I watched Bill walk away from me carrying the found crabbing basket, which carried our found treasures. Sea glass, abandoned critter’s shells, water logged nuts, a hermit crab proper…there was even a piece of blue and white patterned pottery with a partial ‘England’ maker’s stamp visible on one side. My daughters and I had procured the collection from the sands of the Chesapeake Bay shoreline during a particularly lovely low tide along the Savage Neck Dunes. Bill and I had been sharing the responsibility of the basket until I suppose he found my pace annoying, taking it from me without a word and heading off ahead up the soft, white, sandy path. The heat of the velvety sand was startling in contrast to the shade thrown by the loblolly pines over my pleasingly broiled self. This cool blanket covered almost everything between the tiny parking area and the Bay…everything including the sand, which still managed to burn one’s feet in defiance. I find my sandals necessary, as do my children, but Bill strolls along barefoot, having left his shoes with the vehicle hours ago. He tells us that it helps him better connect with Mother Earth, and I do not recall trekking with him in any other state. This particular Eastern Shore excursion was Bill’s proposition. We had asked him for ideas on how to spend an uncharted day on the peninsula and it was with the childish glee of a lifelong Educator that he suggested Savage Neck, dovetailing a plan for giving us an unguided tour. It became our active history lesson on ‘The Laughing King’ and his gift of approximately 9,000 acres of the Eastern Shore to Thomas Savage in 1621. Bill goes on, teaching us about Thomas’ reputation and career as an interpreter between white men and Native Americans during the early 1600s, emphasizing the impact some of these relationships had on the very shape of Virginia history. This is who Bill is, and we love him for it. One could argue that there is no demarcation between Bill’s structured and leisure time, the man so completely enmeshes himself in what he finds important, relevant, sacred. His professional, public, and private time spent in perpetual actualization, the aware observer sees the value in movements. Our summer outing made ‘the cut’. He wanted my kids and I to see this maritime forest, to smell these damp and earthy smells, to look for those eagle’s nests perched way up over Custis Pond, and he wanted to lead the show-and-tell. “Why?” remains rhetorical, since keeping pace with his thought process requires as much energy as matching his swift gait. Plus…today…he’s on a mission. A rabbit with a stopwatch. I met William Dyas the prior summer in Kiptopeke State Park where he worked as a Ranger. My daughters and I went on a tractor pulled wagon ride, which featured environmental and historical interpretations about the area by the driver, Bill-him-self. He initially insisted that we had met “at a festival somewhere”; we had not, but my dreadlocks helped him guess as much. Bill was not only extremely easy to talk to but exuded warmth and friendliness in a magnetic, darn near mythical type of way. This odd, charismatic gem of a human won me over full force. I was ready to lend my powers to his cause. I wound up volunteering with him in the park that year and later in a local elementary school. The whole thing was mildly weird…and mostly wonderful. Meeting Mr. Dyas was some special version of locating a long lost family member, an oddly familiar Uncle I’ve never known but feel an eerie kinship with. My family no longer ‘travels to The Shore’…instead we ‘go and visit Bill’…and we do it every summer. The destination has not changed…but the nature of the experience itself has become something else entirely. Forever changed. We sheltered at his house one night after our tent flooded out. He advised my seven year old: “Never accept invitations from old men to go sleep at their houses…out in the middle of nowhere…unless it is me. I’m perfectly safe, of course.” Of course. Thank you, Bill, for expanding my definition of family...for everything.