"We saw him as kind of maybe an obstructionist," said Dennis McMonigle of the county public works department.
But gradually, Underwood was able to demonstrate his techniques on small projects. One of the earliest, in the early 1990s, was a cranberry bog he created in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood that filtered some of the waste from leaky septic tanks.
Keith Underwood demonstrates the health of the bog he recreated at Howard's Branch by pointing out new, wild growth. "That's the primeval bog right there," he said as he surveyed.
(Photos Rafael Crisostomo For The Washington Post)
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Kevin Smith, of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said he thought the first hard rain would blast the entire bog away. "It was a head-scratcher," he said.
But that didn't happen: The bog survived and filtered away some of the pollution.
"The whole time, everybody that I knew was telling me to get back to work and stop playing in the bogs," Underwood said. "We're all happy that I didn't listen to them."
In 1997, Underwood got his biggest break. He was asked to renovate the muddy valley of a stream called Howard's Branch, between Sherwood Forest and the Downs in the Severn neighborhood outside Annapolis.
The valley had once been a wetland, but in the 1930s the creek was dammed to form a drinking water reservoir.
The dam broke in the early 1980s, and when the water ran out it left behind a thick field of sediment that Underwood compared to chocolate pudding. The creek began carrying out enough dirt to cloud nearby Brewer Creek, a Severn tributary.
The valley was a kind of wetland, Underwood said, but not the kind the area needed.
Fixing it took 58 days of construction and $350,000, provided by the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Anne Arundel County Department of Public Works.
First, Underwood's team laid a special kind of cloth over the shifty sediment. On top of that they spread a huge amount of white sand, of a local type crucial to the bog ecosystem.
The stream was then re-channeled to form several pools, divided by piles of cobblestones. Storm water could pool and slow down as it flowed through, instead of blasting away dirt down toward the Severn River.
Then they planted 1,000 Atlantic white cedar trees, grown from the few remaining west of the Chesapeake Bay, on the site.
Then Underwood and his team waited for nature to do its work.
