Yesterday morning Rick set up the boys to do some "crabbing". He took chicken-wings, threaded them into a piece of coat-hangar wire, and dropped them off the pier on a long string. When the string started to pull away, you would carefully draw up the string and try to to catch any crabs that were hanging on with a net. Two people could be a lot more successful than one and there was a metio to pulling up the string without having the crab let go. We caught a half-dozen crabs over the course of the morning, but we ended up letting them go.
Yesterday afternoon, we took the children to the 
Estuarium. We were met by a docent at the door and, after we paid the entrance fee, were guided (or micromanaged even) through the first two phases. In the lobby the docent began with a large statue constructed of driftwood to represent North Carolina. It was a fairlly abstract sculpture, a spiral of driftwood, with some bottles and other flotsam, and then a long metal contraption that reached across the whole lobby to the wall. The top, she said, represented the mountains, the bottles represented the cites, towns, and human dwellings, then a section below with many parallel sticks were the farms and agricultural fields. The long metal structure represented wetlands and the estuary. Above everything were a golden metal sun and a silver metal moon. Her narrative left Daniel pacing, but eventually she took the kids over to the wall where there was box labeled "Evaporation". She gave each child a ball, which they could place near a tube which sucked it up and sent it sailing across the sky toward the mountains where it entered a cloud, dropped onto the mountain, and rolled along a little track through the bottles, over the parallel sticks, and along the track through the wetlands and estuary, eventually dropping out near the "Evaporation" component of the model. Daniel's ball got stuck and she got out a long stick and poked it expertly to get it started on the path toward condensation.
The docent then led us into a theater and started a digital video about the Estuary which was mainly a folksy song and pretty images of the sound coupled with propadanda about not polluting it. While I was watching the video, I was reminded of a scene I had observed while riding the bus to Boston a few weeks ago. As we drove into Worcester, I saw two thuggish-looking young men walking along a street. One finished drinking a bottle of juice, then tossed it up in the air to watch it smash on the sidewalk. I remember thinking how sad it must be to take such little pride, and feel to little responsibility, for one's environment. I asked myself, "Do they really like walking on broken glass?" It was an awfully dehumanizing environment: cement and weeds near run-down housing and busy roads. There was already broken glass a litter all around. The movie struck me as an attempt to get people to feel ownership and take pride in having clean wetlands and a pristine river. At the same time, I'm struck by the incongruence with history. A hundred years ago, the rivers were considered filthy (and were used as open sewers) and only the poor lived by them. (To be fair, I don't know the history along this river, but that was certainly the case in the industrialized North). The wealthy had their houses in uplands (to get good air, away from miasmas) while their factories dumped wastewater in rivers. The environmental movement, which was fought every step of the way by business, has now reached mainstream acceptability. The rivers have become clean enough that rich people want to buy houses there. The largest sources of pollution are now "non-point-source", meaning just the run-off from roads, yards, and fields. To fix those, its not enough to legislate -- you have to actually change people's behavior, ergo the video. The river is beautiful. Charlie and I sat out this morning and watched the fish jump.
After we left the Estuarium, we walked along a boardwalk over an artifical wetland that Washington has constructed to reduce runoff pollution from the storm sewers. The storm sewers are directed into the artificial wetland and held in for three days. A great idea.
In the evening, we attended the "River Festival". There were rides and food-booths and vendors. I was tempted to get a Robert E Lee commemorative knife and pocket watch, but it was too pricey. A beach-band played during the evening -- the Embers. The music was wonderful, but what was almost more interesting was to see who was there: people of all ages. There were old ladies with white hair and elderly couples dancing the "shag". Equally surprising was a lack of racial diversity: although the festival was extremely diverse, only 50% caucasian, the audience listening to the music was almost completely white. There were several thousand people by my estimate and I counted 8 African Americans (one of whom was a uniformed police officer who was evidently on duty). I liked the music a lot.
We had a quiet day today. I wrote in my journal this morning, had a long conversation with Rick, took Daniel and M down to the river to play in the water for a while, then came back up and hung out with them for a while, snacking and chatting about favorites and second favorites. Both Daniel and M said blue was their favorite color and red was their second favorite. In the afternoon, we watched Lilo and Stitch (the cousins hadn't seen it before) and then I took a boatride with D and R down to the marina to put the boat into its slip. We spent 15 or 20 minutes cruising among the giant pleasure craft docked in the marina. A quiet, restful day before our great trek tomorrow.