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The Chesapeake Bay is not tar-black and dead. It is not bright-green and toxic. It looks just as beautiful as ever, come a sunrise in Annapolis or a sunset over Tangier Sound.

What the Chesapeake has become is emptier.

It has fewer crabs, oysters and watermen than it did 25 years ago, when government officials first pledged to restore its health.

And without all that, the bay region is sloughing off the culture that made it unique. Fewer women know the intricate signals of a blue crab's molt, that a red-sign crab is two days away from "busting" and becoming a valuable soft-shell. Fewer men know how to find oyster bars, underwater landmarks such as Snake Rip, Turkey Leg or Old Woman.

Fewer people know their neighbors in a place where neighbors used to be all you had.

"It used to be when you saw a boat go by, you'd say, 'There goes Cap'n Anthony. He's going out to fish his crabs,'" recalled Ken Smith, president of the Virginia State Waterman's Association. "Now, it's like, 'Who in the hell's on THAT jet ski?' "

The water is still there, but The Bay -- the old, bountiful estuary -- is not.

As the old industries have declined, they have been replaced by tourism, where the look of the water is all that matters.

This is the real cost of the cleanup's failure: People learning to live with broken promises.

These are three of their stories.

Deal Island, Md.

There was still a whiff of the bay -- salt and rotted shellfish -- coming off a pile of oyster shells outside the little building.

Jeanne Webster Abbott was in the doorway one recent afternoon, holding a spare part to an old boat and sniffling so she didn't cry.

"I don't even know what this is," she said.

Then she saw what her daughter had found in the debris outside her late husband's abandoned crab shanty. It was a short piece of wood, notched to mark five inches. His crab-measuring stick.

They both started to cry.

Then, Abbott pulled the door shut. Carefully, as if the shanty didn't have a hole in the roof and a significant lean.

"I'm going to find a way to just keep this place up," she said. "Because he doesn't deserve it."

Deal Island is a legendary place. Joshua Thomas, the "parson of the islands," who brought fervent Christianity to the region in the early 1800s, is buried there. The island, about two hours south of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, was once home to a large fleet of skipjacks, the Chesapeake's iconic oyster-dredging sailboats.

The oysters died off, and the crabs began to follow, and soon a waterman's living wasn't enough. People went "up the road" to work on tugboats, in trucks, at the state prison.

Deal Island's population dropped from 1,237 in 1930 to 578 in 2000. Only about 20 percent of households include children.

"I'm 60. Danny's 58. We're the young ones," said Grant Corbin, a waterman, pointing to another in the fellowship hall of St. John's United Methodist Church.

The men were waiting for the lunch that followed the church's homecoming service, which brought 200 people to the sanctuary instead of the usual 20.

In the hall, it smelled like batter and hot oil. The women were making soft-shell crabs. That process starts with snipping eyestalks, apron, gills. Then, batter and cook until the gooey "mustard" firms up, reaching a consistency that doesn't remind you it's guts.

Abbott, 60, with blond ringlets of hair and emotions very near the surface, was sitting at a table in the hall, tearing up over the two soft-shells on her plate. She was talking about her husband, Charles Abbott, voted most likely to succeed in the Deal Island High School class of 1962.

They had twins when she was 15 and another child later.

He made enough money on the water -- crabbing in summer, oystering in winter -- to buy all three kids a Trans Am when they turned 16.

But then, in the '70s and '80s, the bay turned for the worse.

First, the oyster harvest crashed. They had to sell his family's skipjack, the Thomas Clyde, in 1991. Sold it to a waterman up the bay in Tilghman Island, far away so they wouldn't have to see it again. As the boat motored away, a seagull that the Abbotts used to feed followed it out to the bay.

"It was like a funeral for my husband," she said.

Then, four years later, Charles -- who smoked heavily and worked from 3 a.m. to 8 p.m. some days -- had a series of strokes at 51.

He died on Father's Day 2002.

The shanty where he worked has been empty since then.

For Jeanne, the lowest point of life without him came on a cold day this September. She turned the heat on in their old house. No heat. She looked in the tank. No oil. Charles had always taken care of that.

"I cried and I cried. I felt so hopeless and helpless. I didn't know of anybody else to call."

Tilghman Island, Md.

Inside the Fairbank Tackle shop, men stopped in to grab Tastykakes, cigarettes and long rubber gloves. Others sat down on buckets of motor oil, talking politics, crabs, tall tales and old lies.

