AMC Outdoors, December 2003

By Katharine Wroth

They’ve planted trees and cleared green briar, built barriers of oyster shells and counted great blue heron nests. They lend a hand with river cleanups, monitor water quality in their local creek, and teach schoolkids about storm drains. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Paul and Mary Ann Ray. For the last two years, the Washington, D.C., Chapter Conservation Chairs have toiled for and talked up the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed, inspiring many fellow AMC members to take action along the way.

High-school sweethearts who met at a sock hop, the Rays, now 60, married after college. Stationed in D.C. during Paul’s stint in the Navy, the couple and their three children often explored Shenandoah National Park. They later moved to the Hartford, Conn., area — where she taught language arts and he worked in the insurance industry — and joined AMC in 1983 for the hut discounts. In 2000, they retired to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and conservation came to the fore.

Today they lead about a dozen activities a year for the small D.C. Chapter. (Paul is also “unretired” and the co-executive director of a mental-health agency; Mary Ann is an AmeriCorps member working at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and in local schools.) They often join forces with The Nature Conservancy and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which have active volunteer programs in place. And it’s not all labor: “We’ve found we get much better attendance if we combine a work trip with a hike or a kayak,” notes Paul, who completed his 4,000-footers this year. The avid hiker and kayaker balks at being labeled “green”: “I just want to save what I can for my kids and grandkids.”

And that effort, says Mary Ann, creates “such a good kind of tired. If your back hurts from pulling trees or dredging oysters, you know you’ve helped. Some people know AMC as only a hiking organization. We want to spread the word that it is more.”

—Katharine Wroth is Senior Editor of AMC Outdoors.