The Girl Scouts learn: You're going to get dirty when you're cleaning up the world.
Author: Kristen De Deyn Kirk
Little did I know, but the mud was my friend. My husband had just pulled out about a thousand of our little oysters from the Lafayette River and two of Troop 979's Girl Scouts were shaking their heads in disgust.
"Ewwww....that's gross," one said. "Did you bring gloves?"
Um, no.
Last time, the oysters didn't have much mud on them. Since July, we had been cleaning the floating nets we made as temporary homes for our 4,000 oysters, which we had purchased from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, with generous support from Taylor Franklin, a vice president with S.L. Nusbaum Realty Company. We are happily charged with caring for the babies for one year. They started off about the size of a dime, and if we're lucky, they will grow to about two inches by July 2010, when we return them to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The organization will then place the oysters on sanctuary reefs and continue to grow them.
The girls and I plucked oysters from the dirty floats and placed them in clean floats. Finger after finger became soaked in mud as we sorted through, trying to avoid a couple of baby crabs and dozens of what the girls kept calling "fish eggs."
I thought they were joking and that the squishy stuff I was feeling were clumps of mud. That nasty November Nor'easter had just passed through, and the Lafayette River near S.L. Nusbaum's new apartment complex, River House, had risen high. The water and fast winds must have forced the oysters toward the bank's mud. Of course, there would be lots of mud on the floats and it would form clumps. (We really should have taken the oysters out of the water for a day or so; they would have been OK in the coolish weather.) Then my husband poured water over the first float and I saw shiny, golden clumps.
Fish eggs, not mud.
Lovely.
I preferred mud - and decided to keep my eyes closed as I continued to work. And that's when a crab pinched me.
"Remind me," I said to the girls, "why we're doing this."
I'd like to tell you that they delivered a long, eloquent speech about how it is our duty as citizens to save the world and especially so as Girl Scouts.
Instead, they said "I DON'T KNOW!" and laughed.
A normal reaction for 10-year-olds, and I was still proud. They were covered in mud and their hands hurt (growing oyster shells are sharp!), but they kept on plucking through. Maybe some part of them faintly remembered that they themselves had suggested "saving the ocean" when I asked for ideas for their big Bronze Award project, which Junior Girl Scouts can earn with an intensive community service project. Our well-connected co-leader, Debbie Mundorff, had a friend at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and had heard about their oyster gardening program. For almost 14 years, the Foundation and its partners have grown or transplanted about 10 million oysters, in hopes of increasing the oyster population tenfold. The Bay and ocean needed their help: In the last century, fishing, disease and pollution have nearly obliterated the oyster population to just two percent of its historical levels. Fewer oysters means dirtier water. According to the Foundation's brochure, "like filters in a giant fish tank, oysters purify the Bay as they strain algae from the water for their food. Oyster reefs also provide habitat and food for scores of marine plants and animals."
Every summer, hundreds of people become oyster farmers. They attend one of the Foundation's seminars and purchase baby oysters ($30 for every 1,000) and learn how to make floats. The floats give the oysters maximum exposure to oxygen and their food (plankton) so that they grow faster than if they were on the bottom of the Bay, their usual home. Some people farm the oysters at their home, or like us, ask someone else for water access.
Then all you need is time (float cleanings can take two hours), a little muscle power to lift the oysters out of the water, and GLOVES.
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Source: Tidewater Parent Magazine