It smelled like Vittorio House Blend coffee, like the dog that people feed Slim Jims and, suddenly, like the worst low tide in history.

"What did y'all get into?" somebody asked a fisherman who just walked in, taking a mid-workday break.

"Lot of dead fish," he said.

This was a waterman's happy hour. It was 6 a.m.

Geographically, Tilghman Island is at the end of something: a lobster-shaped spit at the tip of a curved peninsula, roughly across the Chesapeake from Calvert County.

Culturally, though, it's a place in the middle.

The island is just 15 miles from St. Michaels, and its affluent culture is spreading this way: The Tilghman Island Inn offers tennis courts and water-view rooms for $300 a night.

On the other hand, there are these guys: some halfway retired and most all-the-way morbid about the bay's future.

"The onliest way they'll ever save the bay now is to give everybody a mallet and a cork," said William Roe, 74, who has lived on Tilghman most of his life.

But that sort of cynicism only goes so far here. It goes about five blocks, actually, to a skipjack docked at Tilghman's Dogwood Harbor.

Skipjacks are floating loopholes, built when Maryland law allowed only sail-powered boats to pull metal "dredges" across the bottom and scrape up oysters. The number of skipjacks has fallen from more than 300 a century ago to fewer than 10 today.

But Lawrence Murphy, 54, was taking one out oystering.

"She's big. She's heavy," said Murphy, a beefy man with a cigarette who speaks the crayubs-and-orstirs dialect of the bay in a deep, scratchy voice. "She lays there good."

Meaning: She doesn't sway too much in heavy weather.

This is a living that doesn't make sense, but Murphy doesn't do it for sensible reasons. He does it because he likes to get away.

He does it because he doesn't mind the cold and knows where the oysters are, or at least where they were.

And he does it because his father and grandfather worked a skipjack.

"I just always wanted one," he said.

He bought his in 1991, from a heartbroken couple down the bay in Deal Island.

The Abbotts.

St. Michaels, Md.

In 1813, townsfolk hung lanterns in trees to trick attacking British ships, causing most of their cannonballs to miss the town.

For decades after, St. Michaels was like dozens of other places on the Eastern Shore: "a jerkwater crab town," as somebody in Tilghman said.

Oyster-shell streets.

Fighting in the bars.

It smelled like funky marsh mud and the pickled bull lips that watermen used for bait.

But as the Chesapeake declined, St. Michaels found a way out: It built an economy that relied on the bay mainly as scenery.

After the first span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built in 1952, it drew in tourists.

Then the real estate agents descended, and this became another Cape Cod, a getaway for the likes of Donald H. Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

"This ... building right here used to be the town five-and-dime," said Virginia "Ginny" Adams, 74. She was standing in front of a "home decor gallery," with a metal sculpture of a giraffe out front. "Now it's filled with all kind of junk holes."

The old barbershop is an art gallery.

The funeral parlor is an inn (they get a kick out of that one, tourists sleeping in those rooms).

And the grocery store, where it smelled like wood varnish and a quarter bought 25 pieces of candy, became an antique shop.

"If people come here thinking that these stores were here ... no," said Lisa Hayes, who is Adams' niece. "There was stores here, but I don't think they were the kind of stores that would have drawn people from D.C."

Hayes sees the bigger picture here, but also realizes that her own kids missed the childhood she had. They didn't, for instance, learn what to call water that is untroubled by wind.

The old folks here don't say "calm": The Chesapeake pronunciation rhymes with "jam," with no hint of an "L."

"I said, 'It's cam, honey. Remember that,' " she said.

But the new St. Michaels paid for college scholarships for her two girls and provided the kind of jobs that will allow them to come back.

"It's not a bad change," Hayes said, "because it kept our community alive."

Epilogue

In these three places, life goes on despite the bay's condition. The trick is accepting it.

Take a recent day in St. Michaels, where Capt. John R. Larrimore was scolding the crew on his skipjack.

"My old daddy used to say he'd rather you walk on his head than walk on his oysters!" he said.

But the boat, the E.C. Collier, was on dry land.

This was an oystering exhibition at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Larrimore died in 1983: That was a carved wooden mannequin at the wheel, and the voice was somebody else's, a recording made from a script.

The exhibit's few visitors filtered out, and the room was empty. Outside, a chilly wind made little whitecaps on the Miles River.

It smelled like ... nothing.