Water's Way ─ Life Along the Chesapeake

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.

David W. Harp saved to acquire his first camera at the age of 12 and has been taking pictures ever since. Former staff photographer for the Baltimore Sun Magazine, Harp has received awards from the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association and the National Press Photographers Association. His photography is regularly featured in national environmental and lifestyle magazines. Tom Horton reported on the Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun for fifteen years before becoming a freelancer in 1987. Horton's first book, Bay Country, won the John Burroughs Medal for our nation's best natural history book of the year.