting, even the bay itself for commerce are a few examples.

But this intertwining can have disastrous results when thrown out of balance. One such example was the aftermath of a flood event in which the Susquehanna River filled with runoff water and silt from upstream farms discharged into the bay. The layers of deposited silt smothered and suffocated once reliable oyster beds, killing ever single oyster in that section of the bay.

Exploitation of the environment is a recurring theme, and Michener conveys that when nature is abused, the systems that humanity rely on break down.

Michener also writes several uplifting depictions of wildlife interacting with his human characters. One of the scenes involves a hunter who has a sense of the rhythm of nature. He encourages his neighbor to build a tall basket-like platform and spread scraps of cloths and dead branches around, during the time of year for the ospreys to return to nest.

The skeptical neighbor follows the hunter’s advice, and is rewarded with witnessing the osprey’s courtship displays. Through his characters’ dialogue, Michener imparts to the reader that “we need nature for what it teaches us” and for “what it reminds us of.”

This work of fiction is not explicitly a book about nature. It includes many major themes all woven into one, each in themselves unique, yet inseparable from the others, just as the themes in our nonfictional world are inseparable from each other. And so, this book actually is explicitly about nature. As with a missing puzzle piece, when one sees the world without considering the role of nature, they see the picture incomplete. Even though the missing piece is right in front of them!

The wisdom within the pages of Chesapeake is an invitation for us to see the world as complete, with nature and ourselves as pieces within the same, larger, and unfathomably elegant picture.

Phillip Weldy

Stewardship Specialist

Phillip enjoys nature’s wonders from an up-close-and-personal perspective as he works to restore the natural places you love. He came to his stewardship role at CILTI after undertaking invasive species control and trail maintenance for Little Traverse Conservancy in Harbor Springs, MI.