Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [81]
Terrapins used to be vulnerable to upper-class appetites. Today, with their commercial catch and sale banned, they’re more vulnerable to upper-class summer homes—the developments that eat up modest old houses and farms, replace meadows with lawns, and block routes to nesting grounds with banks of broken-stone riprap meant to slow the shore’s erosion. But Neavitt, which was at the heart of the old terrapin fishery, is still intimately connected to the water. The public pier is filled with working boats, barnacled and beaten and sturdy-looking. There’s a crab-shedding operation around the corner, holding blue crabs until they molt and become softshells; Marguerite’s cottage was once a modest lodge for canvasback-duck hunters. Her immediate neighbor, Joe Jones, worked as a waterman for thirty years—hauling crab pots at 4:00 A.M., switching to oysters at 10:00 (Joe says he starts feeling homesick as soon as he passes Bozman, six miles up the road). A high spring tide will flood the sharp, salt-loving spartina grass, and then twenty feet of Joe’s mowed lawn; the water wants this land.
Marguerite is tall and strawberry-haired, with a ready smile and an open, generous face—much more so than I’d expected, to be honest, even for someone whose notion of being “completely self-serving” includes dedicating thousands of hours to protecting a single shy species. When we spoke on the phone before the visit, Marguerite’s voice tightened as she talked about the problems terrapins face; she clipped her sentences angrily, and I pictured someone with sharp, maybe even aggressive features. Her anger peaked when talking about Rodney Lewis, a local man who made a short-lived attempt to farm terrapin a few years back.
“I’m not PETA,” Marguerite said. “And my issue isn’t with Rodney personally. It’s always easier to vilify one guy—I even called him after one article came out about his farm. It had quoted me, and I wanted to clear the air. But he should never have been given permission to do what he did—the permit was atrocious, absolutely outrageous. He was allowed to collect three thousand of every species! Diamondbacks, snappers, sliders, red-bellies. No investment at all on his part, just pulling animals from the wild and putting them in a shallow dugout on an old inland hog farm. Those thousands of eggs he says he found? No way. The turtles were gravid [carrying eggs] when he found them.
“The [Department of Natural Resources] had every chance to stop him; they say they care about the animals. The old terrapin pounds dealers used were these big brick tanks, usually close down to the water where they’d be cleansed by the tidal flow. They’d store their catch there for a while, before eventually packing them up and sending them off to hotels and restaurants. But what you had here was basically a cesspool with ridiculous turtle densities. Deer and geese were using it as a watering hole—no question it was a disease risk. The oversight just wasn’t there.”
Eggs collected, we go to the hatchery: a small side room—almost a lean-to—warmed by Marguerite’s hot-water heater. Glass cages hold minuscule hatchlings (you could fit four in your palm) and larger, three-inch turtles, the latter ready to be passed on to local classrooms. It’s a humble successor to the old fenced terrapin pounds, which held hundreds of turtles and grew more valuable as the terrapin grew scarce. In 1902 the Washington Post observed that
one may commit murder, steal a horse, or run away with another man’s wife on the Eastern Shore and stand some chance of coming clear, but woe betide the hapless one who is caught poaching about the pounds, interfering with the eggs or taking terrapin out of season. For he is as certain of punishment as the sun is to rise. The pounds are jealously guarded night and day. . . . A pound full of diamondbacks is as good as a gold