The Chesapeake Bay has long been appreciated as one of the Middle Atlantic's prizes of nature--an area both beautiful to the tourist's eye and bountiful to the waterman's nets. The Bay has served to define the geographical and historical identity of the region--a place from which the lines of culture have traditionally been drawn.

The Bay occupies a special place in the minds of Marylanders, who have come to define themselves, their foodways, and their ambivalence toward modern times in terms of the Bay and its people. The fluctuating price of crabmeat is not a simple indicator of nationwide economic trends; it is the expression of a complex biological and economic system that is made all the more compelling by its many human participants. The waterman is the central figure in this order--the human link that both generates the system's complexity and makes it comprehensible. The watermen catch the wily crab, itself the subject of considerable folk wisdom, and all of modern science and economics cannot draw the crab unwillingly into the pot.