When I used to live in Maryland, I would go down to a harbor with my friends to see their sailboat. Towards the end of the pier, there was a larger and unique boat, called a skipjack. The sailor who owned the boat also lived on it. I was fortunate enough to have gotten to talk to this man's son; an eleven year old boy named Hannes. He was, and still is to this day, one of the wisest people I know and his intelligence struck me as almost impossibly vast. He was certainly more intelligent than I was when I was 11.
Anyway, he told me of how his father inherited the skipjack from his father, and they made a living fishing and crabbing on the bay. It did not escape me in our conversations that there was an underlying tone of longing and sorrow. Hannes knew his family's tradition, once common on the Chesapeake Bay, was dying. This ending of a way of life corresponds hand-in-hand with the decline in health of the Chesapeake Bay itself, and since that meeting many years ago I've joined the CBF (Chesapeake Bay Foundation) and written this poem as, more or less, a eulogy.