John Page Williams moved to his left, checked for a solid foothold, and then planted himself squarely in the brittle yellow reeds. Bits of conversation floated over his shoulder as he harvested faded cans, bottles, and Styrofoam cups from this sorely neglected bit of marsh.

"Drove his friends nuts," John Page continued,throwing the trash into a plastic tub. "Captain Pike didn't want a funeral or a grave. Just wanted his ashes tossed in a landfill. He was an atheist.No euphemisms like 'fishing around the bend' for him."

A year before, more than a month after the geese and swans left the Chesapeake and the ospreys and herons returned, John Page and Captain Bill Pike spent a day in this same stretch of marsh swapping stories and catching white perch on light tackle and grass shrimp. Captain Pike, the "Perch Professor of the Severn River,"died that same year. The fact that he wouldn't have a funeral seemed to both delight and bother John Page.

"Seems the least we can do is name a good perch point after him," he added as he nearly filled the tub. With this year's perch run fast approaching, John Page, CBF's senior naturalist and a lifelong student of the Chesapeake, and I spent a couple of hours in our hip boots clearing garbage from what is now "Captain Pike's Point."

Hours spent like this with John Page are some of my favorite. I have learned as much from him as from anyone or anything else. A man who has studied and loved the Bay and its watershed as much, if not more, then anyone else I know, John Page brings the watershed to life. His stories paint a picture of the Bay as it is-a rich mosaic of life (both human and wild), built over millennia of geologic and human history, and spread across six very different states.

While our efforts that afternoon might have done more for the memory of an opinionated and gifted angler than a diminished Bay, they reinforced two of the most fundamental lessons one should learn about the Bay. 1. Water, the universal solvent, inevitably carries the watershed's woes from land to the Bay. What buoys cans and bottles also carries far more dangerous passengers-nutrient pollution (nitrogen and phosphorus) and sediment. 2. The quality of the water in the Bay depends on the health of its filters. Reeds that snag cans and bottles are anchored by roots and soils that absorb and trap sediment.

In a manner of thinking, the Chesapeake, like any estuary, is a vast machine dedicated to nurturing life. Air, water, sunlight and nutrients are its fuel. In the proper amount, each is essential. In excess, each can be deadly. As is true for the engines in our cars, trucks, and boats, the trick is to make sure that the fuel is neither to rich nor too lean.

Our understanding of that machinery has come late and only after considerable degradation. Since colonial times, we have lost about half the forested shorelines, more than half of the wetlands, 90 percent of the underwater grasses, and over 98 percent of the oysters in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The losses continue. Today, 13 acres of land are lost to development each hour in the watershed. That's about three Washington DCs each year. We've added some filters in the form of wastewater treatment plants, catalytic converters, smokestack scrubbers, and the like; but technology and engineering are still far from offsetting the damage.

Fortunately, the blueprint for the Bay's restoration has been set in the renewed pledge by Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia and the Environmental Protection Agency to protect and restore the Bay. Supported by decades of research and modeling, the plan sets targets we must reach to achieve a Bay healthy enough to be considered saved. Among those, removing the impairments to water quality are the most urgently needed.

The cost of achieving the goals, according to an estimate by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is an additional $8.5-billion spent throughout the watershed over the next decade, or 15 cents per person per day for each watershed resident. That cost includes roughly $1 billion to upgrade sewage treatment plants, $2 billion to expand forested buffers (trees along shorelines), $2 billion for land conservation, $1 billion to improve urban storm water infrastructure, $2 billion to fully implement farmland quality plans, and $0.5 billion to restore wetlands and oysters. CBF, working with government agencies and other conservation groups, hopes to develop the political and public support needed to reach this level of funding, which would rely on a mix of federal, state, local, and private sources.

We may be tempted to go only part of the way, to postpone the most difficult steps. That's a dangerous course. Each missed opportunity increases the costs of success and the risks of failure.

Some may argue that the cost is simply too high. Fifteen cents a day? Set aside the jobs created, communities supported, heritage maintained, and opportunities opened by a saved Bay. Perhaps the truest measure of this effort's value is the enhancement of the qualities that caused me to call Chesapeake Country home. Fifteen cents a day-less than the change from my morning's coffee-is a bargain to restore the waters in which I'll teach my children to sail, the streams along which we'll hike and fish, and the marshes in which we'll watch eagles and osprey. I'd pay double and then some if only to give my children a single afternoon of spring perch fishing on Captain Pike's Point where they would learn about the Bay and its people, as their father did, through the stories of a man who treasures both completely.