Woodie Walker ‘18 would not go back to school. Not at 50. Certainly not now that he was a grandfather with a job he loved. That tide had gone out two decades ago, when he left college with two semesters standing between him and a fisheries degree.
But that’s the thing about tides. They come back in.
If anybody knew that, it was Walker. The son of an eco-conscious sportsman, he grew up fishing the rivers of South Hampton Roads. He traipsed through woods, identifying birds and catching snakes and lizards. But mostly it was the water he was drawn to – the Chowan and the Blackwater and the Nottoway Rivers.
He’d helped found Virginia’s first Riverkeeper program to protect the rivers he loved. He’d restored trout habitat in West Virginia as an AmeriCorps volunteer.
Finally, five years ago, he’d landed in Fredericksburg, on another river, working as a community conservationist for Friends of the Rappahannock. He taught fishing lessons and organized trips and recruited new members. He took on dozens of UMW interns and volunteers. If a student needed an outdoor classroom, if a professor wanted to survey birds from a kayak, Walker found them a place.
Maybe, he thought, UMW could find a place for him.
It was daunting, of course. More daunting than the rapids he maneuvered along the Rappahannock.
“Think about going back to college at 50,” Walker said. “With a bunch of 20 year olds.”
But things aren’t always what they seem on the surface.
He signed up for his first class in 2014, paying for it with tuition money from AmeriCorps. The next semester, he took a second one. He declared as a history major.
The school was small enough not to get lost in, small enough that the faculty invested in every student.
He never felt out of place, he said. “I always felt good.”
This May, Walker will collect his bachelor’s degree – 25 years after he started. He’ll also leave something behind.
Walker was sitting at the FOR headquarters in a building on the Rappahannock when he took the course-altering call.
The man on the line was a 90-something-year-old from King George County who’d spent his life on the river, first as a boy during the Depression and then as a commercial fisherman. He knew everything there was to know about that body of water.
It occurred to Walker then that there was no official record of stories from people like him. Walker took the idea to Jason Sellers, a history professor who taught an environmental history class.
In the two years since, with the support of Sellers and the rest of UMW’s History and American Studies faculty and with Walker at the helm, FOR has created Life Along the Rappahannock: An Oral History Project.
The audio-visual documentaries, which include five interviews so far, are the latest project in a longstanding partnership between the university and FOR. They tell stories of conservation and preservation, of floods and spiritual connections. They document in great detail the 2004 removal of the Embrey Dam, which transformed the ecology of the river.
“It’s unique. It hasn’t been done before,” Sellers said. “It’s a chance to encourage students to do history.”
Three UMW students – Nancy Milroy ‘17, Matt Griffiths ‘18 and now Janelle Behm ‘18 – have played vital roles on the project, from securing grants for the project to conducting and filming interviews.
“Woodie has been especially good about taking our experiential learning students and giving them something to do,” said biology department chair Andrew Dolby. “Students are inspired by him. He’s extremely enthusiastic and interested in everything. He’s intellectually curious and enthusiastic not only about learning but helping and serving.”
For Walker, the oral history project is all of those things.
“I hope someday, some researcher accesses our work and it adds to their story,” he said.
As for Walker’s story, it’s fluid. The college degree that once seemed like a personal accomplishment may now be a stepping stone to something more.
“I think I’m interested in a graduate degree,” Walker said. “The faculty at UMW have given me the confidence to think maybe I can do this.”
