Water's Way - Life along the Chesapeake (Paperback, Johns Hopkins University pbks. ed)

Those who know and love the Chesapeake will find the bay they treasure on the pages of Water's Way: Life along the Chesapeake. The story of one of North America's most fascinating regions unfolds through the sensitive photographs and prose of two men who have studied the Chesapeake all their lives. Photographer David W. Harp and writer Tom Horton vividly portray how, as Horton writes, "the edges where land and water meet charm us all, from watermen to watercolorists and beachcombers to duck hunters."

Water's Way will guide you to "those rare, hidden nooks of the bay country where nature still appears as glorious and untrammeled as it did a thousand years ago." It will also take you to less hidden, but equally intriguing sites within the Chesapeake's reach as Harp and Horton depict the worlds of both nature and humans.

An intimate knowledge of and an unwavering reverence for the bay pervade Water's Way. Harp and Horton are as attuned to the romance that still clings to the Chesapeake as they are to the realities that inspire and threaten it. In a time when the region faces tremendous changes and challenges, Water's Way is neither strident nor sentimental. Rather, it is suffused with the fundamental respect for the bay which Harp and Horton see as key to its survival.

"Dave Harp's photography and Tom Horton's text are nothing short of inspirational. Through the combination of each man's art, Water's Way communicates the beauty and essence of the Chesapeake like no other book. It conveys the very reasons why I have dedicated my life's work to saving the bay." -- William Baker, President, Chesapeake Bay Foundation

"Three forces have been hard at work in the making of thisexquisite piece: the gentle and informed eye of Dave's camera, Tom's inspirited love affair with our language, and the mystery they conspire in, creating a vivid picture and genuine portrait of a life that is greater than ourselves." -- Tom Wisner, author of Chesapeake Born

"Harp's photographs, gorgeously reproduced here... have, I think, finally surpassed the late Aubrey Bodine's famously romantic shots of the Chesapeake." -- John Goodspeed, Easton Star-Democrat

"Tom Horton has a poet's touch and a realist's frankness as he writes of the delicate ecology of this great aquatic system in chapters whose subjects range from the role of marshes to the life of the watermen to the growing pressures of urban development... This book is a singing tribute to the bay." -- Islands Magazine