A small craft motors to and fro in the Potomac, methodically puttering toward the shoreline and back out again to river's midsection, over and over in the raw chill. The boat is the harbinger of the future, a hired hand brought to the riverfront of the Cherry Hill peninsula to take soundings in preparation for a 400-slip marina that will be the showpiece of a developer's dream.
Change is coming to this place 30 miles south of Washington. Two miles of riverfront and three miles of curvaceous country road, where foxes roam and eagles fly, will be replaced, along with the old houses and the families that live in them, by a huge development called Harbor Station. Down here at the river's shore, in a sweetly sagging wooden crab shack squeezed between the water and the railroad tracks, Tim Bauckman waits. He fought the good fight. He stared down the combined forces of development and government. He stood up for the Prince William County that was.
"When big development comes, people get rolled over," Tim Bauckman said.
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And then, when all the pressures that transform countryside into suburbia bore down on him as surely as a child grows up, Bauckman took the money. He sold Tim's Rivershore to KSI Services, the Vienna-based developer of Harbor Station, and while the deal will let him keep his crab shack and maintain a respite for river men and pleasure boaters for at least one more year, you can tell that the deal Bauckman cut is eating him up inside.
"I have good friends who tell me, 'You're kind of a sellout and we're on the fence about you.' I hate hearing that. But look, if I fight them, in a month I'm done, out of money. Well, when your back's against the wall and you're in survival mode -- I'm trying to save me and my children and the people who work for me. So I made a deal with KSI."
Bauckman bought his hundred feet of riverfront a decade ago, a dream he'd had since childhood, when his dad and the old-timers in Dumfries and Occoquan would tell fish stories, and Tim and his friends would get out of school at 11:45 in the morning -- thanks to split sessions -- and spend the rest of daylight on the river, water-skiing. They went home only to eat dinner and fight with their parents about gas money for the boat.
Bauckman slowly built up his restaurant with the help of its previous owners, Junior Dent and Buzzy Cumberland, Prince William legends who knew everyone in the county and handled most of the fish fries and clambakes along the river. Back when Dent -- whose sister, Hilda Barg, is a county supervisor -- owned the place, nobody bothered with permits and site plans. It was all about families and relationships back then; now it's corporations and lawyers.
Working under the old rules, Bauckman made his place into the most popular spot along this stretch of the Potomac, with a sandbox for the kids and a dock for the boaters and a little parking lot for the landlubbers. The outdoor seating grew into a deck, and then there was a cabana, and then Bauckman bought some more riverfront, and before long, there was one big party the whole summer long.
If Bauckman didn't get all the right permits, the county wasn't much of a stickler for that sort of thing. But then the big developer of "a master-planned golf community" of thousands of houses came along, and everyone's pockets stood to become that much plumper.
Suddenly last spring, the county's agents descended on Tim's like locusts, and they were shocked, shocked to find that the zoning wasn't quite right and the parking was insufficient and the water lines didn't meet code and the deck was structurally questionable and on and on -- 16 county offices were involved -- until Bauckman found himself shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to engineers and architects and lawyers and fixers, and even so, the county sealed off his deck and the outdoor party went silent. The game was up.
"In business, you're always stretching," Bauckman says, "trying to find an edge. Everyone's got some goofy thing going on with their business. But then, when they need something from you, that's their leverage. Okay, I understand that."
And then, wouldn't you know, the developer came around, just like Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life," ready and eager to help.
Revenue was down 75 percent without the outdoor space. Bauckman could give it up, or he could take KSI's offer -- a generous pile of money and the promise of leasing back the restaurant for at least a year.
"My dad said, 'I'd have let them close me up and I'd just sell worms on the deck.' And I said, 'I don't think I can pay the mortgage with worms.' " Bauckman laughs. "Dad's 74. I really, really thought I'd be here at 74.
"When big development comes, people get rolled over," Bauckman says. On the other hand, KSI wants what Bauckman has -- a magnet for people all along the river, a community of folks who will keep coming to Tim's even after Harbor Station is built.
So now Bauckman finds himself having to trust the developers, and, he figures, KSI has to trust him. For now, it's working. KSI knows its way around the county building. They put some of their lawyers and land-use people at Bauckman's disposal and suddenly, things with the county are going more smoothly and everyone expects Tim's to reopen the deck come springtime. "I know everybody in the whole world," Bauckman says, "but all KSI has to do is say it and they have the people who get it done."
Maybe someday the developer will decide that a ramshackle old crab house doesn't fit with the upscale image they want for their community, though Bauckman makes the case that Tim's Rivershore draws a pretty upscale crowd -- just check out the $1 million boats that pull in every day of the summer.
Maybe in a year or two, KSI will decide that it wants its marina restaurant to be one of those barn-like places with a corporate chef, a cutesy name and shellacked oars as menus, instead of Tim's tables, which are covered with snapshots of his regulars.
In a couple of years, no one who's known Cherry Hill for all these decades will recognize the place. The environmentalists are still fighting to save the peninsula, and there have been some setbacks for the developer. But the train has left the station: Prince William is getting itself one of those big fancy concert halls, and a conference center, and thousands of new jobs, and a big, bright green light for developers. "We're in the transition of becoming more like a Fairfax County," Bauckman says, "and you have businessmen used to doing things the old way and now there's a whole new way."
When the new way catches up to some of the old-timers, Bauckman finds himself giving others on the peninsula the advice he ended up taking himself. "Come up with a number," he tells old Virginians who've owned this land for generations, "something that gets you back on the water, down the river." Down in King George County maybe, though truth be told, the land along the Potomac there is getting way too pricey too, so those who value the river for its catfish and eels are heading even farther south, down to Reedville. Don't be too careful about the number you name, Bauckman advises the others. "The developers have come up to everyone's number," he says. "They've been very easy to get along with."
Tim Bauckman is still serving up catfish and oysters, crabs and shrimp. The boaters still come in, the whole old crowd, even though they know that guy out in the water taking soundings signals the end of something.
"I'm just going along with the river," Bauckman says. "I'm used to going one way, and now the tide's coming in and I've got to go the other way."
