Night of the Oysters
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- Written by Kris Legates
This annual winter fundraiser in Georgetown is one shell of a time
By Bill Newcott
Photograph by Scott Nathan
From the Winter 2023 issue
Table 3 is waiting for more oysters. A dozen or so men in ball caps and sweatshirts are shuffling anxiously from foot to foot, most of them fidgeting with the handles of the short, rounded knives they clutch in their hands.
A few puff impatiently on cigars. The thick smoke curls toward the ceiling of the Georgetown Fire Company garage, churning into a growing cloud fed by countless more fat cigars and glowing cigarettes in this enormous, but closed, space.
Some 800 men are crammed into the firehouse, and a lucky hundred or so have spots at the eight 10-foot-long oyster shucking tables: rustic, rectangular wood affairs, slathered with generations of green paint. A shelf rises in the middle of each one, topped with containers of ketchup, vinegar, hot sauce, salt and black pepper.
Also up there are bags of oyster crackers, which I’d always assumed were named that because they look like little oysters. Not so, it turns out: They happen to be a traditional oyster side dish and frequent ingredient in oyster stew.
Water Stewardship
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- Written by Kris Legates
Three Lakes, Many Questions
By Andrew Sharp
Photograph by Scott Nathan
From the September 2023 issue
People used to view ponds and streams as convenient spots to dump old tires, refrigerators and the like. By and large, attitudes have changed, but you can still find plenty of trash in these bodies of water, as well as invisible nutrients from our yards and fields that drain into them, spawning noxious algae blooms.
Join the Crowd
- Details
- Written by Kris Legates
Coastal Delaware’s population has been skyrocketing for decades. Are we peas in a pod … or scorpions in a shoebox?
By Bill Newcott
From the October 2023 issue
Absolutely every time I hear someone complain about how crowded it’s getting in coastal Delaware, I think about a comic strip I clipped about 30 years ago.
In this particular entry from Patrick McDonnell’s “Mutts,” a dog and a cat are aghast at how many rabbits have recently been born in their neighborhood.
“Don’t you think something should be done about overpopulation?” the dog demands of one floppy-eared newcomer.
“Sure,” the bunny responds. “Now that I’m here.”
That call-and-response could echo just about anywhere you wander around the Delaware beach area: among drivers cruising for parking spots in Bethany Beach … patients crowding into a Lewes dentist’s office … diners waiting outside a Long Neck restaurant … bicyclists passing yet another forest being felled to accommodate a house-choked “preserve.”
The complaint rises like the rippling heat waves above the cars lined up on Route 24. It whines like the families who’ve just heard they won’t be getting into overcrowded Cape Henlopen State Park that day.